My family owns and operates a farm, wheat and corn, in Kansas. We use Roundup herbicides sometimes.

Specifically, there is a GMO variant of field corn called "Roundup Ready" where the corn is genetically resistant to the herbicide. Plant a field of that corn, then after it emerges but well before harvesting (obviously) spray it with Roundup, diluted to an appropriate level. All of the pest plants in the field die. The corn looks a little wilted / harried for a few days after spraying, but bounces back and grows out just fine.

We use that specific kind (Roundup Ready) about 1 year out of every 4 or 5, only when pest plants are starting to become an issue. They'd love to sell it to farmers every year, but most only rotate it in when necessary, just like us, and use a small amount of normal seed (not GMO, just some of the normal corn we harvest) held in reserve from previous year(s) in the other years.

Before Roundup (and other major herbicides and pesticides), pest plants could be a major problem. From what my family says, corn can cross-pollinate or do some kind of hybridization with other crops like milo or sorghum or something, which results in a sterile cane-stalk plant like corn that produces no actual grain. Back 20+ years ago, that was a fairly major problem ... but it is very easily controlled nowadays with herbicides, and Roundup in particular.

Pure, concentrated Roundup is pretty nasty stuff. Then again, farmers still use or have used a lot of much nastier stuff during normal farm operations, like Malathion being sprinkled into grain bins to kill off insects and other small pests. I wouldn't want to chug down a glass full of any of that crap, BUT on the other hand I think we're way better as the human race off WITH all these things being used to control what can be or have been significantly damaging pests than how things would be WITHOUT them. Not to mention that all of these things are used in very very trace amounts compared to the actual amount of food produced itself, and usually a *really* long time before it becomes food. I think you'd be pretty hard pressed to detect any of them in the parts-per-multi-multi-billion scale by them time we eat them.


...That being said, the dude walked right in to this one. If his message was "this stuff is 100% safe and beneficial if used properly", I'd actually 100% agree with him. But when he's trying to oversell it by saying that it is perfectly safe to drink a glass of it ... of course somebody is going to call his bluff. Duh.

A friend of mine lost consciousness while parachuting last summer. He says they synched the gear too tight, which cut off his circulation and he passed out. whether he mannaged to deploy his chute, or it opened on it's own, I'm not sure, he doesn't remember anything after that.
He regained consciousness a while after he hit a house and bounced to the ground.
He's lucky to be alive and is continuing to re-learn how to walk again.

You really want to pin the fault on that phone.. there is no fault on that phone. The accident was a side impact, someone drove INTO the truck.. the truck did not drive into anyone, it did not lose control, run any lights, he was doing everything he was supposed to. Just because he was on the phone did not impact anything but his ability to react quickly to a stupid driver making an illegal merge.

Oh yea if he was another semi truck, he cant just slam on the breaks. His load would jackknife. His only choice would be to let the car bounce off his side while he made a controlled deceleration.

Wait...was that a legal shot? I watched it repeatedly, and it looks like he hits the ball, bounced it on his side of the table while he spins, then hits it again over the net. I'm not sure you're allowed to do either, hit it twice OR bounce it on your side of the table. Still, amazing shot!

Sometimes I have a hard time understanding even how she wishes to explain it (yeah, I get it--relative alignment and whatnot).

I however don't view "whatever is in the mirror" as some kind of alternate universe or merely a switch of directions in my head (as she states, that most of us have a psychological impression to do so): I definitely see me, and not a "reverse".

I know, as others mentioned she is explaining it more than likely for younger audiences, but I wonder if there are better ways to do it. I find it far easier to understand it through the traditional physics explanation of photons bouncing off of objects, hitting the mirror and coming to my eyes (but, that isn't what she wants here; that is why I boiled it down into two words: relative alignment). It just makes sense, what could then end up happening--at least to me.

I completely agree with her about Lars on many points. He often (very often actually) makes his technique seem "the best in the world" when compared to ANY other technique (as there are A LOT of shooting techniques; some that need different bows, materials, and setups).

