Comments posted by Thanny

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+70 1. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video How much weight can a dog pull?

That dog did not pull 5.5 metric tons. He pulled a cart holding (presumably) 5.5 metric tons of material, which required an unknown amount of force. That force will vary with the rigidity of the wheels and the surface they are rolling on, as well as the friction of the wheel bearings.
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+44 2. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Hornets vs bees

Here's what happens with native bees, that have evolved defenses against the hornets:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EZtXNIT5QQ
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+43 3. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Jewellery Shop Robbery FAIL

20 minutes? Really?
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+36 4. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Evacuation Tube

That's evacuatED tubes, not evacuation. That means the tubes would be vacuums, eliminating air resistance.

I don't want to think what would happen to a pod going 6000kph that slammed into a wall of air introduced by a seal failure.
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+26 5. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Yesterday in Russia!

If you need a piece of heavy machinery to get something into the truck, you need a piece of heavy machinery to get it back out. Gravity is never your friend when making a delivery.
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+26 6. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie

What you see are oxygen atoms attached to carbon atoms (carbon monoxide molecules) on a copper plate.

The category for this video is wrong. It should be under Awesome, because that's what this is.

Though I'm getting the impression that people are so jaded by our technological ability these days that they're not nearly as awe struck as they should be.
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+26 7. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Little girl narrowly escapes death

Am I the only one who was on tenterhooks waiting for some vehicle to scream into view and narrowly miss her?
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+25 8. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Drunk cop tries to pass a sobriety field test

Has to be fake. There's no way someone as drunk as the cop appeared to be at the beginning could run without falling.
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+23 9. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video BIGGEST EXPLOSIONS

#5 You're confusing a ton with a tonne (called a "metric ton" in the US). The ton in the video is a short ton, which is 2000 pounds, as made clear by the "200,000" pound figure right there in the video. No math fail in the video, but a vocabulary fail on your part.
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+23 10. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video cat vs super mario sound effects

It's a fake. The cat isn't responding to the jump sounds at all. There's a string running under the carpet that someone is tugging on to create a ripple under the cat which prompts the jump. You can see the incriminating evidence at 1:15. It should also be fairly obvious from the fact that the cat is concentrating on the carpet, not the source of the sound.
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+23 11. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Jumping Spider Catches Fly

That's a daring jumping spider (that's the common name, not an evaluation). I have tons of them around here, but I've never seen them actually hunting and catching anything. I'd love to see that last little jump in slow motion.
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+23 12. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Making Art Out Of An Anthill With Molten Aluminium

#6 The ants crawling around the entrance would beg to differ.
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+23 13. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Motorcyclist rescues girl from car

With the utmost respect for this biker, he is not a hero. This is what I expect any moral person to do in his place. Which is perfectly summarized with the end caption, "Just another day [at] the office."
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+22 14. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video That Was Close

#4 Seriously? You see a video like that and wonder why the person in the passenger seat might be shot full of adrenaline and breathing hard? Are you so jaded by videos of extreme situations that you can't fathom what it might be like to actually be a part of them?
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+21 15. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video What is one red paper clip worth?

The big problem is that he publicized while trading, which prompted people to make trades they otherwise would not have considered.

Show me documentation for someone doing this quietly, reporting on it only after the fact, and then I'll be impressed. I expect it would take quite a bit longer to get anything of real value.
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+21 16. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video NASA Hyperwall 2 Demo

The number of pixels in the array of screens is pretty much the least impressive thing one learns in this video.
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+21 17. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video "MISFI- AHHH!!!"

#4 Mortar propellant is in the mortar round. The tube is just a guide with a pin at the bottom to set off the round's primer. The flame from one shot says absolutely nothing about what's going to happen with the next shot.

Assuming that's a modern mortar round, it wasn't armed, so they were not in serious trouble. The round would have to fly for about 100m before the mechanism to arm it had enough time and energy (wind power, believe it or not) to take effect.
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+20 18. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Mother and Baby Mice Made a New Organism

That's a shrew caravan. They do that when they feel threatened, so no one gets lost. One baby grips the base of the mother's tail in its jaws, and the others repeat the pattern.
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+20 19. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video How Japanese addresses work

The US does have block names, but they're not used with the mailing address. So the address 29 Main Street might be block 15, lot 41. The latter is what identifies the piece of land for legal matters, or to professionals like surveyors.

I work with data like this professionally, and I have to say that there's simply no way that using block/lot values to locate a property can be more efficient than mailing addresses. You're replacing a line labelled using sequential numbers with a polygon labelled using randomly ordered numbers. Moreover, when you're not even naming the streets, giving directions is a near impossibility, which is why Japan is littered with maps to the local blocks, and all attempts at directions require citing nearby landmarks every step of the way.

So Japanese addressing isn't just different. It's much, much worse.
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+19 20. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Kung-Fu Monkey Tries To Attack Guy

It's a gibbon, for those who care to know. They are quite acrobatic, as can be seen at http://www.snotr.com/video/3102 and http://www.snotr.com/video/7291.
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+19 21. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Cop Trolls Slow Driver in the Fast Lane

That's a New Jersey state trooper. I've seen them do that a couple times myself.
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+19 22. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Drivers stoned on marijuana test their driving skills

This is really a very poor test of driving skills even for sober people. Keeping track of which between-cone spaces are imaginary roads and which are imaginary sidewalks is a measure of nothing relevant to driving. This would probably be obvious if they had a large number of sober controls doing the same test.

The part near the end where the cop compared the girl hitting an invisible cone to hitting a pole or a person is just ludicrous. A pole or person would be visible through the rear window, not hidden by the car.

At least it shows conclusively that the "legal limit" is an arbitrary and ridiculously low number.
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+19 23. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Turns out Norwegian on helium sounds like minions from Despicable me

#1 There's no toxic level of helium. You just need to make sure you get oxygen as well, so you can sit there making your voice squeak for minutes on end.
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+18 24. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Tornado during a football match in japan

That's a dust devil, not a tornado. Pretty impressive one, though.
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+18 25. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video "Indian Snake Girl" Eight year old loves her pet Cobras

She didn't die because the snake didn't inject any venom. Venomous snakes will often bite without actually using venom, presumably when they feel more annoyed than threatened.

It's also possible that this is entirely a scam, and those snakes have had their venom glands removed.

In any case, I very much doubt that the "medicines" the man used have any effect at all.
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+18 26. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video How to start up a Boeing 737

Makes me wonder how many of those switches have been eliminated in newer models, in favor of automated diagnostics and the like.
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+18 27. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Orrery building time-lapse

Every time I see videos like this, I get jealous of the machine shops people have access to. And their ability to use them properly.
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+17 28. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Chinese build record breaking bridge

#4 A few years back, two people responsible for baby formula contamination were sentenced to death. The Chinese are pretty serious about punishing corner cutters when it results in disaster. If anyone did cut corners, and that bridge does fail, heads will certainly roll.
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+17 29. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Computer program reveals invisible motion in video

There are two completely different amplifications going on here.

For the heartbeat monitoring, they're amplifying color differences to catch the subtle color changes as fresh surges of oxygenated blood flows into the capillaries and whatnot. Things other than skin will change slightly with motion, as reflections and shadows shift.

For the breathing, they're amplifying pixel displacement to exaggerate the motion - something much more complicated, as it requires first detecting which pixels are in motion. That will work better with high contrast areas, where edge detection is much simpler.

I can see some pernicious applications here as well. Those deluded into thinking polygraphs actually detect lies might be tempted to create another fraudulent device that monitors heartbeat passively using this method, and perhaps also pick up on skin moisture changes (sample the color of incoming light and model how increased reflection of that light by sweat would affect overall color - just speculation, of unknown feasibility).
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+17 30. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Rain Room

It's a very cool concept, and no doubt very impressive to experience, but do they really have to try so hard to ruin it with all the pretentious artsy talk? Is it really possible to believe the world gains something by inventing the term "performative architecture"?
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+17 31. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Blind passenger removed

Took me a while to figure out that "blind passenger" means stowaway.
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+17 32. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Cube in a cube

There's something distinctly odd about seeing a drill bit stand still while the drilled item rotates.
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+17 33. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Dutch Driver tries to jump drawbridge - and fails

Looks more like "failed to notice" than "tried to jump".
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+16 34. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Turbine powered RC Jet

$3,995 for a Jetcat 160 SX.

Strong motivation to develop those flying skills - it would otherwise be one expensive crash.

I'd also like to see a camera on this beast, like the one from a few videos back.
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+16 35. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video If Google Was a Guy (Part 2)

#9 No, but focusing on the fact that he's asian is kind of racist.
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+15 36. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video The Kings' Dessert

#3 It's not our fault. Almost all of us take foreign language classes in high school (also, Ich kann ein bisschen Deutsch), but there's no pressure in society to master anything but English. There's Spanish to the south (and a lot more Americans who live near the border speak it), but nothing but English elsewhere on the continent. Most of our entertainment imports are either from the UK, or English-language remakes. The occasional non-English movie that gains popularity gets by fine with subtitles.

It certainly doesn't help that someone competent in English is never more than a stone's throw away whenever one travels.

The simple fact is, most people who speak more than one language speak their native language and English, which is the de facto international language (and the official language of science). The Korean and German men weren't conversing in German or Korean, after all. The only language they shared a fluency in was English. So it's rather unfair to say that native English speakers only know one language, when there's no other language one has an incentive to learn, outside of some specific circumstance.

People in the UK aren't any better, despite being in proximity to a host of other languages, because they already know the one language they can expect to be understood almost anywhere.
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+15 37. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Don't need a gun when you have a Donk

The big guy's name is Donk. I bet more than half of you weren't even born when that movie came out.
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+15 38. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Demolition man

That guy was damn near the next winner of a Darwin award.
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+15 39. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Near Perfect Reflection

This kind of shot is possible at Crater Lake in Oregon as well. Here's a panorama (many shots stitched together) I took there last May: http://i48.tinypic.com/n8fwz.jpg

The snow was around eight feet deep at the time (though fortunately packed enough to walk on).
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+15 40. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Old time strongman

Yes, he does bear a striking resemblance to Zach Galifianakis. His head, anyway.
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+15 41. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video The Most Accurate Hacking Scene Ever

A real "hacking" scene could never be in a movie. It will be a guy setting a bunch of scripts running then going to get a cup of coffee. Or, at best, a guy doing research on a particular person in an attempt to socially engineer the password. And it would take hours. You'll never find that in a movie or TV show.

I just wish they'd stop using IP v4 addresses like 387.421.899.275.

And I also wish they'd stop pretending to drink from obviously empty cups.
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+15 42. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video You'll never forget this moment

#2 And what is your proposed solution? Shoot the bear before it gets close? The bear chose to go that close. And as #3 pointed out, it's clear this bear is accustomed to humans, else she would never have taken her cubs so close to them.
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+15 43. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Atlantic and Pacific Ocean meet at the point of mid Ocean

That's not the Atlantic and Pacific meeting. That's silty fresh water from a river meeting salt water. Apparently off the coast of British Columbia.
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+14 44. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video hula hoop... well not exactly

Is it wrong that, while viewing, I was wishing that were a woman wearing a similar quantity of apparel?
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+14 45. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Piff the magic dragon

#3 If you look closely at 4:22, you can see her 'Y' has a tail below the white area. Now look at 4:49, and you can see that the tail is gone.

So you're pretty much correct - all cards are the Nine of Hearts, underneath a veneer of the entire deck. Save for the white areas, where he had her write her name.

No doubt it's a lot easier to explain than to do.
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+13 46. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video TOP 10 Crosswind and Scary Aircraft Landings

OK, the one starting at 1:30 is pure pro piloting.
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+13 47. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Redneck Bike Stunt Fail

So he thought, what, that the big sheet of plywood would disappear into a cloud of splinters as he burst through unhindered?
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+13 48. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Aphid cloning - Battle of the Animal Sexes

It has nothing to do with variation for the species. There's no such thing as "for the good of the species" in nature. That's just a myth.

Each aphid is a machine built by aphid genes for producing more aphid genes. Mixing with other batches of aphid genes increases any one gene's odds of increasing in number, because a fresh mix of genes is more likely to be resistant to parasites. Sex versus parasitism is like changing the locks versus burglary.

The asexual reproduction phase is very much like somatic cells in a single organism replicating. Each individual aphid is unimportant, which is why you see virtually no anti-predation behavior. It's more economic to make a whole bunch more aphids than to power the intelligence required to avoid ladybugs and parasitic wasps.
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+13 49. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video What happens to boiling water at -41C

By a curious coincidence, about -41C is also about -41F.
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+13 50. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Guys Stop Douchebags From Driving on The Sidewalk

This is the 17th in a series of videos by these guys. In one, a guy pulls a gun and threatens to shoot them, but they don't give an inch (after police arrive, profuse apologies ensue). In another, when an irate car passenger starts pushing members of the group around, some random guy with an AK-47 shows up and tells him to get back in the car and drive away.

Russia is a friggin' video gold mine.

Oh, and the music can be found by searching for "Zoo In Space - Babki", for anyone who's curious.
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+13 51. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Never forget to think outside the box

Isn't that the obvious answer?
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+12 52. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Snowboarding POV

He didn't hold the camera at all, much less steadily. He was obviously using this:

http://www.goprocamera.com/index.php?area=2&productid=6

The camera is attached to his arm, pointing towards his body on the same axis. So if his arm remains extended and attached to his torso, the camera has no choice but to stay centered on his body, which is the only frame of reference which appears relatively steady.
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+12 53. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Now THIS is what "Lighting Them Up" really means!

#8 Yeah, what a waste, giving a group of people some joy in their lives.
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+12 54. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Watch this before you choose to be an electrical engineer

He definitely knew what he was doing. A static discharge of that amount of charge (not much) is harmless. A 750kV discharge from a Van de Graaff generator isn't really painful, either. His timing and dead-pan warning delivery was perfect.
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+12 55. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video How Much Does Thor's Hammer Weigh?

Neutron stars are only dense as neutron stars - you need all that mass and its gravitational field to keep the neutrons packed together.

If you could magically remove a piece of a neutron star and place it somewhere else, it would promptly explode from the degeneracy pressure no longer having gravity to keep it in check. And then the neutrons would start decaying into protons, electrons, and neutrinos (neutrons don't last long outside of a nucleus), within a short time releasing 15 trillion times the energy of that biggest H bomb mentioned in the video. That's enough energy to melt all of the Earth's crust one hundred times over. That's it for all life, quite permanently. Even after the debris coalesces and re-solidifies, there won't be much in the way of water left, and there won't be any bombardment by comets to rehydrate the planet. That means no repeat on the origin of life.

All that assumes that the mass in the video is accurate. I didn't feel like estimating the volume of that hammer.
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+11 56. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Fishing tv show bloopers

It's "dadgummit", which is an old substitute for "god damn it", from when people took such things seriously.

It's like "dagnabbit", for the same phrase, or "tarnation" instead of "damnation".

There's a great many such words and phrases which I imagine most second-language English speakers just aren't aware of. Watching old Warner Brothers cartoons is a good way to encounter a bunch of them, especially Yosemite Sam.
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+11 57. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Planes land at ridiculous angles

If the wind blows that direction so consistently (or at least often), why didn't they build the runway to match?

Why not tear it up and lay it back down so that planes land and take off into the headwind?
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+11 58. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video 2 Black Swan feed Koi fish

The swans are feeding themselves. They're using the water to make the food go down more easily, and the fish are there to get whatever falls out of their bills.
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+11 59. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Celebrity Cruise Ship "Infinity" slams into Ketchikan Dock 06/03/16

Not sure the captain is responsible. When cruise ships come into a remote port, the port sends a harbor pilot out to oversee the docking. Unless the captain (or someone else on the bridge) were ignoring instructions, it's the pilot who bears responsibility.
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+11 60. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video We Were Hiking A Trail, When I Sensed We Were Being Stalked

He just wanted to play.

Seriously.
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+11 61. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Parrot learned how to cat

I think the hiss is by far the most awesome part. That bird knew exactly when it was called for.
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+11 62. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Best luggage handler in the world

#1 Because he actually cares about doing his job, and isn't abusing the luggage. Which is apparently rare, based on how many videos there are of handlers tossing bags around.
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+10 63. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video The Most Amazing Invention

Too bad no one responsible for this "report" understood thermodynamics, else they'd know that the energy produced by the combustion would always be less than the energy put into cracking the water.

The blatant quackery about the cancer was worse, because people might try that absolute nonsense and die instead of getting proper treatment.
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+10 64. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Dark Matters

The percentage of dark matter and normal matter can be estimated by examining how much mass is required to produce observed results (such as galaxy rotation and gravitational lensing), and totting up how much of it is visible in any way. In that sense, it's more or less a direct measurement.

The rest, which most people call "dark energy", is a number spit out of cosmological models that need to account for the apparent accelerating expansion of the universe. You can calculate how much energy is required to drive the observed acceleration. And since matter and energy are interchangeable, you can combine the quantities to provide a total, from which you get the percentages.
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+10 66. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Amazing Facts to Blow Your Mind

This gets a very basic fact wrong. Photosynthesis does not split the carbon dioxide molecule. That molecule is used intact to produce sugars. Water molecules are split into hydrogen and oxygen, the latter being the waste gas that we all appreciate so much.
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+10 67. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video What happens if our body is exposed to Vacuum

There's a fairly sizable error here. While there's no convection in space, there are still two ways to lose heat - radiation and evaporation. Moisture near the surface of the skin will evaporate very quickly, giving off heat in the process (heat of vaporization, which is why we sweat). While our radiation is normally offset to a large degree by incoming radiation from our surroundings (including, to a large extent, the air around us), in the vacuum of space there's mostly just blackness. If the sun were obscured, an average man would have a net heat loss of something like 900 watts. At maybe 10 minutes to hypothermia, definitely the least troublesome problem, but it's a far cry from not freezing. You'd certainly feel cold immediately.
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+10 68. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Outboard engine experts

Starting fluid is useful for getting a stubborn carburetor going. You're suppose to spray a little bit of it directly into the intake. That guy was filling pretty much all the empty space under the motor covering with the stuff, and it exploded.

