your terrible ideas

didn't hero invent the steam engine?

http://www.lyft.me/drivers

it's not my idea, but i feel like this belongs here

That
s a good

idea

i'm going to assume you're a rapist

http://www.yelp.com/biz/lyft-san-francisco

Fuck you Spiral Stairs

http://valleywag.gawker.com/when-your-smartphone-chauffeur-becomes-a-stalker-801080008

As someone who's used Sidecar, Lyft and cabs in San Francsico, and as a young female, I've honestly felt a lot safer in Lyft and Sidecar than cabs. I'd like to believe (and maybe I'm naive) that this is a rare occurrence. When you jump in a cab, no one has any idea where you're going. When you're in a Lyft, Sidecar or Uber, there's an app tracking where you are. You get a picture of your driver, their car and their name before you ever step inside the vehicle, and they've passed a written interview, phone interview and in person interview.

My roommate had a cabbie taking pulls from a handle of whiskey while driving and then whip out a knife on her when she tried to pay with a card. She ran away so panicked she didn't get his cab number or name, meaning he's still out there. That couldn't have happened in Lyft.

It was totally unprofessional for him to ask for her number in that situation and I probably would have reacted the same way, but I'd guess there's just as likely to be a cabbie stalker out there as there is a Lyft driver. 7/16/13 1:55pm

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

tbf, that could happen with a cabbie too, if you gave one your number

yup

And tbh that's not really "stalking"! That's one awkward series of text message exchanges over the course of a couple hours!

I mean, she gave her number, then didn't respond to one text (or volley of texts?), then they had an exchange where the guy was weird, but once she made it clear she didn't want to see him it seems like it ended at that?

waterface i am impressed with your ready knowledge of ways to get some 1 on 1 time in a confined space with strangers

Roberto nice try but I enjoy reading and learning about various forms of public transportation.

But again, kudos to you for trying to frame me as a creep.

didn't hero invent the steam engine?

― sassy, fun, and RELATABLE (forksclovetofu), Friday, July 26, 2013 1:28 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think basically? I believe there are also practical issues to building a steam engine in 100 AD or whenever, just because metallurgy is not at the point where you can really construct a boiler capable of containing the required pressures. But I actually don't really know anything about anything so I could be wrong.

everything i know about this comes from a single paragraph in the william gibson interview with the paris review:

There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time ­because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it. When I came up with my cyberspace idea, I thought, I bet it’s steam-engine time for this one, because I can’t be the only person noticing these various things. And I wasn’t. I was just the first person who put it together in that particular way, and I had a logo for it, I had my neologism.

so, ptolemy. according to william gibson.

Huh!

and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors.

i don't think this is true tbh

they didn't have the metallurgy to make objects both big and strong enough to make a steam engine large enough to do useful work that people or animals were doing

iirc watt was inspired by a principal of planetary movement that ptolemy posited, i think gibson is making a bit of a jump there. hero(n) is really the guy who laid it out. but doctor casino here is essentially correct, the problem is metal. advanced metal working didn't really get going - and like many academic and scientific disciplines it peaked early and tailed off quickly. rome was pretty degenerate after the early empire. i think mental was a PITA for romans because the ores were elsewhere. and crucially they didn't get very far with iron alloys, and that is really the business end of things.

it likely peaked early
and metal, not mental

http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/cowen/~gel115/115CH5.html

ps i love ancient and still-running academic webspaces like this

Great info Roberto, thanks.

goole otm.

Ancient smiths had to learn the metallurgy of iron and its alloys, which again is non-intuitive, much more difficult than that of copper and bronze. They solved the problems empirically, of course, but the chemistry and metallurgy involved were not understood at all until modern times. Most important, the smithing of iron demanded much more luck or skill than the well-understood smithing of copper and bronze. Some smiths made tools and armor and weapons that were significantly better than others. The mastery of iron and steel truly was a rather magical process, and it is at this point that legends begin to feature magic swords, produced by smiths who are also wizards.

^^^ the kind of shit i just eat UP. Makes total sense when they put it like that.