Kind of like being able to shoot through plate-mail... Lars would NEVER be able to pull that off (of course no one, with a shortbow and the wrong arrow--or tip--will be doing it either; the crossbow is as close as you can get to being small and puncturing plate) as it requires a huge amount of pull force to puncture plate (even heavy English oaken wood shields). The type of bow is a big issue, because that is where you get your draw strength. But, what type of tip you have on your arrow will determine whether or not it even goes into or just bounces off the armor...

However, for the most part, archers didn't try to puncture plate armor--because to be honest about it: it was HARD, it required a VERY heavy bow and expensive tips (of course the bows were also expensive, because they would not be made out of normal material--it might be a specially imported type of wood that could hold up to extreme forces; the string may also be made of something a bit different than normal). So, you didn't have very many people walking around with the innate ability to puncture plate. BUT, what most archers trained a VERY long time to accomplish was extreme accuracy, for one reason alone: armor.

Instead of trying to puncture plate or even chain, archers instead aimed for gaps or areas were there was no coverage (basically anywhere you bend or connect the armor to another piece or tie/connect itself together; so places like under the armpit or along the side of the body were the armor is pulled together and tied shut). Then they may not have to go through anything at all, or they will only have light leather or heavy cloth armor in the way--either way they will penetrate, and they will slowly kill their target by slowing them down and immobilizing them, then moving in for the finishing blow OR if they hit the right place they can just let blood loss finish them off...

But, this requires extreme accuracy, especially in battle AND especially so if you are firing from a horse (if you were lucky you were able to ride behind someone and concentrate solely on firing your shots, then you could add a bit of speed as well). This is the one place that Lars has horribly mislead people--OR he has made a really great breakthrough. But, if Lars never bothers to really demonstrate this stuff, we have no idea how great an archer he really is.

His entire video is one gigantic edit. Every shot and "trick" has been setup with the camera in the right place. The biggest problem is we don't know if it took Lars 1000 attempts to accomplish some of these feats (he makes it sound in some areas that it happens VERY fast, however...but due to the editing, or how he edited it, we actually have no idea if his claims are true) or if he did it in ten...or right off the bat...

That is why I said we needed to wait for Lars to actually talk to us about this whole thing, and to clear various areas up (records and competition). Because he has set a very high bar for himself, and from his own video he seems to be amazing--but, I like many know that if you edit enough and try something over and over again, you can make yourself look like an expert *whatever* whenever you wish to do it...

I agree heavily with her about his historic claims (and also mocking him on his "super clumsy" shots and setups to make fun of "modern" archers); she also points out, correctly, how wrong he is on some of those claims. Like everyone shooting from the left side; which somehow Lars, in ALL his studying completely and utterly missed. Which tells me one thing: she knows more about archery history than Lars actually does.

But, is Lars actually a great archer? Would Lars be a good archer in a battle, or more specifically his "technique"? Lastly, is he really an unique archer more than worth praising? We won't know until Lars does what I mentioned above; he must meet these criticisms head on.

If we allow Lars time to learn how to ride a horse; or it might be a bit more fair to just allow him to ride behind someone controlling the horse, which was a common practice even in battle (then make sure Lars knows how to also fire properly from a horse, since it requires controlling a horse--if you're alone--and staying on the horse using your thigh muscles...which is actually a pretty hard thing to do...and requires expert horsemanship; asking Lars to accomplish this is laughable, as this type of thing would have been a lifetime achievement in the past AND any archer that could fire fast, accurate, and ride a horse by himself...would have been a horrific force on the battlefield; then give him a sword/melee skill--make sure they have a lot of upper body strength--and a very well made, thick steel buckler and he'd be godlike; and then enough armor to protect from arrows...BUT this means you have to be very strong...otherwise you will never be able to accomplish ANY of the feats with the bow mentioned above; BTW, I'm mentioning a superhero right here, there "may" have been a few people like this in history, but they would've been very few and far apart...and more than likely used sparingly).

Mounted archers are extremely powerful against all units that are mounted yet slower than them and of course those on foot and without a long range means of attacking them (at least shorter than the mounted archer's range), this I will always agree with. We already know that mounted archery units could create absolute havoc in the past, see: Alexander The Great. However, eventually people figured out how to deal with this type of threat as well... But, horse mounted archers do have their "nemeses", namely foot archers--since they can take some time (if an arrow comes their way, they block it--it is much harder for a horse archer to carry around a big shield or at least just have on sitting nearby--or you can aim for their horse, which is why above I said that "superhero" like warrior would need a melee skill, because eventually they WILL be on the ground).

