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Post by onlymark on Feb 2, 2012 14:25:18 GMT
I agree, I have difficulty grasping it as well. To me it's a bit like the concept of infinity or women. I just can't understand either.
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Post by mickthecactus on Feb 2, 2012 14:37:18 GMT
I understand infinity........
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Post by lola on Feb 2, 2012 16:25:07 GMT
Don't understand, just grasp.
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Post by onlymark on Feb 2, 2012 18:37:22 GMT
I tried that with women.
Boy, can they slap hard!
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Post by lola on Feb 2, 2012 20:32:41 GMT
Either grasping or understanding all women would be futile. Don't know why dudes even try.
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Post by rikita on Feb 20, 2012 14:27:31 GMT
hm, trying to think of anything were you could have needed as precise a time measurement as seconds in the middle ages... though it is also difficult to imagine how you can know how much a minute is without having seconds... like, so you got hours by making a sundial and then making a specific number of lines there and called each distance hour, and then you said "now let's part this by 60"?
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Post by onlymark on Feb 20, 2012 16:30:36 GMT
Blame the Sumerians Rikita. They started it all. Originally it was supposed to be an method of counting using your fingers/hands and 60 was an easy number to split up in different ways. They often used a base 60 for counting things. I would expect you needed minutes and seconds for angles rather than time originally, no? Plus they were needed for navigation by sea but couldn't be accurately measured until good clocks were invented. I think.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2012 18:34:53 GMT
Labour now last two hours longer than it did 50 years ago due to the pain-reducing methods used. I'm wondering how many women would bypass an epidural if they knew the baby would come out faster.
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Post by Deleted on May 10, 2012 13:46:55 GMT
First I was reading this:
In Revolutionary France after the Terror, a quarrel divides anatomists on the issue of the residual persistence of thought and feeling in the human heads after decapitation. Movements on the face had been observed after the execution. What do they express ? What does exactly survive within the heads ? Irritability only or also sensibility and consciousness ? The passive experiment offered by the guillotine dramatically questions the mode of existence of the unity of consciousness.
But then, pursuing the matter a little more, I found out that around 1850, there were doctors still fighting over the freshly chopped heads for medical experiments. They would reconnect the main arteries to tubes linked to a pump full of animal blood and try to wake up the heads. There was great outrage about this, particularly due to the fact that if they succeeded, they would end up having to disconnect the head soon anyway, condemning the person to a second death. "But maybe in the meantime, the criminal will confess!" they said to defend their inadmissible behaviour.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 11, 2012 0:49:29 GMT
I like the way that the quoted text blithely assumes that irritability survives within the heads.
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Post by Deleted on May 11, 2012 7:25:35 GMT
I would be irritable as well if my head was chopped off.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 13, 2012 6:04:54 GMT
It really belongs in the pet peeves thread.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 4, 2012 10:41:01 GMT
While reading about the goings on in the UK, I came across something I did not know.
France tried to join the Commonwealth in 1956 but when the idea was ultimately rejected by the UK, it went on to sign the Treaty of Rome establishing the Common Market. If France had joined the Commonwealth, perhaps the European Union would have never existed.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 17, 2012 11:23:49 GMT
During the time of the "French Connection" (up until 1975), 90% of the heroin arriving in the United States came from France.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 28, 2012 17:05:18 GMT
Roaches are attracted to fresh ginger.
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Post by mich64 on Jun 28, 2012 21:33:25 GMT
That a squirrel had made a hole big enough in the screen in my kitchen window. I learned this by seeing the critter sitting on my kitchen counter with a bag of hot dog buns ripped apart and it feasting on the buns!
Thank goodness once it seen me it exited quickly through the hole it came in and I quickly slammed the window behind its cute little tail.
Now that it has done it once, he will be back, so no opening that window for a while and will have to replace it with metal screening. Do you they even make them anymore?
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Post by Kimby on Jun 28, 2012 21:40:09 GMT
mich, you could try stapling "hardware cloth", which is heavy metal screening with 1/4" openings, OVER your replaced screen if you can't get metal screen.
But squirrels, as rodents, have very sharp teeth and probably wouldn't be stopped by metal screen. But we were able to keep them out of our garage with hardware cloth.
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Post by mich64 on Jun 28, 2012 21:45:47 GMT
Thanks Kimby! I will let my husband know this for when he has some time to make the repairs. I have never heard of this cloth but I am sure he will know what you mean.
We had them in our roof when we bought this place and have been quite successful in keeping them away, but I guess they must have smelled pretty good and were sitting right under the windowsill.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 28, 2012 21:46:16 GMT
And never forget that steel wool (for example a Brillo pad if you have bought 50 of them) is the perfect thing to stuff into a mouse hole.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 28, 2012 21:54:19 GMT
This looks like 1/2 inch and 1/4 inch side by side. It's galvanized and I get it off a roll at the hardware store. Or big box store.
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Post by mich64 on Jun 28, 2012 22:12:58 GMT
That is looks like what I was imagining, thanks Kimby!
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Post by Deleted on Jul 28, 2012 20:48:57 GMT
19,200 baguettes are sold in France every minute.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 28, 2012 22:40:26 GMT
See -- that "take a number for better service" thing works out really well for determining such a statistic.
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Post by mossie on Jul 29, 2012 7:31:30 GMT
Don't forget "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics"
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Post by Deleted on Oct 7, 2012 18:02:59 GMT
French teenagers send an average of 2500 text messages a month. That makes 83 messages a day.
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Post by htmb on Oct 8, 2012 0:25:43 GMT
If the last poll I saw was accurate (March 2012), American teenagers text a good bit less at an average of 60 texts per day. I'm surprised the number wasn't higher.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 19, 2012 19:05:59 GMT
On a quiz show today, I heard that if all of the animals in the world were put on a scale, earthworms would represent 80% of the total weight.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 20, 2012 2:06:31 GMT
That's astounding. I'd never guess that in a million years. Do you suppose it's true?
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Post by lola on Oct 20, 2012 2:37:17 GMT
I read somewhere that ants outweigh humans worldwide, pound for pound.
Considering that every shovelful of dirt in my yard has at least one earthworm, if you multiply by all the loamy shovels full in the world = a lot of worms.
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Post by mossie on Oct 20, 2012 7:28:59 GMT
That is a whole new can of worms
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