fukuda

O is for Oak acorns, also known as oak nuts. They're still eaten in several parts of the world

The Japanese term Gajin (foreigner), I've been told, has its roots in a similarily descriptive term. quote> The word "gaijin" itself has been deemed as no longer politically correct and a new one is being used officially: "gaikokujin" (the character for "country" has been inserted and it now reads as "person(s) from an outside country" instead of "person(s) from outside"). This kind of noun morphing depending on how badly the term is misused is pretty usual in Japan, the same happened with the noun meaning "China". The word "gaijin" and its character-reversed sibling "jingai" (literally "outside of person", it reads as "inhuman") are already being used extensively by xenophobes which is the main reason why a new word had to be adopted...

An Iranian F-4 jet fighter crashed near Bushehr's nuclear facility... Good lord, they may even manage to nuclear bomb themselves this way... And more unrelated but still bad news, there's been a car bombing in South Ossetia this morning and an explosion in a russian coffee near the ossetian border some hours ago, bad news in the caucasus are usually pretty dangerous...

What I think about Apple? Not much really, the Apple vs. Anything discussions are usally nothing more than the background noise of most forums to me. Apple isn't really a part of my daily life. - While I indeed do some graphical stuff for my papers, they're just small diagrams or pictures I can finish in 1 hour at most. i wouldn't buy a computer just for it. - I listen to the radio (I'm listening to it right now), I never really used or needed an MP3 device. This may change in the future, or maybe not. - I'm not a guy who likes spending too much so I won't go buying expensive things if I can buy a cheaper but still ok analogous device. Buying things just because they're trendy or to show off wealth and/or social status isn't really my thing either (not saying that I have anything against it though, you're free to buy whatever you want to). - Despite being a nerd I'm not exactly a hardware buff. I know enough to build a PC by myself (my desktop PC is a rather good dual-core with 4Gb of RAM even though it costed less than 350€ because I bought it piece by piece) but that's because computers are were my father's business and I learned it from him. You'll almost never see me discussing hardware. The games I usually play don't need a powerful computer (ecepting CXL) either, so I don't really care.

Nonsense. Santa is a time-warper who keeps his presents in hammerspace, that's all.

Oops wrong , no Duke87 next.

95/100 Dark mimikko avatars are great, ain't they?

I am not allowed to... .. translate texts out of my domain. .. unilaterally disclose information related to current research at my department. .. conduct unapproved research. .. enter the sterile room with casual clothing. .. play with the lab mice. .. clean the microscope optics by myself. .. extract blood from any animal without an animal rights activist's approval, and he must be present during the extraction (yes, seriously)

I have 4 pairs of shoes: 1 pair of brown leather dress shoes, 2 pairs of sneakers and 1 pair of hiking boots. No sandals as I don't enjoy showing my quite malformed toes

he was sitting by a campfire after getting sacked by a monster wave and began drawing circles within spheres, cutting and slicining the 3 dimensional shape untill he ended up with a pattern that looked like the tracks left behind when particals are smahed in the LHC, when the pattern is rotated.quote> It's Kekulé's dream all again! About Lisi's theory, it's been having some serious problems since 2007. A paper by S. Garibaldi and J. Distler was published recently that unluckily dismantles a big part of his algebra

No, you're right. Neither oil nor mercury are wet because they contain no water (this is what "being wet" means). What makes mercury special is that it cannot wet other things because of the way too high surface tension. Oil does not contain water because its non-polar phase repels water, mercury doesn't either because of the too strong bridges between the atoms that cause the surface tension and don't let water in. As you can see in the pic above, mercury droplets will seek the way to expose the least contact surface possible with the medium they're on and will become "round" to adjust their surface-volume ratio so that the less atoms possible will be on the surface (there's a strong pull coming from the inside of the droplet). This makes them unable to wet other surfaces, because they really love their kin and hate everyone else

90F and 85% humidity outside right now (1:43 am) It's rather cool tonight... Luckily

Feels good

Originally posted by: blakesterville If the universe is without God, then how did it become so well ordered to begin with?quote> The universe is far from ordered, I don't know where you got that idea from. Galaxies are blobs of matter and energy located at millions of year lights from each other, with lots (?) of almost total vacuum between them, within these galaxies the stars are located at amazing and irregular distances from each other, with clouds of gas inbetween (gas being the most disordered dtate), you can find extremely small dots of relative order in solar systems (relative because stars are always losing lots of energy and mass to their surroundings). The universe is waaaay bigger than anything humans are able to imagine, and it's incredibly duisordered. Planets are almost insignificant to the total equation, humans are pretty much non-existing. And at our level, This is order: Regular distances, almost no thermal variation, no reactivity. Extremely stable and ordered. And the polar opposite of life. This is disorder: Irregular distances, always moving around thanks to the impacts of water molecules, interacting and reacting (thus unstable) lots of atoms and molecules running around (non-visible here). This is a tiny portion of a cell's cytosol, showing part of the inner mechanisms of life.. Life isn't exactly ordered, it's not ordered at all inside in fact. Nothing of this random though, because disorder does not mean total randomness. There are strict limitations to what can happen and what cannot in this universe.

Is it using screws instead of wheels, or...? I'll never drive such a .. special-looking... thing (Well, I hope that's just a sketch)

His successor is going to be yet another John Wayne going to blast his way into an even deeper hole.quote> His successor is General David Petraeus, he's not exactly a newb nor a John Wayne clone jokes aside. But generals, like all military men, are just obeying orders too. They can't (and they shouldn't) decide by themselves how to fight a war, neither can they decide how much money and efforts are allotted to the military campaign or manipulate the citizen's opinion about the war. It's a complex problem with factors stemming from all the parts involved, a nice mess indeed.

Horses raised for food. People used (well, some nostlagics still do) mules or donkeys for country work, horses tend to be too fragile in this climate.

Originally posted by: A Nonny Moose Interesting. Apparently, if a horse is in a position of wanting to get out of the enclosure they will try to get over the wire. If they get hung up on it, it can injure them seriously. Most examples seem to be stallions trying to get at mares. quote> Stallions turn into raging machines every mating season. We just confine them into the stables until their hormone levels are back into the normal ranges... The worst part is catching them first, an excited stallion is a very dangerous animal and you wouldn't be the first person killed by one. Electric fences are quite good because even though hitting one hurts it won't leave any injury. And horses are quite scared of electric shocks.. ===================== My bad, I meant "as livestock". I'm not really familiar with English farming terms

Originally posted by: A Nonny Moose Is it customary to fence horses with wire or barbed wire?quote> We used electric wire fences in our family farm... But some people still use barbed wire fences indeed. It's not that big of a problem if you're raising them for poultry as many people do. We just rented the field to city people so their race horses could have a big place to run freely every week, so putting barbed wire was out of question. Although my uncle used a barbed wire fence if I'm not mistaken, he never had any kind of problem with the horses according to him.

My father sometimes drives his old Renault 21 And I drive my second-hand Peugeot 406:

Set it off while wearing a civil defence helmet.quote> A tinfoil hat sounds more appropriate to me

Private schools funded by the government, sounds great! Benefits will go to the trusts and taxpayers will pay any losses, total win-win.