Things To Do Before You Die 675
Lu Xun writes "A group of British scientists has brought some meaning to our lives by providing a list of 100 scientifically-oriented things to do before you die. The suggestions include 'joining the 300 Club at the South Pole (they take a sauna to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F) or learning Choctaw, a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else.'"
Riiight ... (Score:5, Funny)
'Things to do before you die' is a very apt term for this, I think.
Re:Riiight ... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Riiight ... (Score:3, Funny)
Extract your own DNA by spitting gargled salt water into diluted washing-up liquid and slowly dribbling ice-cold gin down the side of the glass. Spindly white clumps which form in the mixture are, basically, you
A much simpler way to do so was described in the parent post. Though a single event will probably be sufficient.
Re:Riiight ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Riiight ... (Score:4, Funny)
A list of 100 things to do before you die? On
Yeah, right after "Have Sex"
Re:Riiight ... (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, right after "Have Sex" ;-)
You forgot the "with another person."
Re:Riiight ... (Score:5, Funny)
If you learned a language where you can speak with a tense for "passing on material taken without checking from someone else", why would you ever need to RTFA again?
Re:Riiight ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, but just think of how easy it would be to filter out people as they talk.
... a built-in bullshit/working from a script detector.
A nice simple "this man has no idea what he's talking about" test to determine that salesman has no concept of what any of the features actually do.
Oh, the possibilities
=)
Re:Riiight ... (Score:3, Funny)
The hardest part (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder if they go barefoot too?
Re:The hardest part (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The hardest part (Score:3, Funny)
Ok, well, my mom's been to the South Pole research station, so it can't be that hard. In fact, the process must be downright intuitive. I don't know that she ran around naked while she was there, but come to think of it, I never asked either.
KFG
Re:The hardest part (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The hardest part (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Riiight ... (Score:5, Funny)
Important 300 Club safety tip! (Score:5, Funny)
(Their storage area is already full of bare-ass frozen tourists-onna-stick with a very stupid expression on their faces.)
Re:Important 300 Club safety tip! (Score:3, Funny)
The Czech, on the other hand, is really into that kind of thing.
Re:Riiight ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Riiight ... (Score:5, Informative)
At -30, again, not much of a problem if you're shovelling snow - shovelling gives you a real workout.
Mind you, in high school I came in first in our version of the polar-bear dip - 5 minutes swimming in a lake with ice floating around. The runners-up were 30 seconds and 10 seconds. Sometimes the skinny nerd IS tougher.
Re:Riiight ... (Score:5, Funny)
The question is, when the 2nd dumbest person there quit after 30 seconds...why the hell didn't you quit after 31 seconds?
Re:Riiight ... (Score:3, Funny)
Hmm...and to think...down here in New Orleans, if it gets to 50 F, it ruins people's days...
Re:Riiight ... (Score:3, Funny)
*That's Celsius, BTW
Anyone have more info (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Anyone have more info (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Anyone have more info (Score:3, Interesting)
What these researchers had done was created a sled like device which they then placed cadavers on (they had cut the bodies at about mid-shoulder and mounted them on this sled) They then had implanted the spine with various sensors. They then basically sent the sled into a
Re:Anyone have more info (Score:5, Interesting)
Cadaver studies are done in many interesting fields where trauma to the human body needs to be explored. In automotive crash tests, they don't usually strap a corpse into the driver seat and run the Nash Rambler into a wall.
Human cadavers are used for two purposes: calibrating test instruments and assessing traumatic effects of measured forces. The first use is simple - you can measure a force, but what exactly does that mean? Is it enough to crush a ribcage, or to fracture an average skull? Test dummies are designed to mimic tolerances determined by cadaver studies, and research with corpses continues in order to further development on the next generation of dummy and computer models. The second use is more medical - what happens to a joint, bone, or other tissue when subjected to a massive impact or torsional force? How does the body fail, and what methods can be used to repair it?
Current automotive cadaver studies are frequently being done with limb prosections, not the whole body. Automotive engineering protects the body trunk pretty well, to the point where previously fatal accidents are frequently survivable. Nowadays, the focus is on crippling injuries to the extremities - people are surviving, but are being left with crushed legs, hands, arms, etc.
