It's a fractionation tower (fractionation column, spliltting tower etc. - lots of different names) for separation of components of natural gas or light ends of distillation or cracking processes for hydrocarbon refining. Hard to tell specifics, but if for Shell in Fort Saskatchewan (the Scotford site), one might guess given length and layout could be debutanizer or perhaps depropanizer for synthetic crude refining (looks too short for a de-C3, but hard to tell on its own).

All good points.

And.

What happens in a court of law is subject to the law. Which is not the same as justice.

I stand by my original question -- what did the university know that we don't know?

There are a lot of suppositions in your well reasoned response to my comment.

I have no suppositions. I have questions.

What did the university know that we don't?

Maybe it is nothing, as you suppose here. And maybe those roommates saw or heard something that scared the bejeebers out of them.

Here is a supposition that you did not put forth -- did the roommates only report the encounter as rape because this guy has dark skin? There could be a racist component to this.

Supposition. What are the facts? What information did the university use to justify expelling this dude?

I don't know.

It occurs to me this may be a highly regional food item. Cheese curds are really just chunks of (typically) mozzarella or cheddar cheese. Usually about the size of a regular or large marble. They can be bought fresh, or at restaurants you'll generally get them deep fried. That's what White Castle had a few months ago, and they were not quite MN State Fair quality (which are divine), but pretty damned good for the price.

If you want the best possible unfried cheese curds though, look to Wisconsin. In rural areas you can get them ridiculously fresh, and you'll know if you have - they squeak when you bite into them. That stops happening in less than a day, regardless of how they're kept.

Edit: Cheese curds are also a vital component of poutine, a Quebecois dish. French fries, cheese curds, crumbled bacon, and brown gravy. So goddamn bad for you / delicious.

I had capsela's back when I was a kid and they gave a basic understanding of gear ratios. I mostly played with the X in one electronic component sets though.

This video seems like a wonderful must see for grade school engineering.

Good luck building this without the massive industry and infrastructure that made those components affordable.

I look at it this way....in the time they would likely serve in prison for aggravated rape and kidnapping, (that time likely made much longer due to the racial components), the likelihood they would both be raped themselves nears 100% (that likelihood also higher due to the racial components, racial revenge rape), assuming they survive. Add to that the 15+- years in prison and lifelong stigma of being a class 1 sex offender. Considering all that, the rape accusation carries far worse consequences than a one evening kidnapping and rape would, although both are excessively egregious. Also, keep in mind that every false accusation effects the likelihood of successfully prosecuting real rapists. I have no stats about that, but I would guess easily 5 rapists go free for every proven false accusation....to pull a number right from my ass. The consequences of the false accusations can easily be the more serious of the two, imo, when all is considered.

I see your point and agree, and I think there should be stringent requirements to prove an accusation was false before pursuing prosecution, but in cases where there's no question like this one, convict and send a strong message with a long....long sentence, not one year (in most places meaning no prison, local jail, and probably under 1/4 of that time actually served since it's considered non violent).
And yes, major compensation is in order. This accusation will follow and haunt them for life, even though it was retracted.

I agree, this is an outlier, but it's a devastating, life altering crime and needs to be treated as such when it's proven. Because rape is much more prevalent than false rape charges is not an excuse to ignore this or in any way hinder aggressively prosecuting it, in my mind it's a reason to go after it harder.

Edit:also, I'm completely irrational in my hatred of liars.

Printable guns are another scare tactic. We are talking about guns that can only fire small caliber rounds and that still require at least a few metal components. There is no such thing as a totally untraceable, all plastic gun. Technically, if there were such a thing, it would be illegal under existing law.

Ghost guns are another freak out buzz word. It's a grey area that is quasi legal as long as you only make it for yourself. If you plan on making them and selling them, you are fucked.

Hell, I can go down to Lowes and buy materials to make a higher caliber zip gun that is actually going to be deadlier than a plastic printed one. With a cork, some glue,plastic vanes, a nail, and a shotgun shell I can make a grenade. With some matches, pipe from Lowes, a firecracker fuse, and threadlocker I can make a pipe bomb.

The point being, you can make damn near anything deadly with some work and access to everyday components. If you want to frighten a gullible populace with a scary plastic 'gun' to further your agenda against guns in general, it's child play to do so.

If that was the policy, I could agree, but the corporate representative has said publicly that in that region it's their written policy that non customers can't use the rest room or loiter inside, and they set up the manager, unintentionally, to fail with their policies. It's horrific to me that, for following written policy, the manager is now fired.

Crazy that you, of all people, are arguing the manager in a privately owned business doesn't have the right to eject even customers, much less non customers. How can that work? Any place open to the public is now publicly owned? No business may prosecute anyone for trespassing? Even non customers? Or is it just franchise coffee shops? I've seen many a white punk asked to leave Denny's at 2am for no purchase, or for nursing their coffee for hours....I've been one.

The cops have said they asked the men at least 7 times to leave peacefully over a prolonged, disruptive time period, and they continuously refused. During that time, backup and a supervisor were called and had time to show up while the men remained seated, ignoring the police requests/commands.

How hard would it have been to just buy their own coffee instead of causing all this over obstinate refusal to respect the manager's requests because they're waiting for someone? How often would you expect that excuse, if accepted, to end with hours of free WiFi and restroom use but no sales? Seems to me they caused all this themselves, and had dozens of easy opportunities to avoid even being asked to leave, much less arrest, just by being a customer in the store they set up shop in.

Edit: and I shouldn't have said it had nothing to do with race, there's likely a racial component....it's not only or definitively about race.

All that said...please go ahead and boycott Starbucks, if not for this then because they're out of control and a near monopoly.

Very cool.

