Mac- I dunno personally… I don't really watch or listen to much domestic news these days I'm afraid, haha :)
I think I did hear something in passing about some floods up in the North East or at least the east somewhere..?
Australia is as big as the continental US (excluding Alaska), so it's easy to miss things if you're on the other side of the country. ^_^

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That 6 month product cycle is for the consumer, so they'll be tricked into spending. Technology doesn't actually move that fast overall, but it is a myth everyone believes, even many technology people… mainly because that makes them their money. :)
It's pretty interesting actually.
The reality is that some technology does develop very fast, but technology development as a whole only moves as fast as the slowest component, and that's generally software that's actually written to take advantage of the new stuff and that is VERY slow in coming. But there are all sorts of other components that slow development down too-
You may have heard of “bottlenecks”?
Eg. That's when you have a fantastic new super-fast memory, and super fast processor, but the interface between the two only handles data at an older, slower rate, causing a bottleneck. So it doesn't actually matter weather you have the faster processor and memory or the older slower type because they can only talk slowly together anyway.

So in conclusion, while processors might “double” in speed every 6 months or every year or whatever, technology that uses them only gets incrementally better over that time, no where NEAR even 30% faster as whole, let alone 100%.
And that continuous change of components actually SLOWS progress in that it's very hard to fully optimise software to take advantage of them when they're never a stable setup. And no matter what's under the hood it's only software use where you see any benefit in the end.

wow I'm dull… turned that joke into a real jem didn't I? -_-

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Hit the ground running at work today. So forking busy! ARGH!
Just when I get used to boredom I get hit with a wrecking ball of work.
Funny listening to go-Workers arguing on the phone with a supplier over the specific shades of yellow they produced their postit notes in. Hilarious.
Too me ages to bloody type this cause I kept on getting more work… >_<

I am SO going to the beach when I get home today!

Ah, I run into the same size issue with Canada :P but I figured flooding (especially to the extent I saw) you'd be more likely to hear about than me :P
.
And sooo true about Technology. As surprisingly immense the amount of changes that have occured have been these last 21 some years it deffinately doesn't move that fast… though I'm pretty certain some people I know are ready to replace their devices the moment they buy them :P

Wow… finally did it. Rerouted all the water piping away from the galvanized pips that my house was built with. Hopefully all those PVC pipes I installed will do the trick for a while. Luckily I wore gloves and other gear because that glue went to a lot of places… it'll make washing the clothes I used a bit tough. Then again I'm not using those too much.

And to think long ago my mother hired plumbers to do this sort of thing and paid for it. Then again galvanized piping can be tough to work with, especially when patching up leakages.

Good thing about this is if my water company decides to charge me $300+ for having a busted water leak again, I can just point to the piping (which is easy to access but covered) and ask them “what leak?!?”…

It's been a mad feww weeks, feels like months actually. The whole family has been constantly ill, going from one illness to another without fully recovering. The latest being scarlet fever. One top of that we've had a house guest for the last few weeks, in the shape of my brother in law as he's on bail for assaulting his girlfriend. Of course it isn't as simple as that, in fact it's a complete mess. Just like him, my sympathy is running low now. I believe he never meant to hurt her, I know he has had some traumatic experiences in the past but he really needs to face up to reality. It doesn't help that he refuses to wash and is stinking the house out. I get it, he depressed but FOR GODS SAKE TAKE A BATH!!! We've not been subtle about it, just just shrugs when told, or says he'll have one in a bit and then doesn't. On top of that I've had my own stresses to deal with but they are far less interesting. Good news is that my fitness drive has been working and I've lost nearly two stone now and still going well.

Ewwww… sounds like you have a real prize there Genejoke. I do not envy you at all.

