The Big Think

Via Yahoo News: A federal court in Oklahoma has blocked the national “do not call” list that would allow consumers to stop most unwanted telephone sales calls, one week before it was due to take effect.

“Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of man’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like: but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things: full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?”
Bacon

9mmsfx.com has some cool contact lenses.

Is it just me, or does the inclusion of the words “Retired General” in Question 6 constitute a biased question? Why not just “nominee,” or just his name? With the positive public sentiment that the military currently enjoys, there is no doubt in my mind that the outcome of the poll is affected by the wording of this question. Granted, the effect is very slight and subtle. I’m not asserting that the wording of the question influenced the poll by more than 1%, but is that somehow permissible even though it’s such a small percentage? And the fact that this poll has been trotted around the past few days as Oracular makes it seem to me to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I am all for polls, but shouldn’t USATODAY ask unbiased poll questions?
For more, check out the “19th Century Guide to Dishonest Argument“. I was specifically interested in the part on using biased language. “A speaker often betrays his purpose beforehand by the names which he gives to things.“

Here’s an amazing thing I learned this morning. Whenever Boeing certifies a new aircraft (in this case a 777), they have to go through a bunch of tests. I’ll let X-plane’s Austin Meyer tell the story:

One of the certification requirements is that the plane be able to lose an engine at the most inopportune of times and places (perhaps just before liftoff at 160 mph on the runway with a full load of cargo and fuel, with the end of the runway approaching fast… perhaps at 500 mph and 40,000 feet over the North Atlantic in the dead of Winter) and still be able to bring everyone home unhurt. And the FAA doesn’t accept predictions or promises. You actually have to go out and DO it. Across the Ocean on one mighty engine. “When we take this thing around the world on the eval flights we bring movies and sleeping bags and camp out here!” my host says, pointing to the vast empty cabin floor between the computers and aft water tanks. Sleeping in a sleeping bag doing mach 0.84 over the North Atlantic at 40,000 feet on one engine. The other shut down, and LEFT shut down, for hours. “But what if you lose the engine for REAL that is holding the plane?” I ask “You can’t possibly start the one you shut down for testing after it has been windmilling through the air at -100 degrees in thin air for the last 6 hours! No engine can start that is so cold!” “Sure we can! That’s part of the certification! We air start and windmill-start as part of certification on every plane”.

Holy shock heating, Batman. To go from -100 to the inferno of full jet thrust and not have the engine fly apart…. amazing engineering.

And speaking of X-plane, if you’re an aviation buff, be sure to check out Austin’s website and software. The guy is the computer equivalent of Orville Wright. He’s the sole programmer behind X-plane: the cross platform computer flight sim. Although calling it a “flight sim” is a bit like calling the Hurricane Isabel a nice little breeze.