I sure would have thought that it would be a platform with hundreds of partially inset mouse/trackballs, rather than treadmills on axes 90 degrees apart. I mean ... sure, any 2D vector can be split into a sum of two orthogonal components. But with redundant inset trackballs you could get stuff like spot pivots that are much finer scale than the scale of the 2-3 inch wide secondary axis treads...

On the other hand, these guys actually have a working prototype, so they clearly thought things through and decided that the orthogonal treadmill solution was better. Rubber meats road trumps off-the-cuff theoretical any day!

NBC nightly news.

I've never had an issue like this either, but I also have never gone to a busy business, set up shop, tried to use the amenities, refused to make a purchase, and obstinately refused to leave. I have been forced to make my purchase before being allowed access to the rest room, doing the gotta pee dance the whole time. You can't ignore that I'm white....but it had nothing to do with that interaction.

Why buy something if you think your friend is buying? Because you sat down and they asked you to. I've not heard anyone claim that was the case, however, nor that they made that clear to the manager.

Could be they're friendlier at your local Starbucks, since I assume it's not run by Americans. ;-)

I think the 'grief' started when they asked for restroom access but refused to make a purchase. Many locations are strict on that rule to avoid becoming a public restroom that serves coffee. Then they refused to leave or make a purchase, and were likely nasty after being denied restroom access, but even if not they were undeniably defiant of the manager, who has every right to ask non customers to leave.
It might have a race component, but just as easily might not. Jumping to the conclusion that just because they're black it must be racial discrimination is bullshit imo, and leads to insanity like people outraged at racist faucets and soap opera tv court cases.

@newtboy

"Discriminating against people for their legal, culturally accepted, natural behavior makes the person doing the discriminating an asshole. "

Slavery also exists in nature, so it's natural, and once upon a time it was legal and culturally accepted. Discriminating against slave owners though, even back than, is contrary to your claim, quite noble.

"The space study with twins showed that in under a year their genes permanently diverged a full 7%"

You gotta be careful there exactly what is being measured, they did not find that fully 7% of his DNA changed and now was that different. Depending what you measure people also claim that human and chimp DNA only differs by less than 2%...


"Twins aren't genetically identical, even at birth. ...That makes twin studies a piss poor method of gene study."

If you read your own linked article it states:
Twins share the same genes but their environments become more different as they age. This unique aspect of twins makes them an excellent model for understanding how genes and the environment contribute to certain traits, especially complex behaviors and diseases.

If you bother to read the list of peer reviewed articles I linked, they are comparing mono-zygotic twins to di-zygotic twins. The very basic and largely accepted theory being that if a trait has a genetic component, 1000 twins split from the same zygote should share the trait more often than di-zygotic twins.

My argument though really doesn't care much though. I simply argue that beliefs, choices and behaviours are the result of free will and grounds to judge(discriminate) for and against those you deem good or bad, hurtful or harmful. Similarly, gender, race and ethnicity being things that are in zero way the result of free will and beyond the control of an individual and NOT grounds to judge(discriminate) for or against.

"A twin study of self-reported psychopathic personality traits"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886902001848

Perhaps the above is more to the point. Similar twin study showing identical twins having similarly significant genetic component to psychopathy as the prior studies show for sexual orientation.

Should we be similarly upset at people assigning morality to psychopathic behaviours?

"Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religious Interests, Attitudes, and Values: A Study of Twins Reared Apart and Together"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062599?seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents

Religiosity shows the same thing, strong correlations for identical twins, raised apart from one another, and much weaker correlations for non-identical twins also raised apart.

If Tom Cruise claims his belief in Scientology is a birth right and how dare we judge him, is he really backed by the science?

Where I am coming from, is insisting that for all the factors involved in human decision and behaviours, I still want to conduct ourselves as though free will exists.

More importantly, the freedom to discriminate against people based upon their behaviours must be defended as strongly as the right to discriminate based upon purely in born, unchangeable attributes like race, gender and ethnicity must be opposed.

, I said it was more controversial.

I dare say even agreeing that we don't solely choose our sexual interests, when it comes to our actions I insist we treat those as the result of free will, aka choice.

When I'm not typing from a 4in screen I can pull up the references, but the peer reviewed studies on genetics hardly illustrate that sexual orientation and identity are dominated by it. Twins studies do show that identical twins more often share orientation than non-identical, which gives a correlation to genetics. However, I'll pull up the studies but last I reviewed them, more than half the identical twins in the studies did NOT share the same orientation. That is an arguably compelling indicator that genetics does not solely determine orientation.

Other twin studies comparing other behaviours like religion show a similar pattern. Studies with twins on violent and aggressive behaviour show an even stronger "genetic" component than the orientation studies, and nobody has any qualms about being politically incorrect declaring that violence is a choice and not a birth attribute...

Do you recall the day you chose to be heterosexual? ;-)

While far from settled, there are indications sexual orientation may be genetically influenced at least, if not genetically determined.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/speculative-genetic-link-to-homosexuality-found

There's more conclusive evidence of a genetic component to transsexuality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexuality

“The most important thing that happens when a new iPhone comes out is not the release of the phone, but the disassembly of it.”

Demonstrably false. The market has proven that almost no one cares about this.

When the iPhone first came out, people derided it’s lack of removable battery. Good luck finding a high end smartphone with a removable battery these days. Then there was components soldered onto the board, then the removal of the headphone socket, all of which Samsung, etc have copied*.

Outside of a vocal minority, no one cares about phone repairability. If you do, congrats, you’re part of that minority, and that’s fine. Personally, I think it’s a reasonable thing, but clearly, most people prefer thinner, lighter, water resistant phones over fixable phones.

* note: yes, Apple have copied features of droid phones too. No, it’s not relevant to this discussion.