It's too hot to cook here and I'm starving… will have to make a sandwich instead I suppose. :(
10:30pm at night and still too hot to cook. ^##@&!!! >_<

He went to court today and they did a deal and he pleaded guilty to lesser charges, he got a conditional discharge and a 12 month restraining order, if he breaks it he's looking at four years in prison… and he is already trying to work out how to get in contact with her. Guess it won't be long.

ozoneocean wrote:
Ewwww… sounds like you have a real prize there Genejoke. I do not envy you at all.

It's too hot to cook here and I'm starving… will have to make a sandwich instead I suppose. :(
10:30pm at night and still too hot to cook. ^##@Still I'd rather put up with this than unbearable heat.

Juliet isn't eating again. I just can't afford to take her to the vet for this every couple of months. I think we're doing everything right with her in terms of her diet, and she's a free range bunny so she gets plenty of exercise. I don't get it.
I honestly don't know what to do.

@Genejoke - scarlet fever!? and a sibling(in/law) who doesn't have the best instincts at time? you Have had it rough. Hope everyone is getting healthy, and that the B-i-L can find some self-control (I have a sister who lacks some judgment at times - there's not a whole lot you can do for people when they won't do for themselves)

@ Hippie Van - I know nothing about rabbits, but I wonder if there is any iota of an innate hibernation instinct involved. Do her non-eating spells coincide with any weather/climate change?
yeah - grasping at straws, but some creatures do have different eating patterns during different seasons

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speaking of creatures, anybody else hear about the Icelandic River Worm caught on video? Gullas? Product? seems “Nessy” does not live in a Scottish Loch.

Got my interview tomorrow. Wish me luck. It is a paid internship and it would be much better for me than just a job.

Niccea wrote:
Got my interview tomorrow. Wish me luck. It is a paid internship and it would be much better for me than just a job.

Good luck and I hope you get it!

And Gene looks like he's got the really SHORT straw with his family and illnesses. I hope the sun shines brightly on you soon.

And yes… it's hot… VERY HOT. And it's not even spring yet. Not that spring ever visits my place. Here it's either very very wet or very very hot. Though I'll have to admit some mornings have feelt abnormally cold…

Time to go off and continue planning my road to total world domination…

ayesinback wrote:
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speaking of creatures, anybody else hear about the Icelandic River Worm caught on video? Gullas? Product? seems “Nessy” does not live in a Scottish Loch.

That's true but our “Nessy”(more like “Lake-Worm”)lives in this one particullar river located east of Iceland… In a valley…. In the the video you are talking about, the footage itself is not from the same river but it's from another one that is somewhere connected to it. This particular river was actually “destryoed” when the biggest hydroplant of Iceland was made and when there is too much water in the damn it sort of puts some water back into it.

I think it's an optical illusion, there is nothing alive in this muddy-clacier water except for bacteria….

There's a bunch of weird stuff under the water. I think my favourite was when scientists sent a camera to the deepest regions of under water to take some footage and about halfway through the camera moved and they realised they were sitting on the back of this like 30-60 foot shark.
I don't know about the rest of the world but I do know in Canada and the US it's always frustrated me when scientists disown the stuff that doesn't match with their research instead of investigating what they missed. The platypus, the dinosaur bones they found in Alberta with blood in them, the fossilized hat and waterwheel… I just never got what's so threatoning to them to admit there's still a little mystery to the world? I mean we only have like 60% of the land on earth explored so far and 30% under water… on top of that nobody will ever know everything. Ah well Slight pet peeve. I prefer a world full of mystery then a small, limited reality where I think I know everything

I wonder if they mean “worm” in the modern sense, or the old fashioned “dragon” sense?
It's tricky because in this case it's a translation so you can't be sure… But in English “worm” always refers to some sort of serpent when it's in the context of lakes and monsters and such.

It's not as awfully all-consumingly hot and close and humid as the inside of a stomach here as it is where you are Lonne. Thank all the gods!
My part of the world is as dry as the desert sands compared to most other places… apart from actual deserts.
It's funny, in the city you get fooled into thinking it's reasonably green and temperate, but it's all the artificial irrigation and imported vegetation. Visit any original bushland here and you can see the place as it really is- that bush is drrrrrrrry and unfriendly and is actually evolved to NEED fire in order to regenerate.
Seriously.
Takes dry, horribleness to a new level.

