Drudge obviously gets it….
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Note: I apologize for putting this in such close proximity to the Furrier Transform (Fourier Transform of a Cat) posting from yesterday, but I’ve actually been studying this thing for a week, and having massive geekgasm after massive geekgasm.
A plan? A Planimeter, that is.
While doing research for another Dr. Lemur graphic I was poring over photo after photo of old steam locomotive drive linkages. It was then that I stumbled upon an instrument that (honestly) I had never heard of but the old Slide Rule crowd all seem to know quite well, the Planimeter.
Three moving parts. The first pivot which can pretty much go wherever you want it is linked to an elbow of sorts, and connects to a second arm that has two things attached to it – a tracing stylus and a wheel that has graduations on it. That’s it. Simple. You can make one out of Tinkertoys™.
What does it do? If you are sitting, stand up. If you are standing, sit down. This is so freaking whackjob cool…
Why, it pretty much directly reads out the area within any arbitrary shape you can draw. And here I thought that there used to be some crazy fellas in a basement calculating areas within a bound shape via brute force Riemann Sum methods (in 2-D, of course). But one does not have to do that.
Think about that… two moving arms, a sharp stylus to travel around the outside of the shape you want to integrate in 2-D, and a wheel that tells you directly what said area is when you’ve traversed one circuit – but part of the time going along the curve C, the wheel turns, and part of the time it does not, but it still works.
The math is really… mathy. The polar planimeter as shown above is easier to follow (if not easier to derive) but the linear planimeter math is cooler because it does a line integral thing.
I asked the resident mathy-guy, who I shall call DocJ, ran me through Green’s Theorem when I showed this to him and he walked me through why this thing works and if anything it was even cooler.
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I’ve cruised FARK tonight and my life is forever enriched by this:
On a flight she took from College Station to Houston in October of 2009, Colleen O’Neal says the turbulence was so bad as a result of the weather the plane banked from side to side and made dead drops in the sky as though it were losing power.
[snip]
O’Neal is now suing United/Continental and few other airlines in charge of the flight because she can no longer fly as part of her job, as the trip gave her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“This does not just affect my ability to get on an airplane, there have been times when I’ve been driving down the road and I hit a pot hole and I have to pull over because I’m having a flash back,” she says.
Lady, you’ve got more problems than PTSD.
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It’s been a while since I read so much utter whinging as here at the Business Insider.
And, by the way, few people would have a problem with inequality if the American Dream were still fully intact—if it were easy to work your way into that top 1%. But, unfortunately, social mobility in this country is also near an all-time low.
If it was easy to work your way into the top 1%, everyone would be there, you schmucks. (ok think about that for a minute)
So what does all this mean in terms of net worth? Well, for starters, it means that the top 1% of Americans own 42% of the financial wealth in this country. The top 5%, meanwhile, own nearly 70%.
Ok, stay with me on this one. I have just one question: So what?
This is really a lot like screaming “There are DUCKS in the POND!!!” hysterically. Is anyone surprised? Is it a crime against nature or just something you’d naturally expect could happen? Is there some rule regarding this that is writ in stone?
That’s about 60% of the net worth of the country held by the top 5%.
Good God, you utter bastards. How dare you own more than others? Have you no shame?
And remember that huge debt problem we have—with hundreds of millions of Americans indebted up to their eyeballs? Well, the top 1% doesn’t have that problem. They only own 5% of the country’s debt.
Let us take a moment from the madness to breathe into the paper bag of rationality. The average savings rate of Americans has been something around 1%. I’m not claiming causation or correlation here, but are the two somehow linked possibly because of the soundness of judgment of the average individual? Just sayin’.
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Pinellas County Sheriff’s deputies say a 22-year-old man accidentally shot himself in the head while showing his girlfriend a handgun.
Deputies say Chaz Ursomanno was taken to Bay Front Medical Center early Thursday with life-threatening injuries.
According to an incident report, 24-year-old Naomi Ensell told her boyfriend to put the gun away about 2 a.m. Thursday. But he told her it was safe and put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. The gun did not fire.
Deputies say he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger again. This time, it went off.
The man was unconscious when deputies arrived.
This is going to sound stone cold, but please tell me he didn’t reproduce. In AP-speak apparently, “unconscious” really means “dead”.
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This is a fantastic idea, because if anything shouts “do me”, it’s a 300m deep structure built into what is basically a city build on a lakebed in a highly volcanically seismic area. It’s like watching a redneck doing a Fourth of July celebration at a refinery.
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Yes, organic bloated roadkill is much healthier than dirty animals at a farm. Man avoids supermarket meat for 30 years by eating roadkill.
I thought those instruments used the same math that the semi-continuous Fourier Transform does: the assumption that the “function” to be integrated is comprised of non-overlapping straight-line segments only.
I saw a purely mechanical “scanner” machine on Dirty Jobs a while back that looked kinda like a piano and accurately measured the area of irregularly-shaped tanned leather skins. It was amazing: it gave you the exact same answer no matter what orientation you fed the tanned sheet in. It was fantastic.
Nothin’ wrong with roadkill, so long as its fresh, and its not me eating it, that is. There’s a groundhog down the highway here that looks like its about to pop. It really pleases me that I can’t smell it at all.
Hey kids! For a really funny prank, move all roadkill you can find to construction sites. Be sure to tuck it out of sight under the crane treads, so everyone in the area gets the full benefit of its juicy goodness and will be aware of its presence shortly after the morning shift starts.
Then, for a really interesting lunch hour – tell the workers it was the class bully who put it there.
I like it ooGcM. It cleans up roads and also teaches about hydrodynamics at the same time.
I saw that Dirty Jobs episode – it was an amazing feat. You would THINK that the errors would be different depending on how the edges lined up and what not, but it was right every single time. I had six consecutive geekgasms at that moment.
That’s the very episode!
I used to really enjoy DJ. They’re running out of ideas, methinks.
Those swollen roadkill corpses are like IEDs, simple, easily produced, and lethal.
There is so much potential win in that Mexico earthscraper. I hope they build it and put up live web cams all over.
The site’s different! It’s that daamned “Follow” thingy over ther to the right at the bottom.
It’s forcing the whole site to be resized to about 80% so “Follow” can be put over there.
Now how do I stop it. I “follow” nothing.
The Earthscraper–think of all the costs they’ll save on burials.
Yeah, but where are all the pumps to pump out rainwater (and other unwanted or used fluids) and the occasional plumbing leak?
Finally figured out the caption for those pics.
Booger eating morons show booger hooks.
And that’s about the most charitable thing one could say about them.
I picture each of them saying “Hey, smell my finger…”
Uh, anyone think that Earthscraper looks a bit too much like The Hive in Resident Evil??
ooGcM, if you want to get rid of the “Follow”, you have to sign in to WordPress. Of course, then the “Follow” tab moves to the admin bar at the top 😉
I can feel a cheesy monster movie coming out of this. An earthscraper extending deep below the surface, something unspeakably awful being disturbed in the depths, a trail of carnage leading up from the depths, and a mad race by the survivors to get back up to surface level and seal off the structure before the unspeakably awful thing from the depths gets loose in the topside world.
I could have really used one of those planimeter things in my younger days. We used to make detailed scale drawings of irregularly shaped landscape areas based on field measurments and then do a complicated process of drawing rectangles and triangles to fit the odd shapes to calculate the square footage of the areas. Very time-consuming. Now we just have the computers figure the areas.