Haakon IV

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• Commented on Anti-vaccine fear versus science
  Gary Null is a quack who is in the business of selling alternative medicine books and overpriced vitamins, not an educator. Even assuming he is sincere, he is more pro-Gary Null than pro-human health. Whatever you want to call him,...
• Commented on Improvising a car fuse
  So go out and stock up on cigarette pack foil just in case! Or, if you're reading this and thinking ahead about fuses, you could actually go out and buy a few spares. And, um, 35 amps? Do you really...
• Commented on Ooma Telo: VoIP your wallet can believe in
  a great deal if you are even remotely capable of financial planning And if you believe that this company will still be in business at least a couple years from now, and that you will still want their services. How...
• Commented on Business Reply Mail pamphlet encourages office workers to revolt
  Although, call me paranoid, might someone not get into trouble for sending back a comic depicting nudity and sex? Some idiot might decide it was pornography as opposed to satire (or, constructive criticism)... I think it is saying something about...
• Commented on What the world will look like if/when the oceans rise.
  @timothy hutton If I understand your question, you're asking how fast will the increased area of the ocean slow the rise in sea level with a given volume of seawater added. I think everyone is overthinking this with fractal coastlines...
• Commented on Keeping the Googling Good Life Going in a Post-Box Store era: Doug Fine
  If both box stores and local co-ops are no more, and we're in a truly "post-consumer" society? This guy may be food- and energy-independent, but most of us are screwed, which means he'll have more to worry about than just...
• Commented on Coffee table with a built-in firepit
  http://www.planikausa.com/how_it_works Planika Fires use a special liquid FANOLA®. As a result, the fire is free of smoke or smell. Having been thoroughly tested, the liquid received a positive opinion of specialists from the Environmental Toxicology Department of the National Institute...
• Commented on HOWTO bake dashboard cookies while you're working
  Also, *do* eat your own homemade cookie dough. DO NOT eat raw prepackaged cookie dough. The difference is taking a chance that one of your two freshly cracked raw eggs is bad vs. one of the thousand eggs in an...
• Commented on Happy Birthday, Nikola Tesla!
  Nikola, not "Nikolai"....
• Commented on Infographic: all US one-time expenditures vs the bailout
  @Roku You're making the classic mistake of ignoring the context and substance of every post that disagrees with your preconceived viewpoint. It is not "100% irrelevant" to comment, in response to a post about a single infographic, that both the...
• Commented on Infographic: all US one-time expenditures vs the bailout
  $15 million inflating to $297 billion makes no sense whatsoever. It implies that $1 in the early 1800s would be equivalent to $20,000 today. That's just wrong: it's more like $12 today, according to "The Inflation Calculator". It's hard to...
• Commented on Infographic: all US one-time expenditures vs the bailout
  @#18 shit that kinda says it all, doesn't it? that inflation has blown 15M up to 297B? that's 1/19,800. The magic of compound interest—that's less than 5% per year. Also, it was a pretty good investment anyway. Do you think...
• Commented on Infographic: all US one-time expenditures vs the bailout
  I don't find the scaling of this chart to be very intuitive. I presume that the scaling of each square is such that the area is proportional to the inflation-adjusted dollar amounts, probably from this previous post (also linked by...
• Commented on Mind Over Ship: David Marusek's hyperfuturistic, hyperimaginative soap-opera
  "soap-opera" or space opera?...
• Commented on What the world needs now is more shiv cosies
  @13, Harrkev Agreed, knives are tools, but I don't refer to my utility knife as a "shiv", and the maker writes of it carrying "your concealed weapon of choice". It clearly is fetishizing a knife as a weapon, whatever you...
• Commented on New York Times webteam nukes the careers of many journalists
  The journalist may not even have the right to repost his stories on his own website if he doesn't hold the copyright. But clearly his main loss was that his articles previously had high google rank and many external links,...
• Commented on Chunky crapgadget used to conduct the US census (kind of)
  On the "bad, inaccurate maps of the area, which looked like they'd been dumped from an early version of MapQuest", that is probably the TIGER database, created by the Census Bureau. It looks like early MapQuest because almost all US...
• Commented on The six year solar Sun Table
  Of course, you can only put things on it at night....
• Commented on NBC Stars Whimper About Jon Stewart's Skewering of CNBC
  actually hphovercraft, in theory homeowners do have lobbyists. They're called the house of representatives. Unfortunately their number is capped at 235, making them just a second senate instead of the populist fresh-idea machine they're supposed to be. Actually, capped at...
• Commented on Proposal to allow publishers to charge for access to tax-funded research
  Respectfully, copyright for academic works offsets the high cost of production of said academic works. But very little of the cost of production is borne by the publishers that hold the copyright. Typically, the scientist does the work (along with...
• Commented on Chinese "poem" on the cover a scholarly journal is actually an ad for a brothel in Macau
  More details (and a better discussion) is at: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=881...
• Commented on To Publish Without Perishing (Clay Shirky guestblog post)
  I think this sort of misses the point of Gleick's article. He was giving advice for how publishing companies survive and make money, not for how readers will continue to find material to read. You may be right that it's...
• Commented on Note to McCain: Overhead projector is not a planetarium projector
  Hayden Planetarium in NYC spent $3.5 million on a new projector as part of a $210 million renovation in the 1990s: http://tinyurl.com/49243f I don't know whether federal funds were involved....
• Commented on David Byrne and Brian Eno's kick ass new album in a million downloadable and physical formats
  Heh. "You do not have the required minimum version of Adobe Flash®" with OS X (Leopard), Firefox 3.0.1. Adobe confirms that I have the latest, 9.0.124.0 (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about). WTF? (OK, works in Safari. Flash still sucks.)...
• Commented on That Violet Blue thing
  I fail HTML. You can copy and paste from my previous post or I try one final time: link: Google "disappears" sex blogs?...
• Commented on That Violet Blue thing
  Sorry, I meant to provide the link. (It was missing due to submitter error, not nefarious BB moderators.)...
• Commented on That Violet Blue thing
  Has anyone actually bothered to find the deleted posts on the Wayback Machine? Irony: one of them is about accusations of Google censoring search results, including excising Violet Blue: Google "disappears" sex blogs?. It turns out that it probably wasn't...
• Commented on That Violet Blue thing
  Reminds me of when ESPN disappeared Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday morning Quarterback column in 2003 for making anti-semitic remarks (involving corporate parent company CEO Michael Eisner) in a blog on another site. Nearly instantly, they not only dropped the column, but...