This trend of "I don't know what happened, so somehow it's a fake" really needs to stop. The only thing suspicious here is that it was being recorded at all. But these days, that's really not all that suspicious - people record the smallest of things routinely, now that virtually every cell phone is a camcorder.
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+10 69. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Subaru WRX STI vs. Stick Bomb

#1 The title is wrong. It's stick bomb, not sticky bomb. The latter is a deadly explosive meant to adhere to a surface it's thrown at. The former is an arrangement of wood sticks under tension that explode apart in a chain reaction after one of the component sticks is dislodged. If you arrange them in a long track, as seen in this video, then the release of tension travels along the track.
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+10 70. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Old man gives noob a checkers lesson

Whatever that is, it isn't checkers. Pieces in checkers must move diagonally.
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+10 71. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video How to make Soba Noodles.

No way I'm spending 12 minutes watching someone make noodles. That's what I said 12 minutes ago.
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+10 72. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Were the "Dark Ages" really dark?

There are two meanings for the term Dark Age. One is the pejorative, indicating the the age was a period of economic and social deterioration. The other is informational, indicating that the age in question is poorly recorded (i.e. like a dark room, where you just can't see).

Used in the first sense, the modern time range is around 5th to 10th century CE. All of this guy's examples fall outside of that range, so aren't part of the Dark Ages at all. Which is no doubt largely due to the fact that however dark that age may have been in the first sense, it's certainly quite dark in the second sense.

He should have chatted with one of his history professor colleagues before making this video.
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+10 73. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Aliens: Are We Looking in the Wrong Place?

This is a really good example of an extraordinarily bad use of statistics.

Not one of the "we should expect" statements in this video is rational. We should expect none of them. They all completely ignore what it means to be an intelligent technological species.
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+10 74. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Tiny Traffic

That was way more amusing than it had any right to be.
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+9 75. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Big Spider

All spiders are venomous. It's just a matter of how potent the venom is. A Redback, close cousin to the Black Widow, will produce a very painful bite, but almost never a fatal one.

This guy was not thinking too intelligently. Even if he did manage to get the container around the spider, what was he going to do next? The spider would just climb right out if he brought it down from the ceiling, and I saw no evidence of a lid nearby.
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+9 76. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Guy Wins a Million Dollars on The Price is Right

That look was priceless. A combination of "I won!?" and "Wait, am I doing the the math right?".
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+9 77. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Hilarious Experiment On Monkeys

This is about a sense of fairness. Demonstrating that the concept of fairness is tens of millions of years old is not "minimal educational purposes".

Lumping these types of experiments together with "animal testing" is just hysterics.
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+9 78. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Wild bunch :D

Zoos are the number one way to get people to give more than two tosses about wild animals to foster support for their conservation. While the zoos of old were pretty poor places for an animal to live, modern ones give most animals quite a lot of space, as well as guaranteed nutritious meals (which no living heterotroph complains about).

Furthermore, most zoos are non-profit, and constantly struggling for funding. Despite that, they actively support wildlife conservation programs.

So if you're really interested in the well-being of animals across the globe, educate yourself about zoos, and support a quality one whenever you can.
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+9 79. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Pull up ! Pull up!

That was 100% pilot error.
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+9 80. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Power of mother nature's plants

They aren't easy to keep. On the plus side, you can feed the plant ground beef, which is a kind of awesomely silly thing to do.

As for the fly husks, they'll be dried out and a stiff breeze will likely take care of them.
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+9 81. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video This player was tired of getting hit while running with the football.

#3 So says someone who has never played tackle football without protective gear, or stood near a typical NFL player sporting arms as thick as a normal person's thighs. These guys break bones, tear muscles, rip tendons, and sometimes get paralyzed *with* this gear on. It doesn't take the sharpest tool in the shed to realize that playing without it would be suicidal.
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+9 82. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Playing With A Friendly Platypus

Just make sure it's a female. The males have venomous spurs on their rear legs. Won't kill you, but the pain can last for ages.
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+9 83. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Terrible Infomercials

I got Mr. Microphone for Xmas one year, probably about 30 years ago now. It worked, but I wasn't old enough to drink, which would be a prerequisite for actually using it.
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+9 84. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Paving road like a boss!

#1 I expect it makes a whole lot easier to go in a straight line. I agree that it's crying out for some kind of robotic sorter at the top to lay the bricks out.
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+9 85. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Evolution Door

The fatal flaw, of course, is that you just can't slam that door in anger.
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+9 86. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Don't Tell Mummy!

I love how the Safety Nazis just assume this was taking place on the streets in traffic.
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+9 87. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Street Guitarist Gets His Youtube Revenue + Surprize

I thought I had a damn chicken outside my house at 1:23.
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+9 88. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Great Dane puppy at 3:30am

At 3:30? I have to say I'm on the dog's side here.
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+9 89. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Heavy equipment operator turns crazy

Yeah, obviously staged.

More importantly, however, how does one stop this new player from automatically starting? I open videos up in background tabs, which in the old player would make them download and be ready for watching when I got to them. But this new one starts playing automatically. I don't like that.
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+9 90. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video SHERP

OK, first, I was blase until 1:31, at which point I became desirous.

And at 2:00, it becomes absolutely clear that this thing steers like a tank. Not having to pivot the front or back wheels no doubt gives it a lot of extra durability. I do have to wonder about it's roll resistance.
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+9 91. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Turkish Coffee

This is what multiculturalism should be (as opposed to what the kind of idiots who talk about "cultural appropriation" mean). Take a plant from the Americas, import it to Turkey, and turn it into something novel.

And when you get your cup of Turkish coffee, don't stir. The bottom will be covered in sludge that you don't want to drink.
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+9 92. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Formula 1 Sniper

OK, annoyances with the new player:

1) No size slider. It's a tiny thing on my screen now.

2) Volume isn't remembered. It's on max each time I load a video.
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+8 93. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Only energy source is the wind and the sun.

It's a glider. It has no power source. Solar heating will cause updrafts that give it a bit of lift. Headwinds will provide lift as well, but drain forward momentum.

The bulk of the energy, however, was provided in advance by the engine of the tow plane that pulled him off the ground and up the mountain, in the process stored as gravitational potential energy, which was then expended by the glider as it made its way back down the mountain.
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+8 94. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Newt

Garter snakes are actually quite resistant to the newt's toxins. Most would just eat it, become torpid for a while, then move on. The two are actually in the middle of an arms race, with the newts becoming more toxic, and the snakes become more resistant. The snakes appear to be winning.
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+8 95. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Tribute to Leslie Nielsen

As great as he was in "Airplane", "Naked Gun", and the rest, it's a shame people seem to forget he had a long career before slapstick. "Forbidden Planet", anyone?
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+8 96. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Nice Magic trick on Americas Got Talent

The guy was probably in the trunk the whole time, behind a false back wall, and the poster draped over the front following the head roll allowed him to get out and shove the suit parts behind him while unseen.
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+8 97. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Feeding The Giants

The guy's hand was never in any real danger. Grouper don't have much in the way of teeth, and use the suction of suddenly opening their mouths to draw prey inside whole. That's why it's so sudden and startling, but really not at all dangerous.
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+8 98. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Why phone buttons are laid out the way they are

Oddly enough, my first cell phone (Nokia 3650) had a pseudo-rotary number design. I kind of miss real rotary phones. Phone calls seem much more important when you have to invest half a minute literally dialing the number.
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+8 99. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video How Computers Add Numbers In One Lesson

That's a Pentium II board from the late 1990's, but the picture is mirrored. The CPU goes into the large black slot with the upright supports. The circled microprocessor would be some version of the Intel 440 northbridge. The CPU shown next looks like an AMD Am486, which would go into a very different (older) motherboard.

As for the size of the heat sink, it's worth remarking that until the Pentium came out, heat sinks were entirely optional. The ceramic CPU package on anything up to a 486 offered sufficient cooling by itself, though there was a market for tiny heat sinks with tiny fans.
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+8 100. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Electric Vehicle Technology

This new hidden-rating comment system strikes me as rather pointless. You still highlight the high-rated comments, and hide the low-rated ones, so people can still hop on the bandwagon.

Beyond that, why should I have to form an opinion of someone's comment just to know what others think of it? It's going to promote a whole lot of meaningless up/down votes, and drive some to just ignore the rating system entirely.

As for this video... I'm ambivalent about electric cars. With generation moved to clean sources, there's potential, but I think there are better ways to power vehicles without relying on fossil fuels.
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+8 101. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video German snacks are quite the mouthful.

The word "dick" in German means "thick", so it's not as bad as it seems. Though that means the treat is named "thickman", which kind of makes it worse.
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+8 102. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Scary Animal Encounter! Wild Cheetah Jumps In Car During Safari!

Scary? I, for one, would not have been able to resist the temptation to pet the cheetah. Attacks by cheetahs on humans are nearly unheard of.
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+8 103. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Gentle Pony Helps Girl Who Falls Off After Fence Jump

That's not nudging her to safety. That's "get this thing off my head".
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+8 104. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video The Superman's Return - Michael Guerra is back on bike to fight road cyclists' crimes

#1 It's just basic aerodynamics. He reduced his drag significantly, and they were obviously on a downhill stretch.
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+8 105. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video The Nuclear Waste Problem

There's a lot wrong with this. First, Yucca Mountain has been around for quite some time, and it's only a matter of cutting through political red tape to make it an active long term facility. So the site described in the video is far from the first.

Second, radiation isn't some mysterious substance that leaks into the surroundings when given an opening. Radiation (which, in common parlance, refers specifically to ionizing radiation) is either particle emissions or gamma ray emissions. It is not contagious. If something is irradiated, it does not become radioactive.

Third, you cannot compare ancient civilizations to today's civilization. The idea that there will be some future population that doesn't know about long term nuclear storage is all but absurd. Even if something really catastrophic did happen, all records were obliterated, and future civilizations somehow didn't have the ability to detect radiation, opening a long term storage facility would not mean contaminating the surroundings. Only those who came into direct proximity of the nuclear waste would be affected.

Building more safeguards into nuclear fission plants is certainly worth doing, but scare-mongering isn't.
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+8 106. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Home made dream car

OK, so now they just need to get some paint, and an engine that sounds like it can do 0-60 in less than 60.
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+8 107. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Help! My Kid's A Socialist

Socialism is nothing more or less than a group of people pooling a resource to accomplish a goal for the individual members of the group that each alone could not accomplish. The very concept of government is socialist - the pooled resource is authority, and what's accomplished is a modicum of order.

Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive, and there's not a single nation on this planet that is not a mixture of both. And they are both needed, because capitalism, while good for innovation on the whole, due to its evolutionary mechanisms, is bad for equality. Socialism is needed to rein in the excesses of capitalism, taking some of the fruits of the lucky winners and making a safety net for the unlucky losers. It's also needed for the basic fabric of a society. You don't have much of a nation without a military, law enforcement, transportation infrastructure, etc. - all socialized goods and services (and much of it outsourced to capitalist enterprises, such as construction firms to actually build the infrastructure paid for by the pooled public resources).

This guy's understanding of the issue is just as simplistic and misguided as that of the brainwashed students.
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+7 108. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video The Oogpister Beetle

Clearly someone does not understand the concept of mimicry in evolution. It has nothing to do with conscious imitation, and everything to do with differential reproduction of inherited appearances and behaviors over vast spans of time.
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+7 109. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Crashproof motorbike

It was obviously fake long before the "demonstration" at the end, because pretty much none of the amazing things she claims this motorcycle can do are actually possible with current technology (or at least not with any equipment that can fit on and be powered by a motorcycle).
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+7 110. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Rubik's Cube

I don't know if this is genuine, but it's not being played backwards from how it was filmed. The blindfold is clearly pulled down in a way that it could not be pushed in the other direction.
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+7 111. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Parachuting from 100,000 feet

#4 No gravity in space? Did you skip physics in high school?
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+7 112. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Bullet Proof Glass

#10 True. Those who are wise say it aloud.
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+7 113. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video How It's Made: Contact Lenses

This shows how soft non-disposable lenses are made. You wear them for around a year, and they require more maintenance (such as removing protein periodically).

Disposable lenses are probably made in a similar fashion, but with a preset range of optical properties, which would allow more automation in the process.
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+7 114. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Alien Super-Earth Goes Supercritical?

You people are just spoiled.

Some time ago, Isaac Asimov wrote a story involving a robot that had reasoned out a method of determining where extrasolar planets could be found, but was destroyed before that knowledge could be revealed.

At the time, no one had any idea how to even determine if any other stars had planets. Now we're discovering them by the hundreds, and are capable of discerning ridiculous levels of details about them, given how far away they are.

Some perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
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+7 115. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Bloke Vs. Butane In Campfire

#9 That was a fireball from probably a small butane lighter. There would be no shockwave to speak of, so he wasn't thrown anywhere. He walked there, no doubt in a bit of pain.
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+7 116. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video How Much Does a Shadow Weigh?

What's with the monstrous Snotr logo? It's really quite distracting.
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+7 117. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Whoa...that was close...WHOA!

Doesn't matter why they stopped. It's the responsibility of the driver behind you to stop when you do, for whatever reason. So the pickup that hit the car was 100% at fault.

The other truck that veered into the oncoming lane was also guilty of driving recklessly. He had no right to obstruct oncoming traffic.

In the northern US, funeral processions get the right of way most of the time, but no one stops when they pass.
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+7 118. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Tornado vs House

#9 There are many people here who can't pass up any opportunity to say something bad about the US or its citizens. However exaggerated it may be, the Ugly American phenomenon, no doubt, plays a part in fueling their hostility. What they fail to realize is that they are precisely as "ugly" while hurling that incessant stream of insults.

Imparting factual information about anything is well outside their motivations.
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+7 119. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Costa Concordia salvage timelapse

#6 Gross negligence on the part of the captain, who took the boat too close to an island, and not for the first time. People died because he then delayed evacuation for an unconscionably long time afterwards. He's facing criminal charges.
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+7 120. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Humpback Whales attempt to save Grey Whale calf

Actually, orcas do quite often hunt for sport. It's typical that once they've killed the grey whale calf, they eat only a tiny portion (sometimes just the tongue), leaving the rest to rot and be scavenged.

They'll also capture seals and play with them (often still alive) without eating them.

Just be glad that they don't seem interested in attacking humans in the wild.
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+7 121. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video 10 of the Wealthiest People (Dead or Alive)

For the curious, that's 440 E Palisade Ave. The house, built in 1906, resides on 4.71 acres of land, and has a 2013 total assessment value of $5,694,700. If it weren't tax exempt (which it definitely is), the 2013 taxes would be $139,349. It was part of the Libyan diplomatic mission at least as far back as 1989, which is when proper digital tax records in NJ began. Over that time period, over $2.5 million in property taxes would have been collected.

Strangely, the house next door has been owned since 2000 by the obnoxious Orthodox rabbi Shmuley Boteach (look up some of his "debates" to understand my choice of adjective).

All this information is public record, I hasten to add.
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+7 122. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Blue Heron eats a gopher

This is much less surprising when you remember that that's a dinosaur eating a small mammal.
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+7 123. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can

#2 Humphry Davy, the British scientist who first identified the metallic element in the mineral alumina, first called it alumium. Then, in keeping with standard etymological conventions, he changed it to aluminum. This is in keeping with the same rules used for molybdenum, lanthanum, platinum, and tantalum. Not to mention the Latin versions of a bunch of other elements (aurum = gold, plumbum = lead, stannum = tin, and so on). The general rule was, take the metallic salt, lop off the ending 'a', then add 'um'. So zirconia became zirconium, while alumina became aluminum.

Then an etymologically deficient halfwit suggested changing it to aluminium, because most other elements ended that way, including many that weren't originally metallic salts at all. He actually wrote that "aluminum" didn't sound "classical" enough, despite being the actually correct name according to the classical system.

It wasn't until about a hundred years later that the metal became common enough for either version of the word to gain any public purchase. In America, Davy's preferred form took hold, perhaps due to being also preferred by our most famous dictionary producer, Noah Webster. In the UK, the etymologically deficient version took hold, and about 25 years ago, some international committee saw fit to choose that version, then later added that both spellings are acceptable.

So you are wrong on multiple independent levels. Congratulations.
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+7 124. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Before and after stropping

OK, so now I have to figure out where to hang the big honking strip of leather in my kitchen.
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+7 125. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Don't Stay in School

What a load of codswallop. Let's ignore, for the moment, that most of what he said isn't taught in school is, in fact, taught in school.

The idea that fundamental, foundational knowledge and methods shouldn't be taught because they aren't immediately practical to everyone is horrific. That's a recipe for turning out ignorant twits like this en masse.
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+7 126. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Premium gas vs. regular: Which is Better?

There are quite a few problems with this. First and foremost, they obviously went into filming with an expected answer, which is going to color what they decide to show.

They did not test horsepower. Put the car through a series of 0-60mph (or 0-100kph) tests with each gasoline, or use the dynamometer to actually measure the car's maximum horsepower and torque with the different fuels (which they manifestly did not do).

They did not test mileage properly. Run the engine dry with a fixed quantity of fuel at a fixed throttle several times with each fuel.

They misreported the emissions data. You can see clearly that the regular fuel had a 6.0 value with the hydrocarbon emissions, while the premium fluctuated between 6.0 and 6.1. That's a variance less than half as large as the variance in the mileage test they did do.

They also only tested a single model of car. Why not a car that actually recommends premium fuel as well? Or several different cars?

There's no data here, just one big anecdote.

And as for regular fuel octane in the US, it's actually much lower in parts of the west where elevations are a few thousand feet above sea level. You don't need as high an octane rating in the thinner air, and you also get a lot better mileage (on the order of 20% higher when I did a lot of driving out there in 2011).

