Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[None]

we had a somewhat isolated thunderstorm over in salt lake yesterday

MASSIVE torrential whiteout conditions on the freeway, inches of standing water

and people are just flying by at like 50mph without their lights or hazards on while I'm blinking along at 25mph

and you couldn't see more than four or five car lengths ahead and they're just crossing lanes and pulling trailers and by GOD they just have to get their 8pm Swig or so help them

and, uh, Utah doesn't get rain like this and nobody knows how the fuck to drive in it

god, the drivers here are horrible. i conclude they are only Really Fucking Nice People if they're trying to sell you something (the new New Testament, pesticides, essential oils, etc) and you can't sell stuff from your $70,000 Tesla or F150 on the freeway so fuck you very much get out of the way so i can get me some Good Christian Chick Fil A and a 32oz noncaffeinated soda

[pisskop]

I love all wheel drive.  I understand why people drive the way they do when its slippery and poor visibility, but just the confidence that have 4 tires that charge through the snow/rain is gorgeous.

That said, people are crazy.  Im not at all afraid of overreaching, taking risks, or my own ability.  Im afraid of other people driving.  Much like the internet, you can never convert or account for them all.

[hector13]

I'm sure those in hurricane areas will think nothingburger, but we got 4" of rain (100mm) last night over the course of about 4 hours.  My yard flooded as it often does.

The WTF:  I have a spot of wet carpet in my basement.  In the middle of the floor only, so not seeping in from the walls. Crap was it seeping up from a crack in the foundation? Nope: water coming in from the ceiling.  But only a single tile... and this tile is "in the middle" of the room, underneath the upstairs.

There is a vent that exits onto our deck, which I never knew its source.  The wind must've pushed the rain into the vent, because the duct to which the vent is connected is full of water, and that is leaking int my basement.

Now I have to figure out... to what does the vent go? Can I just plug it up?  It's a soft vent line, definitely not part of HVAC... but I can't tell where it goes.

Do you have a shower in your basement? Or, perhaps more specifically, anything requiring an extraction fan? Stove or a dryer or something?

[Maximum Spin]

god, the drivers here are horrible.

A friend of mine often makes a very good point about places where the drivers are reputedly bad: when everyone there routinely gets home all right despite the chaos, that proves the drivers are really good (in being able to manage it), not really bad. Utah's traffic accident statistics show that it's working out fine for them.

[Frumple]

Why, they only have about twice as many fatal accidents as Massachusetts, which has the best lethal rates in the nation. Utah, 11th in the nation for fatal accidents, must be doing something right!

... wait, no, that doesn't actually preclude them from being horrible drivers, it just means about 4/5ths of the US is worse.

Note to self, though. Drive through mississippi as little as possible. What the actual hell MS.

[McTraveller]

What people forget about all wheel drive is it primarily gives you a benefit when you are trying to accelerate or maintain speed.  All cars already have "all wheel braking" and "all wheels involved in steering."

To follow up from earlier: Best I can tell is that strange vent line is connected to the cold air return of my HVAC system.  I'm trying to figure out how to confirm.

[Frumple]

air spray, maybe? Give it a spritz on one end and see if it stinks up the other.

E: That feeling when you're really sure someone is dead, but. They're not. I could have sworn I saw news Tim Curry died a year or three ago, but no, guy's still around.

Latest KSBD had me think of 'em, Princess is now rocking what's almost an inverted Frank N Furter getup, which mixed with the hair is, just... Curry for Princess VA? Maybe.

[Grim Portent]

Less of a WTF, more a 'huh, neat but disturbing,' but I found out about African Spiny Mice* and their ability to autotomise their skin when grabbed. Which is to say it falls off like the tails of many lizards do, or the limbs of invertebrates like crabs. Leaves a big wound, but they also regenerate their skin at quite a rapid pace.

I don't know how much skin they can shed it terms of depth but it's enough to include cartilage, sweat glands and hair follicles. If that's the case, then I think they shed their skin down through basically all the dermis at least, which is kind of mental.


*Which are not mice. Apparently their closest relative might be gerbils.

[pisskop]

imagine how many prey animals could escape an alligator if they could just shed the skin on the hind leg at will

[EuchreJack]

imagine how many prey animals could escape an alligator if they could just shed the skin on the hind leg at will

None?

[Eric Blank]

I don't think shedding skin will help you much when the predator has its teeth dug into your muscles or bones

Now if terrestrial vertebrates had like eight legs and they could pop off like lizard tails and then grow back, that might help. But then we'd just have more predators that specialize in ripping legs off and booking it with them.

[Egan_BW]

Okay but what if the skin detachment action is explosive. Then you could detonate your explosive reactive skin and blow the predator's jaw clean off.

[hector13]

… and yourself with it.

[Eric Blank]

Okay, but the likelihood of life developing shaped charges that don't blow your leg clean off, or launch bone shards into your guts, is low to nil. And what's to stop a zebra's legs from blowing up if it, say, jumped off a short ledge or simply after jumping into the air and landing again? If the pressure to trigger the chemical reaction isnt high enough, it could trigger in day-to-day life, and if its too high, predators that crush bone will be selected out but predators that just cause evisceration or use venom will take over. Or just frighten the prey into blowing its own legs off. Or worse, trigger the evolution of intelligent predators sooner, that just wack them in the leg with a stick from a safe distance.

[Egan_BW]

What evidence do you have to support the theory that evolution would be unable to develop safe biological ERA provided the correct selection pressures. Which is consciously activated, not through pressure, duh.