So, again, we have to wait and see if Lars bothers to respond to this video and to ALL of the others that have also been made (he did make a lot of people angry; as he did make some stuff up and possibly "overshoot" the mark on other claims and possibly even his own abilities...). I won't hold my breath though.

I think we can all come to a fairly logical conclusion on this. If Lars NEVER responds to anything, then we will have to assume that a lot of his "super-speed" with "accuracy" was due to one thing alone: editing.

Phew, I think that covers everything...it certainly was long enough!!!!

I actually did this as my final chemistry experiment in High School. We used rubbing alcohol (75 and 99%) and got many different results.
Sometimes it would be a jet. Sometimes it would make a 'plane' of fire that hovered 1/2 way down the bottle. Sometimes it made a ball of fire that bounced below the neck. Sometimes it flashed repeatedly, igniting the entire bottle at once and repeating. Different results could be gained by rolling the bottle around, spreading the fuel and creating a denser vapor load, or blowing O2 into the bottle before lighting.
We used a glass 5 gallon bottle (it got HOT). I was surprised he only seemed to get the jet reaction.
(EDIT: I forgot, at the end the teacher brought out some liquid ether for me to try. Everyone (except me) stepped back for that one, afraid it might blow the bottle up)
Almost downvote for the last one...WTF guy?

I have no particular allegiance to either brand and have bounced back and forth between the two for years. This is my first Nvidia card in a while, the main reason for buying ATI cards came down to price for me, why spend hundreds more when I could get a comparable ATI card with more VRAM to boot? That changed with the 970, I could get a better GPU with another gig of VRAM over my Radeon 7970, or is this only a half a gig now?

tldr: Actually, games do this all the time, but usually only for water surfaces!

The reason for this is that the way you render a proper reflection is to "flip" the camera to the other side of the reflective surface plane: looking down on a lake, you'd render the water reflection from the point of view of the camera looking up from under the water surface, flipped over. This is called "planar reflection". In order to do this, you render your entire scene again, so it's not cheap. Also, the reflection only works for that one plane: if you had two altitudes of water (or two differently angled mirrors) they'd be on different planes and so you'd have to render a reflection for each one.

You can't render curved surface reflections this way, though. For example it doesn't work on a car (what plane would you flip the camera over?). For that, the trick is called "cubic environment maps". I won't go into the details, but it only really works well for faking reflections on objects since it shows the correct view from a single point. You can create them dynamically for things like racing games, but they require 6 scene renders (one for each face of the cube) for each environment map.

Half Life offered both techniques for water reflections, so one could fire that up and compare them that way.

This demo seemed to use environment maps for the mirrors and I suspect all of the other shiny surfaces.

Note that these techniques are to get detailed reflections: specular lighting (where you don't reflect an image, but instead mathematically simulate simple light bouncing) is easier and cheaper, since it's just math to get a color and strength.

You could do planar reflections for every mirror, but it's a full scene re-render for each one so your frame rate would tank or you'd have to take out other features. Compromises!

Game graphics is all trade-offs and smoke and mirrors: it's our job to fake things and make you think the game is doing sophisticated simulation when actually it's doing as little as it can to get as much as possible.

Tigger Bounce!

The source video says: Competing in the World Bowling Men's Championships in Abu Dhabi, UAE, Team USA's Bill O'Neill threw what looked like a perfect strike. However, one the pins bounced around and stood up in place, making it the strike that didn't count. Instead, O'Neill had to shoot the spare, which he made.

So it appears it counts as a spare.

I cringed every time he looks up stream/floats backwards. You always want to go down feet first, so your feet and legs bounce off the rocks instead of your head and spine.
Not a good way to start your day kayaking. He must have French fried when he shoulda pizza'd, because he's sure having a bad time.

I would love it. Unexpected bouncing colored balls on just another mundane day would put a smile on my face even if i had to be sooooo burdened by using the elevator instead. I think they were doing it for everyone's amusement(i know i'd be amused). But that's just me. Maybe some would feel inconvienenced, and that would be quite the bummer for them.

Your video, Bouncing Baby In The Snow, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.