Chicken Test
Sometimes it DOES take a Rocket Scientist:
Scientists at NASA built a gun specifically to launch dead chickens at the windshields of airliners, military jets and the space shuttle, all traveling at maximum velocity. The idea is to simulate the frequent incidents of collisions with airborne fowl to test the strength of the windshields.
British engineers heard about the gun and were eager to test it on the windshields of their new high speed trains. Arrangements were made, and a gun was sent to the British engineers.
When the gun was fired, the engineers stood shocked as the chicken hurtled out of the barrel, crashed into the shatterproof shield, smashed it to smithereens, blasted through the control console, snapped the engineer's backrest in two and embedded itself in the back wall of the cabin, like an arrow shot from a bow. The horrified Brits sent NASA the disastrous results of the experiment, along with the designs of the windshield, and begged the US scientists for suggestions.
NASA responded with a one-line memo:
"Thaw the chicken.".
Contributed by William J. Lee, Author Unknown
Saw a science article in the paper. According to a scientific study (known as "Boomerang"), the universe developed very nearly flat.
Five-hundred years after Columbus, now we're debating the shape of the universe.
Gene therapy is now a success. Two babies with "Bubble Boy" syndrome in France were recently cured of it using tailor-made viruses to inject the right peice of genetic code in a sample of their stem cells, which were then put back in.
A virus that actually causes people to get better: what next?
Not long after "Dolly" was revealed to the public, six cows were cloned using a different process. When it was revealed Dolly was aging prematurely, it was assumed the cows would do the same. As it turns out, however, a look at their cells shows they're aging less than normal.
Perhaps the worries that cloned tissue would rapidly age were just "bull."
BEEP THIS: HERE'S HOW WE CAN CURB CELL CHATTER IN THEATERS
Much has been made in recent years of cell phones and beepers going off during concerts, plays and other live performances. The age of Me-ism has joined with the era of Interactivity and Multitasking, resulting in a cacophony of beeps and chatter that ruins the enjoyment for thousands, as well as making the performance itself more daunting for the musicians, actors and singers.
I fear there is little hope of going back to quieter times and voluntary compliance with the rules of civility. So instead, I offer a few alternatives:
Cellular Rooms
: Much as many churches have "crying rooms" so noisy infants can holler without disturbing the rest of the congregation, the same should work for those who must be attached to their electronic umbilical.Cellular Detectors
: Metal detectors work at airports. Detectors are already used at rock concerts, and I once saw a roller rink with a metal detector. (Effective too: Since its installation, not a single roller rink has been hijacked to Cuba.)Telephonic Harmony Ushers Guaranteeing Security, or THUGS
: Station a crew of THUGS in the audience. When a cellular phone or beeper goes off, the THUGS politely and unobtrusively fling the offending lout from the concert hall for a complimentary thrashing outside.Play Louder
: There's a new invention. It's called electricity. Stick some pickups into those fiddles and crank it up to 11. People won't even hear their cellular phones going off.Individual Laser Identification Device, or I-Lid
: For those who feel they must be contacted, adapt the laser hearing system to send a blinding microbeam of laser light at the eyelids of the patron without disturbing others.More Rock, Less Rach
: Replace Rachmaninoff with Rage Against the Machine.It's about time these opera snobs were brought into the 21st century.
Peer Pressure
: Sometimes the most effective means of maintaining control is getting peers to apply subtle pressure on the insensitive patron. Try putting buggy whips under the seats and let the fun begin.Rewrite the Show
: Get with the times. An electronic interruption might well add a needed comic touch if it occurs while Hamlet knocks out his revamped soliloquy: "To beep or not to beep, that is the question."Contributed by Eric, From L.A. Times "Counterpunch"
According to a news article, nearly 90% of the words in the English have been registered as dot-coms.
Considering English has one of the largest vocabularies of any language, thats a LOT of dot-coms.
Sorry, no joke today due to the "ILOVEYOU" Internet Virus.
(Hey, everyone is using that excuse these days)
"Writer's Block" response to the creator of the "ILOVEYOU" Internet Virus:
ILOATHEYOU
YOU-LOATHE-I
I HOPE YOUR COMPUTER SHORTS OUT AND FRIES
How do Mac and Amiga owners feel about the ILOVEYOU virus?
Much the same as economy car owners felt about the recent rise in the price of gas: We hate it, but on the other hand, we feel a little better about our purchase :-)
"Man , first that %^&%n' 'Love Bug' wipes out my computer, then everyone nags me about not making back-ups of my hard drive! If I hear it one more time, I'll scream! Maybe a little music will help." CLICK
(rap tunes) You gotta back tha' thang, back tha' thang, back tha' thang up!
" AAAAAUUUUUUGGGHHH!! "
Since Internet viruses only affect PCs, should their vandalism be called "Breaking Windows?"
A customer came into the store one day to return an internal modem, which he had purchased a few days earlier. He complained that it would not work. I took the modem out of the package and could scarcely believe my eyes.
The card had been filed down to about half its original size.
* Tech Support: "Why has this card been filed?"
