It's around time for a science experiment video, and for today's, I'll again resort to plastering Steve Spangler all over your screen. Today, the object is to expand a bit on the old can't-mix-oil-and-water chestnut.
By not mixing seven layers worth of stuff, with water in the middle, lamp oil on the top and honey on the bottom. You'll note numbers on the labels; that's the specific gravity level. Water is the baseline at 1.00; everything else is relative to that. For a more complete list (not complete, but more complete) of liquids, go here.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Sunday, July 8, 2012
A Message From Those Of Us Who Work In The Service Industry
We are cool with you using pennies to pay for things. As much maligned as they can be sometimes, they are still useful.
But please, use them in moderation. Try to limit your usage to four pennies per transaction. The more you use past four, the more annoyed we will be. If you choose to use pennies to conduct the entire transaction, we will become quite cross. At the very least, it will eat up vast amounts of our time and energy to ensure you have the correct amount of pennies. We may in fact elect to refuse service, and as you'll see, may go further than that. Technically, they are legal tender, but private businesses and, it seems, local governments are free to specify how they wish to be paid (though it's preferred that we specify prior to transaction). It's their call if they want to deal with you or not. If you want the pennies to be taken, you had better be nice enough about it to be deemed worth dealing with.
There was an experiment run here by a group of people in New York, to see what happened when they tried to pay a bill of about $1, give or take, with pennies. What they found in their self-admittedly-small-scale experiment was that it wasn't so much the pennies themselves. It was more the fact that it would take more work and more time to count them all. The cashiers tended not to think all that much of it until the people behind the experimenters in line started getting agitated and impatient, at which point the cashiers started feeling pressure to just get the transaction done and over with.
That was just for a dollar. Two people in the news got lucky with their pennies when paying much more. One man, Thomas Daigle of Milford, Massachusetts, was dealing with the Milford Federal Savings and Loan Association, and he was nice enough to call in ahead of time and let them know; it was something he'd been working towards for 35 years and he'd always wanted to make his final mortgage payment in pennies. They approved it.
Let me reiterate: the paying-off of a mortgage with 62,000 pennies is something that had to be specifically approved.
There's also Faith Hammock of Indiana, who has been gathering 500,000 pennies to help pay for her daughter's college tuition. The story here on that doesn't get into how she intends to turn in the pennies, but she'll find someone to take them.
But these people are the lucky ones. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people like Ron Spears of Cle Elum, Washington, who attempted to pay a $330 property tax bill in pennies and was refused. He ultimately paid in the manner of a normal person.
And then there's Jason West of Vernal, Utah, who paid a $25 medical bill- one he was disputing- in pennies. Jason was not being a pleasant person to deal with, especially since he just up and dumped them on the counter, causing pennies to fly everywhere.
West, who was paying a $25 bill, was subsequently cited for disorderly conduct, which carries a $140 fine.
And then there's the case of Frank Gilberti of Nutley, New Jersey. In 2008, Gilberti had a $56 traffic fine to pay (he wasn't wearing his seatbelt). He went out and got some rolls of pennies. The Bloomfield municipal court told him no. Gilberti persisted, pestering people to take his rolls. At one point, he was told to write his drivers license number on each roll. He asked if he'd have to do that if he paid in bills too. And then came the part where he found out the municipal court had actually put out a warrant for his arrest. And then they revoked the $90 bail after his uncle- doubling as his lawyer- said Gilberti would be pleading not guilty. (The media seems to have gotten bored with the case before finding out how it ended.)
Keep in mind, this only applies in the United States. In the United Kingdom, the penny equivalent, the 1-penny and 2-pence pieces, actually cease to be legal tender in amounts over 20 pence, meaning someone could shoot you down and have full legal backing to do so.
To reiterate: pay in dollars, or with a debit or credit card, and you won't go to jail. Pay in pennies, and we cannot make any guarantees.
