@SGTalon

I bought my wife one for Xmas a couple years ago - we had to 'roomba-proof' the house. It kept getting hung up on all the cables and wires and cords on the floor, then it would run up onto the lamp base and get stuck there. It got itself jammed under the kitchen cabinets. Now none of the dust gets into the bin -…

I was going to say some of the same things - especially about the anti-microbial effects of the wood cutting boards.

No, no no. It was a joke in Innocents Abroad. The reason I even brought it up was that I believed it myself until I googled it. If you can find corroboration. please let me know.

@etwarrior: I am not sure what your old saying was about:

Swamp coolers can only lower temperature by 20 degrees - Tucson would get up 113.

I think it was the ease with which carbs are converted to sugar and you feel hungry again sooner than when eating proteins/fats which take a little longer to be converted so you feel satiated longer.

In the US, buy your coke from your local bodega and/or buy your coke with a yellow cap on Passover(?) to get sugar coke. Most bodegas import their coke from Mexico and there is a prohibition against grains on Passover (again with the ?? as I am not Jewish).

I don't think seeing in the infra-red would help that much against the predators that already do that very well. I infer that finding a cave at night was an easier adaptation and more useful than seeing in the infra-red.

I think what puts us on top of the food chain is that we are about average at everything. Birds of prey can see detail sharper from further away; scavengers can smell more from further away; others run faster, hear better, et c.; our average is better than their weakest so we do not have to compete against their best…

When I worked at Lockhead, in the early 80s, they had a guard stationed across from the women's bathroom to keep track of the time spent in there. Eventually someone figured out that the cost of full-time guard at each ladies rooms was way more than the cost of time spent in the rooms.

When I worked at NOAA in the mid-80s, someone opened the crate that contained a canister of Ethanethiol (the Natural Gas oderant) - the canister was inside an airtight container inside another airtight container and yet it cleared half the building. Ethanethiol is so nasty it only takes a few molecules to be noticed

Right now I am unemployed - $10k would sure look good to me

Caltrop is the first thing I thought when I saw the opened tool. (I remember and curse the 4-sided die from my D&D days).

When I worked at NOAA, it was all the rage to print your name on a styro-cup and attach it to the outside of one of the submersibles. A 16 oz cup comes back about thimble-sized once all the air is removed. People ask how did you write your name so small?

Mark Twain joked that the Egyptians burned mummies as fuel for their locomotives(Innocents Abroad).

I have not ever been able to tolerate any of p.n. drugs - I fall asleep. They tell me to titrate up until the pain is gone but I never get to a point where i can stay awake long enough to tell if the drugs work (neurontinsa and nortripyline).

Unfortunately drugs do nothing for peripheral neuropathy - well, make that most pain drugs do nothing for p.n. There is a certain amount of associated pain that is dulled by pain drugs but the p.n. pain itself is always there. The only medication that works for me is distraction so I self-medicate with first person…

There is a group of Australian aborigines who do not use words for left and right - they always know what direction they are facing so any reference we would make for left or right would actually be a reference to the direction - eg. your north eye, look over your west shoulder. An ethnographer who worked with them…

And you can make a non-Newtonian fluid with it. You can grab the liquid and make it into a ball in your hand but as soon as you release the pressure on it, it will flow through your fingers