* Customer: "The modem didn't fit in the slot, so I had to file it till it would fit."
from Computer Stupidities
When NASA was preparing for the Apollo project, they did some astronaut training on a Navajo Indian reservation. One day, a Navajo elder and his son were herding sheep and came across the space crew. The old man, who spoke only Navajo, asked a question, which his son translated. "What are the guys in the big suits doing?"
A member of the crew said they were practicing for their trip to the moon. The old man got really excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts. Recognizing a promotional opportunity for the spin-doctors, the NASA folks found a tape recorder. After the old man recorded his message, they asked the son to translate. He refused. So the NASA reps brought the tape to the reservation, where the rest of the tribe listened and laughed, but refused to translate the elder's message.
Finally, NASA called in an official government translator. He reported that the moon message said, "Watch out for these guys-they've come to steal your land."
Contributed by William J. Lee
Tech support to caller: "No, the 'Love Bug' virus cannot be spread through adult chat lines."
Just two weeks after the "Love Bug" stuck comes a much more destructive e-mail worm/virus. Calling itself a number of different names, it is recognizable by the attatchment with the "vbs" in it.
Now what does "vbs" stand for - "vicious biting shark?"
Or perhaps "vacuum-brained stupidity?"
"Computer Advice From an Expert"
Advise from our resident computer tech:
If you are having computer problems, this is what you need to do...
Take the mouse thingy and click on the whosit, then scroll down to the third thingamagig, highlight it and copy and paste to the whatchamacallit. It will take you to the gizmo that you are looking for.
Works for me everytime!
contributed by Kathy Dragoo
Normally I don't put clickers to cartoons as the joke of the day, but had a hard time getting online at times this May 2000. Click here to see how your host felt.
from jokeseveryday.com
Booze In Space
This week, a million fraternity brothers rushed to join NASA. The reason: scientists have discovered beer in space.
Well, not beer exactly. But they did find alcohol: ethyl alcohol, to be precise, the active ingredient in all major alcoholic drinks (antifreeze Jell-O shots, quite obviously, are exempted from this category). Three British scientists, Drs. Tom Millar, Geoffrey MacDonald and Rolf Habing, discovered this interstellar Everclear floating in a gas cloud in the contellation of Aquila (sign of the Eagle, the mascot of Anheuser-Busch! Hmmmmm).
Millar and his compatriots have estimated the size of this gas cloud at approximately 1,000 times the diameter of our own solar system; there's enough alcohol out there, they say, to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer. These guys are British, mind you; if you were to translate this in terms of American beer (which the British, with some justification, regard as fermented club soda), the amount of potential brewski just about doubles.
In human terms: remember that double-keg party you threw at the end of your Junior year in college (the second Junior year)? Imagine throwing that same party, every eight hours, for the next 30 billion years. You'd STILL have beer left over. And boy, would YOUR bathroom be a mess! Simply put, no one could ever drink 400 trillion trillion pints of beer, except maybe Buffalo Bills fans.
The sheer volume of all this alcohol begs the question of how it managed to get out there in the first place. Despite the simplifying effect it has on the human brain, ethyl alcohol is a reasonably complex molecule:
two carbon atoms, five hydrogen atoms, and a hydroxyl radical, all cavorting together in beery camaraderie. It's not a compund that is going to spontaneously arise out of the cold depths of space. It can lead to speculation: What is this cloud?1. It's God's beer. After all, He worked for six days creating the universe, and on the seventh day, He rested. And after you've had a hard week at the office, don't YOU grab a beer? Since man is made in God's image, it could be that this cloud is the remaining evidence of the first, best Miller Time.
2. It's Purgatory ("400 trillion trillion bottles of beer on the wall, 400 trillion trillion bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, three hundred ninety-nine septillion, nine hundred ninety-nine sextillion, nine hundred ninety-nine quintillion, nine hundred ninety-nine quadrillion, nine hundred ninety-nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine, bottles of beer on the wall!")
3. Proof of an undeniably highly advanced but chronically dipsomaniac alien society. This particular theory is shaky, however: it's reasonable to assume that if the aliens were going to construct a nebula of alcohol, they'd also have large clouds of Beer Nuts and pretzels nearby for snacking. Advanced spectral analysis has yet to locate them.
The truth of the matter, however, is far more prosaic. In the middle of this gas cloud is a young and no doubt quite inebriated star. As the star heats up and contracts, sucking the dust and gas of the cloud into a smaller area, complex molecules form as a result of greater interaction between the elements. Ethyl alcohol forms on small motes of dust in the cloud, and then, as the motes angle in closer towards the star and heat up, the alcohol is released from the motes in gaseous form. And there you have it: an alcohol cloud. Or, as Dave Bowman might say, "My God! It's full of booze!"
Enough with the science lesson, you say. Just tell me how to GET there! Sorry, Chuckles. You can't get there from here. The gas cloud (which, by the way, has the utterly romantic name of "G34.3") is 10,000 light years away: 58 quadrillion miles. Even if you hijacked the shuttle and headed out with thrusters on full, by the time you got there, the guy in Purgatory would be done with his tune. You'd have had time to work up a powerful thirst, but you'd also be, in a word, dead.