An absolutely fascinating book is Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers [amazon.com].
Choctaw (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Choctaw (Score:5, Informative)
Choctaw does have two past tenses, but they are not differentiated in the way claimed. The regular past tense, written -tok (or -tuk in older orthogrophies) is used for completed events ranging back about a year. The other suffix -ttook is for events that were completed more than a year ago. Furthermore, events that happened within the past few minutes and are still relevent for the current situation are often marked as "present" (-h).
Choctaw, and a huge number of other languages in the world, also have what are called evidentials. These are suffixes that indicate how you know the statement is true. In Choctaw, there is a first-hand knowledge suffix -hlih, used when you have direct evidence of the claim (you saw it, heard it, smelled it, etc). There is also the suffix -ashah which indicates that you are guessing that it is true -- you have some indirect evidence, such as hearsay, or very circumstantial evidence.
Tense and evidentiality are definitely distinct, as you can find tense and evidentiality marked at the same time on the verb.
Checkout the papers by a Choctaw expert: Aaron Broadwell [albany.edu].
A la Austin Powers (Score:5, Funny)
Amen.
Re:A la Austin Powers (Score:5, Informative)
Office Space [imdb.com].
The Office (Score:3, Funny)
Gareth Keenan: Hmm?
David Brent: We're just doing the ultimate fantasy, we're all doing it.
Gareth Keenan: Two lesbians probably, sisters. I'm just watching.
Rowan: OK. Erm. Tim? Do you have one?
Tim Canterbury: I'd never thought I'd say this, but can I hear more from Gareth please?
We regret to inform you... (Score:5, Funny)
Missing from the list (Score:2, Funny)
Looks like I can't die yet.
Uh, threesome? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Uh, threesome? (Score:2, Funny)
Whoa! This is
Korean has two tenses for certainty (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:To tell you the truth (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you mean, "to tell you the truth", all that other stuff you've been telling me is crap?
That's not actually a future tense, it's a qualifying phrase. A separate future tense would have an alternate way of conjugating the verb.
Things To Do Before I Die (Score:5, Funny)
take a sauna to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F
Introduce the Celsius system to the US
Re:Things To Do Before I Die (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Things To Do Before I Die (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Here's a Cluestick (Score:4, Interesting)
F puts 0 and 100 at the edges of the extreme temperature ranges experienced in my country. In January, it can get to around 0 (some years not quiet, others a bit below), and summer heat tops out at 100. So, it seems to be a better fit for describing the weather.
In Canada (Score:5, Interesting)
Fun fact, -40 degrees F is equal to -40 degrees C. At these temperatures, the radio weather reports from the little town in northern Alberta where I lived use to include how many minutes it would be before exposed flesh froze (if there was a wind, the time dropped significantly, to under a minute in severe cases). Working outside at these temps is not fun. I'm just glad I didn't have to do survival training at -60C like some of my friends where were in the Military had to do.
Re:Here's a Cluestick (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Things To Do Before I Die (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Or: (Score:4, Funny)
Become a diamond (Score:5, Informative)
Here's there website [lifegem.com]
From the site:
What is a LifeGem?
A LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.
The LifeGem provides a way to embrace your loved one's memory day by day. The LifeGem is the most unique and timeless memorial available for creating a testimony to their unique life.
We hope and believe that your LifeGem memorial will offer comfort and support when and where you need it, and provide a lasting memory that endures just as a diamond does. Forever.
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Re:Become a diamond (Score:3, Funny)
Gallery, funny - they don't have before and after pictures....
Re:Become a diamond (Score:5, Funny)
I can see this now. A guy proposing to his girl:
Guy: I want to to have this. (Slips ring on her finger.) It was my grandmother.
Girl: You mean it was your grandmother's ring?
Guy: Ummm. No.....