I don't think the differences between grades in a normal car justify the price premiums, but I also dislike half-assed reporting. And there was a lot of the latter here.
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+7 127. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Tree Trunk Carving

There's a pretty busy one of those a couple miles from here, which you can see in this animated GIF:

http://www.milfordpa.us/tree.gif

The New Jersey State Fair has a chainsaw carver every year, too. Needless to say, the work isn't cheap.
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+7 128. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Racing pilot nearly decapitated when hit by another plane

Fortunate for him he had the good sense to stay in his plane.
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+7 129. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Drone Exposes Warehoused Research Beagles

#3 Tell me that after you've had your life saved by some kind of medical science that wouldn't exist without animal testing.

It's pretty likely you already have.
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+7 130. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video ... until the cops showed up !!!

#3 It's in a computer.
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+7 131. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video What humans will look like in 1,000 years

Humans are not going to be taller.

The increase in average height over the past 100+ years has nothing whatsoever to do with evolution, which simply cannot operate at that speed (a handful of generations).

It has to do with nutrition. In areas where malnutrition is a major problem today, which becomes mitigated or solved in the future, average height will increase, up to a point. So will average intelligence, as it takes a lot of calories provided at regular intervals to build a brain as well as it can be for a given genotype.
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+7 132. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Confronting The Hot Bitchy Girl

#1 The alt-right is a term that refers to white nationalists, which number a couple tens of thousands at most in the US. It does not refer to people who are merely to the right of you (which is nearly everyone).

Try to get your terminology right when you go on your long-winded ignorant rants. I'd suggest you also avoid making assumptions about the people you invidiously attack, but that's probably asking too much.
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+6 133. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Moon Landing

The main players are Mitchell and Webb. Not sure which show this is from.
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+6 134. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video How to find the water from a Baboon

#7 is correct. This is "Animals are Beautiful People". Made by the same guy who did "The Gods Must Be Crazy", a few years before the latter came out.

It's worth renting or buying for the drunk animals alone (on fermented fruit).
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+6 135. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Anthony Bourdain schooled by a 10 year old.

You would-be geography teachers seem to be having difficulty with the math.

If she's half-Czechoslovakian, it means her mother or father is full-Czechoslovakian. If this video is from 2010, the girl was born around 2000, which means her mother or father only had to be around eight years old to be born in Czechoslovakia, which is a pretty safe assumption.

As for the rest, if I took a camera crew anywhere in the world, I would have no difficulty finding ample subjects to reveal a nation peopled by fools on screen.
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+6 136. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Ladybug plays with sprinkles

I wonder if the sugar in the sprinkles smells somewhat like an aphid full of nectar, and if that would explain why it's trying to eat them.
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+6 137. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video In Soviet Russia, Bear Hunts You

It may be a complete fake, but another plausible possibility is that the first part was real, and after the bear went away, they staged the last bit as a joke. Note how there's a complete cut hidden by the motion of the camera between when the bear enters the vehicle and when the funny part (stuff being thrown out) begins.
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+6 138. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Are you afraid of the dentist?

With Tim Conway and Harvey Korman, that must be from the Carol Burnett Show.
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+6 139. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video how to draw an anatomic face in 2.5 minutes

As soon as he drew the iris outlines, my brain said, "That's a face!". Amazing how little it takes.
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+6 140. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Tribe Meets White Man for the First Time

Simple? Innocent? Piffle.

Surviving in the jungle without modern technology is not simple. There hasn't been a human society yet found where murder is not endemic (the !Kung, AKA Bushmen of the Kalahari, have a higher murder rate than any modern civilization).

There are decent arguments pro and con for offering these tribes the opportunity to enter the modern world. But let's skip the mythologizing.
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+6 141. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Tim Cameron and his beast

Seems to me he could use a few lower gears.
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+6 142. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Unimog is still the best

A great example of what a lot of low-RPM torque can do, as opposed to the high-RPM tire an dirt grinding found in http://www.snotr.com/video/8700.
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+6 143. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Base Jumping Without A Parachute Packing

Looks to me like the cliff is so low that a packed parachute would take too long to open.
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+6 144. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video And then he saw my wife ...

Most black bears around here run at the mere sight of a human. I had to yell at only one to get it to run, and that was a sizable male who had got into a metal garbage can full of black oil sunflower (for birds; silly me thinking the chain across the lid would keep bears out - he just knocked it over and squeezed the sides until the lid popped off). He looked very sad that he had to leave such a nice meal behind, but he ran just the same.
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+6 145. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Cheetahs

First, it's worth it to find the 1080p version on YT and download the file to watch in a proper player.

Second, I can't get over how still they hold their heads when running. That's not how it is, of course, since the neck muscles are working overtime to counteract the motion. But the result is, to my eye, astonishing. It's as if the cheetah's head is flying through the air, dragging the body behind.
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+6 146. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video The World's First Precision Guided Firearm

He says "first shot", which means it's only intended to be useful for sniping. It may be able to handle movement, but not much. He also mentioned a "firing solution", which suggests that the scope has a range finder, and maybe even some kind of wind measurement, which it uses to calculate the trajectory. In other words, it does what a sniper and spotter together can do only with a lot of training and experience.

I can imagine a rich guy using it to hunt, but it seems clearly intended to make any soldier an instant sniper.
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+6 147. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Way Too Close...

#4 Definitely a woman, and definitely a real plane. Complete with pilot.
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+6 148. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video All you can eat ribs courtesy of Golden Corral

#2 He was not fired. The manager of that Golden Corral was fired. He also did not have a video of them rolling it back in. All the food in that video was disposed of, not cooked and served.
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+6 149. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Acoustophoretic Waltz

The bits are being held in place by sound waves (i.e. held up by regular pulses of air).
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+6 150. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Can you trust your eyes?

There's an element of deception to illusions like these. The shadowed grid one, for example, is misleading. They refer to "removing the shadow", but do nothing of the sort. They leave the box itself untouched, when in reality the removal of the shadow would mean making the box lighter.

Our brains try to figure out what objects actually look like, so they can be recognize under a wide variety of lighting conditions. They are not trying to make accurate photon counts. Perceiving the box in shadow as lighter is correct. You can't just chop a piece of the real world out of a real shadow and have it remain the same color. The brain isn't failing at all.
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+6 151. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video A-10 Warthog Gatling Gun Test

#7 Depleted uranium rounds are extremely weakly radioactive. Not enough to cause any kind of illness. It's the impact of extremely dense metal that you need to worry about, with a minimal side worry (for small bits of shrapnel) of heavy metal poisoning. It's used to bust through armor, not make people sick.
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+6 152. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video A cars worst nightmare

I was about to say, "Yeah, now try that with the engine still in it."

Then, well...
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+6 153. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Homemade aluminum ingot

That's melting, not smelting.
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+6 154. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video We are (apparently) here to stay

#4 How about from statistics? The US is a nation with around 330 million people, and, if estimates are to be believed (there are no reliable actual figures), about 300 million guns. Yet around 10 thousand people each year are killed by another person with a gun. Even if you assume that only 1 in 10 people in the US own a gun, that means 99.97% or so of gun owners are responsible enough to not kill someone with their gun each year.

The reason for the relative abundance of gun killings in the US has nothing to do with the guns themselves, which any honest person who examines all the pertinent facts would have to conclude. You can start with the relative abundance of non-gun killings (typically more than all killings combined in other first world nations), and search for an explanation of that.
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+6 155. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Amazon Prime Air

#3 He, along with James May and Richard Hammond, got paid a ton of money to develop a new series for Amazon after the BBC sacked Clarkson from Top Gear over the fracas incident. I imagine doing promotions like this was simply part of the deal.
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+6 156. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video 0 to 316 mph

That's an average of about 2.6g worth of acceleration. Probably higher at the beginning and lower towards the end.

And I can say from experience that those things are insanely loud even from the stands. Ear plugs are a good idea at these races.
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+6 157. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Gimbal

It's like a video game with movement bounce turned off.
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+6 158. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video The Specious Present

1) I did notice the audio sync problem.

2) There was no flash in the initial green circle test. Apparently the conversion process killed that frame.
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+6 159. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Fractal Jigsaw

The point is that large structures that don't have distinct borders with their surroundings are hard to see.
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+6 160. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Why Doesn't Time Flow Backwards?

"..the fact that we experience the flow of time right now means we're not in equilibrium."

Absolute nonsense. It will never, ever be the case that a conscious entity fails to experience the flow of time. Equilibrium, for a conscious being, is nothing more or less than a decomposing brain that has reached the point where it's a homogeneous puddle of ooze, which is capable of experiencing nothing.

Beyond the physical constraints on the ridiculous statement quoted above, there is the fact that the flow of time has nothing whatsoever to do with entropy. Reversing entropy is not equivalent with reversing time. It's equivalent with introducing energy and/or matter to a system.

The voice sounds like that of Sean Carroll, and he's made this claim (that time's arrow is a function of entropy) many times. But it's rubbish. Time is nothing more or less than a sequence of events. Entropy is the observation that absent an influx of energy, events always lead towards disorder. He's even made ridiculous statements about entropy being why we remember the past and not the future.

The very idea that the arrow of time needs and explanation is nothing but an artifact of our mathematical models of reality, which should never be confused with reality itself. The fact that you can slap a negative sign on a number representing time and do valid math with it does not indicate that in reality, the flow of time (the fact that the real-world analog of the time variable always increases) is something in need of special explanation.
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+6 161. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Avoiding Traffic

I've seen this kind of thing several times now. In what country are the traffic laws so daft that simply driving backwards would exempt you from a citation for doing that?
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+6 162. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Cool Crocodile

That's an alligator, not a crocodile.
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+6 163. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Had to be done I guess.

Sorry, but you have to be comprehensible to be considered talking. She isn't.
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+6 164. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Guy blowing a bubble with a tornado on fire inside

I was hoping to see flame inside the bubble, so I'm slightly disappointed.

But only slightly.
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+6 165. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Stossel: Sweden is Not a Socialist Success

There are zero successful capitalist societies. There are zero successful socialist societies. All successful societies have mixed economies, employing both capitalist and socialist principles.

People who say differently have no idea what they are talking about.
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+5 166. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Rotifers - Just add water!

The really interesting thing about Bdelloid Rotifers is that they are asexual, and have been for millions of years.

Normally, when a species drops sex, it goes extinct after a short while, for a number of reasons centered on a lack of genetic diversity.

It seems the rotifers escape this fate much like bacteria do - taking genes from the environment to try on for size.

I've seen elsewhere, too, that their little drying-up trick helps them combat a particularly pernicious fungus. After a couple weeks without water, the rotifers remain viable, but the fungus dies completely. Without that trick, the fungus is almost 100% fatal.
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+5 167. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video faceview of a Wingsuit

#2 Nicely done, mocking those confused by the snowboarding video.
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+5 168. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Mini cannon firing and destroying targets.

#8 Compare the size of that cannon with the size of a .22-caliber short cartridge. Are you equally puzzled at the latter's ability to do damage?
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+5 169. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video FPV RC Plane Flying Over NYC

Judging from the acknowledgments near the end, I'm pretty sure the guy got permission for the flights beforehand. These days, to do otherwise would likely lead to an arrest.
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+5 170. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Coldplay steals from Super Mario bro's

Anyone who thinks these two things are the same has tin ears.
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+5 171. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Particles

This is deeply misleading.

Observations don't take place with a little eyeball that magically detects an electron without interfering with it. All observations involve meddling of some sort - either you capture the result of something that was already happening (such as a photon being emitted by or bouncing off of an object), or you cause an impact of some sort to capture an effect. In all cases, the observed object behaves differently because of what happened to allow the observation - the observation itself is irrelevant.

In the case of the double-slit experiment, the only way to detect the electron is to put something in the way of it that it interacts with in some way to produce something measurable (an electrical impulse, say, or an emitted photon). It will not continue on to do exactly what it was going to do before the "observation" (a word that is treated as passive in common parlance, but which is anything but in the world of particle physics).
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+5 172. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Snow Bomb

As #9 says, this is extremely dangerous. If there were sheets of ice on there instead of just snow, that driver could have been killed easily.
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+5 173. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Visiting ElK City

The elk go there because of the grass created by settlement. It's not an elk gathering area that was invaded by humans.

This notion that animals have always been wherever we currently find them is just ludicrous. They move around just as much as we do, and "invade" just as rudely, from the perspective of whatever critters happen to be there at the time.

Know where else elk like to hang out in great numbers these days? In the valley that 31 years ago was plowed clear of every living thing by a mud and ash flow from Mt. St. Helens in Washington State, USA. They wouldn't be there before the eruption, just as these elk wouldn't be in that town before the well-manicured grassland created by human habitation.
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+5 174. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video A misunderstood man...

This version blacks the screen when he lifts the woman's dress, but the older version doesn't. Peculiar.
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+5 175. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Diving With Sharks

#4 That's sand falling off her pelvic fins, from when she was resting on the bottom. You can see the same thing happening with the pectoral fins at 2:50.
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+5 176. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Norwegian blonde with chainsaw

#6 An electric chainsaw is good in the same way an electric hedge trimmer is - dealing with things around your house, for far less money than gas-operated models.
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+5 177. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Huge underwater snake tries to eat eel

Here's one that had a bit more luck:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uyT4Cbx2XU

Seems morays are resistant to sea snake venom, which would go a long way toward explaining why sea snakes are more venomous, by far, than any land snake.
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+5 178. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Talkative bird!

#3 It's a Common Hill Myna. Did you think there was only one species of Myna?
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+5 179. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Too Fast to be Good

#14 The broken line indicates when you can begin passing, not when you can end passing (that would be incredibly stupid - sorry, can't get back in your lane because the line is solid now; tough luck).
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+5 180. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Google Data Center

#4 I like electromagnetic radiation quite a lot, thank you very much. I'd be blind without it. As for cancer, anything beyond UV (visible, microwave, radio) doesn't have enough energy to break chemical bonds and damage DNA, which is what actually causes cancer. You need to get yourself a basic science education.
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+5 181. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video What happens to boiling water at -41C

#14 Celsius and Fahrenheit are exactly the same at -40, period (hence the "about" in my comment above - exactly -41C is exactly -41.8F, but about -41C is about -41F). It's only possible for them to be equal at one value, given the difference in the size of the unit.
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+5 182. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Adolescent deer stuck in a fence

A couple years ago, I heard that sound every few minutes or so for hours on end, not knowing what it was. Finally, I left my house and hiked to where it was coming from, and found a fawn with its leg trapped in a piece of chain link fence that was lying on the ground. I freed it, but its leg was probably broken. Last I know of it, a neighbor was taking it to the vet.

So that's how I learned that deer make that sound when in distress.
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+5 183. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Smart duck fools hyena

It's from this:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071143/

Very entertaining movie, even if some parts play fast and loose with how things actually happened. From the same guy who did "The Gods Must be Crazy".
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+5 184. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Most intelligent Mimic Octopus in the world

1:17 looks an awful lot like a frog fish to me.
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+5 185. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Hawaiian girl free-dives with huge great white shark.

Great Whites don't like human flesh. The problem is that their method of tasting is to take a big bite. That's how people, very rarely, get injured or killed.
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+5 186. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Lorenz Machine

How rude to cut Keeley Hawes off like that.
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+5 187. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Tomtato or Pomato

Every cultivated plant that we eat is genetically modified. In random and haphazard fashion through crossbreeding, so that each modified plant will have unknown effects and be entirely untested for health consequences. That includes all tomatoes and potatoes.

Genetically engineered plants, on the other hand, are modified in one or a few genes directly, which produces known effects, with thoroughly tested health consequences.

Yet many people complain about the latter while blithely accepting the former. Profound ignorance of biology is surely to blame.
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+5 188. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Iranian guitar player approaches speed of light...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_bumblebee

For those who apparently don't recognize that he's playing actual music.
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+5 189. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Water Transfer Printing

Looks good, but it raises some questions:

1) How does it look when it's dry?
2) How durable is the finish?
3) How easy is it to clean it all off and start over when they mess up, like they did with that one motorcycle helmet (went too fast at the chin area, and the pattern came out all distorted)?
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+5 190. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Raw, unedited, silent footage of the bombing of Nagasaki, August 9, 1945.

#6 Yes, it was crucial in ending WWII in the Pacific. But I have yet to see a convincing argument that they needed to be dropped on inhabited cities to do it. Telling the Japanese, "Go here on this date at this time," then dropping the bomb on an empty desert somewhere, would have sent the message quite clearly.
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+5 191. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video An Optical Poem (1938)

There's a strange sort of irony here. This piece of art was created before computers existed using laborious means, yet I would have never known of or seen it without computers and the internet. No doubt the same is true of the vast majority of those who see this here or on other video sites.

I also find it interesting that the authors refer to it as a scientific experiment. Science in general was accorded much greater respect by the culture of the time. Calling it that today would raise a few hackles and draw cries of "scientism".
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+5 192. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Which is the Killer, Current or Voltage?

It's the current actually passing through the body that kills. Obviously you need a high enough voltage to get the current moving, but you can easily have a very high voltage but too low a current to do any damage. Most examples of that involve electrostatic discharge of some kind.

For tens of thousands of volts, just walk on a carpet when the air is dry, then touch a doorknob. Or find an electric fence designed to keep animals in or out. Same tens of thousands of volts, but a hell of a lot more charge. In between would be touching the outside of your car after going for a drive in the winter.

For hundreds of thousands of volts, any school room Van de Graaff generator will do. If it's big enough, you can easily get more than a million volts discharging safely into your body (or someone else's, if you hold your hand on the top for a while then point at them from about 33cm away).

One example of very high voltage with very low current that's not ESD is a taser.

Overall, however, if you see a sign warning of high voltage, you can safely assume that there's plenty of energy behind it to produce a very high current as well.
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+5 193. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video The Milk Industry from a Doctor's point of view

This guy clearly doesn't understand evolution. Several human populations (in Africa and Europe) with domesticated cattle reproduced the same phenomenon - genes preserving the production of lactase into adulthood spread like wildfire, because those who were able to drink milk as adults had a gigantic reproductive advantage.

Those who didn't have the genes didn't do just fine at all - they got left behind. From the population in northern Europe, the genes spread over much of the rest of the continent (in general, the further from Sweden, the less likely you are to remain lactose tolerant).