And when you visit anywhere else the green just hits you like a shock. Compared to here most places seem to have muted, diffuse sunlight and solid, vivid greenery. Compared to other places, the light here is like stark white gamma brilliance, and the greenery is sparse, muted brown-yellow

Mac: Hrm, I don't like that blanket statement about scientists. Traditionally it's been scientists who find things, and others who dismiss them. Like stevia as a better alternative to sugar, or the Earth orbiting the sun. There have been scientists, I'm sure, who ignored findings which contradicted their hypotheses to save face or what have you, but it's not common.

Scientists have other quirks - most refuse to say that something is a fact unless it's been absolutely proven. My dad's boss used to get mad at him all the time for this. His boss would say “Our customers want to know if this will work” and my dad would tell him “I think it will. I don't know.” Because that was the truth. I think what you're referring to is this kind of misunderstanding. A scientist might hear anecdotal tales of a strange animal like a platypus or an okapi and would not admit to its existence until the animal had been credibly documented.

The hat which I think you're talking about was petrified, but not really a fossil. Even if it had been, fossils can form in different lengths of time. We have many ways of dating a fossil to see when it was formed, which is why we know the earth is as old as it is. The argument isn't as simple as “The Earth has fossils. Fossils take a long time to form. The Earth is old.”

Scientists DO admit that there is mystery left in the world. If they didn't, there would be no scientists. Their job is to uncover the rest of that mystery!

I'm not a scientist myself, just the product of two of em, so I'm probably not explaining any of this very well. But you should go have a second look at those examples you cited.

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I have some leftover medicine from last time Juliet was sick, so I gave her some and she's moving around now. She's still not eating though, so I'm going to syringe-feed her in a little bit. It's so hard being responsible for such a delicate little thing.

Wow, I'd never heard of Stevia before. What a funny name for a sweetener. I need to discover some ozonia! Or Michaelocide! or something?

In North America I think those high government subsidy addicted corn farmers probably have a lobby to force their nasty fructose sugar stuff on people and influence to change laws and regulations in order to restrict competition.
It wouldn't be the first or last time. Dairy farmers did that with margarine in the past. In some cases if people wanted it they had to illegally smuggle it in from Canada O_O
And even when it was legal the dairy lobby would do things like force it to have pink or green food colouring so it would look inedible and unappetising to people.

Hippie Van: Sorry, never mean to blanket people. I don't think I've really ever heard a statement which applied to everyone :P (though some times it sure can ‘feel’ like the loudest are all one way :P) but yeah. I dunno where we're headed really in the world.
Has anyone else ever found it that when you talk to people individually they are usually intelligent and inspiring yet as a group the perceived mentality can severely drop? I've always been curious about that trait. I mean is it group think? is it just arguing amongst themselves limiting productivity? who knows
PS. Genejoke I meant to say this earlier but I had scarlet fever before. You're pretty tired and you look like something out of a horror show due to the rash but as long as you keep up with the meds it doesn't hurt too badly. I hope things work out for you. Sorry to hear you're going through all that :/ Glad to hear you're taking the high road through it all though

People are stupid in groups because the group's intelligence is not cumulative but is reduced to the lowest common denominator. Communication in a group is reduced from paragraphs to sentences to easily understood phrases of as few words as possible.

So your intelligent well spoken debate about the disadvantages of X gets boiled down to X is Bad! Which easily gets turned into Destroy X!

“I don't like your hat because that color clashes with your scarf and your glasses are too big for your head.” easily becomes “Off with your head!”