But please, use them in moderation. Try to limit your usage to four pennies per transaction. The more you use past four, the more annoyed we will be. If you choose to use pennies to conduct the entire transaction, we will become quite cross. At the very least, it will eat up vast amounts of our time and energy to ensure you have the correct amount of pennies. We may in fact elect to refuse service, and as you'll see, may go further than that. Technically, they are legal tender, but private businesses and, it seems, local governments are free to specify how they wish to be paid (though it's preferred that we specify prior to transaction). It's their call if they want to deal with you or not. If you want the pennies to be taken, you had better be nice enough about it to be deemed worth dealing with.
There was an experiment run here by a group of people in New York, to see what happened when they tried to pay a bill of about $1, give or take, with pennies. What they found in their self-admittedly-small-scale experiment was that it wasn't so much the pennies themselves. It was more the fact that it would take more work and more time to count them all. The cashiers tended not to think all that much of it until the people behind the experimenters in line started getting agitated and impatient, at which point the cashiers started feeling pressure to just get the transaction done and over with.
That was just for a dollar. Two people in the news got lucky with their pennies when paying much more. One man, Thomas Daigle of Milford, Massachusetts, was dealing with the Milford Federal Savings and Loan Association, and he was nice enough to call in ahead of time and let them know; it was something he'd been working towards for 35 years and he'd always wanted to make his final mortgage payment in pennies. They approved it.
Let me reiterate: the paying-off of a mortgage with 62,000 pennies is something that had to be specifically approved.
There's also Faith Hammock of Indiana, who has been gathering 500,000 pennies to help pay for her daughter's college tuition. The story here on that doesn't get into how she intends to turn in the pennies, but she'll find someone to take them.
But these people are the lucky ones. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people like Ron Spears of Cle Elum, Washington, who attempted to pay a $330 property tax bill in pennies and was refused. He ultimately paid in the manner of a normal person.
And then there's Jason West of Vernal, Utah, who paid a $25 medical bill- one he was disputing- in pennies. Jason was not being a pleasant person to deal with, especially since he just up and dumped them on the counter, causing pennies to fly everywhere.
West, who was paying a $25 bill, was subsequently cited for disorderly conduct, which carries a $140 fine.
And then there's the case of Frank Gilberti of Nutley, New Jersey. In 2008, Gilberti had a $56 traffic fine to pay (he wasn't wearing his seatbelt). He went out and got some rolls of pennies. The Bloomfield municipal court told him no. Gilberti persisted, pestering people to take his rolls. At one point, he was told to write his drivers license number on each roll. He asked if he'd have to do that if he paid in bills too. And then came the part where he found out the municipal court had actually put out a warrant for his arrest. And then they revoked the $90 bail after his uncle- doubling as his lawyer- said Gilberti would be pleading not guilty. (The media seems to have gotten bored with the case before finding out how it ended.)
Keep in mind, this only applies in the United States. In the United Kingdom, the penny equivalent, the 1-penny and 2-pence pieces, actually cease to be legal tender in amounts over 20 pence, meaning someone could shoot you down and have full legal backing to do so.
To reiterate: pay in dollars, or with a debit or credit card, and you won't go to jail. Pay in pennies, and we cannot make any guarantees.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
I Sentence You To 212 Words
One thing that gets perpetually brought up as a complaint about government is that the legislation put out by it is just too darned hard to make sense of. Individual bills get called out for perceived excessive length and obtuseness all the time, the tax code being a perennial favorite target. Someone is almost bound to tout a proposal that all legislation be given some sort of limit. Two pages, for instance.
There's a tradeoff to that, though. Legislation is meant to do very specific things. Poor wording, corner-cutting language, can easily lead to unintended consequences. You all know the fictional stories of people who find a genie, wish for, oh, say, "a ton of money", and then end up getting flattened by an anvil made of dollar bills. Legislation is essentially that in a real-life setting. Loopholes, exceptions, and unexpected prohibitions and permissions await the constituents of anyone that doesn't do the job right.
