Category Archives: Uncategorized

Some Say, Yadayadayada

Ebola victims in one of the hardest-hit parts of Liberia have been treated by homeopaths who are determined to prove that arsenic, rattlesnake venom and the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly can cure Ebola.

The homeopaths arrived in Liberia to use the deadly outbreak to prove their controversial theories and have already spent two weeks in the country with patients in a hospital in Ganta, in the north of the country near to the epicentre of the outbreak.

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Homeopaths claim that the way their remedies are prepared - which includes hitting the container 10 times against a leather and horsehair surface - give them a special potency and that the water molecules remember the presence of the active ingredient. Their opponents dismiss the 'treatments' as mumbo-jumbo and fear that desperately-ill Ebola patients will die as a result of their involvement.

Minor, Tremolo, Bent Chords

Is there a name for the sub-style of country/rock where the songs are slow, with an electric guitar (usually with a lot of tremolo and reverb) playing sparse minor key leads and big minor chords that get whammied down at the end of verses? It usually got a bit of western feel to it. Everything on Neko Case's Blacklisted, for example.

Exhibit 1, Exhibit 2

Sciencey

When Tony Stark tries to lift Mjolnir using his Iron Man glove, he exerts a large upward force, greater than its weight, and yet the hammer remains at rest. So where does the additional downward force come from? One can only conclude that a unique property of uru metal is that, under the proper stimulus, it can emit large quantities of gravitons. On Earth, these fundamental particles have not been experimentally confirmed to exist, but as stipulated, the Asgardians are ahead of us scientifically. Gravitons are conjectured to transmit the gravitational force, and if an object emits additional gravitons, it is equivalent to increasing its mass. Thus, when an “unworthy” person applies an upward force, the uru metal increases the hammer’s weight to exactly cancel this lift, and the hammer remains unmoved.

If Mjolnir emits gravitons, could enough unworthy persons simultaneously attempting to lift it cause Mjolnir to start to attract objects via gravitation? And could sufficient force be applied that Mjolnir's gravity would be enough to capture light - turning Mjolnir into the center of a black hole?

If so, would Thor be able to lift Mjolnir without being destroyed by the tidal forces of all the attracted matter compressed around it?

The Medea Hypothesis

Wiki:

The Medea hypothesis is a term coined by paleontologist Peter Ward for the anti-Gaian hypothesis that multicellular life, understood as a superorganism, is suicidal; in this view microbial-triggered mass extinctions are attempts to return the Earth to the microbial dominated state it has been for most of its history. It is named after the mythological Medea, who killed her own children. Medea represents the Earth, and her children are multicellular life.