The recent classic column, “What happens if the earth stops spinning?” (22-Nov-1996) features an illustration of a man asleep in bed, with his wife sitting up, and incidentally, apparently sitting on a baby.
Try as I might, I cannot figure out what this has to do with the Earth spinning. Does anyone have a clue? Am I missing a joke, or is the illustration mixed up?
I’m gonna go with explanation B.
Ah, but is the bed standing on anything, or floating in the air? (Kinda hard to tell from the picture.)
Betcha a dollar that this was one of those two-part columns, and the other half had something to do with asphixiated children in beds.
If the earth would stop spinning, we’d have a whole lot more to worry about then the slight weight increase.
Climate issues would be killer. You would have massive heating of the side of the earth pointed at the sun, and massive cooling of the side opposite. The only areas with decent temperature would be at the boundary between the sides. But there would be immense storms across the boundary between the two sides - which would make it difficult to live there.
Not a pretty picture. Tide-locked planets don’t seem like fun places to live on, compared to spinning ones.
Aside from that, you’d need a helluva lot of energy to stop the earth from spinning.
-Geon
Tide-locked doesn’t mean they don’t spin. See, for example, the moon.
If the earth stopped spinning, it would still have year long “days.”
But that doesn’t answer the OP. A quick look at http://www.straightdope.com/columns/961122.html shows that Ike was right, it was a multi-part column, the second part dealing with smothering a baby by accident while sleeping. It also answers the question, How did Bazooka Joe lose his right eye? (Answer: he didn’t)
Hah! Everybody owes me a buck! Let’s see…there’s 9,944 of us as of 9:53 AM EDT on October 5…
Okay, the first round’s on me at the next New York Dopefest.
Well drinks and domestic beer only.
Ike
I betcha 9,944 dollars that you don’t collect.
Drinks are on me!