Comments on: Free thoughts

By: Gary Ansorge

Gary Ansorge — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:04:27 +0000

LArian:
Bureaucracies remind me of Robert Heinliens definition of a committee:

“The only beast known that has 100 bellies and no brain,,,”

GAry 7

By: Gary Ansorge

Gary Ansorge — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:56:54 +0000

Larian LeQuella:

One might note that the best thing about:
Bureaucratis Impedicus:
,,,is that it actually impedes bureaucrats from doing ANYTHING,,,which insures they don’t succeed in doing anything STUPID as well,,,

Gary 7

By: Daniel J. Andrew

Daniel J. Andrew — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:15:42 +0000

Quite agree, John. It was a crackpot website. I do recall (not first hand experience, I assure you )the end of the world worries about passing through a comet’s tail earlier last century—it must have been Haley’s comet as you point out. There was a bit of panic but some unscrupulous (wily?) entrepreneurs sold antidotes to the coming poison. These “comet pills” were a huge success and the must have worked because most people who took the pills were still alive after the earth went through the tail. Of course, so were most people who hadn’t taken the pills too, but why wreck a perfectly good piece of cherry-picked data.

By: Davidlpf

Davidlpf — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:52:44 +0000

@Larian Lequella, my work blocked JREF, reason education.

By: John Phillips, FCD

John Phillips, FCD — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:13:28 +0000

Daniel J. Andrew, there are a number of problems with this ‘worry’. If the cyanogen given off could even actually penetrate the earth’s atmosphere there is not enough to do be a danger and the closest it approaches Earth is ~38 million miles so would be very diffuse at worst. So I don’t think we need worry, do you Earth has actually passed through the tails of other even larger cyanogen bearing comets in recent history, such as Haley in 1910 without effect. Though some people had the same worries about the possible cyanogen danger back then as well. Science.nasa.gov has more info.

By: Larian LeQuella

Larian LeQuella — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:10:03 +0000

Thanks folks. It’s a daily struggle I have to deal with. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t just be glad that I got passed over for promotion and am now forced to retire (don’t get me going too much on that saga). I guess I couldn’t keep my logic and reason hidden in order to make it through the system.

At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so “utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream.”

Wow, another person in the AF that sounds reasonable!? Where they heck are they?

Funy Story: I work in weapons development. So one time I was looking over a new non-lethal capability, found some interesting studies, only to find that the sites were blocked because they contained… get this….

weapons.

Uh… okay?

If you really want to hear more retardery, feel free to drop me a line sometime. Although it may make you lose all hoe for humanity. Bureaucratis Impedicus thrives.

By: Daniel J. Andrews

Daniel J. Andrews — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:02:46 +0000

Off-topic: Phil, could you write a blurb about this backward green comet named Lulin that is heading through our system? From the basic news sources, it suonds interesting—and I did find one blog (bad blog) that suggested since the comet is throwing out cyanide the earth will come in contact with this interstellar cyanide cloud which will herald in another grand extinction event, and then they tied that in to past extinction events. They also concluded this was probably part of the future doomsday astrological planetary alignment scenario….did you cover poisonous comets in your Death from the Skies book? )

Come to think of it, this blog might be a good argument why we should ban blogs afterall. There, brought it back to On-topic. )