“We need an alternative to our current economic system because it is broken” becomes “Occupy!” and the dissinterested observer wonders what the hell that is supposed to mean. Listening to how commentators try to make sense out of what the Occupy thing meant was often laugh-out loud funny espeically when many tried getting an intelligent answer out of many of the Occupy protestors.

ozoneocean wrote:
I wonder if they mean “worm” in the modern sense, or the old fashioned “dragon” sense?
It's tricky because in this case it's a translation so you can't be sure… But in English “worm” always refers to some sort of serpent when it's in the context of lakes and monsters and such.

It's a dragon type, although in the fables it looks kinda like a larva or something. It is supposed to be huge and it friggin shoots poison.

Considering a pile of new species were discovered last year that no one had ever bothered to look at before there's a lot more to cryptozoology than you'd think. Not every undiscovered species is a bug either. There were a couple of new birds and lizards too and one or two reclassifications.

So you never knowwhen a lake monster will turn out to be some kind of mutant eel. But those screeches and clawed tracks in the New Jersey Pine Barrens don't belong to a devil and big mooneyed winged things in West Virginia aren't flying mothmen. If an observer has no idea what he/she is looking at he/she will precieve it according tohis belief systemand evencreate a new belief system to explain it. If one has no idea that an owl in flight at night looks like a huge saucer-eyed person they'll think that they saw a huge saucer eyed person and not the owl and make up the myth of a huge saucer eyed person.

If an observer has no experience of seeingthe orange lighted aerial refueling boom on a KC-10 tanker they'll think it's an orange alien spaceship because no normal plane has orange lights.

If one has never seen how the flow of water can be affected by wind and debris every eddy and ripple becomes a lake monster.

If one has never examined how birds and bugs fly and is not familar with night vision devices you suddenly have wars between flying saucers in the night sky.

bravo1102 wrote:
If an observer has no idea what he/she is looking at he/she will precieve it according tohis belief systemand evencreate a new belief system to explain it.

Huh reminds me of another mosnter/fable that's form my area. Aparently it was a horse, with extra pair of feets that lured children on it's back. When they got on it would race to the lake which it lived in and drown the kids… Makes you wonder what these farmers were smoking back in the days…

gullas wrote:
Huh reminds me of another mosnter/fable that's form my area. Aparently it was a horse, with extra pair of feets that lured children on it's back. When they got on it would race to the lake which it lived in and drown the kids… Makes you wonder what these farmers were smoking back in the days…

That sounds like a cross between Odin's Sleipnir and the Celtic faery horse called “kelpie”. The Kelpies would look like nice friendly lost ponies. Childern would get up on their backs for a ride and become stuck like glue… Then the Kelpie would dive into its pond and drown them… possibly to eat them later.

Wow, Wiki has a lot of interesting stuff about that! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelpie

Apparently all those north west uropean cultures, From Ireland to Germany, to Scnadinavia etc all have a similar myth. So that one is probably pretty damn old…
Maybe it was just a really effective cautionary tale to keep stupid kids alive?

Probably it is, but I like the name we have for it : “Nykur” (the ‘u’ is silent).

hah Bravo that kind of reminds me of Lockheed's skunkworks when I was in aviation and not business general.
There was two sides of a triangle drawn in lights floating above a city in the states and people freaked. They got pictures, hundreds of witnesses, everything and people were having alien fever. Then Lockheed finally stepped in and told them how they were testing their new secret project stealth blimp and after a few months they went through all the trouble of trying to remove info of their blimp from the internet… then a few months later they fly it too close to ANOTHER town and have the exact same problem all over again :P
At least that's what they told me in my aviation news class. I still remember watching the stealth blimp go from like 100 google results to 2 within a week :P

ozoneocean wrote:
Wow, I'd never heard of Stevia before. What a funny name for a sweetener. I need to discover some ozonia! Or Michaelocide! or something?

