Neat invention, though $200 each?

Yep, it was neat back then. I played it on my IBM PS/2 model 30 286 10 Mhz desktop PC, but had no voices because it needed EMS.

There is something innately fascinating in finding technical, biological and economical explanations of historical developments, and it's definitely so much more satisfying than having to resort to nationalism, racism, or religion to explain one region or another's successes.

The risk, I guess, in treating human history as a set of engineering problems, is that the human mind is so attuned to finding cause and effect that it might make us a little blind to situations where the answer is actually more blind chance than anything else.

One of my favorite of these explanations is when China's 'failure' to colonize the world is attributed to the success of porcelain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0OhXxx7cQg

It seems almost too neat to be true - like the false etymology of Marie est malade - so does anyone know if there are scholars who poke holes in the Porcelain vs Glass explanation?

Edit: Improving my googling shows that this explanation remains reasonable but still also involves a bit of blind historical chance. Colored glass was available in ancient Greece, and the Romans and Egyptians used manganese oxide to decolor it, which led to transparent glass and the basis for lens-grinding... that decolorization process apparently didn't pass on to China or wasn't valued by their culture, perhaps due to the clear competitive advantages of porcelain.

I wish they had used a fly in the pea shooter to prove (or disprove) their theory that the dragonfly identifies the object.

Still neat stuff. I love dragonflies. They're brutal predators and beautiful.

I was surprised to hear John Oliver discussing the "Get Rid of the Penny" topic in the USA, not because the subject is uninteresting, but because he failed to point out the glaring anachronism that Americans still call their one cent coin a "penny".

Do they not realise that they started a revolution in 1765, declared independence in 1776, and started making one cent coins in 1793?

Why do they still call cents pennies? After more than 200 years, I would have thought that even the most parochial or remote American would have heard the news.

The Canadians aren't much better. The penny finally dropped there in 2012, when they stopped minting one cent coins. The first Canadian one cent coin was struck in 1858. One strange quirk is that the word penny in Canada used to refer to a two-cent coin, even though they never issued any 2 cent coins! It is possible they were referring to US 2-cent coins, which were issued from 1864 to 1873, but more likely because a French sous was worth approximately half a (British) penny, therefore a two sous coin was the near equivalent of a penny.

In Euroland, the Irish recently started to phase out the use of one and two cent coins, but most of their discussions were also about dropping the penny!

One solution could be to emulate Zimbabwe, where high inflation means that one US dollar is worth about 360 Zimbabwe dollars, or about 520 to a British pound. This neatly avoids the need for any fractional denominations.

Talking about fractional coins:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lawrence_chard/7145393421/

...which also reveals a surprising etymological link between coins and anatomy, as does this:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lawrence_chard/6390568191/

Perhaps the guy he mentioned getting a cent stuck in his anus was going for the closest alternative.

Thanks.
I thought that was a neat idea too, and damn impressive to watch.

Huh, that's neat. What is the mechanism used here?

Neat, but are all the planets chock-a-block full of life? If so, that's using a kind of math seriously divorced from our own experience with planets. Yes, it would be insanely boring if all the planets were either barren rocky planetoids (with the occasional microbial life) or gas giants. It reminds me a bit of when I returned to Minecraft six months ago, after not playing for a year or more. The new biomes made me want to pick a direction and walk and walk and walk, but after a while, it became monotonous.

I'm an IN??

Help! I can't tell if I am thinking I am feeling, feeling I am thinking, perceiving I am judgemental, or judging I am perceptive. I want to fit neatly inside one of the 16 boxes! or do I? I DON'T KNOW PLEASE TELL ME.

Stromae 'Papaputai' http://videosift.com/video/Pretty-neat-ElectroRumba

Neat! I remember seeing one of these at a science fair when I was a wee tyke. If he'd put the radioactive metal in line with the plane of the alcohol vapour we'd have seen a full-length supernova of particles in the bubble chamber.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Would be neat if there was some way for them to give actual directions through keyboard - like the arrow keys would signal the character somehow.

as it is, reminds me more of a Zork style game.

There is this neat website called www.Google.com where you enter some information about something of interest and you get back a lot of information on that subject. Check it out !



*~* The MOaR you KnOW *~*

People who buy Spyders are a neat breed. Was driving alongside one last week on my way up to a friend's lake cabin. The personalized plate for the Spyder the couple was riding read "FOR US" and their trailer's plate read "4 STUFF".

Neat!
How can that guy resist jumping on and sliding down the ramp on a cushion of plastic balls?!