Contrary to what this fact-challenged person claims, the people in these populations who couldn't drink milk as adults didn't do just fine at all - they were utterly out-competed, to the point where lactose tolerance in some areas approaches fixation (i.e. lactose intolerance almost completely died out).
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+5 194. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Chemistry Life Hacks

That banana still wasn't ripe. It will still be too starchy and bland until the peel is covered in brown spots.
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+5 195. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Other side of the Moon

I didn't know tinfoil hats were allowed to downvote videos.
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+5 196. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Keep an eye on your kids!

It's not strangers that we need to be worried about. The whole "stranger danger" concept is harmful to child safety.
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+5 197. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Old computers did it better!

#2 You have it entirely backwards. The 5.25" floppies were much more reliable than 3.5" floppies, when properly handled (i.e. no folding, frisbee games, etc.).
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+5 198. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Three sisters unbelievable dancing skills 1940s

#8 Technicolor film was invented in 1916. I don't know if this is a colorized clip or not, but the film was available and used in many movies by that time (such as The Wizard of Oz).
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+5 199. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Tesla's new charger prototype

Short version of #9:

Electric car infrastructure lags well behind combustion engine infrastructure. After 100+ years of the latter and a handful of years of the former, who'd a thunk it?

Oh, and a bit about electricity generation, which ignores the trend of moving away from fossil fuels (i.e. energy stores that can only be utilized by liberating carbon into the atmosphere) and towards carbon-neutral alternatives (solar, wind, nuclear, etc.).

I'm not a huge fan of electric cars in general. I think a carbon-neutral liquid fuel system would be preferable, such as running methanol fuel cells backwards to produce combustible methyl alcohol using as inputs carbon-neutral electricity and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, plus hydrogen cracked from water using more carbon-neutral electricity (or perhaps biological solutions involving engineered photosynthesis).
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+5 200. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Poignant Norwegian #DearDaddy campaign highlights rape culture

Low ratings would be because the idea that we live in a "rape culture" is nonsense.

Unless, of course, you're talking about the rape of men, which is dismissed and mocked.
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+5 201. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Lucky truck driver

If he were lucky he'd have been born with sufficient intelligence to not do that.
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+5 202. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video The Problem of Evil: Crash Course Philosophy

The existence of evil is only a problem if you're superstitious and believe in deities.

It's no mystery at all to rational people.

Furthermore, none of those theodicies are remotely valid or sound logically. Only through plugging one's ears and saying "La la la, I can't hear you!" can a theist reconcile evil and their sky daddy.
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+5 203. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Sprout World - The only pencil that you can plant after use

Looks like it's just a normal pencil with a gel cap (soluble in water) containing a seed, and perhaps some plant food.

The pencil is then just a piece of wood in the ground.

So this is an attempt to get rich on green trends, with a pretty worthless idea.
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+5 204. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Home made mouse traps

It's important to remember that every one of those traps is lethal if you don't check them at least once every other day. Mice don't last long without water.

And if you want to avoid cannibalistic horrors when cleaning out the trap, put something edible (such as a blob of peanut butter) in there as well.
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+5 205. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Animal Attack

One annoying thing about the new player is that it doesn't cache the whole video, and the CDN is far too slow to keep up with any video. With the old player, I could just open it in a tab and wait for it to download. Now, longer videos require several pauses as the slow server catches up.
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+5 206. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Crane Operator's competence test in Germany.

Amusing, but not an actual test, and not a crane.
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+5 207. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Warning against upsetting the girlfriend

So....

Women are crazy, but you can keep them calm by forcing them to snort peppermint.

That's an odd lesson.
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+5 208. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Genius Ideas

#1 And if you're coming from a room with no windows where you've spent several hours?
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+5 209. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Top 20 Country GDP (PPP) Ranking History (1980-2023)

Note that this comparison is not GDP, except for the US. It is GDP scaled by purchasing power or cost of living, in comparison to the US.

In the simplest terms, if it costs half as much to buy things in China as the US, then China's GDP is doubled for this ranking.

Actual GDP is about $20.6 trillion in the US, and $13.4 trillion in China, as of the end of 2018.

The PPP measure is very imprecise, because it's impossible to come up with an objective cost of living comparison, and all the estimates are flawed in one way or another.

I also wouldn't trust the projections too much. Cost of living goes up as an economy becomes more advanced.
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+5 210. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong - Vernon Franklin - Chappelle’s Show

It's funny because Chappelle is mocking the bad aspects of US black culture, rather than just taking the easy route for a black comic, which is to mock aspects of various white cultures.
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+4 211. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Remarkable space saving furniture.

Confused by English measurements, and wondering why we in the US don't use the metric system? It's because measurement systems different from what you grow up in are confusing. You've developed an intuitive sense for measurements in centimeters and degrees Celsius. We've developed an intuitive sense for inches and degrees Fahrenheit. Speeds in miles per hour are familiar to us. Speeds in kilometers per hour always sound faster than they are, just as (I expect) speeds in the former metric sound slower to you than they really are.

So it's just momentum that keeps us on English units, and I don't really know what it would take to change that. Passing a law mandating the metric system in some way would be exceedingly difficult.
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+4 212. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video super bici ...bicicletoide..

That front tire weighs several hundred pounds. Downhill, that contraption would become a deadly weapon.
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+4 213. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Tesla Roadster

#10 Refueling time is definitely an issue to be concerned with, which is why I generally favor doing something like using methanol to power conventional engines, with the methanol produced in a carbon-neutral fashion (such as running a fuel cell backwards with hydrogen and electricity provided by clean generation).

However, work is being done on battery charging speed. At least one researcher I've heard about has materials which allow charging fully in seconds. A full electric car battery might take a couple minutes.

But the fact is that a commuter could easily benefit from an electric car with this range, as the car won't need to be charged quickly, or even away from home. Granted, a Tesla Roadster is for a wealthy commuter. The company made a deliberate choice to start with a sports car, probably to attack the idea that an electric car has to be a tiny powerless roller skate. I think it does that rather effectively.
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+4 214. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video man takes off half his face

#7 No, that would be a surgically implanted replacement for the part of his skull that had to be removed due to the cancer. What I find most fascinating is that his prosthetic has such a dramatic functional purpose for him - without the false upper jaw, he can't really talk, but sounds normal with it in place. It makes me wonder if it's secure and functional enough to allow him to chew food, or if he's on a fluid diet.
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+4 215. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video start the future now

Several comments don't seem to understand the concept of efficiency. When something is said to be, say, 80% efficient, that means 80% of the energy going into it is used for some kind of work. What happens to the other 20%? It's given off as waste heat.

When the task itself is giving off heat, efficiency is not in the mix, save for one aspect - putting as much of the heat as possible where you want it, instead of into the outside world where it can't do work.

Once you insulate as much as is possible, all you're left with is the need for the fixed quantity of heat required to melt and vaporize a given mass. There's no more room for increased efficiency.

The simple fact is, this device is useless for reducing carbon dioxide. It's utility is solely in managing solid plastic waste. Much better to simply recycle the plastic into more plastic - less energy input, and the carbon remains fixed.
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+4 216. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Fast jet car

Ejecting a hot gas to generate thrust is the very definition of a rocket. Oxidation is not a required part of the process.
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+4 217. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video How CDs are made

Dual-layer pressed DVD's are made in much the same way, though there are two molded layers stuck together. The coating on the bottom-most layer is semi-transparent so that adjusting the laser focus allows signal from the top-most layer to be read.
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+4 218. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video How It's Made: Contact Lenses

#9 Daily disposables are a much thinner lens, and would not last months, no matter how well you cared for them.

Longer-lasting lenses (called "frequent replacement", as "disposables" technically applies to the dailies) are thicker and more durable, though I can't say how they actually compare to the non-disposable ones. I don't know how well frequent replacement lenses would hold up to protein removal. I do know that after three or four weeks, I can tell that my lenses need to be replaced, which would translate into an enzyme soak otherwise. I can't imagine using a single pair for months on end.

One notable difference between the disposable or frequent replacement lenses would be customization. As shown in this video, you can have a pair cut to your exact eye measurements. The others come in one or a few base curve sizes and 0.25 diopter increments. Those designed for astigmatism don't start until 0.75 diopters of cylinder, and the angles come in ten degree increments.
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+4 219. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Toccata and fugue played on "glass harp"

#12 The word "crystal" applied to glasses means "lead crystal", which in turn means that the calcium oxide is replaced by lead oxide. This makes the glass easier to cut and increases the index of refraction, allowing you to get more attractive tableware with sharper corners and higher amounts of reflection.

The acoustic properties are also significantly affected. You can't get this kind of sound from normal glass.
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+4 220. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video How many ...

Interviews like this say nothing whatsoever about average knowledge in a population. They don't show you the ones who get the answer correct, or save it until the end. And even the "first one to get it right" comment means nothing out of context. When was that guy interviewed, in relation to the others?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - you can go to any country on this planet and make the same kind of video. Any populace can look entirely composed of idiots with a small amount of editing.
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+4 221. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video The Roads Less Traveled

If you don't recognize that music, go rent "Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo" right now.
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+4 222. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Police hits traffic signal post

At least he didn't kill anyone. Not a year goes by without a bunch of police officers killing themselves or innocent bystanders with reckless driving.
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+4 223. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Tai Chi - Amazing Chi energy explained

Qi gong is complete nonsense. There is nothing to explain, and it's not impressive.
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+4 224. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Ice Fishing in Russia

Your transcription/translation is missing "yob tvoyu mat", one of the few Russian phrases I know. It means, more politely, "copulate with your mother".
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+4 225. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Wireless data from every light bulb

Putting line-of-sight back into telecomm. Just what we all need.
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+4 226. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Green is a really pretty color

I think #19 has hit on the important point. Location shooting would take too much time and money for a television show, so these kinds of shots are necessary. Unless you want to return to the old days, where the show took place entirely indoors or on one little piece of land.
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+4 227. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Head-on collision and a massive engine explosion.

#9 Lithium ion batteries do not contain toxic materials. Such materials can be formed if they burn up, but that's true of any car.
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+4 228. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Turn your 4x4 into a tracked vehicle quickly

OK, now how do you get them off?
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+4 229. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Meanwhile, in Utah

#6 Frozen rain is the correct term. It's not standing water that freezes. It's super-cooled liquid rain drops that freeze upon hitting the below-freezing ground. The phenomenon creates a coating of clear ice on trees, cars, and anything else it hits. It's especially common on the US east coast. Just had some here yesterday, in fact.
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+4 230. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video How To Make Filthy Water Drinkable

It's for sterilizing fresh water. It's not magic, and won't desalinate or detoxify.

As for the guy's motivations, how many people think, "How can I get rich?", and conclude that the answer is coming up with a way for poor people to drink safe water? It's still possible that he's got a patent, and wants to be the supplier so he gets a paycheck for his trouble, but I'm not sure that should disqualify the good he's accomplishing. If the money is coming from (comparatively) wealthy donors, and not the poor people with no clean water, I have no problem with him getting a bit rich. That is, after all, why we tolerate wealth at all - encourage the development of new ideas which benefit us all in the long run.
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+4 231. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video PhysX - Real-Time Fluid Physics Demo

The behavior on a flat surface (such as when the container is broken) is less than impressive, no doubt due to the fact that such huge particles are standing in for actual fluid.
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+4 232. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Black bears are just cute and cuddly

When I first saw this video (a while ago), I was amazed that the bear didn't run away immediately. Here's what happens at my house when I try to get close to a bear:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgv8-tgALuo
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+4 233. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Rock Fall

I don't understand how the guy in the white car didn't stop dead and stare aghast at the giant boulder that almost turned him into a liquid.
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+4 234. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Extracting Honey

The absolute best honey is made from Tupelo nectar. Second would be that from blueberry nectar, though it will crystallize, unlike Tupelo.

And the guy's comment about honey lasting for years is a huge understatement. Honey interred with Egyptian mummies is still edible thousands of years later.
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+4 235. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Evolution got it right on running...

Archaeologists study human cultural artifacts. Paleoanthropologists would be the ones wondering when bipedality evolved. And they conclude it happened much earlier than Homo erectus, despite what the name implies. Australopithecines, in particular, which lived in excess of 3 million years ago, had hips indicating bipedal locomotion.

The upshot is, our ancestors were bipedal long before we'd call them human (i.e. assign them to the genus Homo).
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+4 236. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Tractor Fails Compilation 2014

The guy at 5:12 gets credit for not gunning it and flipping the tractor on top of himself.

Overall, this is a good advertisement for roll bars and kill switches under the seat.
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+4 237. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Man wakes from coma speaking Mandarin

#2 Never happened. No one has ever woken from a coma speaking a language he or she had never been exposed to before. It's conceivable that such a person might have completely forgotten the exposure (we're talking about serious brain damage here), but it's hardly unlikely that prevarication to generate interest is the explanation.
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+4 238. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video In Honor Of The Internet Turning 45 Today, Here Is Its First Router

They should network the surviving units together in their respective locations and get them operating again. Let people visiting them send messages to each other over the links.
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+4 239. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video German Shepherd throws a fit when she has to quit swimming

Reminds me of my nieces at the beach.

More importantly, why are the videos autoplaying now?
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+4 240. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Stunning sight of ice stacking like shards of glass

In case it's not obvious, this is timelapse. The actual motion is considerably slower.
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+4 241. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Everything This Man Says Is True

He had about a half dozen errors in there.
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+4 242. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Gamma-Ray Bursts Explained

A bit melodramatic at the end. GRB's don't come from nowhere. We know the locations of possible GRB creators in our galaxy, and none of them are close enough to cause problems if they were to go off and be pointed at us at the time.
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+4 243. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Why kind of a Philistine would vote this down?
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+4 244. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Winter Accidents

#1 That fake virus warning is essentially a scam ad. Ad Block is your friend.
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+4 245. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Fastest Turtle In The World!

That is not a snapping turtle. That is some variety of softshell turtle, the bite of which is nothing to laugh at, but also nothing remotely like that of a snapping turtle.
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+4 246. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Popping a Balloon in an Anechoic Chamber

Now I want to hear a gunshot in the same two rooms. That might just be a walk-in silencer.
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+4 247. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video World's Biggest Chainsaw vs Ancient Salvaged Redwood

Probably would have gone a lot faster if they used one of those crazy V8 chainsaws with a longer bar.
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+4 248. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Massive Hornet Nest Removal

#1 Doesn't look like anyone but the owners live nearby.
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+4 249. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video An astonishing old calculator - Numberphile

I've heard of a lot of weird ways of storing bits, but that's by far the strangest.

It's like embedding a mechanical telephone in the box, and having it talk to itself with it.

There seems to be roughly 10m of wire there. To space 400 bits out along that wire would leave 2.5cm between bits, which at the speed of sound in steel (~5800m/s, depending on the type) yields around 4 microseconds between bits. That's really incredible.
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+4 250. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Plane crash in Russia

The plane wasn't flying too low. It was flying too slow.
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+4 251. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Slinky Treadmill Stayin' Alive

I had no idea a slinky could have so much swagger.
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+4 252. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video SR71 Black bird pilot tells a very cool story.

#1 A knot is a nautical mile per hour. A nautical mile is ~6076 feet, compared to the 5280 feet of a statute mile. That's about 15% longer, so to convert knots to mph, multiple by 1.15.

For this video, that makes the 620 knots of the Navy jet about 713mph, and the 1992 knots of the Blackbird about 2292mph.
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+3 253. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Cool solution to clean up oil disaster

While 62,500 tons of hay might seem like a lot, Louisiana by itself produced 1.1 million tons of hay in 2009.

That's less than one percent of the national total (146 million tons in 2008).

So, supplying that much hay is not a problem. Collecting it would be more difficult, but I expect it's a whole lot easier to search for and collect oily hay on the surface than oil itself. As stated in the video, collecting it from beaches is a lot easier than collecting the oil itself.

The only concern I have about this method is that the floating hay may attract marine animals, which would otherwise have stayed away from the oil.
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+3 254. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Uphill Maniacs

Amazing that so many keep trying, after seeing what happens to those who go before them.
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+3 255. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Lightning strikes 3 of the tallest buildings in Chicago at the same time!

Lightning delivers a lot of energy over a very short period of time. You could power a 100W bulb for several hours from a single bolt of lightning, but the cost of the apparatus necessary to capture and store the high-voltage discharge for conversion to low-voltage continuous power would dwarf a simple photovoltaic array that would power the bulb indefinitely.
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+3 256. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video How Long Does It Take To Revolve Around The Sun?

Again, you could take cameras to any nation on this planet and find similar results - substantial numbers of people just do not know basic facts about the orb they live on.
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+3 257. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video "ZBV" - Z Backscatter Van

That would be illegal in the US. Not that such a trivial concern would stop some from using it.

Like the first commenter, I'm not fond of the radiation exposure implications.
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+3 258. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Transforming a House Into Firewood

#2 Explosions of that size don't have flames, except their fake Hollywood versions that are really just rapidly lit fires, and not explosions at all. It's simply a solid converting rapidly to a gas, pushing a lot of stuff out of the way in the process.
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+3 259. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Bodybuilders fails

#4 is dead on. This should be called Spotting Fails, especially the one around 1:35, who displays an astonishing degree of stupidity. A bench press spotter should have hands under the bar at all times, and should never do something so stupid as suddenly releasing support as shown in the video. It's ironic that this guy is the only one trying to lift a non-insane amount of weight (looks like about 290 pounds, which I can just manage).

Well, the last guy looks to be doing a bit less, but something strange is going on with him, to simply fall straight backwards like that.
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+3 260. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Drift Wars

175hp is ridiculously powerful for a motorcycle.
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+3 261. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Immigration, world poverty and gumballs.

Talk about beating a strawman. No one claims that immigration is a method of fighting poverty around the globe.