In North America I think those high government subsidy addicted corn farmers probably have a lobby to force their nasty fructose sugar stuff on people and influence to change laws and regulations in order to restrict competition.
It wouldn't be the first or last time. Dairy farmers did that with margarine in the past. In some cases if people wanted it they had to illegally smuggle it in from Canada O_O
And even when it was legal the dairy lobby would do things like force it to have pink or green food colouring so it would look inedible and unappetising to people.

I figure that's probably why it's not entirely legal here and in the US. It's so funny because they allow it to be used in certain instances: “To date, Health Canada has approved the use of stevia and its extracts as a non-medicinal ingredient (sweetener) in 108 natural health products, and as a medicinal ingredient in three natural health products (NHPs).” To me, that seems like an admission that the product is safe.

I hadn't heard about it either until recently - my dad and I have been on a discovering-the-history-behind-sweeteners kick, and I happened to spot a stevia-sweetened drink in a health food store.

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I'm enjoying all these stories about legendary monsters! I find those myths so interesting.

Canada doesn't seem to have very many of its own. We have Caddy(the cadborosaurus) and Ogopogo, the sasquatch, and the loup-garou. Those are hardly creative, but still pretty neat. My favourite is the loup-garou, just because it's so fun to say. We used to play a version of mafia in school called Loup-Garou.

Don't be too hard on Canada :P We have our plethura of enigmas as well. Like I said before the dinosaur bones that still had blood in them, or the story of the hole that seemed to go on for ages and when they tried exploring it they found it was booby trapped and it got flooded by ocean water, or the Avro Arrow scandal! Oooo or haunted buildings we have plenty of those. And Viking settlements. We're awesome in Canada =D
And Oz, if it makes you feel any better, when Europe and the other places decided to ban the Genetically Modified foods they saved an entire generation from suffering peanut allergies. Little told fact, 9/10 people with peanut allergies can survive eating peanuts from Europe!
Don't you just love it when a plan to make more money turns out like that? :P

ozoneocean wrote:

Apparently all those north west uropean cultures, From Ireland to Germany, to Scnadinavia etc all have a similar myth. So that one is probably pretty damn old…
Maybe it was just a really effective cautionary tale to keep stupid kids alive?

actually it would drown ANYONE who was dumb enough to climb on it's back and it was super inviting, bows down for easily access an' everything. i believe it was developed to prevent horse theft really. never knew which one of those horses would go mad at the slightest smell of water and try to drown you, you know.

Missed all that talk about icelandic sea serpents. Watched that video but it really does look like a line made out of floating ice, that's oddly enough sticking to the same place instead of going down the river. The news article did state that those doubting the validity of the serpent believed it to be a piece of torn net that somehow ended up getting stuck on that spot and has since built up some ice on it. That would explain why it looks like it's slithering around the river like that.

gullas wrote:
Huh reminds me of another monster/fable that's form my area. Apparently it was a horse, with extra pair of feet that lured children on it's back.

It didn't have extra pair of legs. It looked like an ordinary horse, which made them harder to tell apart from ordinary horse. The big telltale difference was that their hooves were supposedly turned the other way.

They also had stories of other animals that looked like land animals but were from lakes/seas; this one story was about a farmer that discovered a bunch of sea cows (that's cows that breathe underwater, not the manatee variety) mingling with his normal cows. Sea cows could be told apart from normal cows because they have a big, bladder like organ on their nose. The seacows started running away with his normal cows when they noticed him but he grabbed a nearby stick, managed to separate his cows from the underwater ones and started whamming at the nose bladders of the seacows that he managed to reach. The act of bursting those nose bladders meant that the seacow lost its ability to breathe underwater and he was able to claim ownership over them.

…apparently they turned out to be pretty good milking cows.
~A true urban legend.

Oh hey, hello? Wait what's all this?

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To come back months later and still see the site in pieces. :(

I Am The 1337 Master wrote:
Oh hey, hello? Wait what's all this?

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To come back months later and still see the site in pieces. :(

-hands broom-
well, better get to work or something… how are you rival?