In practice, for one recent example, one could point to the Nebraska 'safe haven' law passed in 2008 offering parents who had just given birth, but could not support the child, the chance to drop the child off at a hospital, no questions asked. The law, poorly written, failed to include an age limit, leading to parents from all over the country descending on Nebraska to drop off teenagers. 35 non-infant children were dumped in Nebraska before the state legislature could get back to the chamber and write in a 30-day limit.
"Please don't bring your teenager to Nebraska," governor Dave Heineman found himself saying.
But today let's talk about the actual writing act, as opposed to the end result.
In March 1958, Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins of Utah was reading through the instructions for filing one's 1040 tax return for 1957. As he was doing so, on page 8, under 'Additional Charge for Underpayment of Estimated Tax', he came across a sentence that clocked in at 212 words. (On MS Word, it gets counted at 218, but 212 was the operating number for this story.)
You can't really get away with shirking on a section like 'here's what happens if you don't pay all your taxes'. That part's kind of important. Just tossing that out there.
This is the sentence, which you can find here in a PDF file.
Pretty dense, right? Watkins thought so. He passed it around to some of his Senate colleagues; they thought so, too. In fact, he thought so to the extent that he put together a contest. He challenged average Americans to rewrite that sentence, in 300 words or less (and, please, more than one sentence), in such a way that the result was easier to read and the meaning of the sentence unchanged. The winner, as judged by a panel of experts from New York University's School of Commerce, would get a Bible and a copy of a book called Simplified English, which Watkins suggested the winner autograph and send along to then-IRS commissioner Russell Harrington. NYU kicked in a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
In addition, from the accounts of the story, the reveal of the winner was to be televised as the culmination of a program on simplified language.
Somewhere between 600 and 700 people tried their hand at rewriting the sentence. (About half were considered serious efforts at the task. No word on what the other half consisted of, but there was likely much angry ranting disguised as contest entries.) If you'd like to give it a shot, the sentence is right there and the context is a click away. Feel free to take a crack at it. The winner of the contest was Page A. Mead, a sales engineer from Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan. But in truth, there was no winner.
Because nobody could pull it off. Not even the panel could do it. The best the panel could do was inserting the occasional period into what was already there.
Mead's entry may have won the contest, but it still didn't meet the essential goal of simplifying the sentence without changing the meaning. He made five grammatical errors in his rewrite, three of which changed the meaning. However, he was given kudos by the panel moderator just for being able to understand the thing.
The panel came to the end conclusion: "Brevity is not necessarily a virtue in official documents, but precision is. The taxpayer is responsible whether he understands it or not."
And that was a contest asking you to convert a single 212-word sentence into several sentences that could be up to 300 words. It permitted you to add length to the text if that's what it took to understand it better while keeping the meaning intact. It still could not be done.
What do you think your odds are of achieving such a result by condensing a gigantic bill to two pages?
There's a tradeoff to that, though. Legislation is meant to do very specific things. Poor wording, corner-cutting language, can easily lead to unintended consequences. You all know the fictional stories of people who find a genie, wish for, oh, say, "a ton of money", and then end up getting flattened by an anvil made of dollar bills. Legislation is essentially that in a real-life setting. Loopholes, exceptions, and unexpected prohibitions and permissions await the constituents of anyone that doesn't do the job right.
In practice, for one recent example, one could point to the Nebraska 'safe haven' law passed in 2008 offering parents who had just given birth, but could not support the child, the chance to drop the child off at a hospital, no questions asked. The law, poorly written, failed to include an age limit, leading to parents from all over the country descending on Nebraska to drop off teenagers. 35 non-infant children were dumped in Nebraska before the state legislature could get back to the chamber and write in a 30-day limit.
"Please don't bring your teenager to Nebraska," governor Dave Heineman found himself saying.
But today let's talk about the actual writing act, as opposed to the end result.
In March 1958, Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins of Utah was reading through the instructions for filing one's 1040 tax return for 1957. As he was doing so, on page 8, under 'Additional Charge for Underpayment of Estimated Tax', he came across a sentence that clocked in at 212 words. (On MS Word, it gets counted at 218, but 212 was the operating number for this story.)
You can't really get away with shirking on a section like 'here's what happens if you don't pay all your taxes'. That part's kind of important. Just tossing that out there.
