DrKrettin

I remember some presentation by a company which produced hypodermic needles. These days, they are made with sharp angular tips so that any half-trained nurse can use one without the patient feeling anything at all. I also remember that they said they have to produce special batches with blunted tips for export to Africa. Apparently on that continent nobody believes anything can do you any good unless it really hurts. So a vaccination program will only work if seen to be unpleasant.

It might help if you actually formulated the question.

Good point - and surely there would be scratch marks on the iceberg as well. Big ones.

I think it was suggested (years ago) that the rivets had been weakened, not the actual steel plates, so they all popped.

What I don't understand is that this is old news - they knew about the fire and raised the possibility that the hull had been weakened by it. What's new?

I thought the most unlikely aspect was that there were 9 chess players all wearing suits.

For me, the key would be to find a job where you get read good books. If you have to read any book presented for publication, I suspect you read quantity, but not much quality.

Even if they were both playing white and chose different openings?

Ak - ok. I had misunderstood your comment about "your imaginary connection of chess and intelligence" which I took to be a generalisation. In fact we are both saying that same thing.

Oh come on, are you saying there is no positive correlation between ability at chess and intelligence? Apart from my own anecdotal experience of knowing Cambridge maths scholars who are extremely good at chess, the internet is a good source of research, for example this. Obviously it does not follow that somebody with a rating of 1700 is necessarily intelligent - in fact it rather speaks against it simply because of the self-propagated idea that it does.

Your responses are phenomenally stupid. I hope for your sake that you are just a troll.

Hang on - I thought you had claimed to have translated it to Welsh (which was not true anyway). Has your Grand Unification Theory been accepted by mainstream science (which would automatically trigger a Nobel Prize)? Any fool could come up with a theory.

Do they really say that in two syllables without the acute accents?

Wow - the whole study cost $278. No comment on my name, by the way.

I had a question about the first response to the OP: I had always understood that the physical centre of the earth was not quite the same as the gravitational centre, and that there was a 20 km difference. I can't find any reference to this - but if correct, this might alter the response above.

I found this quite amusing: Background is that in the European cup there are two games to decide who wins. In the first leg, a French club beat Barcelona 5-0, so the second leg at Barcelona was not expected to be a big deal. Except it was - Barcelona won 6-1 in the last seconds of the game. The crowd, and the whole of Barcelona, went nuts, so nuts that a seismograph registered their celebrations. Here is the article (in Spanish) which shows the graph and spikes each time Barça scored. I didn't realise that these instruments were so sensitive (or that Barcelona is so crazy)

There is an article in the Guardian newspaper: Pruitt denies that carbon dioxide contributes to global warming.

You are the one living in confusion. Your post is so daft that it's hard to know where to start, or why anybody should even bother responding. If you are so bothered about the planet's galactic path, what about the motion of the galaxy itself? And the motion of the local group of galaxies? Relative to what? Oh, and by the way - a planet's orbit relative to a sun is a conic section, not because of an inverse square law, but because of a force towards the sun and a conservation of angular momentum. Did you read that word "relative"?

We have a small garden, with 1 lemon tree, 1 orange tree, 1 avocado tree, 1 apricot tree and 1 olive. The avocado is a mistake because we need 2 for fertilisation, so no avocados, otherwise they all give fruit.. As I type, the apricot is in full blossom with a fantastic scent, and the olive is full of tiny unimpressive flowers too. Oh, and 1 marihuana plant doing very nicely.

Which reminds me of the silly puzzle - if the answer is "9 W" what is the question? . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . Herr Wagner - do you spell that with a V ?

Isn't this just a random walk problem?

Ha ha - which reminds me of a true incident when I ordered 200 fence posts from Jewsons. Because I needed to fence off a field on a steep slope, I specified 6' 6" lengths. When the delivery lorry came, knowing Jewsons, I carefully counted them, and counted 240. When I questioned it, the response was "ah yes - we didn't have any 6' 6", just 5' 6", so you have more." I asked whether I might have had 400 posts of 3' 3" instead, but they didn't get the point. They could not understand why I was not satisfied. This post doesn't have any point either.

Why don't you just explain why, instead of a link to a very silly site?

I managed to read all of that post without an urban dictionary, but I don't know what IRL means. Anyway, I can't see much wrong with the thread other than the OP doesn't really defend himself when asked to define his terms. It's the way these threads develop in the absence of decent discussions. Try introducing one.

I've dug up this thread because I was looking at the Rules of Chess. I was asked what the latest change in rules was, and somebody alleged that the rules were originally dictated by the Catholic Church, and that promoting a pawn to a queen was not allowed if there was still the first queen on the board. The reason was that this would make the king a bigamist. *sigh* Anyway, somebody also claimed that the latest change was that originally the rule was that a pawn could be promoted to any of queen, rook, knight or bishop. A change was made to add of the same colour and that this was initiated by a problem similar to this one, where promoting to a piece of the opponent's colour gave checkmate. This change was around 1800, so this problem is perhaps not so daft as we all thought. Sorry, no references, so it might all be testicles.