No, the Space Beer Cloud will have to wait for the far future, when men can leap through the universe at warp speed. One can only imagine what they will do when they get there:
Captain Kirk: My....GOD! Sulu! What....is....THAT?
Sulu: It's a free floating cloud of alcohol, sir.
Kirk: And we've just run out of Romulan Ale! Could it be a trap, Bones?
Bones: Damn it, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a distiller of fine spirits!
Kirk: We need that booze! But if we fly through that cloud, we'll be too drunk to drive!
Spock: May I remind you, Jim, that I am a Vulcan. We are a race of designated drivers.
Kirk: Well, all righty, then. Spock, drive us through! Bones and I will be out on the hull. With our mouths... open!
To boldly drink what no man has drunk before.
from Nights of the Blue Planet - Space Jokes
As the Microsoft judgment nears, the judge is talking about splitting the company into three seperate parts.
For Bill Gates, bad luck really does come in threes.
You have perhaps heard about the House of Representatives repealing a 3-cent tax on telephone calls that, believe it or not, goes all the way back 102 years to the Spanish-American War. (It ain't over ... the Senate must still approve it and then so must the President.) As bizarre as it may sound, here is a quick (??) history of how the tax evolved from then until now:
1898 Temporary tax on telephone services adopted to help fund the Spanish-American War.
1902 Tax repealed.
1914 At outset of World War I, long-distance luxury phone tax is imposed at rate of 1 cent per call.
1916 Tax repealed.
1917 Tax reinstated at a rate of 5 cents per call once the United States enters the war.
1918 Tax expanded to cover additional telephone services.
1924 Tax repealed.
1932 Tax reinstated at per-call rates ranging from 10 cents to 20 cents, depending on the cost of the call.
1942 Tax rate changed to a flat 20 percent.
1943 Tax rate increased to 25 percent.
1954 Tax rate reduced to 10 percent.
1959 Tax rate slated to expire in 1960.
1960-1964 Expiration delayed anually.
1965 As part of the excise tax reform project, the 10 percent tax is scheduled to be phased out over three years.
1966 Phase-out delayed one year.
1968 Phase-out restructured to conclude in 1973.
1969 Phase-out delayed one year.
1970 Schedule replaced by a 10-year plan that begins in 1973.
1973 Phase-out begins.
1981 Tax cut to 1 percent but elimination is deferred to 1984.
1982 Tax rate increased to 3 percent with elimination in 1985.
1984 3 percent rate extended through 1987.
1987 3 percent rate extended through 1990.
1990 3 percent tax made permanent.
Source: Repeal the Tax on Talking Coalition
"Every time we pick up the bloody phone, just to say 'hello' to a friend ... one wonders how many other dirty little secrets the politicos are hoping we don't find out about."
contributed by Eric
Well, it happened again. Somebody put another oddball object on e-Bay up for auction.
Michael Toney, sentenced to death for a 1985 briefcase bombing, is entitled to five witnesses to his execution. He put them up for auction May 24 2000 on e-Bay, minimum bids at $100, saying the money would go to his astranged children and he would waive further appeals on his conviction. The posting was removed four hours later. A spokesman from the state's Department of Justice said bidder's wouldn't be allowed to attend.
The bids had no takers.
Not long after the "Killer Resume" Worm/Virus appeared, this showed up from C/NET:
We have a theory about all these viruses that have been hitting Windows users lately. The way we figure, there's one guy worried about one file on one computer. He keeps writing viruses hoping to wipe out this single hard drive, but it hasn't worked yet. It's probably a picture, since JPEGs were one of the few file types deleted by I Love You. Is it a politician worried about a picture of himself in a compromising position? A Coca-Cola executive drinking Pepsi? A prominent opera singer taking in a NASCAR race? We'll likely never know. But he's not going to quit until he's safe.
contributed by Virginia
Well, still another oddbal object was offered on e-Bay, and yanked off.
On Monday May 28, a "jimp8" put up the following ad: "Titanitc -- Small peice of the Titanic's hull." He claimed to have a 2-inch by 1.5 inch chunck of the famous shipwreck. He claimed to have gotten it from the 20 ton chunk raised in 1998.
Trouble is, only one sole company in the world is allowed to own peices of the Titanic: R.M.S. Titanic Inc. The small chunk was either stolen or fake.
By Tuesday, it had attracted one bid of one thousand dollars. On Thursday, Titanic's laywers went after the ad, "If that's from the Titanic, you better give it back ... I take this very, very seriously." After e-Bay got a call from the lawyers, the ad for the peice of the Titanic was gone.
Another strange e-Bay sale 'sunk.'
from an article by Marc Davis in the Virginian Pilot
Recently, two physics experiments did something mind-boggling. Make light go faster.
"Using a combination of atomic and electromagnetic effects, researchers have produced light beams in the labratory that appear to travel much faster that the normal speed of light." In one, a pulse of light was accelerated to 300 times the speed of 186 thousand miles per second.
Perhaps someday this will be recorded as the begining of some "Star Trek" sort of technology.
In the meantime, this cornerstone law of physics may not have been broken, but it sure has been bent quite a bit!
quoted material from New York Times article