Bronze Age heroes did not have magic weapons. The heroes of Troy had to use tricks for victory, even when the gods were interfering. (I imagine that the gods would have provided their favorite mortals with magic weapons if they had been available: certainly the Iron Age Norse gods did.) However, Iron Age soldiers had swords that were forged one at a time, and Iron Age gods and heroes often had magic swords such as Fafnir and Excalibur. Legendary Iron Age smiths such as Wayland Smith traditionally possessed great strength for hand-forging weapons, as well as great skill. Ironically, Wayland was lame, but only because he was maimed deliberately by the King: is this a faint echo of the Bronze Age?

there is an interesting division between legendary swords that did crazy shit and swords that were just known for being especially hard or sharp, e.g. excalibur or durendal(sp?). the latter seem obviously to be referring to steel swords, most likely accidentally made rather than some particularly talented smith, hence the specialness/rarity.

also fafnir is a dragon not a sword

ha, wait, yeah, what is that about?

Agreed about 'magic' versus 'special' swords. On the Gibson tip, there's a great sequence somewhere in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle - probably midway through "The Confusion" where a couple of our heroes, one a warrior, one a seasoned alchemist, get to watch a bunch of metallurgists at work somewhere in the Near East. The alchemist is following the whole process, step by step, focusing on what they're doing with the hammers and the heat and so on, and meanwhile the warrior, who has been carrying around a prized 'watered steel' blade the entire story, gradually has this jaw-drop moment of realizing that this is the place where watered steel comes from, this is the procedure that's created his amazing super-sword that everyone fears. And this is set in the late 17th century!

the sword sigurd used to kill fafnir was forged by wayland the smith, which is probably the writer slipped there. it has a more boring name though (gram)

I remember Gram, it was a sword in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. IIRC the description was the rather underwhelming ''The sword named Gram.''

An actual terrible idea: sitting in the inverse castle library and killing eight million Dodos in the hopes of them dropping a rare Crissaegrim. (I speak from sad experience.)

Er...wait. those are Shmoos, I think. The Dodos are in the inverse castle entrance but they also drop something really cool about one in ten thousand times.

kill ilxor account

a poster that reads

KEEP CALM
and
SHOW ME
THE MONEY!

I had a terrible idea, which was to start a thread called "Describe yourself in the harshest, most uncharitable way possible."

omg, it exists already

so does
"keep calm and i drink your milkshake"

however

"keep calm and don't taze me bro" is open

i think that's a great idea xp

KEEP CALM
and
DROWN CATS
& BLIND PUPPIES

This came to me in a vision on the way home -- it's a movie in which Clint Eastwood plays a truck driver who picks up a hitchhiking Chris Tucker, and the rest of the film is just two hours of them talking in the truck, with Clint Eastwood doing more or less his character from Gran Torino, and every exchange is Chris Tucker doing his stupid schtick and Eastwood responding with his slow, salty barbs. "Yeah so I really appreciate you pickin me up dawg" "I'm not your...dawg." "So what up man you like hip-hop or what?" "No...I don't like...hip - hop."

If Chris Tucker hadn't self-imploded that would be available on Netflix right now

My Drive Wit Dre

Here's one: a site that's like a "longform" version of buzzfeed -- "576 Cool Things You Didn't Know About European History 1076-1492" "1000 most attractive people of the 20th Century" etc.

A cover version of King Missile's 'Detachable Penis', but retitled 'Detachable Booster', with new lyrics appropriate to the video game Kerbal Space Progam ("I was orbiting Kerbin, and my booster was missing again. This happens all the time. It's detachable.").

Here's one: a site that's like a "longform" version of buzzfeed -- "576 Cool Things You Didn't Know About European History 1076-1492" "1000 most attractive people of the 20th Century" etc.

― HOOS next aka won't get steened again (Hurting 2), Thursday, August 1, 2013 4:35 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

buzzfeed actually has a 'longform' section now, i would sort of love if it became this

"Wow, has it been three and a half hours already? Better get back to that spreadsheet"

This would be great if the factoids were in chronological or organized thematic order, so it was basically just every sentence of a high school textbook, rewritten as a dumb heading with a huge picture.

an 8+ piece band playing a hybrid of math rock and western swing named "texas instruments"

lol

the line-dancing would be incredible

I guess you don't really line-dance to western swing. Oh well. I like it anyway.

DANCING SQUARED