Re:Become a diamond (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Become a diamond (Score:3, Insightful)
Another option (Score:4, Funny)
All my bone and sinew take
Put me in the compost pile
To decompose me for a while
Worms, water, sun will have their way,
Returning me to common clay
All that I am will feed the trees
The plants, the fishes in the seas
When radishes and corn you munch
You'll be having me for lunch
And then excrete me with a grin
Chortling "There goes Lee again!"
--Lee Hayes
Shouldn't that be DeathGem? (Score:3, Funny)
137 (Score:5, Funny)
and solve the mathematical mystery of the number 137
To join that 'elite' group you need to insert another 3 in the middle.
;-)
Re:137 (Score:3, Informative)
Or add ".03599976" [wolfram.com] to the end, although those last two or three digits may be subject to change.
I live in the Choctaw nation (Oklahoma) (Score:3, Funny)
Pick of the List (Score:5, Funny)
Extract your own DNA by spitting gargled salt water into diluted washing-up liquid and slowly dribbling ice-cold gin down the side of the glass. Spindly white clumps which form in the mixture are, basically, you
You know, there are easier, and much more fun, ways to create clumps of white goo that contains your DNA.
Re:Pick of the List (Score:5, Funny)
Well.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Only half of your chromosomes that way. (Score:5, Funny)
Please tell me you haven't actually attempted this? :-)
People are telling me to attempt this all the time.
Before I die... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Before I die... (Score:4, Funny)
Use your excreta... (Score:5, Funny)
I tried this in the food court at my local mall, but security showed up before I saw any beetles.
DNA extraction with spit & gin (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:DNA extraction with spit & gin (Score:5, Interesting)
No, thanks.. (Score:2)
Choktaw (Score:5, Interesting)
And if so, would that mean that an unscrupulous person would be more likely to use the "definitely true" tense?
Would marketing types use it exclusively?
Re:Choktaw (Score:5, Funny)
How do you spell "weapon of mass destruction" in Choktaw ?
Re:Choktaw (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Choktaw (Score:3, Informative)
No, I wouldn't say it's close at all. The trait of the Choktaw tenses that the article mentioned is the distinction between first-hand, definite observations and second-hand ones. The Spanish distinction is something like this:
#101: See the shock wave on an airplane wing (Score:5, Interesting)
As the plane goes faster, the shockwave is pushed back toward the trailing edge. As the plane slows, it moves toward the leading edge. And during turbulence, the wave will flutter.
Re:#101: See the shock wave on an airplane wing (Score:3, Funny)
Assisting birth of an animal (Score:5, Funny)
I grew up in a rural area where my uncle raised cattle. Consequently, I've "pulled" calves on numerous occations. My first experience, the cow projectile-shat all over me. Surprising? yes; moving? I'm not so sure.
Re:Assisting birth of an animal (Score:3, Funny)
Well, you SHOULD have moved
What I wanted... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What I wanted... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What I wanted... (Score:3, Informative)
Hope this makes sense!
To Spin the Moon? (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, who knows what boondoggle projects the Solar Congress of 2470 will be involved with? Properly terraforming Venus might involve speeding up the planet's rotation. If you consider changing the rotation of a planet to be impossible, calculate the relative magnitudes of the angular momentum of its spin, and of its orbi
Re:What I wanted... (Score:4, Informative)
Visit the Bahamas. I don't remember the exact location (visited on a cruise) where you take an elevator down to the seafloor and then you can watch the reef life and sharks. Contact a sales rep for the Norwegan Cruise Line. They may have a brochure. Been there, done that. I personaly prefer to take a sub. The ones in the Cayman Islands were great (before Ivan pitched one ashore).
Re:What I wanted... (Score:3, Informative)
Oh no, you've got it all wrong... (Score:3, Funny)
The Earth is not a sphere (Score:3, Informative)
From the article:
Above sea level? Since the Earth's oceans form part of that 20-kilometer bulge, "sea level" isn't a constant distance from the center of the Earth either, and Mount Everest is still the highest mountain above sea level (while there is no actual sea right below either Mount Everest or Chimborazo, the shape of its hypothetical and non-spherical extension around the globe, called the geoid, can be determined mathematically).
What they mean is that Chimborazo is the place on the surface that is most distant from the Earth's center.