His use of certain code words (such as "elite";) shows that this is just faux-intellectual immigrant-bashing, nothing more.
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+3 262. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video CamelTale

#7 & #9

Bactrian camels (from Asia) have two humps. Dromedaries, the ones domesticated throughout northern Africa and the Middle East (and feral in Australia, a shown in this video), have just the one.
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+3 263. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Ski jumping POV

#6 He is in the air from about 1:06 to 1:12. I had to watch it twice to figure that out, though.
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+3 264. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video The lungfish is no ordinary fish

They have it backwards. It's lung, though not as efficient as that of any given tetrapod, is functioning as originally evolved. Swim bladders are exaptions of lungs.
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+3 265. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Art With Salt

#7 This isn't done from memory. There's a photo reference nearby that's being copied. Not that that makes it particularly easy.
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+3 266. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video The Pale Blue Dot

#7 The habitability of Earth is not nearly as fragile as you suggest. Ozone blocks ultraviolet radiation. It does not have any large effect on temperature, and it fluctuates in thickness constantly. It didn't exist at all until well after life evolved, since free oxygen (from which ozone is constantly created) did not exist before it was created by life. Our distance to the sun varies throughout the orbit as well. Changing axial tilt would make seasons more or less severe at certain latitudes, but not affect overall habitability.

Furthermore, a megaparsec is not a million light years. It's a million parsecs. A parsec is the distance at which 1 AU (the distance from Earth to Sol) would subtend an angle of one arcsecond. When you do the math, you get 3.262 light years.

All these facts are accessible to anyone who pays attention in high school science classes.
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+3 267. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Fishtail fail

#3 You're probably thinking of simple harmonic motion.
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+3 268. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Things are not always what they seem

The green dot is a phantom, not an actual dot in the video. It appears where the pink dot disappears, leaving just the grey background. This is easy to verify by pausing the video and watching as the green "dot" quickly fades away, leaving the empty grey background. It has something to do with the green being the pink's complement, though whether the illusion is more in the retina or the brain, I don't know.

Why do they disappear after a while? I don't know, but it's pretty damn cool.
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+3 269. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Monkey feeding baby tiger

Humans are a type of ape, apes are a type of monkey, monkeys are a type of primate, primates are a type of mammal, etc.

Calling a chimp a monkey is just less vague than calling a chimp a primate.
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+3 270. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Ant colony raids a rival nest

#4 Group selection is not part of evolution. Ant colonies are cases of kin selection, which is simply gene selection (the only selection that counts) operating across multiple closely-related organisms.
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+3 271. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Dara O'Briain - Honey, We're Killing The Kids

#1 My hair started noticeably thinning at 19, so I know where you're coming from. The benefit is that going bald isn't one of those things that makes you feel like you're getting older.

That happens when you start getting grey hair, which hit me a year or two ago (now 36). Play the hand you're dealt is all I can say.
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+3 272. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Earth temperature anomalies from 1800 to 2009

#8 CFC's are extremely stable molecules that don't react with anything until they reach the stratosphere, where UV radiation from the sun breaks them apart, allowing the chlorine to react with (and destroy) ozone. Ozone absorbs UV radiation. More CFC's means more UV at the surface, which means more skin cancer for humans, among other planetary ills.

CFC's have nothing to do with global warming.

#15 Argument from personal incredulity and personal ignorance, all wrapped up in one. Very impressive. You don't understand how temperature is measured historically, so therefore no one has that information. And your utter ignorance of the science involved doesn't deter you in the slightest from pontificating. You might benefit from looking up the Dunning-Kruger effect.
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+3 273. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Dallas wildest police chase

The commentary is scarily close to the game show narration in "The Running Man".

Note how all the actual danger started when the cops began shooting.
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+3 274. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Déjà vu - Explained

#4 And when you switch to contacts, you find yourself often trying to adjust the glasses that aren't there. Wonder where that fits in.

On a side note, who else recognized Gary Sinise before his face was uncovered?
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+3 275. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Parking free

Looks a lot to me like taking a ticket to enter a parking lot, not paying to leave. Still, reaching for the ticket while moving isn't the wisest choice.
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+3 276. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video This is one happy fox

#4 Every domesticated animal species on the planet came from a wild ancestor. Obviously. Can you think of any cogent reason why we should prevent new domestication, on any scale, for any animal which isn't endangered in the wild?
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+3 277. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video The fastest robot of the world

Anyone not impressed simply has no conception of how difficult it is to move that mass that quickly with that precision. What exactly it's doing for the demonstration is beside the point.
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+3 278. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video RoboBee

I was all ready to be amazed at how they powered something so small, but then I saw the wire. Oh well.
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+3 279. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Rare colour video of London in 1927

#13 Good catch. Maybe it was a motorized camera, whereas most cameras of the time were hand-operated. With the latter, the speed is variable (go ahead and try to turn a crank at a consistent speed). Between the jarring effect of things slowing down below normal speed, and the need to meet a minimum number of frames per second, those old hand-cranked films are usually sped up. This one shows none of that. That, plus the color, gives one a real sense of what it looked like to actually be there.
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+3 280. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Speed Kills

I wouldn't say undisputed. The pronghorn is pretty much just as fast, and can sustain top speed for longer. The mystery is why, since there are no predators in North America even close to it in speed.
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+3 281. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video So this is what we eat at all the major US pizza places...

#23 Every substance in the universe composed of atoms is a chemical. Those involving multiple types of atoms joined by a bond are chemical compounds.

The word "chemical" is not a synonym for "bad stuff". And the word "natural" is not a synonym for "good stuff".
The worst toxins we know of are all natural. Everything that's good for us is a chemical, regardless of how it was made.

To address your actual statement, the mineral salt *IS* the chemical compound called sodium chloride. It's an identity.

As for the bread, try looking at the whole bread aisle in the store, and at the myriad bakeries that produce more varieties fresh every day. Not everyone buys the bleached white stuff.
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+3 282. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Unbelievable Realistic Liquid Render

#5 That's common with most water simulations. Since they use large particles to calculate the motion, then fill in the gaps to render as a solid body, it looks more like a very viscous syrup when moving over a surface. That despite appearing to have the same viscosity as water in other respects (including the speed), so it creates a visual clash.

Couple that with a complete disregard for wetting (the way water sticks in a thin film after the bulk of it has receded), and the overall result is less than convincing.
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+3 283. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Giant scary Robber Crab

Just do a Google Images search for "coconut crab", and you'll get some results showing various scale objects. Note that the one with the crab on the garbage can is a bit misleading, since the can isn't as large as one would normally think.
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+3 284. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Euclideon Geoverse

For confusion about prefixes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
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+3 285. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video 4-Way Stop Vs. Roundabout

We have traffic circles in the US (circles for short), but they're usually larger, and often involve more than four entry/exit points. They're also hated with a passion by all drivers. It takes forever to enter the circle (it's like trying to turn onto a highway), and the accident rate is extraordinarily high.

Most normal four-way intersections with this volume of traffic would have traffic lights.
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+3 286. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Why Does My Body Do That

Good grief, "hypnotic" jerk? It's hypnagogic.
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+3 287. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video The Most Insane Amusement Park Ever

I remember those commercials from the 80's. I had a few friends in school who went there, but I never heard any particular horror stories from them. Nor did I (regretfully) ever manage to get there myself. I went skiing at Mountain Creek a number of years ago, though, but didn't know it was built on that location.

I only live about 45 minutes away, so I guess I should keep an eye out for any Action Park-like changes.
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+3 288. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Cool visualisation of a Dial Up Modem Handshake

I also remember the different connection sounds for slower modems (2400bps through 33.6Kbps). The first time I heard a 56K modem connecting, I thought it was broken when I heard it that harsh bit starting at about 00:14.

Kind of makes me miss the BBS days.
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+3 289. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video How the original HBO intro was made

I must have seen that sequence a couple hundred times in the 80's while growing up (it looked much better than it does in this low-res and somewhat choppy video).

What astonishes me most is that the floating HBO logo was an actual chunk of metal.
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+3 290. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video 50 Cal ricochet knocks off earmuffs

#4 And someone needs a BMW for what, precisely? Anyone who brings up the word "need" in any discussion about guns is missing the point entirely, and is not qualified to take part in a rational debate on the topic.
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+3 291. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Australian Food

#11 Pizza was invented in the US. And tomatoes, of course, are indigenous to South America.
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+3 292. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Air Race Helmet Cam

Those are some pretty tight Immelmann turns.
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+3 293. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Homemade aluminum ingot

#7 Smelting is a chemical reaction that extracts metallic elements from compounds that contain them. The metal aluminum featured here is smelted from aluminum oxide (aka alumina, where the element gets its name - originally alumium, then aluminum, with some misguided folks later deciding to make it sound more like other element names as aluminium). Alumina itself has to be refined from rocks containing an amalgamation of minerals. The most common one these days is bauxite, which is typically less than half alumina.

The only chemical reaction in this video would the oxidation and whatnot of paint on the cans. The metal itself is already elemental, and undergoes nothing but a pair of phase changes - solid to liquid to solid.

As I said, melting, not smelting.
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+3 294. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Mantis fly swatter

#4 They eat whatever they can catch, including hummingbirds and snakes. So I think wasps are definitely on the menu.
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+3 295. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Fastest street legal car in the world

#3, #6 1:24
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+3 296. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video 5 Most Haunting Space Disasters

The Apollo 1 disaster had nothing to do with nylon. The problem was the very high concentration of oxygen in the capsule, which is what was brought up and not properly addressed.

That's such a basic factual error that I have to doubt much of the rest of the video - pretty much anything I don't already know to be true.
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+3 297. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video A Magician Never Shows You How A Trick Is Done, Unless They're Penn & Teller

Teller is only mute during the performance.

Even during the show, he'll talk to an audience volunteer, such as when he does the water/coin trick (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69ozgnv6idI). As chance would have it, when I took my parents to see them in Las Vegas in 2011, Teller picked out my mother from the audience to be the one holding the bowl (it was done with pennies, and she got to keep the bowl and pennies). He told her little things, like "take a bow" after the trick was done.

And as already demonstrated, he speaks quite well outside of a performance.

But having Penn do all the talking is a real stroke of genius, because Teller can convey without speech what some people can't do in an entire oration.
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+3 298. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video My Life After 40 Years in Prison

40 years for attempted murder is awfully steep.
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+3 299. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Lucky truck driver

#9 It's a two-way road. The barrier has to come down on both sides simultaneously. Furthermore, if you look at the timer, you see that it took 15 seconds for the train to hit after the barriers came down. That is, of course, still far too little time. The barriers should come down about a minute before the train arrives.

The fact that the train is described as coming around a bend makes it worse - the truck driver probably looked for a train and didn't see one before deciding to proceed. He just failed to react fast enough after being no doubt startled by the barriers coming down.
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+3 300. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video 400km/h in 26 seconds

#2 Make sure you're using a browser that supports HTML 5 video. All current versions of modern browsers should support it.
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+3 301. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Slow Motion - How an Impact Wrench Works

#1 You might also want to imagine how poor that sod would be if he didn't have that job at all.
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+3 302. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video How to stop on a longboard

Your new CDN can't even keep up on this video. It's paused four times already.
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+3 303. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video The most luxurious motor homes and buses in the world

Probably take two hours to actually watch this, given how slow the CDN is.
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+3 304. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video The most honest Arab Muslim on Planet Earth

#1 No, but it seems to match, if you look for common words, length of statements, proper names, and so on. It'd have to be a really creative fake to match so well.
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+3 305. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Why Black Holes Could Delete The Universe – The Information Paradox

Being pulled apart by massive tidal forces seems, to me, quite a bit more "bad" than "nothing bad".
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+3 306. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Manufacturing plywood boards: then and now

Yeah, my primary thought during much of the classic footage was, "Why the hell are they not wearing gloves??"
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+3 307. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Man uses homemade mower for his hard to cut lawn.

My tractor would be able to cut that no problem. I guess a riding mower wasn't in his budget.
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+3 308. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video You Will Never Throw Away Plastic Bottles After Watching This

This woman needs some basic grammar lessons, letting "until useful garden hacks" and "have to install fancy irrigation system" actually get into the text of the video and the voice over.
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+3 310. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Angry Turkey Attacks TV Reporter

That is a wood grouse, not a turkey. Turkeys are indigenous to North America, where this video clearly wasn't shot.
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+3 311. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Golf trick sorcery

It's either a bunch of hours spent in a video editor, or a bunch of hours spent positioning bricks and hitting a ball until it worked.

Take your pick.
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+3 312. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Samurai Wasps Say 'Smell Ya Later, Stink Bugs' | Deep Look

I have those damn stinkbugs invading my house in droves every fall. I want those wasps.
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+3 313. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video F/A-18F Carrier Break

Can't resist. It's "brake", not "break".
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+3 314. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video How To EASILY Solder Wires Without A Soldering Iron!

Who on earth is going to have the solder (correctly pronounced SODDER), flux, and heat shrink tubing but not a soldering iron?
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+3 315. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video How to put air in your tires with a lawn mower!

I thought he was going to externally crank the engine and just use the piston to produce compression. Much cooler the way he did it.

Though completely impractical.
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+3 316. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video How wine corks are made

#2 Pretty sure you're right about that. The actual synthetic corks are plastic and some kind of foam. There are composite corks which are obviously ground up cork bark held together with something. They're far superior to the actual synthetic ones, which are no longer liquid-tight after being pierced with a cork screw. Don't think they're any better than a whole piece of cork, though.
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+3 317. Thanny commented 3 years ago on video Driver barrels through traffic arm to cross Daytona Beach drawbridge as it’s going up

Too bad he wasn't being chased by cops, as that'd be a pretty good way to lose them.
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+3 318. Thanny commented 2 years ago on video Happy Goose love woman and hugs her - Cute reaction

If only that were the norm. All the domestic geese I encountered in rural Missouri as a child (~5 years old) were very mean.
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+3 319. Thanny commented 2 years ago on video Spiders on drugs

Pretty sure this one was posted here a long, long time ago.
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+2 320. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video A homebrew trick called Lampuh!

Just go to the YouTube link in comment #10. It's explained pretty clearly exactly how the trick works in that video's description. It does not involve any confederates.
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+2 321. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Horse race announcer loses his voice.

I felt compelled to clear my own throat listening to that.
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+2 322. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Reporter Enjoys Close Call

#7 A crane was attached to it and pulling it back up - you can see the cables dangling clearly after it's upright, and you can just see them attached while it's flipping.
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+2 323. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Cats & Dogs that speak

Those first two cats were about to make hairball deposits, and the clicking one was watching a flying insect of some kind. Can't say any of the cats I've owned ever did what the one at 3:22 was doing.
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+2 324. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Robot Ant

Am I the only one who was surprised how how big it was when the soda can came into view for scale comparison?
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+2 325. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Rocket jump in real life

Rocket jumps originated with Quake, which was the first FPS with full 3D aiming ability.
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+2 326. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video First NES commercial

The robot has camera eyes, like the gun, that get instructions from flashing on the screen.

The gyro holders are on the right, a button-pressing rig is in the center, and the spin-up motor is on the left. You instruct the robot to move the gyros to the motor, then to one of two indented buttons, connected by a lever to a bracket holding a normal NES controller.

The only game I had that was designed for the robot was the one that came with it - Gyromite. Holding buttons down kept certain gates or walls open, and the challenge was to keep the gyros spun up and on the right buttons. It was easier to just use the controller manually, once the novelty of the robot wore off.

I still have mine in the basement somewhere.
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+2 327. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Asbestos Hands

Wood gives off heat very slowly. Without any calluses at all, you can pick up a hot coal and chuck it back into the fire within half a second, and just start to feel that it was hot - no damage at all. If you have a bunch of calluses, which seems likely for this guy, then it's not a big stretch to hold one long enough to light a cigarette.
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+2 328. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Transforming a House Into Firewood

#18 First, that gas pipe explosion was huge. Second, the fire was caused by (wait for it) the gas. I saw it glowing in the night sky from my front porch, a bit less than 6 miles away, at the time it happened.
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+2 329. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video AT&T predicts modern gagdets

#5 Uh, no. None of those commercials seemed at all outlandish at the time. Most of those technologies already existed, after all, but were priced out of reach of the general public.

I realize that 18 years ago seems like an eternity to young folk, but that was yesterday for those of us who were adults at the time (just barely, in my case).
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+2 330. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Wrong Number

Carol Burnett is not "fugly".
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+2 331. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video How UPS Deliveries Actually Work

Or, do what I did when I moved here ten years ago, and sign the form that lets them leave packages without a signature. Works best if you live in the sticks, where no one will happen by to steal them.
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+2 332. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Skull Face Tattoo

Do they really get idiots on this show to base important life decisions on the results of a fraudulent "lie detector"? Is this the polygraph scam device they're talking about?
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+2 333. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video The last free people on this planet

Early 20th century anthropologists were deceptive in their reports, and also deceived by the natives they studied. These people do not live idyllic lives, free from the worries of modern civilization. Hobbes had it mostly right when he wrote, of pre-civilized human life, that it was "nasty, brutish, and short".

Beyond that, there's also an island south of India populated by hostile natives with no exposure to modern civilization, beyond the boats off shore that they throw spears and whatnot at.

Advocating the continued isolation of these people's is a deeply selfish act, on the whole, though it's arguable that becoming another poor underclass in a developing nation would not be much of an improvement at this time.
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+2 334. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video How To Peel A Pineapple

Rather faster than I do it (I use the end of a vegetable peeler to dig out the seed areas), with a bit more waste. When I just want speed, I use a spiral cut gizmo that does the whole thing, core and all, in about ten seconds.
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+2 335. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Self propelled robot walks only by using its own weight

Hope where you want to go is downhill. Always. Otherwise, this thing is entirely useless. Scratch that. It's useless, period, since you can roll downhill in your choice of wheeled vehicle.

I really don't get it.
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+2 336. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video SUPERHERO

And here I was thinking of Psychonauts.

Have to admit, the exit cracked me up.
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+2 337. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Connecting on the Internet

#4 When you see a "hacker" in a movie or TV show decrypting information, you're seeing fiction, not reality.

