Could a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building kill a pedestrian on the street below? The Experiment. (Thanks again to Joanne Schmitz)
2021: Closing comments on this one to cut down a little bit on spam.
Another thing I’d like to know is why I was able to run cdrecord on Red Hat 6.2 but not on 7.1 or 9.
Later: The CDR had gone bad in the interim. I replaced it with a DVD/CD burner.)
Laterer: Which seems to have gone bad in turn, within eight months.
Why Jews Don’t Farm. Link from Matthew Yglesias, whose commentors don’t think much of the essay.
Amy Greenwood takes on those pestilential ‘bioethicists’ whom I have heckled more than once.
Yes, if the world is different, we will think about it differently. So what? A worldview in flux is not an ethical problem, and why assume a new one will be inhuman or less profound? Besides, I don’t think I’m less committed to science now that I expect to live to 80 than if I expected to live to 40. In fact, if I had reason to believe I would die at 40, I might as well stop working on difficult problems because I probably wouldn’t have time to make much progress anyway. So in that way, I may be more committed to my work and to my personal engagements because I expect the long run to be, well, long.
. . . .
Anyway, the idea of living to 200 appeals to me enormously. Wouldn’t it be fun to have more time to get good, I mean really good, at what you are doing? There are so many languages to learn, books to read, people to talk to . . . in fact, I would distinctly relish a glut of the able. Maybe I’ll have my grandmother send some cookies over to the Council on Bioethics, because life is just really not that bad.
(Thanks to Charles Murtaugh for a link.)
In the Spiderman movie that appeared a year ago, one striking departure from canon was to have a bio-engineered spider, rather than a radioactive one, bite Peter Parker. (Makes more sense anyway.) I wondered at the time, would Daredevil make a similar change?
Well, I never saw Daredevil. Did you?