How Well Did You Know The Deceased

From the Bob & Tom Show:

Really funny.

Best line: "Don't let that scare you, it's just a formality."

UPDATE: The prankster has a website.

Posted by: LauraW. at 05:11 PM | Comments (16)
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I assumed, it seems wrongly, that BMW's cars would be combusting H2, the same way pretty much an engine compusts gasoline vapor.

Entropy says I'm all wet, and I believe him, partly because I've just never grokked this whole "fuel cell" dealio. Even when I actually had to teach people about fuel cells for the MCATs. I just sort of vagued it all. Repeated what was in the book. Had no frickin' idea what they were talking about.

Apparently there is a chemical reaction going on -- hence the "fuel part" -- which liberates energy, but it's not actually burning it:

Fuel cells create water by mixing H with O, yes. Absolutely.

But they do not turn use mechanic or kinetic energy. They don't use the expanding (because of heat) H2O to push a piston.

They're actually collecting electric energy from the reaction by forcing the hydrogen to follow a certain path to get to the oxygen, which energizes the circuit the electrons pass through.

It actually has to remain rather cold to work. If it starts blowing up, it will destroy the fuel cell. The water is hot, yes, but the heat is not where the energy is coming from and would be avoided if it could.

Elemental hydrogen is being burned. Somewhat. Yes.

Still, you've got a big tank of H2, yes?

Posted by: Ace at 03:09 PM | Comments (66)
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Kaus started up with this, noting that Bush has let ten days pass since the border security fence bill passed -- which would result in a pocket veto, a veto simply due to not signing the bill in a timely manner.

Mary Katherine Ham explains that's just not the case. The clock starts ticking when he's officially "presented" with the bill by the Clerk of the Congress, and as of yet, he hasn't been.

Could just be waiting to sign it at a more opportune moment, i.e., closer to the election, or after the Mark Foley rage subsides and someone will actually notice he signed it.

Posted by: Ace at 02:54 PM | Comments (11)
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Conflicting opinions at Instapundit.

Here's what little I know about nukes. Even in an advanced nuke, very little fissionable material actually gets fissioned. The rest would get fissioned, except for the fact that the nuclear detonation blows out the rest of it too quickly to any longer be within a half mile of the detonating core.

So the trick is to build a bomb with such precise (to the billionth of a second) detonators that as much of the fissionable core as possible fissions simultaneously, before it's all blown away. Again, even in advanced US nukes, this is not a large fraction of everything that could be fissioned.

If the Nork bomb was a dud, it's because they engineered it poorly and primatively and could only manage a very small amount of actual fissioning. Mistiming might have caused just one side of the bomb to explode or something like that.

But even if it is a dud, it's not terribly reassuring. They can always improve. And they have 60 years of scientific papers on atomic bombs to help guide them.

On a more hopeful note, an atomic device is not the same thing as an atomic bomb. The Trinity nuke was a "device" rather than a bomb; a bomb implies you can easily transport it to a target, by a plane, say. The Trinity device was too large and cumbersome for that.

Again, though: this is 60 year old technology we're talking about. It's easy to simply follow in the footsteps of those who have managed it successfully, like, say, A. Q. Khan.

Hoax? Instapundit also links this interesting piece speculating the blast was just a hoax-- a purely conventional explosion (but a big one) designed to seem, seismically, like a nuke.

They've done it before, he notes.

Seems there are two ways to create a .5 kiloton blast (where a kiloton equals the explosive force of 1000 pounds of TNT):

1) Set off a very, very small, or dud, nuke that equals the power of 500 tons of TNT; or

2) fill a cavern with 500 tons of TNT and set that off.

We know that Kim Il-Jong is a movie fan-- and that's exactly what Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) did in A View To A Kill.

Compare:

Bonus! Kim Il-Jong wants congratulations.

Let's fix the Sixth Fleet up with ribbons and balloons and give him all the congratulations he can take.

Posted by: Ace at 02:38 PM | Comments (50)
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I think I'm going to let nitwit teenagers start uploading lipsync videos here.

You'd think when you had the price at $1.6 billion, negotiations would stop. Nope. They needed another 50 million.

Thanks to DB, assist from Hot Air.

Posted by: Ace at 02:03 PM | Comments (9)
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If you're thinking of sitting on your hands this election-- don't.