This is the sentence, which you can find here in a PDF file.
"The charge with respect to any underpayment of any installment is mandatory and will be made unless the total amount of all payments of estimated tax made on or before the last date prescribed for the payment of such installment equals or exceeds whichever of the following is the lesser-
(a) The amount which would have been required to be paid on or before such date if the estimated tax were whichever of the following is the least-
(1) The tax shown on your return for the previous year (if your return for such year showed a liability for tax and covered a taxable year of 12 months), or
(2) A tax computed by using the previous year's income with the current year's rates and exemptions, or
(3) 70 percent (66 2/3 percent in the case of farmers) of a tax computed by projecting to the end of the year the income received from the beginning of the year up to the beginning of the month of the installment payment; OR
(b) An amount equal to 90 percent of the tax computed, at the rates applicable to the taxable year, on the basis of the actual taxable income for the months in the taxable year ending before the month in which the installment is required to be paid."
Pretty dense, right? Watkins thought so. He passed it around to some of his Senate colleagues; they thought so, too. In fact, he thought so to the extent that he put together a contest. He challenged average Americans to rewrite that sentence, in 300 words or less (and, please, more than one sentence), in such a way that the result was easier to read and the meaning of the sentence unchanged. The winner, as judged by a panel of experts from New York University's School of Commerce, would get a Bible and a copy of a book called Simplified English, which Watkins suggested the winner autograph and send along to then-IRS commissioner Russell Harrington. NYU kicked in a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
In addition, from the accounts of the story, the reveal of the winner was to be televised as the culmination of a program on simplified language.
Somewhere between 600 and 700 people tried their hand at rewriting the sentence. (About half were considered serious efforts at the task. No word on what the other half consisted of, but there was likely much angry ranting disguised as contest entries.) If you'd like to give it a shot, the sentence is right there and the context is a click away. Feel free to take a crack at it. The winner of the contest was Page A. Mead, a sales engineer from Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan. But in truth, there was no winner.
Because nobody could pull it off. Not even the panel could do it. The best the panel could do was inserting the occasional period into what was already there.
Mead's entry may have won the contest, but it still didn't meet the essential goal of simplifying the sentence without changing the meaning. He made five grammatical errors in his rewrite, three of which changed the meaning. However, he was given kudos by the panel moderator just for being able to understand the thing.
The panel came to the end conclusion: "Brevity is not necessarily a virtue in official documents, but precision is. The taxpayer is responsible whether he understands it or not."
And that was a contest asking you to convert a single 212-word sentence into several sentences that could be up to 300 words. It permitted you to add length to the text if that's what it took to understand it better while keeping the meaning intact. It still could not be done.
What do you think your odds are of achieving such a result by condensing a gigantic bill to two pages?
Thursday, July 5, 2012
The Big Bay Bust
Here in Wisconsin, due to the high temperatures and lack of rain, a ban was placed on commercial fireworks in parts of the state. In addition, some local fireworks displays were cancelled. You never know where that firework shrapnel is going to come down or if it's going to start a fire somewhere.
If your community saw its display cancelled, it's okay. We'll have one here today. In the process, we'll also answer a question that may have crossed your mind at some point: fireworks displays are stretched out to 20, 30 minutes or something like that; it depends on the city. What would happen if you set all those fireworks off at once? You get a bit of an idea at the end of a display, when they speed up the pace and set off whatever they have left right in top of each other. But what would happen at its logical conclusion: the entire display, lit off at the same time? What would it look like?
Thanks to a technical glitch in San Diego, we now have the answer. I present to you the 2012 Big Bay Boom. The entire thing. And an instant replay.
If your community saw its display cancelled, it's okay. We'll have one here today. In the process, we'll also answer a question that may have crossed your mind at some point: fireworks displays are stretched out to 20, 30 minutes or something like that; it depends on the city. What would happen if you set all those fireworks off at once? You get a bit of an idea at the end of a display, when they speed up the pace and set off whatever they have left right in top of each other. But what would happen at its logical conclusion: the entire display, lit off at the same time? What would it look like?
