Random Thought of the Day

Quote: Ayecarumba

Why do maps always have the North Pole at the top center?

Why not? Some pole makes sense on top. And it was Europeans who conquered the world and spread their civilization to other lands. That's why their naming, mapping, numbering, etc. conventions were adopted.

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For that matter, why is North the "top" and South the "bottom" of the map? How would society be different if what we currently call the North was historically always found on the lower half of the map?

Because if Europeans had drawn it that way, they'd have fallen down off the Earth ;)

Seriously, I do wonder how people reconciled a round Earth, and the world was known to be round since ancient times, with the instinctive feel that those below would inevitably fall off. Newton was a long time in coming.

Quick car wash. Quack.

Because pennies are often different colors you can do this with them.



Now the real trick is to create one of those fine mosaics.

Quote:

Stomp on the gas in a new Ford Mustang or F-150 and you’ll hear a meaty, throaty rumble — the same style of roar that Americans have associated with auto power and performance for decades.

It’s a sham. The engine growl in some of America’s best-selling cars and trucks is actually a finely tuned bit of lip-syncing, boosted through special pipes or digitally faked altogether.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americas-best-selling-cars-and-trucks-are-built-on-lies-the-rise-of-fake-engine-noise/2015/01/21/6db09a10-a0ba-11e4-b146-577832eafcb4_story.html

Fake engine noise, fake new car smell, fake make you feel like a truck driver when you are hauling ten pounds of groceries six miles, fake sticker prices, but you get to drive to a Truck Rodeo which is fake too.

Quote: rxwine

americas-best-selling-cars-and-trucks-are-built-on-lies-the-rise-of-fake-engine-noise

once the consumer knows this stuff, it's all over a lot of times ... in this case, we shall see

reminds me of how the big breweries put out "fake" microbrews, fake in that the consumer is supposed to look at the label and imagine some small local brewery has put out the product. This doesn't work, as the typical microbrew drinker really cares that it is authentic, reads up on stuff, talks to other like-minded beer drinkers ...

Alot of those brewery restaurants have equipment just for show... they truck in the beer.

Remember Bartles and James.... two old guys who bought a truck and took out a second mortgage and wrote away for a Harvard mail order MBA degree.... It was the Gallo wine company.

Now alot of breweries are making very low alcohol beers.

Soon we will return to a sort of oatmeal gruel usually served to drunks with totally shot stomachs and call it beer.

Pertaining to bankruptcy of Skymall and some of their oddball products. I could see hiding this in your backyard with a motion detector and a recording of low growl would probably scare the ***k out of wanna-be prowlers. In the dark it would look real enough. The growl would just be the kicker.

Actually, it reminds me of another thing that happened about a month ago when I getting some exercise at night. Your mind can react to shapes that are primitive but dangerous.

In a parking lot I was walking along and my eye caught a S shape on ground almost as I was on it. Turned out to be a piece of cable, but my mind registered snake until I saw it clearly. I jumped back at first.

As I recall in another thread, more people die of snake bites in the world than anything else.

Quote: rxwine

A

As I recall in another thread, more people die of snake bites in the world than anything else.

About 20,000 people die from snake bites
a year, worldwide. Want to guess how
many die in car wrecks?