I’ve got no bad science stories. I’m just here to say as an avid paintball player, the idea of doing it on horseback kicks ass.
So will the horse, the first time it gets hit with a paintball. 
We are in big trouble 86,400 years from now. I just hope my ancestors are on the sunny side.
Depends where they bury the survivors.
They drowned digging the hole when they buried them at sea. :smack:
Months ago, my husband argued with me that aurora borealis were cause by the sun reflecting on polar ice caps.
OK, it turns out that I spoke a bit too harshly :smack: kicks self in the wazoo, because the leap second is indeed connected with the earth’s rotation slowing down. However, as I stated, the slowing down is nowhere near a second per year, it is indeed, as I said, about 2.3 milliseconds per century, or thereabouts. If it was a second per year, we’d all be utterly screwed very soon indeed.
Leap seconds keep the number of standard seconds in a year close to mean solar time. Seconds are counted these days using accurate atomic clocks. It turns out that the second that is counted by atomic time standards has been defined in such a way that its length matches the nominal second of 1/86400 of a mean solar day between 1750 and 1892. Since then, the lenght of the day has been increasing. The reason for leap seconds is the *sum * of the difference between the length of the SI (standard system of units) day and the mean solar day over a period of time. To make up for this, we currently tack on about 0.7 seconds to each year - this is done by adding a leap second most years.
Blast. This stuff is more complicated than I thought. I’ll get back to you on this, and I’ll probably bring pie.
I heard someone else mention this upthread too. Really, potatoes with the skin do have more vitamins and nutrients located in the skin, and just under the skin. Why eat the rest? Because vitamins and nutrients alone won’t keep you alive - no calories. Vitamins and minerals are micronutrients that are necessary for health, but don’t provide any energy themselves.
That said, potatoes without the skin have less micronutrients, but they’re not completely devoid of them either. It’s not such a huge difference that you’ll suffer vitamin deficiency if you peel your potatoes, especially if you eat healthy in general and/or use a multivitamin.
The biggest differences I can see from the chart below are that the levels of calcium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, folate, vitamin A and vitamin k are all noticable lower in baked potatoes without the skin.
The levels of Vitamin C and copper actually increases!
From the USDA nutrient database for 100g quantitiy of “Potatoes, baked, flesh, without salt” versus “Potato, baked, flesh and skin, without salt”
Nutrient / With skin / Without skin
(all quantities in mg unless otherwise noted)
*Minerals *
Calcium / 15 / 5
Iron / 1.08 / 0.35
Magnesium / 28 / 25
Phosphorus / 70 / 50
Potassium / 535 / 391
Sodium / 10 / 5
Zinc / 0.36 / 0.29
Copper / 0.118 / 0.215
Manganese / 0.219 / 0.161
Selenium (mcg) / 0.4 / 0.3
Vitamins
Vitamin C / 9.6 / 12.8
Thiamin / 0.064 / 0.105
Riboflavin / 0.048 / 0.021
Niacin / 1.410 / 1.395
Pantothenic acid / 0.376 / 0.555
Vitamin B-6 / 0.311 / 0.301
Folate (total) (mcg) / 28 / 9
Vitamin A (IU) / 10 / 0
Vitamin E / 0.04 / 0.04
Vitamin K (mcg) / 2 / 0.3
Cecil on potato skins. In short, he says that the skins protect the rest of the potato, both in the ground and during cooking if left intact, but don’t have much nutritional value in themselves. On the other hand they contain a mild poison which may be dangerous in large quantities.
That method could work on some gas stoves/ovens/furnaces. Opening the throttle to the max allows a greater flame which would let the oven or whatnot reach the desired temp faster. On my mom’s old electric range, it did work that way. Turning it up all the way increased the current to the elements making heat up much faster - going by the time it took to turn the burner bright red.
Its how I heat up my car, when I actually own one, on winter mornings. Crank up the heat to the max.
Here is what Scientific American had to say about the subject.
You could be speaking of my mother-in-law, here. Lovely, intelligent woman, a maverick in her day - went to college for the MBA not the Mrs., that sort of thing… and yet, she’s a Young Earth Creationist.