Star in your own Murder mystery (Score:5, Funny)
Your demise is inevitable, why not make good fun of it:
- Pick a handful of suspects to frame for your "murder"
- Plant, and contrive evidence to implicate the "suspects" in your death
- Secretly make silent calls from suspect's phones, nearing the night of your demise. When questioned they will deny any knowledge of such phone calls further raising the suspicion
- Intentionally accuse potential suspects of plotting your death, say things like "I know what you're doing, you won't get away with it!," just load enough to be overheard
- Change your will to benefit the suspects, but don't make them aware, they'll deny any knowledge of the change the in the will. But it gives them a motive
Watch the hilarity ensue
I wanna see a list (Score:5, Funny)
43. Get a FP on
44. Modify a computer to look like something else
45. Contribute some code to an open source project
46. "Daydream" about two chicks at the same time
47. Reference the movie Office Space 400 times in a single day
The Mystery of 137 (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to -0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
The real mystery to this number, which the article hints at, is that it can be defined in a variety of interesting ways, including as (charge of an electron)^2 over (4 pi epsilon-naught h-bar c)- a formula that involves quantum mechanical (Planck's constant), relativistic (c) and mathematical (pi) constants produces a dimensionless number in the neighborhood of 1/137. The number itself is not so important (except to a bunch of people who have applied numerological methods to its study, most notably Arthur Eddington); rather, the issue figuring out the relationship between the fundamental constants that pop up everywhere in calculations (like h, c, and pi) and the universe that these calculations describe.
strict choctaw (Score:3, Funny)
And if you won't die of old age.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Halito! Chahta Sia Hoke! (Score:5, Informative)
If you are interested, here is a link to Chahta Anumpa (Choctaw Language) classes via the Internet. [choctawonline.com]
You can click here for more information about the Choctaw Nation. [choctawnation.com]
Choctaw pedantry (Score:4, Interesting)
1 -- The distinction between direct and reported speech is not one of tense
2 -- Choctaw has _three_ past tenses
This pedantry brought to you by Pedant's Revolt (tm)
Linguistic Silliness (Score:3, Interesting)
Every language I've seen so far has some way to indicate doubt or lack of authority about what you're saying. For example, many Indo-European languages use the subjunctive mood (also called "conjunctive") rather than a separate tense for that purpose, and even English still uses the past subjunctive to indicate a condition that is contrary to fact: "if I *were* god" (but I'm not). We also use the subjunctive for something that someone else wants to happen: "I insist that he *go*" (the indicative would be "goes").
Perhaps those scientists could find something more useful to do with their time, such as encouraging people to send postcards to a dying boy.
They got one of them a bit wrong... (Score:3, Funny)
Brief primer... (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, I'd like to see some of that grammar come into common usage. At least, on Slashdot.
Re:Brief primer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Brief primer... (Score:5, Informative)
The Tariana [abc.net.au] language does this, and more. When stating a fact you must specify as part of the grammar whether you know it because you saw it yourself, or because somebody told you, or you deduced it from other evidence, or you know it as a general principle.
Yes, it would have interesting an effect on political debates.
...laura who will stick to Russian verb aspects for now
Re:Brief primer... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Brief primer... (Score:3, Insightful)
They would market and hype that "modern engrish is good 'nuff" and put it into obscurity.
Or
Always, always use the first tense.
Although, I do share your passion. It would be cool if we had a society that took so much care in being factual that we had a language syntax around it.
Although, language change starts at home. I imagine by the time today's children are 20
Re:Running naked on a pole.. interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Why the *FUCK* would I want to do that??
I really *shouldn't* be telling you this but....
There are rumors that, at the Pole, there are nubile virgin maidens ready to pleasure any
Re:Things to do. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm impotent, allergic to trees, and have lost the use of my right hand. Thanks for making me feel good.
Re:Things to do. (Score:5, Funny)
See kids.. that's what happens when you spend too much time looking at things you shouldn't.
Re:Things to do. (Score:3, Funny)
Yowza, I hope those 3 conditions ain't related...
Re:Things to do. (Score:5, Funny)