Tomato, tomato

(thanks... still working out my OCD issues)

Um. Not an engineer or anything, but those aren't paperclips. Retitle?

It's considered to be a very reliable and long lasting action. The fit and design keep the action "tight" through repeated use and reduces wear on mating surfaces. A larger-than-most extractor claw reduces the possibility of stuck rounds from breaking the claw or slipping out during extraction. A noticeably smoother action when chambering or extracting a round. I don't know that it contributes to the accuracy of the rifle, would say not in my experience, but opinions vary.

Well yeah, but only when they don't know the words.

Not sure that I'd call it trivial, but from what one can gather, using the panel of known colors as a calibrant for correction during processing does seem like an obvious approach. I'm assuming that the newsworthiness of this is in the trick or complexity of the post-processing - removing scatter, haze, correcting the full color spectrum with multiple calibration points - it won't be a simple linear correction. I ain't no expert, but have spent oodles of time trying to color correct videos and stills from our scuba trips, and the *automatic* color correction in current software is still pretty poor IMO, relying often on a single color as the calibrant (so, a "pure" white region in the photo, a "pure" black region in the photo etc.). Manual adjustment of the photo color balance for UW vids and photos is on my list of "What Hell must be like".

Great sift - I'm by no means an art buff or anything close, but this process and the explanation is very fascinating and educational. What dedication on the part of the craftsman as well - an art in itself. Kudos.

The usual recourse is water fog (vs water stream that just tends to raise more dust and spread more fire). If it's a large mound of extracted sulphur from e.g. sour gas fields, we used to just push more sulphur on top if the fire and that'd snuff it out.

As hamsteralliance says, ContentAware uses proximity matching and relative area matching. If you tried to fill in the white space with ContentAware, it'd be full of everything except eyes. They nVidia folks used thousands of images to train the neural net (ie generate the model using training data) which has more discrete sequential or spatial relationships between features (ie. eyes go to either side of the nose, below the eyebrows, level, interpupilary distance etc etc). The neural approach ALWAYS needs training data sets - it doesn't appear to (from reading the paper) any adaptive or learning algorithm outside of the neural framework (so, it's not AI in the sense that it learns from any environmental stimulus and alters its response... that I can see anyway. The paper doesn't get into the minutiae). But I'd still date her, if only she'd have me.

Glass is a fluid and a liquid (liquids are a subset of fluids). All window glasses will, given enough time, flow. The rate dependent deformation of the glass is described by its viscoelastic properties. Many stained glasses and all lead based glasses behave more viscously than elastically when compared to their modern counterparts, and thus appear to flow more, when the reality is that they just flow faster.

And lava is in fact a type of soap.

Sorry to jump the thread here; not sure if dubious is the word either, but pretty amateur and more fear mongering with no supporting data.

First, the suggestion that no more reactors should be built because people use them to aid in production of nuclear weapons. Well kids, that ship has already sailed: In June 2014, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that nine nations (United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) possessed approx. 16,300 nuclear weapons in total. So someone builds one or 10 more? Yeah, that will matter. Someone needs to read up on the concept of deterrence.

When talking about waste: "Germany has literally tons of the stuff just laying around" - well, that's just horseshit.

Regarding accidents and number of deaths due to nuclear reactors: "devastating disasters every 30 years" - devastating? Come on, people died, but compared to other sources of energy, according to the WHO, it is by far the safest. Consider:

Energy Source Mortality Rates; Deaths/yr/TWh

Coal - world average, 161
Coal - China, 278
Coal - USA, 15
Oil - 36
Natural Gas - 4
Biofuel/Biomass - 12
Peat - 12
Solar/rooftop - 0.44-0.83
Wind - 0.15
Hydro - world, 0.10
Hydro - world*, 1.4
Nuclear - 0.04

* Includes the 170,000 deaths from the failure of the Banquao Reservoir Dam in China in 1975

So, if not dubious, certainly cheap and pedantic.