I’m sorry, sir, but as one who lived north of the Mighty River (and crossed it several times), I must nitpick and tell you that it’s spelled Mackenzie. It’s an awesome sight (assuming that you have not seen it in your many years).
My brother had 1/4 of his brain removed and functions normally. There is no discernable difference between him now and him before, except now he has an excuse for being an idiot. 
Medical practise removes a hemisphere of the brain in people with severe epilepsy or other seizure-causing conditions, which then ceases seizures. Cite; Cite; Cite.
But that article makes clear, for the corpus callousum, that functioning was not normal.
And it isn’t clear which study of hemispherectomy from Johns Hopkins they are referring to. If it is this one, this is the conclusion of the authors of that paper regarding hemispherectomy:
Young children do recover and adapt fairly well, but I still haven’t seen anything to suggest that their functioning will be normal.
Whenever we walk our mustelid buddy Buster on his leash we invariably run into someone who doesn’t know that not every ferret with black feet is a Black-footed Ferret. They question how it can be legal for us to make a pet of an endangered species.
Once, while looking at the new ferret babies Petco had just gotten in, a woman said to her daughter that the black-legged/black-footed ones probably weren’t legal.
The little girl, around 8-10 years old, said “Moth-ther! You’re SO embarrassing! Not every ferret with black feet is a Black-footed Ferret! You’re like saying a chihuahua is the same thing as a wolf!” Not quite. It’s more like the difference between a German Shepherd and a wolf, but she was pretty close for such a young kid.
I can one-up you there.
A bit of set up:
Picture a moonshine tent set up for a semi-permanent camp, in which rye mash is fermenting in big ol’ drums. There are thermostatically-controlled DC-powered aquarium heaters to keep the mash from getting too cold during the May mountain nights. Things tick along nicely, until the summer, when the sweltering heat during the day punishes the yeast and the fermentation slows waaaaaaaay down, severely affecting production.
Now picture a woman who has a simple solution to the problem, (if it’s too hot, turn the thermostat down,) and can’t be made to understand why it would be ineffective, no matter how hard you tried to explain that the control is connected to a heater which won’t lower the temperature below ambient, and is irritated that you won’t follow her sound advice. “Just turn it down!”
Very late, but yes I would make that bet too. However, we had agreed that the coins were perfect and unbiased. Our debate wasn’t about empirically discovering biased coins, it was firmly set in the realm of pure statistics.
I’ve known scientists who when faced with a cell culture or bacterial incubator that has accidentally been set too high (say, 45C when it is supposed to be 37C) will turn the incubator down to the correct setting, close the door then wonder why it is taking all day to get down to the correct temperature.
Hint: try leaving the incubator door wide open, Einstein!
What strikes me as strange about it is that according to the Bible, Adam was the one who had one rib removed in order to make Eve from it. Therefore, women ought to have one more rib than men!
I’ve had several people insist that Mexico is in South America: “It’s south of America.” They don’t believe me when I tell them that “America” means the entire New World.
I’ve known people who think that a radio signal is the same as a sound wave. One actually laughed at me when I told him that radio signals travel at the speed of light. I tried to explain that a radio station transmits an electromagnetic wave which is then converted to sound by the radio, that if it was a sound wave you wouldn’t need a radio to hear it. He kept laughing and said “Sound can’t travel at the speed of light!”.
If you think it’s funny hearing people trying to use statistics to predict a coin toss, then you must check out some of the jag-offs sitting around the roulette table. These people actually think the past spins affect the current spin: “oooh! 9 hasn’t come up in a long time! It’s due!”, or “26 is hot!”. The casinos have even started catering to this idiocy, with LED boards displaying the past 20 or so spins. I know, some guy broke Monte Carlo by picking up on an anomalty in one of the wheels, but that was in like 1890; I’m sure the wheels are better quality these days. And with everything being fed into computers, the house is going to spot an anomalty before any of us are. But nothing fazes the jag-offs: “If it doesn’t mean anything, then why do they bother displaying the numbers?” As if the casino is trying to help them win!