Author: Muttrox

This is ridiculous.

;

“When I go to heaven, I’m gonna have my own waterpark for my backyard.”
“Me too! We can all have waterparks!”
“But you have to ask to go, you don’t always get it, because it’s heaven.”
“Or you could have a warm comfy bed to snuggle in!”
You have a comfy bed all the time in your waterpark, you go down the slide on it!

That does sound kind of awesome.

Cyclone, the wooden roller coaster at Six Flags over Georgia is closed down forever. Presumably it will be replaced by something more modern.

Notice the estimated wait time. Over 60 minutes. This is true, the actual wait time is hundreds of thousands of minutes.

It isn’t easy to improve on The Beatles. It takes some giant grapes to say you can do their song better than they did.

Like many Motown artists, Stevie Wonder was a Beatles fan—of sorts. “Stevie loved the Beatles, mostly Lennon and McCartney for their writing,” Wonder’s childhood best friend John Glover says in Mark Ribowsky’s Stevie biography Signed, Sealed, and Delivered. “That was where he saw their genius, not their performing—in fact, he didn’t think they performed some of their songs as well as he could do it.” That’s a sentiment that requires a lot of chutzpah, but Wonder backed it up on 1970’s “We Can Work It Out,” a track that so thoroughly reimagines the Lennon–McCartney classic that it feels like an entirely new piece of music.

Stevie delivers.

 

I don’t understand how Bernoulli’s theorem works with airplane wings.

The top of the wing is curved. Therefore, the air going past the top has a longer path to travel. Which means that it is moving faster than the air going past the bottom of the wing. Which, by the theorem, means it is lower pressure. Which means that the pressure differential pushes the wing upwards.

But why does having a longer path imply greater speed? Why does the air that is going over the top of the wing need to end up at the back of the wing in the same time as the air traveling over the bottom of the wing? Why doesn’t it all travel at the same speed with no differential in pressure? This inquiring mind wants to know.

Late update: A knowledgeable friend said that Bernoulli is part of it, but there are other effects in play, particularly at the edge and tips of the wing. If it was just Bernoulli, there would be no need to taper the wings as you move to their tips, or angle them towards the back of the plane.

And hey, XKCD also says it’s more complicated! So maybe this blog post is just knowledge dropping…

Me, telling a blonde joke: How many blondes does it take to change a lightbulb?
Child 1: Two.
Child 2: No, three.
Me: Um. It takes four. One to hold the lightbulb, three to turn the ladder. Get it?
Child 2: I was closer!
Me: That’s not the point!
Child 1: Why does it take 3 to turn the ladder? It should only take one.

That’s a good excuse to reference my favorite scene from Raising Arizona:

* or Poles, MSU grads, whatever…

Most of the obvious points have been covered already. I enjoyed this post from Matt Yglesias, particularly the role of luck and comparing it to Donald Trumps successes. A couple other thoughts:

1) Voter Suppression

Turnout in the black and poor demographic was very high. If it hadn’t been, Moore would have beaten Jones. You can bet we will see renewed efforts by the GOP to put up more barriers to voting. The populace has turned against them years ago, they have retained their majority through (among other things) gerrymandering and making it hard to vote. Look for more bills about voter IDs, less location open for less hours, more stripping felons of rights, difficulty for students to vote, less early voting, less automatic registrations. You will see no efforts to make it harder for retirees or the military to vote.

2) Moderation

One of the unfortunate aspects of our party primary systems is how it discourages centrists. To win a primary it doesn’t help to have the majority of all the voters on your sides, it only matters to have most of the voters from your own party. A candidate with appeal to both parties is at a disadvantage. Futhermore, if there are multiple candidates, the one who is unlike the rest can win (the ‘normal’ vote gets split.
In a Republican primary, the crazies often win. Perhaps less on the Democrat side, but the same logic applies. This is how you get the Tea Party. They haven’t been very successful at general elections, but they’ve managed to win a lot of primaries.
When one of the crazies (Roy Moore) loses, it creates an incentive for more moderate Republicans to run. It creates an incentive for voters to vote for more moderate candidates in the primaries. And the same applies on the Democratic side.
Donald Trump aside, the lesson I hope that is being taught is that getting attention and winning the primary is very different than winning office. More centrist candidates from both parties are good for all of us.

This was one of the best-selling songs of all time in the United Kingdom. You’ve probably never heard it in the United States.

I don’t know any other big hits featuring the bagpipes, does anyone else?

Trivia: This summer, I dealt with a kidney stone and my son broke his arm. How much do you think the total charges were?

One answer is: Just over $50,000.
Another answer is: Just over $6,600.

You see a few things when you look at the bills.
1) Lots of charges for things I never really consented to. I never consented because they were never really discussed. Certainly not in terms of financial impact.
2) Lots of high charges. Most seem pretty reasonable considering how well our bodies were fixed. But then you see the charge for someone standing in the room for ten minutes, over $100.
3) Huge discrepancy between pre-insurance and post-insurance. That’s the difference in those two numbers.
4) Huge discrepancies between the percentage insurance paid. Most were paid off at ~90%. But half the final bill, $3,387 dollars came from one charge that was paid at only 50%. And it was very similar to a previous charge. I should have investigated more on this one.
5) The exact same thing, for $883 dollars, was done on two different days (part of pre-op). The description was printed on the bill the exact same way both times. One time, insurance covered all but $61.20, the second time it was $55.20. I assume the difference is because of the intricate vagaries of exactly how someone coded it.

Stairway to Heaven and Welcome to the Jungle were deleted from my playlist. They are both self-evidently amazing songs, but at some point you don’t need to hear them a ten-thousandth time.

Tom Price was a terrible congressman for Georgia. I don’t mean he was ineffective, I mean he fought for terrible policies firmly in line with hard right ideology. It was a pleasure to see him go to Washington and fall on his face. After a hard fought race, the GOP retained his seat with a narrow win over Jon Ossoff, but Karen Handel will be that much less effective than Price was, and is lower on the seniority later. All in all, a net loss for the Republicans.

Good riddance to bad trash.

There is no argument anymore. The best there has ever been.