That seems to be the case here in the US as well. For the last several months all of my credit card statements have included this information.
Real estate is a good investment because it always go up in value.
Especially if you live in North Dakota. I swear, they’ve had 100-year floods the past 7 out of 9 years. North Dakota floods, the west burns - it’s a truism.
I remember being very dissillusioned by this on the very first time I did my taxes. I thought I was going to be getting thousands back because I had put a few grand into my IRA and it was “tax deductable.” As I was actually filling out the form and saw the truth, It was most dissappointing.
I wanted to say that despite reading tons of history books in my life with heavy indexes, even going back to the 70s, I never once thought about how the index was created. I didn’t think it was created by computer, but until this moment I never imagined a human being actually going through and doing it, I find it strangely interesting that there is a profession for this :).
On that same vein (heh)- you did not get the flu from your flu shot. It’s flu season, you were exposed before you got the shot, or you are having mild side effects of the shot- but not the flu itself.
Heh. When Hadrian’s Wall was built, the English were still living in Germany and the Scots were still living in Ireland.
OK, I’m going to comment on this one too.
Humans are mammals, right? It’s not exactly wrong to say “we evolved from mammals”, in the sense that our ancestors were mammals. But it is misleading since it implies that we’re no longer mammals.
So it turns out that humans ARE monkeys. Primates are a particular kind of mammals, monkeys are a particular kind of primate, apes are a particular kind of monkey, and humans are a particular kind of ape.
So humans evolved from monkeys in the same way that baboons and gorillas and macaques evolved from earlier monkeys. In the same way it’s sort-of correct to say that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but it’s more correct to say that birds ARE dinosaurs.
An outlier is a statistical term that is determined using statistical tests. It is incorrect to simply look at a spread of data points and arbitrarily determine that this or that one are outliers. Statiscians have actually devised methods for doing this.
Schizophrenia does not involve having “multiple personalities”. So saying “The weather has been pretty schizophrenic lately” is a misproper use of the term (even though it’s so common that it’s kind of a jerkish to correct people about it).
Pollution does not always mean toxic substances. Dirt (sediments) is a pollutant. And nutrients aren’t good in your local waterways. Yes, fish need nutrients just like the rest of us, but they don’t need help from humans to get them. Mitigating excess nitrogen and phosphorus in streams, rivers, and lakes is actually more problematic and expensive than fixing “toxic pollutant” problems.
Also, while point dischargers (e.g., industrial factories and sewage treatment plants) are not always blameless innocents, they are not the biggest culprit of poor water quality. Agriculture and John and Jane Q. Public are, because in most jurisdictions, there’s no legal enforcement to make sure they comply with the Clean Water Act.
Butterflies don’t come from cocoons of silk. Moths and a few other insects do.
And “fish.” And a bunch of other things.
But we did not evolve from the sort of “monkeys” we see in the world today. Those species have had just as much time to evolve since the split as we have.
For that matter, yes, we evolved from mammals, we evolved from something that would today likely be called a fish, but not from any of the mammals or any of the fish here now.
It does. Disregarding local variations in the actual attractive force of gravity, a person standing on the equator (and therefore orbiting the center of the earth at 1041 MPH) would perceive a gravity to be 99.6% of what he felt standing at either pole.
A person flying east along the equator on a 747 (ground speed 600 MPH) would experience 99.1% of what he felt at either pole.
The pilot of an SR-71 flying east along the equator (ground speed 2100 MPH) would experience 96.9% of what he felt at either pole; something dropped in the cockpit would accelerate toward the pilot’s feet only 96.9% as rapidly as would happen if the plane were parked at the north pole.
My understanding is that apes and monkeys are two distinct types of primates. That is, apes are not a subset of monkeys, but an entirely separate branch. The primates are divided into the prosimians and the simians, and simians are divided into monkeys and apes. Humans, being apes, are therefore not, in fact, monkeys. At least, as far as I know.
Oil and water don’t mix because oil is less dense than water.
(really, they don’t mix because oil is non-polar and water is polar)
Fair enough. That seems to speak more to the idea that monkey is just an inaccurate term than anything else (or at least that new and old world monkeys should be referred to separately). Or, as wikipedia says, “monkey” is not a good taxon.
At any rate, I can say with confidence that I am not a Monkee.
Likewise, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission has PSAs that proclaim, “Water and Alcohol Don’t Mix”. I always scowl and explain to whomever I’m with that they most certainly do.
When you’re walking down the street, do you get the funniest looks from everyone you meet?
Colgan Air Flight 3407 did not crash because of iced wings. Any ice build up on the wings wasn’t sufficient enough to particularly affect the flight, and the deicing system was turned on. Alongside this fact, the plane did not enter an icing-induced tail stall to trigger the accident sequence; this was mentioned early in the investigation as something the Dash-6 is susceptible to, but the design of the Dash-8 (especially the Q400) is such that if your tail has stalled, you are well into a wing stall already!
My fluid and aerodynamics profs at school continually point to this crash as an example of things that can affect/reduce lift, but they are simply wrong about the facts of the situation. The TV episode of Mayday which covers this accident also points to icing as part of the cause. This episode was produced before the accident report even came out, and they are simply wrong.
I am, apparently, suffering a misconception about this. Are you saying that butterflies don’t come from cocoons or that they don’t come from silk cocoons?
Because I thought they came from cocoons (maybe created from leaves or other materials).