Unless it's incredibly weak encryption that can be brute-forced in short order, the only way a "hacker" might get access is to guess the passphrase that generated the key, which itself can be done via social engineering or brute force only for weak passwords.

Solid encryption with a strong password is unbreakable.
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+2 338. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Grizzly charges

#13 Interfering? Looks like a group of people out in the wilds, minding their own business, when a bear decides to start interfering with them.

Fortunately, it seems they knew that a bear charge is almost always a bluff.
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+2 339. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Texting and driving test

I'm too old to be a part of the mobile phone texting fad, so I can objectively say there's a bit of hysteria about it.

There have always been things in the car to dangerously distract the driver, such as reading maps, applying makeup, fetching something on the floor, etc. Texting is no more or less dangerous than any other engrossing activity. For some people, that includes a voice call (with or without headset). For others, a voice call is no more distracting than a conversation with another person in the car (again, with or without headset).

Doing anything while stopped at a light risks missing the light change, but that's it. You will not miss an emergency vehicle with a siren - that's a ridiculous claim.

I fully expect there are some people who are able to switch back and forth between phone and road rapidly enough to actually text safely, but I also expect their numbers to be so few as to suggest nothing against laws forbidding texting while actually in motion.
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+2 340. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Path of Hate

If nothing else, this is an excellent demonstration how not to compress a video. Each frame is progressively more degraded by artifacts until the image is thoroughly trashed by the time the next key frame comes along and restarts the process. Horribly distracting throughout.
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+2 341. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video You think you are brave?

#12 You cannot outrun an alligator or crocodile.
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+2 342. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video The moon illusion

His explanation is completely incorrect. The large moon illusion works out on the ocean, where there are no smaller objects to compare with, as well as anywhere on land where the horizon is flat and empty.

The real cause has to do with how we perceive the dome of the sky. If you poll a group of people and ask them to point to the part of the sky that's halfway up, their arms will not have an angle of 45 degrees, but something much smaller. What it indicates is that the model of the sky in our heads is that of a flattened dome, not half a sphere. Halfway up in height is not halfway to the zenith.

That makes the moon a circle on the flattened dome of the sky. When it's at the horizon, the model says it's further away. When higher up, the model says it's closer. But it subtends the same angle in both cases (we're talking about one night here, so changes in orbital distance are irrelevant), so it's subject to the Ponzo Illusion. That illusion is simply that given two objects of the same size on our retina, the one we perceive as being further away will seem larger.
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+2 343. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Mind blowing new creative animation style

Way too distracting to actually follow what's supposed to be the story.
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+2 344. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Bill Gates jumps over a desk chair like a boss

MS-DOS was just a renamed 86-QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), which MS licensed (and later purchased) to fulfill their contract with IBM for a 16-bit personal computer OS. It was a rough clone of CP/M (Control Program for Micros). Far from being the most important software, it was basically the minimum required to put 16-bit personal computers on the market.

Without Microsoft, the early years would likely be dominated by a 16-bit version of CP/M instead, and some other Xerox-inspired GUI for PC's instead of Windows. For a while in the mid-90's, I hoped OS/2 would remain a viable alternative, but the anti-competitive bundling practices of Microsoft ultimately consigned it to obscurity.

With MacOS always being tied to expensive Apple-only hardware (aside from a couple years in the mid-90's when they licensed clones), it was never going to dominate a market that wanted more open hardware.

The short answer to #4's question is that without Microsoft, we'd probably be better off. Windows has improved a lot over the years, but it's still lacking in a lot of fundamental areas.
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+2 345. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Wait for it...

Ah, so that's what liquid wood looks like.
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+2 346. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Fire with Fire

#4/#10

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1983Sci...220..868B
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984Sci...224..497P
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984Sci...224..500G
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984Sci...224..503S
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984Sci...224..506S

Those are the early ones from 1983 and 1984. I'll let you do the absolutely minimal research necessary to find the copious peer-review scientific papers since that have confirmed isolation of HIV, which has been established beyond any doubt as the cause of AIDS.

#2

Every assertion you have made is patently false. Cancer occurs in virtually every multi-cellular species of life the planet, and only one of them buys food at grocery stores. In any case, if you want home-grown food to be the only source of nourishment, you had better begin by making a list of the several billion people who must immediately begin starving to death.
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+2 347. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video All you can eat ribs courtesy of Golden Corral

#9 Obviously the manager (the person who was actually fired) intended to use the food, but that never happened. It was all thrown away.
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+2 348. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video 10 Awesome Vinegar Tricks

For the fruit flies (which are actually more properly known as vinegar flies), skip the plastic wrap, and put a couple drops of dish soap in to break the surface tension. They'll fly right into the vinegar and sink to the bottom.
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+2 349. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Two deer fight and get stuck together...

#3 Patently false. There have been fatal attacks, but they're quite rare.
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+2 350. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Firearm myths about knock-down power

The video is pretty much spot on. Only in the movies are people knocked down by bullets.

A simple physics calculation can demonstrate it as well, using mass and velocity of bullet. But an even simpler physical principle obviates the need - every force action has an equal and opposite reaction. All of the force that a bullet might impart on impact (and then some) was delivered to the person who fired it. If you aren't knocked over when shooting a gun, you won't be knocked over by getting shot with that gun.
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+2 351. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video The Irish don't fuck around with their adverts...

If a car going 1mph/kph over the speed limit were struck by a drunk who swerved into the wrong lane, they'd attribute the accident to speeding.
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+2 352. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Dizzy Turkey

#5 It's not a coincidence, either. I get lots of wild turkeys here, and it's really easy to get them to gobble.
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+2 353. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Is Earth Actually Flat?

Wow, he butchered that name. It's erra-TOST-thenn-eez.
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+2 354. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video How many water-filled balloons does it take to stop a bullet ?

I guessed 4-5 based on the MythBusters show and my estimate of where the .44 fit between the guns they tested.
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+2 355. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Honey bee vs badass spider

Saying they move their retinas is a bit of an understatement. Here's a good view of a jumping spider moving its eyes inside its head:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvN_ex95IcE
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+2 356. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video This Crazy Virtual Reality Controller Can Fling You Across the Room

#5 Actually, just the opposite. Most people get motion sickness when there's a disconnect between what their inner ear tells them about their motion and what their eyes tell them. Such as being below deck on a boat where you can feel the motion but your surroundings appear steady. Or looking down during a car ride (e.g. kids playing on a tablet rather than looking out the windows) so the motion you feel isn't backed up by what you're seeing.

This device ties apparent motion in VR to actual motion, so someone using that with a VR headset is much less likely to get sick than someone using VR alone.
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+2 357. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Why Asimov's Laws of Robotics Don't Work

This guy's objections are bush league nonsense. None of the "edge cases" he brings up are remotely difficult to account for once you've reached the point where a machine has sufficient power to recognize a bog standard human.

He also, amusingly, seems entirely ignorant of the fact that Asimov actually used different definitions of what counts as human as a plot point (on Solaria).
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+2 358. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video A must-see

OK, so now I'm officially jealous of an orangutan.
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+2 359. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Neil deGrasse Tyson on science and kids

The IAU has no real authority to classify objects. [Their] job is to name objects. So if you want to ignore their nonsensical rules (and they are absolutely stupid - it would take more than a video comment to explain why), then feel free to do so. Pluto is a planet. So is Ceres, Sedna, probably Quaoar, and quite a few more objects in the outer solar system.

Does Pluto fit a classification that other planets don't? Yes, absolutely. Is there any coherent definition of a planet which includes Jupiter but excludes Pluto? No, absolutely not. Again, that would take more than a simple video comment to explain.
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+2 360. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Fun with burning methane on a lake First experiment

#3 Methane has a much more potent greenhouse effect, but it has a tiny fraction of the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's removed by natural processes very quickly, so it's not as bad for global warming.
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+2 361. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Fastest Things in The World !!!

The largely obnoxious music kind of ruined this. And the clip at around 1:20 of the dude running on water is completely fake. He was running on something just below the surface.
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+2 362. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Proof That The Human Race Is DOOMED!!

Ironically, the fire warning is not that crazy. It's not uncommon for people to hang clothes in front of a fireplace to dry them out quickly, when in an area far from any kind of laundry equipment. This warning says not to do that with the underwear. Or at least watch how close you get.
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+2 363. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video How tennis balls are made

That's a lot more manual labor than I was expecting.
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+2 364. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Catching the mouse

That's a rat, not a mouse.
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+2 365. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video An Improbable Weapon

#6 Completely wrong. Violence has decreased. The world right now is far safer than it ever was in the past.
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+2 366. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Top Fuel Acceleration

You really need to experience these things first hand. The noise is absolutely incredible, so bring ear plugs.
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+2 367. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Feisty Snake Slithers into Internet Cafe

Apparently it was a non-venomous rat snake. I had to look it up to figure out whether this was comedy or a potential snuff film.
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+2 368. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Operation: Dry Tank

Isn't this kind of thing common knowledge? My car says 0 miles left right about the time the low fuel light comes on, and that comes on when there's about 3.5 gallons of gas left. Based on my typical mileage, that means I can go for another 75 miles (~120km) or more.

It's always been the case that low fuel warning lights (and now range estimates) are set to push people towards filling up earlier rather than later. And that's such common knowledge that no one does it. Everyone getting a new car figures out how far they can really go when the low fuel indicator comes on, and bases where they stop on that. And before low fuel lights were a thing, the same scenario played out based on when the needle reached the line on the gauge marked 'E'.
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+2 369. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video A Scientist Spilled 2 Drops Organic Mercury On Her Hand

A drop is about 0.05mL, so three drops is 0.15mLm, which at 3g/mL in a 95% solution is ~430mg dimethylmercury. And that's assuming 100% absorption into the skin through the glove.

The idea that what happened to her was the result of a couple drops on the back of her gloved hand is pure nonsense. She got dosed with a much higher quantity.

#6 Elemental mercury isn't that dangerous. You can swallow a spoonful and come to no harm, because it doesn't react with much of anything on the way through your body. If you spend hours breathing in the vapor over a big vat of the stuff, you'll develop problems, but there's no danger like there is with methylmercury and dimethylmercury.

And ethylmercury is mostly harmless as well, being removed quite quickly from the body. That's why it's perfectly safe to use in the vaccine preservative Thimerosal.
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+2 370. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video The Pemmy Floor Project

There are a few variety of pennies worth thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.

A couple of them require weighing the penny to determine what it's made of. If it's from a particular year and has a particular weight, it's worth a small mint.

Now imagine learning this and then seeing copies of that year staring up from under all that lacquer, and having to resist the urge to dig them up and check.

1983, incidentally. If you weigh a 1983 penny and it weights 3.1 grams instead of 2.5 grams (copper alloy instead of copper-plated zinc), it's worth a whole lot more than 1 cent.

A 1944 penny made of steel is worth even more (supposed to be copper), but that's obvious without weighing it. Worth slightly less is a 1943 copper penny (supposed to be steel).

What are the odds this guy checked for any rare pennies before putting that floor down?
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+2 371. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Nuclear Powered Icebreaker Ship

#1 I see a large black funnel in the middle of the ship, visible on the last frame of the video.
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+2 372. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Opposed Piston Diesel Engines Are Crazy Efficient

#3 All diesel engines use compression for ignition. Glow plugs heat up the cylinder so that's possible in cold weather conditions. A diesel engine without glow plugs is very difficult to get running in the winter.
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+2 373. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Impossibles Doesn't Always Live Up To Its Name - 16 August 2018

"Impossibles" is the name of the location, so I'm guessing the title is an attempt at a pun, since surfing there looks quite possible.
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+2 374. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Powers of Ten

I always hate when I hear "twisted ladder" to describe DNA. That's not what DNA looks like. It's a double helix.

If you take a ladder and make it do a corkscrew pattern, with both sides remaining parallel, then you have a double helix, and the shape of DNA molecules.
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+2 375. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video How UV Causes Cancer and Aging

Only part of the UV spectrum is non-ionizing. The ionizing part causes cancer, and most of the damage being talked about here.
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+2 376. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Which one are you

There is no such thing as a lie-detector test. Polygraphs are fraudulent devices.

She lost a lot of credibility by claiming otherwise.
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+2 377. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Plane Shooting LASERS At The CROWD | Friday Fireworks Display | Avalon Airshow 2019

#2 It's from Sandstorm by Darude.
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+2 378. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Is It Southern or Hipster? – wellRED Comedy

Here's a video clearly aimed at minimizing division between clashing cultures, and it gets down-voted by those who don't understand it.

What a shame.
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+2 379. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Slow Turtle Attacks An Eagle and Other Amusing Clips

During my childhood, there was a time where my sister's cat (Mittens, due to being almost all black with white paws) would deliberately jump on a chair and dangle his tail down, to be attacked by another cat (Tiger, despite not looking like one). Tiger died quite early, for unclear reasons after being outside all night. When a new cat entered the mix (Buffy, name origin unclear - this was well before the vampire-hunting teen from either movie or TV show), Mittens would try to do the same thing - dangle his tail down to be played with, but the new cat wasn't playing ball. It was an extra layer of sadness I still recall, somewhere around 30 years later now.
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+2 380. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video The CO2 debate

"It was warmer than today for at least 95% of the last 10,000 years."

That statement is false. Absurdly false, in fact. So, no, that's not something "you can say" unless you want to be known as a liar.

There's no science discussion going on in this panel. Just deceptive propaganda.
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+2 381. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video Milk. White Poison or Healthy Drink?

02:52 Because the majority of people with functional lactase genes in adulthood are white, and it's very fashionable to attack anything that benefits white people these days.
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+1 382. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Best Idea Ever

Lots of "push" mowers have drive wheels. These days, in fact, it's only the cheaper models that don't.

And anyone who thinks this is the result of laziness has no conception of how much effort making this video would take.
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+1 383. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Cruise ship

It's a lot less impressive when you consider that the ship is quite small by cruise ship standards - little more than half the length and about a quarter the displacement of those you see in a typical cruise advertisement.
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+1 384. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video optical illusion to slow down drivers

The idiots who came up with this apparently never heard about the boy who cried wolf. The last thing we need is for drivers to be conditioned to ignore apparent little kids in the road.
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+1 385. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video A new paradigm on human evolution

#(removed comment) That's *Richard* Dawkins, and your badly-described scenario is explained, in detail, here:

http://www.skeptics.com.au/publications/articles/the-information-challenge/

The rest of your spiel makes too little sense to debunk. Evolution - the common descent of all living things, and their change over time - is an observed fact of the world. Evolutionary theory, in is many facets, is an attempt to explain that observed fact.

Elaine Morgan's aquatic ape theory, however, is unscientific nonsense.
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+1 386. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Fast Painting - can you guess what it is?

Now, if you didn't see it before he flipped, back up and try *not* to see it upside-down.
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+1 387. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video 3000 HP Aussie hotrod

That's still less than one half the power of a top fuel dragster or funny car.
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+1 388. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Final Destination in real life

There is no such thing as a safe following distance for this kind of incident.

I once had an aluminum drive shaft of some kind get kicked up by a car and crash into my windshield. It was caught between the hood and fender, otherwise one of the two people in the front seat would have been hit, probably fatally. The car was quite far ahead, and there's no way the driver (not me - I was dozing in the passenger seat, and my reaction was a loud WTF) would have been able to avoid it.

In cases like these, the responsibility lies with the vehicle that hits the debris. Something like that is easily seen in the road, and neglecting to avoid it establishes liability. My insurance company went after that of the person who launched the drive shaft at my car, and got paid for most of the damages.
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+1 389. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video What if every machine would run with gasoline?

The greenhouse effect is an indisputable fact of chemistry. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and you increase the temperature of the planet.

#20 has no clue about anything he/she wrote. With no greenhouse effect, the planet Venus would be slightly below the freezing point of water, simply because of its distance from the sun. But Venus has a huge amount of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, and the actual temperature is above the melting point of lead.

Beyond that, it's worth pointing out that burning fuel is not a problem for the carbon dioxide balance. It's only burning fossil fuels that's a problem, since that releases carbon that had been sequestered in the ground. Anything else you burn will be releasing only carbon that was removed from the atmosphere during its creation.

So using electricity from solar and wind farms to crack water for hydrogen and drive methanol fuel cells backwards would provide a liquid fuel that be burned without impacting the carbon balance. The CO2 released was all taken from the atmosphere during production, so it's a zero net change.
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+1 390. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video World's Greatest Drag Race

I had a friend who custom-built his own engine for about $10K, stuck it in an El Camino body, and beat every one of those quarter-mile times. He estimated the horsepower rating at about 680. That was nearly 20 years ago.
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+1 391. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Ford Focus 120mph (193km/h) Crash Test

Actually, two moving objects do sum up the speed, but also provide double the mass to absorb the consequences.

That's why two cars colliding at 60mph each is the same as one at 60mph hitting an immovable object.
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+1 392. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Star Size

#18, #19 Not even close. The distance to the sun varies throughout the year by about 5 million kilometers. The last perihelion (closest approach to the sun), in fact, was about a day before this video was posted. So those of us in the northern hemisphere, far from burning up when closest to the sun, are freezing in winter.
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+1 393. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Grammar nazi

#14 Some people think acronyms have to be words, while others only require that it be constructed from initial letters. In common usage, the latter view tends to hold, so he didn't need to shoot himself until ignorami.
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+1 394. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Meet the Autobahn - The german Highway

When I renew my NJ driver's license in a couple weeks, it will cost me $48 for eight years.

And let me say, in a nation with more than 26 times the surface area of Germany, the idea of a cup holder is hardly extravagant. Driving is mostly transportation here.
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+1 395. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Crazy stuff going on Japan

That is not liquefaction. That's liquid coming up from the sewers.
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+1 396. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Wealth distribution in US

What this video doesn't lay out is the fact that inside the top one percent, the distribution has a similar shape. It's a small fraction of the top one percent that makes the graph turn up like that. Almost 80% of the top 1% makes less than one million dollars per year. The top few hundred (out of about 1.4 million) make hundreds of millions per year.

