Just give it a few weeks and something else will come along to KILL the planet. I am 71 and played with mercury when I was a kid and it did not hurt me, me, me... Heck we rolled it around in our hands and put on rings to wear. What a joke.
@Klebert L. Hall: I hate that. They always talk about "The most dangerous car on the road" or "the fourth leading cause of death among teenagers." Just because something is most common, doesn't mean it is common.
A major problem in medicine, too - just because something doubles your risk of (cancer, heart disease, whatever) doesn't necessarily mean it's a big deal. It might be doubling it from infinitesimal to... infinitesimal.
-Kle.
@Dr Emilio Lizardo: When I was in middle school, I figured the 4th leading cause of death among teenagers was masturbation.
And I did my frantic best to make it #3.
hahah and i still remember the first time i sukced down on the nitrous and it was in the early 70's high on LSD at a party where some guy had a tank of it with a gas mask rigged up.
"Every hit you take on that nitrous cracker is killing the Earth"
Guess this chick is the Ted Bundy of the environment then.
EDIT: Ah dang, I just realized that she's only hooked on inhaling from computer dusters (which normally don't contain nitrous). For some reason I thought she was also doing whip cream cans.
@omgwtflolbbqbye: It's like I'm walking on sunshine! I will NEVER get tired of that. And how she freaked when they came to take her cat away, which lead to the two police officers having to restrain her.
I never understood the practice of sucking the nitrous out of whipped cream. The short span of intoxication is no match for the HUGE amount of bliss you can get out of eating the whole can of whipped cream. To say nothing of what you can do if you're not alone. ;)
I'm fascinated by the philosophical transition here... It used to be that life in the universe was so improbable that Earth was the only possible place it could be. Now, life in the universe is so probable that it's making life on Earth look more and more impossible. Of course, I say this is all philosophical because, regardless of your speculations, Earth is still the only place we know of with life.
@Cory Gross: Yeah, it's sounding like instead of a "Goldilocks Zone" we're in more of a "Rumpelstiltzkin" situation... Locked in a tiny room, a power-mad king (hot sun) breathing down our necks, trying to spin straw into gold while tiny dwarf-creatures mock us from afar.
The dwarves, of course, are aliens who evolved in much higher gravity-- hence their short stature.
Cory Gross promoted this comment
brentbent: C.O.C.K.R.O.A.C.H. )for all the queer super villians out there( was starred
brentbent: C.O.C.K.R.O.A.C.H. )for all the queer super villians out there( was unstarred
Look, honestly? With lip service and apologies to all of the experts we hear from every week:
Given the immense frigging size of this universe we live in, I would not be surprised...no, actually let me rephrase that: I will bet cash freaking money on the fact that there is a damn-near-duplicate copy of this rock we live on with people who look exactly like us.
Write a "1" on a billboard sized piece of paper and then start writing zeros next to it for about 3 or 4 months. Look at that number. That probably doesn't cover the number of planets out there. How could it not be possible?
@kolacek: Actually, A more recent estimate of the number of stars in the universe has it around 7*10^22 ([www.space.com]). If our solar system is average in having 8 or 9 planets but only one or two of which may be in a 'habitable zone' you're still only looking at somewhere around 10^23 potentially habitable planets in the universe. The number is absolutely gigantic, but not as long to write out as you make it seem. Here, let me do it for you: 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Even if we turn out to be a small-ish solar system and most had far more planets than ours, or larger habitable zones, it's unlikely we'd see any number larger than adding one more zero to that figure.
08/28/09
08/28/09
08/28/09
08/29/09
Oh, fine - you rich kids got Plutonium every day, while we had to walk ten miles, just to get a scrap of depleted Uranium for dinner...
-Kle.
08/28/09
08/28/09
More accurately, it always has been, but now someone is pointing it out.
" A study published today in Science proves it is the leading cause of ozone layer destruction in the twenty-first century."
That would be because we have reduced the levels of the former leading causes to the point where NO is now prominent.
There will always be a leading cause; it would be more useful to talk about the magnitude of the effect than about what is the biggest effector.
-Kle.
08/28/09
08/29/09
A major problem in medicine, too - just because something doubles your risk of (cancer, heart disease, whatever) doesn't necessarily mean it's a big deal. It might be doubling it from infinitesimal to... infinitesimal.
-Kle.
08/30/09
And I did my frantic best to make it #3.
08/27/09
Needs more Devo
08/27/09
So I guess going green would consist of . . . starting to shoot up heroin instead?
08/27/09
08/27/09
Guess this chick is the Ted Bundy of the environment then.
EDIT: Ah dang, I just realized that she's only hooked on inhaling from computer dusters (which normally don't contain nitrous). For some reason I thought she was also doing whip cream cans.
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/28/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
Oh look, Annalee posted something about science.
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/13/09
They'll be here next Tuesday.
08/13/09
08/13/09
The dwarves, of course, are aliens who evolved in much higher gravity-- hence their short stature.
08/13/09
08/13/09
08/13/09
08/13/09
Given the immense frigging size of this universe we live in, I would not be surprised...no, actually let me rephrase that: I will bet cash freaking money on the fact that there is a damn-near-duplicate copy of this rock we live on with people who look exactly like us.
Write a "1" on a billboard sized piece of paper and then start writing zeros next to it for about 3 or 4 months. Look at that number. That probably doesn't cover the number of planets out there. How could it not be possible?
08/13/09