Howdy - sorry for the delay, was traveling on business. The issue you are referring to below with regards to reusable water bottles is I believe related to the type of liner (thin coating of polymer based material that is coated on the inside of some but not all of these bottles). In most cases when polymers come in contact with food (incl. water) the concerns are usually not in the polymer itself, but in some of the additives (processing aids, plasticizers, anti-oxidants, UV stabilizers, pigments etc) that in some cases have negative impacts on some human metabolic processes. I would emphasize 'some'. The recent outrage over BPA is not supported unequivocally by scientific evidence, but there is enough uncertainty to move away from it as a plasticizer in PET bottles. If one was to use a food grade polyethylene or polypropylene water bottle, requiring no liner, and totally suitable as a water bottle, then there is no concern at all with the long term use of this material in water bottles. Next time you go through the grocery store, have a look at all the packaging - films on processed meets, stretch wrap on fresh meat cuts, all of your cold dairy products - the vast majority of these are made from one of either polyethylene or polypropylene, with a smattering of polystyrene and polyvinylidene chloride thrown in. All perfectly safe.

As for how the balls are made - these are blow molded. If you have a look at the plastic baseballs made for kids that come with a big fat plastic bat (or really any hard plastic ball that you might find at Wal Mart or Toys'R'Us, you'll see the small ridge that runs equatorially around the circumference of the ball (that's the parting line where the two mold halves come together) and somewhere on that line there will be either a little tiny hole or a small protruding knob that used to be the parison where the air was injected into the small plastic glob forcing it to the walls of the mold like an expanding balloon. This is the same type of molding that makes your liquid dishwashing detergent bottle, plastic ketchup and mustard containers, and plastic milk jugs. Hope this helps a bit. cheers

Great post - thanks for taking the time to do this.

Between anti-vaxxers and homeopaths, I don't know which are worse at providing "facts" concocted from anecdote or imagination.

Yes, did. As noted in other replies, if it makes one feel better (or makes one think they feel better) they're going to do it, and the gluten thing is a relatively minor contributor compared to other wonky ideas. Consider - homeopathic medicine, in 2007 the CDC says $2.9 billion was paid out of pocket by adults > 18 years of age. This is one that to me is absolutely ludicrous even before the patient puts the 6C dilution to their lips, but hey it makes some people feel better, so damned if they're going to be influenced by logic. I guess making the effort is justifiable enough for motivation for the presenter, I'm just not that optimistic.

Couldn't agree more. But (there's always a 'but')... if a person convinces themself that they feel better without gluten, then the most passionate and data filled argument presented to tell them that what they feel is not justifiable scientifically, they're still going to be silly and tell the informed individual to screw off. The point is, some people have a reason that is good enough for them, and nobody is going to convince them otherwise. Are we really that dialed in to what's healthy and what nutrients we need for a healthy lifestyle? (whatever that means...). By example, consider the history of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - in the early 90's, people were feeling shitty and weak, in pain and suffering. They were labeled as fakers or diagnosed as having a psychological disorder, but certainly not a verifiable medical condition related to any consistent physiological disorder. Thousands then and now millions of people have been diagnosed with the disease that is finally recognized as a true medical ailment. The point: we know a lot but we don't know it all when it comes to physiology, nutrition and "sensitivities", and there is no one size fits all solution to guarantee we will be healthy. It's understandable that some are dismissive of this gluten thing as completely irrational based on current science, but parallel that with the irrational and mocked CFS sufferers from 30 years ago who now carry a disease that is has a clear diagnostic methodology and is to varying degrees treatable. Sometimes we don't even know what we don't even know, and for some if it makes them feel better, they're going to do it. Harmful? To each their own.

Yeah, that's true, I'm sure the burden of glutenophobics on our medical system and taxpayer dollars is right up there with hangnails and "it hurts when I do this". Tempest in a teacup. If I'm going to get pissed about something chewing up taxpayer dollars that's related to healthcare for stupid people doing stupid things, it sure isn't going to be gluten. How about, oh, I don't know, smoking. For the years 2009–2012, economic cost due to smoking is estimated to be more than $289 billion a year. This cost includes at least $133 billion in direct medical care for adults and more than $156 billion for lost productivity from premature death estimated from 2005 through 2009**.

Any stats out on the gluten hysteria and burden on health care? I think that cumulative is going to take a long time to show up on the graph, and the fad will likely have died before the next leap year.

(**US Department of Health and Human Services. The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 Years of Progress: A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta, GA: US Dept. of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 2014)