All thanks to conservative financial principles over the past 35 years or so.
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+1 397. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Map of Europe - 1000 A.D. to present day

It's important to realize that nationhood didn't exist for most of this video, with arguable exceptions for France and England after a short while into it.

Germany, for example, didn't exist as anything like a nation until 1871, when Bismarck pulled a Qin Shi Huang on pretty much all Germanic regions of Europe save Austria.

Borders, governments, and constitutions are late-comers. Most of the "borders" in the video are placeholders for the zones of influence among squabbling "nobles" or barbarian hordes.
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+1 398. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Pitbull really wants that stick...

Pit bulls must be trained to be vicious, so #5 is showing (sadly common) ignorance. They do naturally have an inordinate fondness for wood, though. An old friend's pit bull could be carried by letting him grab a big stick in the middle, then hoisting the ends onto our shoulders.
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+1 399. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video A Mythbusters episode you'll never see.

#3 That's not what happened. See here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10031601-52.html
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+1 400. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video The biggest organism on Earth

The most massive definitely-discrete organism is the Sherman Sequoia. I'd recommend to anyone visiting California, though, to visit the coastal redwoods in the northwest, which are not surrounded by idiotic barriers that protect the trees from nothing.
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+1 401. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Interrupter gear or machine gun synchronizer

Of course, the propellers still had deflectors attached to the back, since the rounds could occasionally fire late.
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+1 402. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video A book collection nobody will ever read

#4 There were several donors, but most were either not used or used to generate tools for the sequencing. The actual sequence is something like 70% one anonymous man, and the rest other donors, including women.

The idea was to get a complete typical human genome. Later projects have sequenced complete genomes of individuals, with the goal to analyze the differences.
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+1 403. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Redneck Air Show

#8 In general, those are called inverted gull-wing planes. There were quite a few designed and built, though, and I can't identify the specific one in the video.

What I'd like to see is the recovery from the inverted flat spin shown in a couple clips starting at 2:16.
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+1 404. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video This motorbike runs on WATER!

And money grows on TREES!

Complete horse pucky. The only way to extract energy from water is to crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. The energy required to do that exceeds the energy gained from combusting the resulting hydrogen.

So absent an input of energy from elsewhere into the system (such as the aforementioned big solar panels you don't see), that bike is not running on water. This is a complete fraud.
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+1 405. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video The world has never eradicated a parasite. But Jimmy Carter is about to.

#1 Life on earth was not created. It evolved from self-replicating molecules. What forms life evolves into have nothing whatsoever to do with "good" or "bad".
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+1 406. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Twin Strangers - Unrelated Identical People

Whenever I see anything like this, I'm immediately struck by how different the "twins" look. Many are fairly similar, but none are remotely spitting images, or worthy of calling "clones".
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+1 407. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Egg Cooking Basics - "Egg Anatomy"

Once you drink a glass of egg nog and get a chunk of chalaze in it, you decide from then on that the chalaze must always be extirpated.
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+1 408. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video How To Uncork Cristal with a 50 Cal.

#3 Guns don't create a culture of violence. That's clear from international statistics, which show no correlation between guns per capita and violence rates. And the fact that banning guns doesn't reduce homicides (Australia).

The "high" violence in the US (it's high only in comparison to a handful of first world nations with bigger social safety nets, and only on average across all states) is not caused by the guns that end up being the most used tool.

The automatic assumption that "gun violence" is caused by the presence of guns (i.e. wouldn't have taken place with another tool in the absence of guns) is irrational and unsupported by any evidence.
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+1 409. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Dashcam Shows Dramatic Moment Car Loses Control and Flips Over

Wind had nothing to do with that. She was taking the turn too fast, overcompensated, and flipped her roller skate.
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+1 410. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video SpaceX Nails Rocket Landing on Drone Ship

Naturally, that footage was... embellished:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSx4DGBstYA
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+1 411. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video The BEST humane mouse trap!

Live traps only keep their name when you check them often. Mice don't last long without water.
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+1 412. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Honest Coffee Commercial

Coffee is not addictive. This was clearly made by someone who doesn't like coffee, and can't conceive of any other reason why other people would disagree with his/her assessment.
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+1 413. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video The 4th of July

InfoWars is headed by the insane Alex Jones, but PJW is not Jones. He has a conservative bent (and if you think that means he's incapable of having valid opinions, you are a dangerous ideologue), but he's not a conspiracy nut.

The only outright factual error in this video is the claim that women are stoned to death for being raped in Islamic countries. That's false. When you hear claims about women being stoned to death for being raped, what you have is a woman who claimed she was raped, to avoid the punishment for adultery (being stoned to death), and failing to convince the court of that claim. While there may have been women genuinely raped who nevertheless received the punishment for adultery, it's not correct to say the reason they were killed was the fact that they were raped. A man who rapes is stoned to death, as is a man who commits adultery. So in those situations, the man is always killed (either he committed rape or he committed adultery), while the woman can avoid punishment by convincing the court she was raped. Another instance of where Islam is painted as horrible for women, when it's actually just horrible for everyone.

Slavery was something everyone did at one point or another in history, with very few exceptions. The Europeans, after all, didn't actually go ashore to capture Africans and stuff them on a boat. They bought them from other Africans who had already enslaved them. Europeans were themselves enslaved by the Ottoman Empire for several centuries, who did unspeakable things to child abductees to turn them into Janissaries (think Unsullied in Game of Thrones, but without the castration). The US fought a bloody civil war to end slavery, which killed more Americans than any other war it's been involved in.

The overall point of the video is correct. Those people on Twitter are historically illiterate incompetents who understand nothing.
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+1 414. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Manly-Man Skills - The Lineman Splice

The first time I needed to join two wires together, that's what I did without giving it a second thought. It just seems obvious.

Don't forget to slide on a piece of heat shrink first, so you can cover the wire. Better than tape.
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+1 415. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Impressive F-16 Touch and GO followed by 2 aileron roll's

Immelmann off the runway. Pretty cool.
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+1 416. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Forget hoverboards! World's first fully-manned hoverbike tested in Moscow

#1 While a century plus of ignorant feminists have muddied the waters, the word "man" is sex-neutral by default. It only refers to a male when the context makes it clear that it does.

And in verb form, it never refers to a male.
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+1 417. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Girl Gets Revenge on Construction Workers

Obviously staged, in response to a trivial issue.
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+1 418. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views

All that rhetoric about stealing and theft, to describe copyright infringement, which is both legally and conceptually entirely distinct from theft.
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+1 419. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Amazing Forklift Skills

Judging from the condition of that tine, not everyone at that facility is as skilled with the fork truck.
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+1 420. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Can You Spot a Fake Rolex?

OK, but what's the difference in timekeeping ability?
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+1 421. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video The Differences Between Petrol and Diesel Engines

Diesel engines are more reliable, too, because there are fewer parts to go wrong. No ignition coil, contact breaker, distributor, wires, or spark plugs. And if you have a spill while refueling, it's far less dangerous. If you throw a lit match into a puddle of diesel, the match goes out.
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+1 422. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video How Long Does A Severed Head Remain Conscious?

#1 It's not at all unusual in the US. We don't over-Anglicize foreign words to anything near the extent that people in the UK do.
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+1 423. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Dare to Eat the Philippines’ Delectable Woodworms

They're basically clams without a shell, not actually worms. So if you'll eat clams, oysters, or scallops, you've got no cause to say you wouldn't eat that.
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+1 424. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Crappy User Interfaces

I hate the Netflix UI. I don't want the screen to shrink into the corner, making it impossible see the credits. If you cursor over and select the little screen to maximize it again, you've likely missed what you were looking for. So just rewind, right? No, because it shrinks again when it reaches the credits, so you still miss what you were trying to see. And if you do manage to get to the spot you wanted, and pause to allow reading something, the background fades, killing contrast, and blocking parts of the screen with an info popup.

I also don't want some stupid clip to autoplay when I pause on an item. I just want to read the summary. I don't want the movie or episode to start playing automatically when I select it.

The Netflix UI used to be simple and functional. It's a horrific mess now.
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+1 425. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Opposed Piston Diesel Engines Are Crazy Efficient

Well, here's my question.

Where does the pre-combustion chamber and glow plug go? In normal diesel engines, these occupy some of the space that would be occupied by the opposite cylinder here.
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+1 426. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video People Who Follow The Rules So Literally That They Beat The System

Regarding breastfeeding in public, I say go right ahead. But you forfeit your right to complain about people staring.
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+1 427. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Rang-tan - The television ad barred from UK TV broadcast after it was deemed too political.

I used to like Greenpeace. Then they went full retard on genetically engineered plants, and are now a disgrace to environmentalism.
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+1 428. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Superfluid helium

The only common use of liquid helium I know of is keeping other things cold.

I don't see superfluid helium having any particular use. Anything you try to do with it is almost certain to make its temperature rise, making it no longer superfluid.
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+1 429. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video The science behind ice storms and thundersnow

That's called freezing rain, because it's rain that freezes when it hits the ground.

Makes very pretty landscapes, but also creates all the problems he describes.
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+1 430. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Proper tea

Let's see.

Uses a tea bag instead of loose leaf.

Uses milk instead of cream or half and half, and thinks it matters when it's poured in.

Uses sugar instead of honey.

Doesn't understand diffusion or dissolution.

Tea plebeian confirmed.
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+1 431. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video A near fail

#1 Yes, she nearly died. Those areas of the Canyon wall are roped off for good reason. She became complacent, and backed up without verifying there was somewhere for her to actually step. A few inches difference, and she would not have been able to maintain her balance.
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+1 432. Thanny commented 3 years ago on video Robots Are Able To Dance Now

#1 No CGI here at all. If you look at the details, like shadows and reflections, you'll see it would be insanely hard to do this with CGI.

It's all real robots actually doing the moves. Pre-scripted moves, of course, but even doing that is quite difficult.
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0 433. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video What happens if you flip a starfish upside down?

Not bad for an animal with no brain.
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0 434. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video The Chipophone

#10 The AdLib card for PC's came out in 1987. Sound Blaster came out two years later. There were quite a few cards to choose from by 1993, including the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 that I got somewhere around that time. Don't confuse what comes with a Packard Hell with what's available.
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0 435. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Bird Imitates Car Alarm

These days, whenever I hear one of those things, I find myself wishing the car really were being stolen, and that the thief would hurry up and drive the wretched noisemaker away.
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0 436. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video A new paradigm on human evolution

For those tempted to lend credence to this theory, here's a primer on some of the specific claims, and what's wrong with them:

http://www.aquaticape.org/aatclaims.html
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0 437. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video World's most powerful telephoto lens

Seems a bit bulky. You can accomplish much the same thing with a 14" SCT and a focal extender, which is certainly not a small instrument, but smallER.
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0 438. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video A house that always faces the sun

I'm a bit puzzled about the utilities cable. He says it can go up to two full rotations without undue stress, but restricts it to one. But how? Does he turn the house in different directions? They mention the speed as up to two full turns an hour, but that would max out the cable in just an hour. The omission of details like that bugs me.
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0 439. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Helicopter barrel rolls

Some helicopters do have ejection seats. And while helicopters can't glide, they can autorotate, which allows you to land safely after engine failure. It requires quite a bit more timing than gliding with a fixed wing, though.
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0 440. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Hard drive teardown

#8 The first recorded practical use of A/C predates the birth of Nikola Tesla. He made advancements, but he did not invent it, nor did he do anything that was outside the ability of others at the time.
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0 441. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Real Time Rendering Technology

You can't do simple arithmetic based on the size of the area and the given resolution. Obviously each atom is not unique, which is the basis for the other (most on-target) criticism - they're just repeating a small set of objects over and over. Well, yes, just like any game you care to describe on the market today. The question is, how many objects, with what kind of storage requirements?

This is definitely not a scam, nor do those saying things like "if you knew how graphics worked [blah blah]" actually appear to know anything about how graphics work.

They are several years away from a marketable product. That's the only thing anyone should be confident saying.
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0 442. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Danny Macaskill - Industrial Revolutions

Seeing what he can do while on it, I wonder why he bothers to carry his bike at all.
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0 443. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Solar Sinter Project

#4 There's a good chance that battery was acting as little more than a capacitor to provide a steady voltage, while being more or less continuously charged by the photovoltaic panels.

This was obviously a crude prototype of the concept. I can't see where it's going, but that's more an indictment of my imagination than a valid criticism of the concept.
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0 444. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sends back picture of Apollo landing sites

#6 It was generally understood by the educated classes at the time of Columbus that the Earth was round. Eratosthenes even came up with the right value of its circumference over 2200 years ago.
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0 445. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video how a microwave works

#2 There's still plenty of water in butter. Most modern microwaves even have presets to soften or melt sticks of butter.

However, water isn't necessary. While water molecules are particularly good at absorbing energy from microwaves at 2.4GHz, they aren't the only molecules that do so. Oil (such as clarified butter, where all the water has been boiled away) will heat up in a microwave all by itself, but more slowly.

Other things will heat up as well, including dishes that are not microwave safe (that's what makes them unsafe - they absorb the microwaves and heat up by themselves, unlike safe dishes which get hot only by virtue of contact with the heated food).
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0 446. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Big Cats + Mirrors = Funny!

OK, what's the critter at 1:59? It's definitely not a cat.
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0 447. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Zeno's Paradox

Zeno's paradox falls apart in reality because reality is not analog. There's a smallest possible distance and a smallest possible time interval (Planck length and Planck time, respectively). After all the halving of distance and time, there comes a point where you either move a Planck length or you do not over an interval consisting of at least one Planck time (if it's one Planck length in one Planck time, you're going the speed of light).

Dealing with infinity is only required with the mathematical translation of the problem, and math is imaginary. Reality has no infinities, so there's no real paradox.
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0 448. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video INSIDE a Spherical Mirror

Left and right is just as parallel as up and down to the mirror. That's a nonsense explanation.

The real explanation is that mirrors do not, in fact, reverse the image from left to right. They reverse the image from front to back.

If you raise your left hand, does the reflected hand on your right go up? No, the one on your left does, because the image is *not* reversed left to right. When you look in a mirror, you get the same view you'd get if all of the object being reflected were transparent save the very surface facing the mirror. So a "reverse" word isn't really reversed - you're looking at the front surface of the letters from the back. Hold up any sufficiently light t-shirt with writing on it to a bright light, and you get the same exact view that a mirror provides, albeit with much lower fidelity due to the fabric still being in the way.
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0 449. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video 3D design has just taken another step forward

#3 Look at 4:30 and tell us again how the background fills are perfect.
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0 450. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Coke mixed with Milk Experiment

#6 is speaking absolute rubbish. Lactose tolerance in adulthood evolved for a reason in the populations that have it (virtually all Europeans, and a few tribes in eastern Africa).
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0 451. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video What happens when you film the police in Sweden

Amusingly, the song playing is "Girls' Night Out" by The Knife.
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0 452. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Walmart Ice Cream Sandwich Won't Melt!

It has stabilizers to prevent it from melting, because it's something people eat with their hands.

This video would show the exact same kind of ignorance if it depicted the guy putting a match to flame-retardant fabric and wondering why it didn't catch fire.
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0 453. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Mantis fly swatter

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0 454. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Misnomers

In culinary terms, to "french" something is to cut it into thin strips. So when you cut a potato into thin strips and fry those strips in oil, you get frenched fried potatoes. It's not difficult to see how that name would get shortened to french fries. Has never had anything to do with France, except by way of the origin of the term frenching itself. They were invented in the US, not Belgium.
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0 455. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video This seed drills itself into the ground to insure germination

Using 'insure' in place of 'ensure' is not an American thing. It's just a mistake that any English speaker (native or otherwise) might make.

#7 British chemist Humphry Davy first describe the metal, calling it alumium. He then changed his mind about the name, and called it aluminum, as it made more linguistic sense given how other elements were named with respect to their oxide names. The aluminium version came from a twit who reviewed Davy's work and claimed that 'aluminum' had a less classical sound.

So Americans (continentally speaking, as Canadians agree on this) use the most sensible version of the word.
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0 456. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Spoon carving

At 1:14 is where I'd end up having to choose whether to start over or make a smaller spoon.
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0 457. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Sandstorm by Darude played with accordions

#5 The question in the subtitle is a joke about the trend started a few months ago (at the suggestion of some channel or another) whereby commenting trolls would look for anyone asking about the name of a song on any video, and respond with "Darude - Sandstorm".
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0 458. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Will Happer, Princeton's Galileo

This man is a blinkered fool. I don't want to write a novella pointing out all the factual errors in this video, which are copious. Perhaps the biggest lie is the claim that warming has levelled off in the past 17 years. It hasn't. The only way it looks remotely like it has is when you dishonestly cherry pick a sampling range that starts at an abnormal high and ends at an abnormal low, rather like comparing the temperature in mid-July to that in mid-February (for the northern hemisphere), and saying, "See? The planet's actually getting cooler."

His reasoning is far more stupid than his dishonesty. Photosynthesis operates more efficiently with more CO2. That's true. But you know what else it works better with? Water. In fact, it shuts down entirely without water, and if you raise the global temperature by increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, you create a lot more desert, where there's plenty of CO2 but no %$?#ing water. Plants are not going to thrive under those conditions.
Nor are they going to thrive when completely under water, which is where thousands of square miles of land will be if morons like him are given the time of day.

Comparing him to Galileo is absurd.
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0 459. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Women at the wheel compilation

The crash at around 00:30 was not her fault. The guy jumped the light by quite a bit, and she still had the right of way.
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0 460. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Drag race car is too overpowered starts flying

The problem here is that this was a luxury road car that wasn't designed to successfully transfer that much horsepower to the ground, and whoever replaced or modded the engine failed to modify the rest of the car to suit.
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0 461. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Key & Peele's PC Pirate Chanty

Yeah, pedantic, but the word is "shanty".
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0 462. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video What Your Handwriting Says About You

Graphology is pure bunk. There isn't even a kernel of truth to it.
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0 463. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video 10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Human Body

Never mind. The video is self-contradictory.
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0 464. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Nissan GT-R Hood FAIL at 180MPH!!!

