Greenhouse calculator

Made by the Aussies, it's a greenhouse gas calculator - it determines how much CO_2 you produce in a year (3 tonnes per year per person is the sustainable amount, 24 is the average Aussie), and therefore when you should kill yourself so you don't use more than your fair share.



I produce 15.0 tonnes of CO_2 per year (according to their calculator), and therefore I should die at age 15.4. At least I'm better than average! :-P

Y Baad Speeling Iz Gud

Stolen from a friend of mine, who stole it from elsewhere.

* 0. Stop spelling correctly before it's too late! | 03/04/2008 07:41:42 PM UTC


The Daye Aftur Tumurrow: Y Baad Speeling Iz Gud

Recently, I've seen many people on the internet trying to correct others' spelling. Unfortunately, in doing so, you are endangering the lives of every good person on earth.

As you all know, Earth rotates on its axis, giving us day and night and stopping any portion of earth from freezing or incinerating. What you may not know is that the primary driving force of this rotation is English teachers. More precisely, English teachers rolling in their graves. Thanks to conservation of angular momentum, for a teacher to spin one way forces Earth to spin the other way. Our ENTIRE EXISTANCE depends on these teachers! To clarify the point, here is a diagram:



But how, you ask, could this possibly be related to the internet? As it turns out, teacher grave-spinning is fueled by only two sources: 1st grade essays, and the Internet. Unfortunately for us, 1st grade spelling has rapidly improved in the last decade, leaving the internet as the only source of terrible spelling. For each idiot on the internet, one teacher spins, and this effect has increased over the past decade to become the only force keeping our planet alive. Misuses of there/they're/their and you're/your are especially potent, and account for over 90% of the Earth's rotational velocity.



Why do you care? Because your life depends on it. I put out as a call to all mankind, PROMOTE BAD SPELLING! It is the only thing between us and a horrible, barren world where everything good is dead. For example, consider the following image (it may be shocking to some, parental consent is advised for young children). The red areas are burnt to a crisp, the blue areas are at roughly -42 Kelvin, and only the yellow portions survive.



To prevent the horrific image just pictured, you must forget the grammar and spelling you have learned. Still, if you choose to continue in your rash action, please at least slow down the damage you cause by including the following in your signature. The repeated posting of such content should be enough to allow those truly willing to solve the problem to do so.

Q u o t e:
Their they're, an tey hav there lewt w/thm. Your so dum you're brane is leik a peenut.

Thank you for reading this, and please, consider the future of humanity when you post.

And because I'm who I am (physicist and daughter of an English teacher), I just had to reply...

For completeness, I must point out that there is actually a secondary source of angular momentum: living English teachers rolling their eyes. However, this is a second-order effect for two reasons. Firstly, angular momentum depends upon the mass and the radius of the object (L=mvr), and eyes are both less massive (m) and smaller (r) that entire bodies, so each individual eye will have less of an effect than each individual body.

Secondly, although it is wel known that teachers (of which English teachers are a subset) have eyes in the backs of their heads (resulting in 4-8 eyes per teacher, depending on whether they wear glasses on any of said eyes), there are stll many fewer living English-teacher eyes than dead English-teacher bodies.

Combining these two reasons, the angular momentum from living English teachers rolling their eyes is expected to be more than four orders of magnitude smaller than the angular momentum from dead English teachers rolling in their graves, and therefore can be safely ignored for the purposes of this argument.

Scientist Badges

If scientists earned Boy Scout badges, I'd have nearly a dozen.

Statz Rappin'

Math is less my expertise, but this's still to awesome to not post.



I bet it was a project for a kickass Math class.

Smart is Sexy

Former child-actress Danica McKellar got sick of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears' examples and is publishing a book "Math Doesn't Suck" after she herself majored in Math in college. Get it for your daughters and neices.

Rice Resonance

In the above video, grains of dry rice are placed on a flat sheet that is driven at different frequencies (the text implies that the surface is a speaker, but it could also be done with a metal sheet or somesuch). At certain frequencies (depending on the size, shape, and material) there are spots on the sheet that tend to stand still (nodes) and spots that wave up and down a lot more (anti-nodes) - these key frequencies are called resonances. If a grain of rice lands on a spot that waves up and down a lot, it will be knocked around, but if it lands on a stationary spot it will act just like it was on a normal table surface and stand still. Thus the grains of rice tend to gather around the nodes in the material when at a resonance frequency - as shown by the pretty patterns.

As the frequency changes away from a resonance, all of the material will shake up and down (no nodes exist), and the rice will scatter all over (these are also the times when the person adds more rice). Then it moves into another resonant frequency and the nodes are located in different spots on the sheet, resulting in a different pattern to the rice. There does exist a lowest possible frequency for resonance, presumably the really simple pattern you first see, but there is no theoretical max to the highest resonance state, just technical limits to how fast you can drive the sheet.

What do teachers make?