I used to get occasional work helping farm kids pick rocks. We don’t seem to have built any fences in Saskatchewan, preferring instead to just pile them up or bury them.
Never underestimate what happens when thousands of individual people do one thing over and over again, rock by rock, step by step, day in and day out, year after year. Whether it’s building fences, depleting resources, or putting waste into the environment, we always manage to more collectively than we can imagine as individuals.
I think for maximum uselessness, they should not be overlapping spheres, but deform at the interface, like soap bubbles or rubber balls. As long as the spheres are the same size and modelled with the same “surface tension” or “elasticity”, the “intersection” of two sets would then be a circular interface with an area proportional to what would otherwise be an overlap (I think). If the spheres have different sizes or are modelled with different surface tension or elasticity, one would “intrude” into the other.
Multiple sets would have increasingly complex shapes that may or not also create volumes external to the deformed spheres but still surrounded by the various interfaces.
Time to break out the mathematics of bubbles and foam. This data ain’t gonna obscure itself!
Might there actually be utility to something like this? Scrunch the spheres together but make invisible everything that is not an interface and label the faces accordingly. I suppose the same could be said of the shape described by overlapping. (Jesus, you’d think I was high or something. Just riffing.)
My favourite is the idea that it takes time to build out the “infrastructure” that allows for life. Basically, no supernovae, no life, not enough supernovae, extremely low probability of life. Even if that doesn’t put Earth’s life near the leading edge, we may be on the leading edge of technological civilizations.
Interesting. That page says “few vertebrae”, but the image makes it look to me like a full set.
On the other hand, if I found an animal with no ribs and pelvis and only the rudimentary limbs typically found in fish, I’d tend to say that the skeleton was missing. Or at least, ahem, skeletal.
Thanks. My first impression was that there was some funny business, but then I found what I thought was a decent article.
Are you serious? They really have what amounts to an exoskeleton? Or maybe it’s more accurate to call it a whole-body rib cage?
Just searched and found this fun article. Not really a skeleton but a collection of really stiff hairs or feathers (loosely: the genes are the same ones responsible for “other skin appendages” in vertebrates).
I made a half-assed guess as to its meaning based on the fact that I’ve heard of an elite basketball player by that name. I got pretty close, according to urban dictionary.
All roads lead to PIE. Or is that from? Oh, and maybe not “all.”
But seriously, I went through a linguistics phase in my reading and came away with the sense that Proto Indo European is a lot closer to us than it seems at first glance.
I used to teach Excel at an adult vocational college. When I moved into the corporate world, I quickly learned why the University of Hawaii’s research found that well over half of spreadsheets have critical errors. Even the people treated as Excel experts were often clueless.
I’m not saying that spreadsheets should be banned from the workplace, but they definitely need to be very tightly controlled.
Oh, and always, always lock formula cells, even in sheets that never leave your control. :) If possible, make use of Excel’s native data forms, too.
There word “sticks” is being used in the sense “adheres”. So the “coo” doesn’t bounce around in a series of reflections, but instead remains attached to the first surface it strikes.