The question is, what did they do to break the hood attachment? A stock GT-R can go that speed without its hood flying off.
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0 465. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Wii Soccer

OK, here's another annoying "feature" of the new player. When you want to move the position slider to the beginning (because the video plays automatically now, so opening them in new tabs means you're missing the beginning every time), you end up changing the volume half the time, because the volume control expands horizontally and displaces the position bar - quite possibly the worst design decision ever for a video player.
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0 466. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Neil Degrasse Tyson: "If you're scientifically literate the world looks very different to you&q

#7 Your comment was so amusing I just had to return and point out that Trump's picks for agency heads and other cabinet members have made the Executive more swampy than ever. Good job.
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0 467. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video This Car Charger will SAVE YOUR LIFE!! (Really!)

I hope that guy's name is Jerry, because the correct term is jury-rig.
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0 468. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video The Importance of Load Balancing When Towing

I've never seen a trailer that would let you put that much weight that far behind the wheels, which are always at or near the back.
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0 469. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Why Earth Is A Prison and How To Escape It

Just play Kerbal Space Program.
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0 470. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Flying fish hunt - The Hunt: Episode 4 preview - BBC One

CDN not doing a good job of keeping up in NJ, USA. This video has stopped several times, despite this (taken right now):

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/6177345660
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0 471. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Spider with three super powers

#4 Look up the bolas spider.
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0 472. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video 5 Simple Questions - Intelligence Test

So the first question was dead obvious in their intent, but it shows an abysmal failure of language comprehension on the part of the would-be quiz master.

In English, and probably most other languages, economy of words is very important. As a consequence, most statements include implicit meanings, which every fluent speaker understands, This is no different when saying things of the form "X contains Y widgets". If we mean Y or more widgets, we say "at least Y". If we mean as many as Y but no more, we say "no more than Y" or "as many as Y". If we provide no qualifications, we implicitly mean both - "X contains Y widgets" is identical in meaning to "X contains no less and no more than Y widgets".

A more concrete example is describing the number of legs an animal has. A two-legged animal does not have at least two legs. It has exactly two legs - no less, no more. A month with 28 days does not have at least 28 days, but only 28 days - no less, no more.

So the correct answer to the first question (oddly numbered #4, as if the list were a countdown) is 1 or 0 - February during normal years, and no month during leap years.
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0 473. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Lock Picking 101

Those transparent practice locks are absurdly easy to pick. It takes a lot more time and effort even with just an inexpensive name-brand padlock.
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0 474. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Ice cream that did not melt in room temperature for 2 hours

This is stupid. They put stabilizers in hand-held ice cream products precisely to keep them from melting and running all over your hands before you eat them. It's exactly the same principle as using a casing for sausage meat. Or a tortilla around a burrito. Or pectin in jam.
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0 475. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Laser + mirror + sound

#1 In principle, yes, at least partially. In practice, not bloody likely.
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0 476. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video 5 Things OKAY in Japan (but illegal/rude in the USA)

Laws against open alcohol containers (i.e. "drinking";) in "public" are varied from state to state, and from locale to locale within states. It's simply not accurate to say that you can't legally drink in public in the US.
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0 477. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video 100+ Consecutive Speed Bumps High Speed Testing

Those aren't speed bumps. They're absurd constructions higher than the ground clearance of almost every vehicle, which were altered between tests, probably to ensure that everything crashed.
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0 478. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Operation: Dry Tank

Fuel pumps overheating due to low fuel is pretty much an urban legend.

Electric fuel pumps in the tank (mechanical ones are next to the engine) don't overheat from low fuel. They generally come in two types - those that need to be surrounded by fuel to radiate heat, which reside in a bucket-shaped section at the bottom of the tank that is always full of fuel, and those which are mounted at the top of the tank, and therefore almost never submerged, relying only on the fuel flowing through them to take away the heat.

Running the tank very low can run the risk of washing sediment from the bottom into the fuel system, but that's not nearly the problem it was with metal tanks (from rust).

There's no good reason to fill up more frequently. Some suggest never letting the tank get below 1/4th capacity, but that's hogwash.
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0 479. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Gun owner "destroys" rifle after Florida shooting: ‘Now there’s one less&rsquo

The state of Vermont has some of the loosest gun regulations in the US. There are no gun licenses. Everyone is just allowed to go buy guns.

The murder rate in Vermont is about the same as that in Finland and France.

The phrase "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." is not just some stupid NRA slogan. It's what the actual facts show. There is no correlation between the number of guns in a population and the number of homicides. The only thing having more guns around does is make it the tool of choice for homicide, because it's better at the task than most other tools. That's also why most suicides are undertaken using a gun.

That's not the say there aren't any homicides which wouldn't have taken place in the absence of a gun. But that's also true for other weapons - if that fire poker hadn't been there (or knife, frying pan, marble bust, etc.), she wouldn't have bashed his head in. It's also true that the presence of a firearm has prevented homicides (and other crimes).

What this video shows is abject simple-mindedness - an emotional reaction to a tragic event which nothing short of magically making guns disappear from the face of the earth would have prevented (he'd have had to get a sword instead, or perhaps decide to build a bomb).

Without exception, all of the proposals for new regulatory laws by anti-gun advocates would, if enacted, have made no difference whatsoever in the tragedy du jour they've chosen to exploit.
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0 481. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video How Long Does A Severed Head Remain Conscious?

#5 Closer to the French on the first, Anglicized on the second.
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0 482. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own you cannot even imagine...

And then they ruined that awesome start to the story.
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0 483. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Why knights fought snails in medieval art

Reminds me of the bit with the French knight of Waterloo World in Psychonauts.
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0 484. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Water Tower Collapsing Compilation

I have to say, I'm very disappointed. I was looking forward to unintentional collapses of full water towers, not controlled demolition of empty ones.
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0 485. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video That Time a Guy Parachuted Onto Devils Tower and No One Could Figure Out How to Get Him Down

#1 Because it's not a vertical drop. He'd almost certainly hit the side no matter how fast he ran while jumping off the edge.

On a side note, the picture at 1:30 is anachronistic. That type of parachute (ram-air or parafoil) didn't exist in 1941. He would have been using a normal round parachute which has essentially no control once deployed.
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0 486. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Powers of Ten

#3 I understand no such thing, because they aren't the same at all.

A double helix does not look like a twisted ladder.

Twisted ladder, which is wrong:

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/shutterstock_34693498%20copy.jpg

Double helix, which is right:

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/illustrations/dnastructure.jpg
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0 487. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Beautiful green hummingbird filmed in slow motion

Just picking a random video to make this comment. Videos don't play anymore on my version of Firefox (which I cannot update due to the idiotic removal of NPAPI). The play button simply does nothing. Only in the past week or so.
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0 488. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video Transforming Air Into Pure Drinking Water Is Finally Possible, Here’s How

Sounds like it could easily be a complete boondoggle. How much does it cost to manufacture and maintain these devices, versus how much water they produce? How does that compare to how much it would cost to simply ship water in from elsewhere?

Pulling water from the air takes a lot of energy, which is why it's pretty much never done for any reason other than getting rid of that water (i.e. dehumidifying).
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0 489. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video Social Justice Warrior Therapist

Actual therapists really are being trained with this kind of nonsense right now. The textbooks are awash with it.
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0 490. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video BRAINSTORM -OR- GREEN NEEDLE

#3 It's all the exact same sound, over and over. I heard "green needle" first. Then, after reading the title again and figuring out what the point was, was able to hear "brainstorm". I now hear whichever one I decide it will be beforehand. If I let it play without thinking, it tends to be the last one I chose to hear.

Unlike with the "Yanny/Laurel" case, I can't simultaneously hear both.
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0 491. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video Stephen Fry's milk trick in QI

#1 Sandy is a funny person, but she's no Stephen Fry. Haven't actually seen the show since she took over. It's not distributed to the US, so it takes a bit of effort to see it at all.
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0 492. Thanny commented 3 years ago on video Why all world maps are wrong

In the GIS world, nobody cares about a projection that does the entire planet. You work on a region, and in that region, there's usually a projection that's best based on the size and shape of the extent. For example, if you want to preserve area while maintaining very good shape with the United States, you'll use an Albers conic projection with parallels roughly in line with the top and bottom of the contiguous states. The further you drill down, the better match you can get between projection and real surface.
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-1 493. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Unique multiplication style

Did #3 mean dyslexics?
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-1 494. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Rotating stars, not.

#5 You're missing the point entirely. Time lapse movies of the sky are a dime a dozen. This one is interesting because it was processed afterwards to fix the frame of reference on the sky, so the earth appeared to rotate instead (which, of course, it actually does).

This is one of those things where you either get why it's interesting, or you don't.
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-1 495. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Live broadcast augmented reality

T-rex almost certainly had feathers. Too bad they're still using the outdated scaly appearance.
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-1 496. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video If the Moon were replaced with some of our planets

Doing the simulation with a daytime scene was a great choice. The Jupiter rotation in particular looked awesome.

Putting something with Earth's mass only 400Mm away from Saturn would seriously change the structure of the ring system, though, so that one was bound to be off.
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-1 497. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video OLEDCOMM shows Li-Fi, 10mbitps Internet by Light

http://www.snotr.com/video/7688#comment-152529

My comment there still stands. I don't think introducing line-of-sight into indoor telecommunications is a particular good idea.
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-1 498. Thanny commented 7 years ago on video Neil Degrasse Tyson: "If you're scientifically literate the world looks very different to you&q

Down-voting scientific literacy? Must be Trump voters.
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-1 499. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video Why the US doesn’t use metric (even though it does)

You can compel a company to print metric, but you can't compel them to not print imperial.

So a legally compulsory switch just isn't possible in the US.

I don't see any real path to a complete switch, because the units simply aren't that important in day to day life. Whatever you're used to works.
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-1 500. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video All Countries Total Forest Area Comparison (2019)

#6 You might take a hint by the comment number I referenced. Brazil contains much of the Amazon rain forest. There were erroneous articles all over the world recently claiming disastrous levels of forest fire in the Amazon. The comment thus alludes to this fake news, suggesting that Brazil will have a lot fewer trees.

Honestly, I really shouldn't have to explain this. And Trump? Are you going the way of Austin?
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-1 501. Thanny commented 4 years ago on video How To EASILY Solder Wires Without A Soldering Iron!

#4 Don't make me debate English with a UK resident. I could spend days citing town names alone, showing how you lot treat letters as entirely optional when it comes to pronunciation. That's after I'm done talking about that big river in London, which you guys pronounce as a German would the word Thaems.

And all that's before having a big laugh about how you think Nicaragua is pronounced. And before I begin my lengthy lecture on aluminum, which is the one and only correct name for the metallic element at the heart of the oxide salt alumina.

I disavow all Southern US pronunciation, though they're actually much closer to the UK, in many respects. A modern rural Georgian accent is more representative of the mainstream English accent of the late 18th century than any current accent in the UK.

My trigger finger is itching.
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-2 503. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Aging Face Transformation

This really highlights just how bad typical aging makeup in the movies really is.
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-2 504. Thanny commented 9 years ago on video Idiots

Nothing like an idiot who doesn't understand the concept of money using advanced technology (which wouldn't exist without a society that uses money) to make a half-witted video calling everyone else an idiot.
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-2 505. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video How To Cool Down Your Computer

That guy does some pretty insane videos. Here are a couple more:

Egg cooking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUqO3tFexiQ

Guitar tuning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Eu01-yTII
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-2 506. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video The Fastest sand car to ever see Glamis Sand Dunes in California !

Seems they should try to move the engine a bit forward. They're leaving a lot of the power behind due to the incessant wheelies.
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-2 507. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video Gun owner "destroys" rifle after Florida shooting: ‘Now there’s one less&rsquo

#12 No, it absolutely is the correct statistic.

The question isn't whether or not homicides are committed more often with guns than with other weapons, in the presence of ample guns. The question is whether more homicides are committed due to the presence of guns. One questions is about how effective guns are are killing people, which has an obvious answer. The other is about whether or not having guns makes people kill other people more often, which doesn't have an a priori obvious answer. The actual answer, however, is that it doesn't, except in the way indicated in my comment - the lack of a weapon at hand will prevent a spontaneous homicide. The absence of a gun will not prevent any premeditated homicide.

So your problem is that you're failing to distinguish between homicides committed with guns and homicides caused by guns. It's actually quite dishonest to act as if they are the same thing.

Furthermore, the United States is a large nation. The homicide rate varies considerably from one location to another. It's worst in poor neighborhoods of large cities, inhabited mostly by blacks, who are more than half of all perpetrators as well as more than half of all victims, despite being only about 13% of the population total. Take those homicides out of the stats, and the US is middle-of-the-road in terms of homicide rate (there are other hotspots that, if remediated, would reduce the rate even further). So the bulk of what we have is a black on black violence problem, not a gun problem. Solving that problem is no simple matter, as there are many factors that contribute to its existence (inherent racial characteristics aren't among them, despite what alt-right idiots claim). What's clear, however, is that no amount of gun regulation is part of the solution.

Lastly, armed citizens is historically important in the United States. The first thing the British did to trigger active conflict in the Revolutionary War was go after the guns - trying to prevent the citizens from taking up arms. Many of the fighting forces during the war were private militias, too. And it was as recently as the 1940's that private citizens had to take up arms to fight government corruption, when a sheriff stole the ballot boxes during an election to avoid losing (the private citizens, after a gun battle, secured the true election results, and got rid of the corrupt sheriff). It may sound like crazy talk to some, in this day and age, to suggest that guns are for the prevention of tyrannical government, but it's as true as it ever was.
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-2 508. Thanny commented 6 years ago on video 10 Objects Invented Just to Defy The Laws of Physics

The internet has only a tiny fraction of the world's knowledge on it.

Information is digitized and placed online only when someone is willing to pay the up front and continuing costs of doing so.

Most information does not fall into this category.
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-3 509. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video Perverse Woman In TV

YOUR-uh-nuss

That's how it's actually pronounced, in case anyone's curious.
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-3 510. Thanny commented 10 years ago on video Soccer wizard

#3 The term soccer originated in England, and like it or not, that's what it's called by most native English speakers.
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-3 511. Thanny commented 5 years ago on video All Countries Total Forest Area Comparison (2019)

#3 No, the nonsense about the fires is fake news. Though slightly above the ten-year average for number of fires, what's going on down there is entirely normal. Deforestation, which is the real danger, is still on the decline.
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-4 512. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Grocery Store Wars

Organic food is not more healthful. It does not taste better. It is not safer. But it's definitely more expensive.

If that's not enough, anyone who would want the entire world to eat only organic food would need to begin by creating a list of the two billion people doomed to immediate starvation.
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-4 513. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video How much ash a 20-a-day smoker makes?

I think a lot of you didn't get the joke - the ash is from the cremated dead smoker, not the cigarettes he/she smoked.
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-5 514. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video You need to get off facebook

I just find it amusing he seems to think that wanker abbreviations (LOL, ROFL, etc.) come from using Facebook.

I remember seeing that kind of nonsense on BBS's, long before the internet became popular.
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-5 515. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Fiat Money

Virtually nothing in this video is true, beyond the fact that it was Nixon who killed the last vestiges of a gold standard. No doubt it was created by a gold bug.
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-5 516. Thanny commented 8 years ago on video Snotr is Back Online!

So while fixing your pathetically old server with no hot swap bays, can you bump up the available throughput? I haven't been able to play a video in real time for over a year. The transfer speed from the server is always slower than the bit rate.
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-7 517. Thanny commented 13 years ago on video Rugby - see you at the hospital

I have no interest in watching sports in general, but if that's what passes for hard tackles in rugby, it's no wonder they don't need the protective equipment used in US football.
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-7 518. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video Why the whole banking system is a scam - Godfrey Bloom

Comparing quantitative easing to counterfeiting is ludicrous. And fractional reserve lending is not a problem when you have deposit insurance and regulation. Moreover, no bank in history has ever *not* done fractional reserve lending.

Really, this is just a profoundly ignorant rant, from a man who clearly has no understanding what caused the financial crisis and what did not.
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-7 519. Thanny commented 11 years ago on video So this is what we eat at all the major US pizza places...

I get really tired of people using the word "chemical" as if it were synonymous with "toxin". It's abject ignorance.

Some actual facts:

1) Potassium bromate is classified as possibly causing cancer, not actually causing it. Which you can say of any oxidizing agent whatsoever. Because they oxidize. Like oxygen. That stuff we suffocate without.

2) There is no potassium bromate in the finished product. It is all consumed in the leavening, unless you add way too much. But it's already mixed in the flour in the right proportions.

Do I want it used in the making of my pizza? No, and since I don't eat at Domino's or Pizza Hut, it won't be.

But let's skip the "chemical" hysteria. And the ridiculous elitism while we're at it. Using bread flour for a more substantial crust is reducing the required skill level? Please.

And the thing eaten by people all over the world called "pizza"? Invented in the United States in the 1950's.
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-8 520. Thanny commented 12 years ago on video US Debt Crisis - 2012 is only for America

This video shows a stunning lack of knowledge about macroeconomics. Inflation in the US is ridiculously low, just like the interest rate on 10-year bonds. There's no risk of runaway inflation or stagflation, and there's no shortage whatsoever of entities willing to buy US bonds.

The correct path out of the slump we're in involves massive federal borrowing (with the current interest rate, it's nearly free, and is actually more than free with inflation-protected bonds), used for temporary spending projects that directly put people to work - infrastructure like roads, bridges, power grids, etc.

The deficit is not a problem right now. 9+% unemployment is the problem.
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-14 521. Thanny commented 14 years ago on video Guys gets slapped then slaps back.

1) He hit her *way* harder than she hit him.

2) Regardless of your psychological problems with respect to equal rights for women (and judging from the number of comments referring to kitchens in any video involving women, it's pretty common here), you don't assault someone smaller and weaker, and that happens to be the case for the average man vis-a-vis the average woman. If she were a body-builder and he a 90-pound weakling, it'd be different, but that's not the case here.