Thanks to a technical glitch in San Diego, we now have the answer. I present to you the 2012 Big Bay Boom. The entire thing. And an instant replay.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Cue The Very Tiny Confetti
About two weeks ago, we mentioned here that two teams of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, looking for a '5-sigma' result in looking for the Higgs boson, meaning that what they wanted to find needed to have only a 0.000028%. Rumors suggested that the two teams had each come up with a 4-sigma result, meaning there was a 0.13% chance of it being a statistical outlier as opposed to what they've been looking for. The buzz came from the fact that in this case, 4-sigma plus 4-sigma might equal 5-sigma.
This morning, the two teams announced their official results.
Both reported 5-sigma. The Bad Astronomy blog at Discover Magazine goes into the nitty-gritty of it here.
Unless there is a spectacular misjudgment going on, they've found it. And unless someone comes along to disprove them- and the community's surely going to do their due diligence- it's just about a given that three of the people who helped find it have a Nobel speech in their future.
This morning, the two teams announced their official results.
Both reported 5-sigma. The Bad Astronomy blog at Discover Magazine goes into the nitty-gritty of it here.
Unless there is a spectacular misjudgment going on, they've found it. And unless someone comes along to disprove them- and the community's surely going to do their due diligence- it's just about a given that three of the people who helped find it have a Nobel speech in their future.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Today's Thing I Can't Believe I Have To Clarify
So there was this show on Animal Planet called 'Mermaids: The Body Found'. It was fiction, conspiracy and crap piled on crap, aired as part of 'Monster Week' back in May, and the filmmakers admitted as much. Apparently, the filmmakers saying outright that they made "science fiction" was not enough for some people, who now think that the filmmakers have made a very plausible case for the existence of mermaids. After all, there was CGI and interviews with people from the NOAA and there were some actual facts sprinkled in amongst the crap piled on crap! After all, if you shake candy sprinkles into your toilet, the result is always delicious, right?
The NOAA has been forced into taking time out of their day- time they would otherwise be using to monitor hurricanes- to give an official denial and make sure you're aware that mermaids, in fact, do not actually exist, nor have they ever. You will not meet Ariel at the bottom of the ocean. You will not get to date the mermaid lady from Splash. You will not have to deal with the problem of what's down there to have sex with, and by extension, nor will you ever meet a reverse mermaid with a fish head. And if I hear one word about 'well, that's the GOVERNMENT'S word, and are you really going to trust the government like the rest of the sheeple', I will cut you.
Honestly? We had to cover this?
The NOAA has been forced into taking time out of their day- time they would otherwise be using to monitor hurricanes- to give an official denial and make sure you're aware that mermaids, in fact, do not actually exist, nor have they ever. You will not meet Ariel at the bottom of the ocean. You will not get to date the mermaid lady from Splash. You will not have to deal with the problem of what's down there to have sex with, and by extension, nor will you ever meet a reverse mermaid with a fish head. And if I hear one word about 'well, that's the GOVERNMENT'S word, and are you really going to trust the government like the rest of the sheeple', I will cut you.
Honestly? We had to cover this?
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Plan B. Yes. B.
The typical line of thinking when a business really, really wants to use land that's currently occupied by a house or a neighborhood is conventionally thought to be 'get the land and to hell with whoever's living there'. You hear horror stories of eminent domain and lost local heritage and starting construction on all the land except one house occupied by a holdout and the like.
What you don't normally hear about- what doesn't tend to even come close to happening- is what's happening in Morococha, Peru, or at least what's being attempted.
Morococha is a small mining town 67 miles northeast of Lima- 92 if you drive (and 20 miles from the notoriously polluted and currently-shutdown La Oroya mine), housing about 5,000 people. It's more or less what you'd expect a poor mining town to look like. It also happens to sit in the way of the Toromocho copper mine, owned by a Chinese state-owned mining company, Chinalco. (Specifically, it's intended to be an open pit mine.) One might expect that, it being a Chinese company, and the town sitting inside land designated for mining by the Peruvian government, they'd just go ahead and start whacking houses down.
