joelphillips

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• Commented on Hitler: football coach?
  It was multiple choice. Who was Hitler? Coach to the German national football team 6.88 Leader of the Nazi party 76.74 Invented gravity in 1650 13.55 The first national German to orbit the earth in space 1.88 Eurovision contestant representing...
• Commented on Video snapshot: "Topless rights" protest hosted by Raëlian UFO clone sex cult
  I ran a 10k in Montreal once and the Raelians had a booth near the finish line with a banner proclaiming: "No to drugs in sport, yes to genetic manipulation in sport." Their idea was that the Olympics would be...
• Commented on CBC radio show on advertising now podcast
  This is a bloody awful show. How many episodes do you think would be necessary to examine "the cultural and sociological impact of advertising on modern life"? 3? 6? 10? No, millions. Endless, endless, ridiculously North American-centric analysis of supposedly...
• Commented on Obama turned the Queen of England into a copyright crook!
  @1 - If the Queen does it, that means it's not illegal. Really. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2400003.stm...
• Commented on Antony and the Johnsons: Epilepsy is Dancing
  If that's NSFW, you should get another job. Beautiful....
• Commented on Canada's science minister is a creationist
  The problem isn't that we have a science minister who believes in creationism and that reading chiropractic papers and rubbing his car engine with snake oil give him insight into the scientific process. The problem is that we have any...
• Commented on Tough geometric brain teaser
  Don't know if he was the original, but Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll posed a problem like this in the 19th century ... (searching for references)....
• Commented on ThruYou, an album made entirely from YouTube clips, far greater than the sum of its parts
  Click on credits while a video is playing. Gives you a clickable list of toobs....
• Commented on World crisis charts fed into Songsmith
  me too :-). It was called Anthem....
• Commented on No-fly list: $100 million a year pissed away
  I love the final point. I have a picture of all these terrorists who are being stopped every week sitting around practicing whittling knives out of plastic cutlery and damning the efficiency of the TSA in continually foiling their plans....
• Commented on Reutersvärd Heärt
  It's not a Moebius strip (it's not even a thickened Moebius strip). Consequently, I suggest: "My perspective on our love is a little odd."...
• Commented on Machine Project's FRY-B-QUE is this weekend in LA
  Budweiser? How can that possibly be exciting?...
• Commented on Directly downwind faster than the wind - part 3
  #17 ... the presence of such a justification doesn't mean that the proponents aren't arguing in favor of a perpetual motion machine. It just could mean that they are following the standard template for proposing perpetual motion machines ... The...
• Commented on Directly downwind faster than the wind - part 3
  #11, Does that mean if you put two propellers on it, it will accelerate twice as fast? No, because you've increased the mass of the cart. In spite of the facetious comment, there's an interesting question here. I wonder if...
• Commented on Directly downwind faster than the wind - part 3
  The propeller in the diagram appears to be the wrong way around. The questions all assume that the wind turns the propeller, which turns the wheels, which pushes the cart forwards. In fact, the wind pushes on a large object,...
• Commented on Downwind faster than the wind, part 2
  #85 - There's no theoretical limit to how small rolling resistance can be made, so we can add that in to (3). #84 - You're confusing force with energy. The force the cart exerts on the air is backwards, so...
• Commented on Downwind faster than the wind, part 2
  #60 - okay, "air currents created by eddies"....
• Commented on Downwind faster than the wind, part 2
  It's not perpetual motion. There's energy being put into the system - the treadmill in the case of the video in this post; the wind in the case of the original model. To get a perpetual motion machine, you'd need...
• Commented on Downwind faster than the wind, part 2
  Here's some thoughts about the force balance: The forces acting on the cart are: 1) Gravity 2) A reaction to gravity perpendicular to the treadmill 3) The contact points of the wheels are stationary with respect to the treadmill, so...
• Commented on Downwind faster than the wind, part 2
  @43. The premise of the tread-mill is that a stationary object in moving air is equivalent to a moving object in stationary air No, the premise is that that the stationary object in stationary air on moving ground is equivalent...
• Commented on Comprehensive reviews of jihadi video-games
  But the developers ... completely passed up the opportunity to stoke their target audience's anger. ... Bush simply attacks you with no apparent master plan. That's pretty much exactly what makes me angry about Bush....
• Commented on HOWTO Make an upside-down bookshelf
  I don't see an inverted bookshelf, I see a double capacity bookshelf....
• Commented on <em>Vanity Fair</em> asks advertising agencies about Microsoft's Seinfeld campaign
  The ads worked for me. Microsoft spent quite a lot of money to entertain me during a commercial break that would otherwise have been filled with attempts to convince me that I should speak to my doctor about some made...
• Commented on Londoner videos his bullshit anti-terror stop-and-search
  I don't see why the individual police officers should be criticised here. They do their jobs honestly, don't aggravate the situation and don't attempt to exert any more power than is either legal or necessary, given the (quite possibly stupid)...
• Commented on BBC iPlayer now goes to 11
  The flash television iPlayer has been going to 11 for as long as I've been using it. Many months....
• Commented on Video: Gordian worm leaves its cricket host
  Accompanying the original Nature article is an even more disgusting video of the worm emerging from a frog's mouth after the frog has eaten a cricket, which hosted the worm. The frog is not very happy about this. I expect...
• Commented on iTunes may not be used as a weapon of mass destruction
  I spent a hugely productive hour doing an analysis of something similar to this a few months ago. In summary, After about OS X 10.3, the only piece of Apple software that you can manufacture WMDs or nuclear technology with...
• Commented on Gay consumers love Apple, but hate Samsung for some reason
  Maybe it's just those awful "imagine" TV ads. Banality like that means that they deserve to be at the bottom of every demographic's friendliness list. I quite like their monitors, though....
• Commented on Law-firm: copyright prohibits "view source" on our page
  I have to say, I'm not that upset about being prohibited from viewing their HTML. Urgh...