Flies have a primitive if-then decision tree for a brain. Neither fear nor bravery plays a role in any of their reactions. What are they supposed to be afraid of, the water, the bag or the fact that it hovers? The truth is most bugs don't have eyesight worth a plugged nickel.

Couple of quotes from an Orlando Sentinel article a while back:

"Phil Kaufman, a University of Florida professor of veterinary entomology, said there is no scientific research to back up those claims.

"It's a pretty safe bet it doesn't work," he said."

"But a North Carolina State University researcher spent 13 weeks looking at the effects of water bags on flies at an egg-packing plant. Mike Stringham, also a veterinary entomologist, meticulously counted droppings left by flies on white "spot cards."

The results were conclusive: The water bags attracted more flies.

"In the control room versus bags, the bags were consistently higher every time," he said."

In the words of XKCD, "Stand Back! I'm going to try Science!"

No.

Oh please.

It's the kibbutz that scares them.

Sadly, Blue Jeans Cables are just as overpriced as Monster's else I would buy from them too -- a dollar's worth of copper wrapped in 30 dollars of marketing. Much as I admire his gumption in smacking the bullshit out of Monster, the same cable you get from Cables Direct for $18 comes from Blue Jeans for $30. I'm sorry, but copper is an element. Nobody has a better type of copper than anyone else. Use enough not to break and put a good strain relief on it and that's a good a cable as anyone makes.

I'd love to support the guy but I just can't.

They're just trying to reignite the culture wars in time for the election. The religious wingnut vote is looking shaky. Still won't drag McCain's sorry ass across the finish line.

What the hell is butt milk??? That's not exactly what comes out of my personal butt.

Peroxides are powerful oxidizers. The one you buy at the drug store is very dilute (2.5% concentration). Industrial peroxides are very dangerous even without the Tang and require special containers and special handling. High test peroxide (80-90% concentration) is used as a component of rocket fuel. In contact with a catalyst, it decomposes rapidly into a high temperature mixture of steam and oxygen (which in turn can burn anything in sight). The Bell Rocket Belt used hydrogen peroxide as a fuel. Hydrogen peroxide leaks from torpedo propellant have been blamed for the sinking of several submarines. Spilling high test peroxide on a flammable substance (like a fine powder, plausibly Tang) can cause it to burst immediately into flames -- flames that rapidly grow worse due to the free oxygen liberated by the reaction. It was part of the 2005 London underground bombs, which failed to explode.

Fortunately, the only way to really get it if you aren't a corporation or a government is to take low concentration peroxide and distill it. This is extraordinarily dangerous and more likely to kill the distillers than anything else.

But even 10% pure peroxide gives off enough oxygen from decomposition that it can spontaneously detonate at temperatures above 70 degrees. The vapors can form contact explosives when reacting with hydrocarbons such as grease. Spilled on clothing, it will evaporate water until the concentration reaches sufficient strength to burst into flames. Even medicinal concentrations can be dangerous. Swallow it and it will release enough gas to cause internal bleeding.

Tang is funny. Peroxide is dangerous stuff.

"could be recycled easily once it is no longer fun, or when it rains, whichever comes first."

Or when The Kid With No Pants has peed to fulfillment.

WNYC's program Radiolab has a fascinating program on musical language, largely involving the work of Deutsch. Podcast available here:

http://feeds.wnyc.org/radiolab

I'm telling you nobody's seen Elvis lately . . . .

Plus . . . what the hell's a Nickelback?

I thought Mythbusters addressed . . . you know . . . myths. This was an award winning undergraduate research paper at the Georgia Academy of Science that year, as I recall. (I'm the secretary of the Academy.)

Sorry. I refuse to believe that Atlas Shrugged correlates with anything other than masturbation.

I was the first person on my campus to get a web browser running -- pokey old Mosaic. Had to download the entire contents of the page before it could free up enough brains to render anything. Netscape 0.9 (which, if memory serves, was called Mosaic Netscape) was a revelation. Not just because of the Big Blue N that pulsed luridly in and out of the screen, but because it rendered data as it came in. That's probably not, in the end, any faster but it sure seemed like it. In a sense, the battle goes on. Mozilla/Firefox derives from Netscape, and Internet Explorer is based on Mosaic, purchased by Microsoft in 1995.

Mosaic still loses.

By the way, Jon Adair, Netscape was free too. It was released in a regular version and an "N" version (e.g. 1.0 and 1.0N). This version was freely downloadable for evaluation purposes, but you were supposed to voluntarily pay for it when you decided you liked it. Nobody ever did. Within a year, the distinction was dropped and only the free version was left, as long as you downloaded it. For the CD, you paid money, but why?

So much information, so little knowledge!

Yes, this is a Michaelson interferometer. And by 1932 you could still pass as a serious physicist doing ether experiments. Yes, Einstein had pretty much dispensed with the need for an ether model in 1905. But when he won the Nobel Prize in 1921, it was for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. At that time, relativity was still pretty controversial.

The Michaelson-Morley experiments are frequently cited in reconstructed histories of the development of relativity as seminal influences on Einstein's thought. Trouble is, there is absolutely no evidence of this. In Einstein's papers up to the publication of his paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies in 1905, there is no mention of Michaelson-Morley. As usual, the real history is a great deal more complex and less logical.

Einstein did not "take Lorentz's equations." What Lorentz did was essentially ad hoc curve fitting. He found a function that reproduced the data, but had no justification whatsoever for why time and space measurements should behave in that way. Einstein started with the demand that mechanics should obey the same laws as electrodynamics, and from that *derived* the Lorentz transformations.

In his biography of Niels Bohr, one of the creators of quantum mechanics and one of the 2 or 3 great physicists of the 20th century, Abraham Pais reports his experience reading Bohr's research journals. He says there was essentially no math at all. Bohr's thought process was almost entirely verbal.