Not quite.
The Chinese government is at least dimly aware of the importance of maintaining not-entirely-hostile relations abroad, and really, how would you feel if your own personal home got targeted for demolition by a company owned by a powerful foreign government on the other side of the world?
On the other hand, how would you feel if that same foreign government was offering to basically build your entire town a brand new, much nicer town 15 miles down the road, rent-free? You might feel a little different about things now. There's also a $2,000 cash payout, which doesn't sound like much to American ears but is a lot more significant in an impoverished Peruvian mining town. (Well, most of the town will get this, anyway. There was a 2006 moving-in deadline. If you arrived in town after that, then it's pretty much just the first scenario.)
The key word here is 'might'. There's still a debate raging in Morococha. Not that it's going to matter much in the end- this move is going to happen, as per the results of a 2008 referendum- but there's still a debate. Naturally, the people not getting new homes are in the 'against' camp. The mayor of Morococha led some protests two years ago citing concerns that Chinalco still isn't meeting enough of the residents' needs, that the payout is too low compared to what they feel they could have gotten, and that the new town's location is too humid. (Protests that were broken up by the cops, as viewable here.) And of course, there are always those people that, no matter what their home is, still consider it their home and they'll be damned if they get moved from that spot until they're good and ready.
Chinalco puts the percentage of residents currently in favor of the move at 75%. But then, that's Chinalco's number. I can't get it confirmed elsewhere. All I can get is the fact that a "majority" voted in favor in 2008.
The fact that it was indeed a referendum that kicked off the move does help take the edge off things a little bit. And it's certainly better than what Chinalco could have pressed for. But displacement is still displacement.
What you don't normally hear about- what doesn't tend to even come close to happening- is what's happening in Morococha, Peru, or at least what's being attempted.
Morococha is a small mining town 67 miles northeast of Lima- 92 if you drive (and 20 miles from the notoriously polluted and currently-shutdown La Oroya mine), housing about 5,000 people. It's more or less what you'd expect a poor mining town to look like. It also happens to sit in the way of the Toromocho copper mine, owned by a Chinese state-owned mining company, Chinalco. (Specifically, it's intended to be an open pit mine.) One might expect that, it being a Chinese company, and the town sitting inside land designated for mining by the Peruvian government, they'd just go ahead and start whacking houses down.
Not quite.
The Chinese government is at least dimly aware of the importance of maintaining not-entirely-hostile relations abroad, and really, how would you feel if your own personal home got targeted for demolition by a company owned by a powerful foreign government on the other side of the world?
On the other hand, how would you feel if that same foreign government was offering to basically build your entire town a brand new, much nicer town 15 miles down the road, rent-free? You might feel a little different about things now. There's also a $2,000 cash payout, which doesn't sound like much to American ears but is a lot more significant in an impoverished Peruvian mining town. (Well, most of the town will get this, anyway. There was a 2006 moving-in deadline. If you arrived in town after that, then it's pretty much just the first scenario.)
The key word here is 'might'. There's still a debate raging in Morococha. Not that it's going to matter much in the end- this move is going to happen, as per the results of a 2008 referendum- but there's still a debate. Naturally, the people not getting new homes are in the 'against' camp. The mayor of Morococha led some protests two years ago citing concerns that Chinalco still isn't meeting enough of the residents' needs, that the payout is too low compared to what they feel they could have gotten, and that the new town's location is too humid. (Protests that were broken up by the cops, as viewable here.) And of course, there are always those people that, no matter what their home is, still consider it their home and they'll be damned if they get moved from that spot until they're good and ready.
Chinalco puts the percentage of residents currently in favor of the move at 75%. But then, that's Chinalco's number. I can't get it confirmed elsewhere. All I can get is the fact that a "majority" voted in favor in 2008.
The fact that it was indeed a referendum that kicked off the move does help take the edge off things a little bit. And it's certainly better than what Chinalco could have pressed for. But displacement is still displacement.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)