Just don't do it. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:53 PM | Comments (4)
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Students show off their student films. Mostly about what a whore "Melanie" is.

CAUTION: F-bombs aplenty.

Posted by: Ace at 01:10 PM | Comments (3)
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And, get this, shocker of all shockers, he still got elected.

Some Florida Democrats call Kevin King a rising star amongst the ranks of Democrats, but others, like the head of the Pinellas Democratic Party, Ed Helm, have doubts.

King was arrested in 2001. A judge ordered the St. Petersburg Police Department to seal all records regarding the arrest. King admits that the arrest stems from when he was a substitute teacher. He was arrested for computer solicitation to commit a lewd and lascivious act and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

According to published reports, King sent e-mails or instant messages to two female students, aged 14 and 15, trying to get them to skip school and drink alcohol with him. In addition, the reports say that King also asked the 14-year-old to perform a sexual act on him.

King, who admits he was arrested, insists he did nothing wrong and points to the fact that the records were sealed and he was not found guilty of anything. King would not appear on camera for this story.

Public records obtained from the Pinellas School District state that it was initially substantiated that he was committing or convicted of a felony. King convinced the school district to change the record to say that it was "misconduct in office where a student was related."

King resigned his paid position in the Democratic Party after the primaries election to care for his parents. Two weeks ago, however, he was elected a Democratic committee member position in Pinellas.

Not to get into degrees of bad, but honestly, it is worse to pray on children over whom you have a supervisor capacity. Most laws acknowledge this.

Posted by: Ace at 12:58 PM | Comments (28)
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Westworld, baby.

A while ago I read an article, maybe on Slate, that stated that almost all media technology, no matter what it's original intention, quickly became popularized and advanced by its pornographic usages.

Cave drawings? Pottery? Statuary? A lot of them show dirty stuff.

Writing? Well. I'm sure words for "gynie" and "boobie" were invented before, say, "reverse mortgate."

The printing press? Well, the Bible was the biggest engine, but close behind it were thousands of pornographic books.

Photography? Film? Yup.

Videotapes? Forget about it. Some say we wouldn't even have had a thriving videotape marked if not for porn-- which was always the biggest profit-source for mom & pop operations. The legitimate moves were loss-leaders just to get you behind the curtains in the back of the shop.

And the internet? I think we all know the name of that tune.

And now robotics. Yes, we all want a robotic pool-cleaner or lawn-mower.

But you know what's going to get us full-blown androids, right?

Not their usefulness as greeters at corporate offices.

The sexual urge drives so much human industry-- as Dave Chappelle said, if I guy could get laid in a cardboard box, he wouldn't bother renting an apartnment or buying a house. And it drives a hell of a lot technological innovation too.

Men think about sex once every minute or two. And hence: The Brooklyn Bridge.

You're welcome.

Islamism Is Ahead Of The West: They've decided to simply make their women into biological robots, like in Blade Runner, I guess.

PS, what the hell were the androids in Blade Runner? It wasn't clear to me in the book if they were just really cloned humans, and the movie calls the "replicants" but there they're plainly entirely biological. Not "androids" at all.

Maybe that's just what people in the future call them to deny the fact that they're simply owning cloned human slaves.

Posted by: Ace at 12:47 PM | Comments (37)
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Here at AOSHQ we pride ourselves on being morons. But not incomprehensibly insane morons.

OK, maybe that too. But not like this chick:

ERIE, Pa. - A woman used her 4-week-old baby as a weapon in a domestic dispute, swinging the infant through the air and striking her boyfriend with the child, authorities said.

The boy was in serious but stable condition Monday at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, police said.

"Never, never, never. I can never remember anything like this," District Attorney Bradley Foulk told the Erie Times-News.

Chytoria Graham, 27, of Erie, was charged with aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and simple assault.

In all fairness, if my parents had named me Chytoria, I would be an angry person too.

She was held Monday in the Erie County Jail in lieu of $75,000 bail.

I guess the BF decided not to spring for a bail bond.

The infant, whose name was not released, suffered a fractured skull and some bleeding in the brain, authorities said. His head hit Graham's boyfriend, the baby's father, police Lt. Dan Spizarny said.

Mom accused of swinging baby as weapon

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (25)
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