The recently completed Campos Novos Dam in southern Brazil failed last week to contain the water in its reservoir, releasing all the water impounded behind the 626-foot (202-meter) tall structure.
Campos Novos is the world’s third tallest dam built with a concrete face filled in with rock. Switkes says this design has become increasingly common in recent years for very high dams.
I HATE IT when that happens. Let’s hope the Three Gorges Dam has better luck!
You’re playing Texas Hold’Em. ~ Which of the following has the best chance of winning?
Jack-10 suited (e.g., a Jack of diamonds and a 10 of diamonds)
Ace-7 unsuited (e.g., an Ace of spades and a 7 of clubs)
Pair of sixes
The answer, to nobody’s suprise, is: it depends! ~ The absolute probability that you will win obviously goes down if you are playing against more opponents with randomly-chosen cards, just because there are more ways they could beat you. But, much more interestingly, the ordering of which hand is best also changes.
What happens if, instead of putting one of these three hands against some other random cards, we put them up against each other, two at a time?
Sixes are likely to beat A7, and A7 is likely to beat JTs, but JTs is likely to beat a pair of sixes. It’s a kind of combinatorial rock-paper-scissors situation.
1. Find the Big Dipper and the North Star, as shown on the face of your Star Clock.
2. Face the North Star, as shown on the front of the clock.
3. Hold your Star Clock so the current month, ~ is AT THE TOP.
4. Turn the smaller disc until its stars line up with those in the sky.
5.. Read the time in the window.
Sky Wheel with more constellations
I’m an engineer. I decided to approach weight loss as an engineering problem.
Bob Bickford, computer and video guru, defined the true essence of the hacker as “Any person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent limitations.”
You don’t need a computer to use The Hacker’s Diet; easy-to-work paper and pencil methods are presented in the book. But if you have a computer with Excel or a PalmPilot, the companion tools may save you time and provide more insight into the engineering underpinning of the methods described in the book, while producing an illustrated log of your progress.
Every pixel in this illustration represents one person alive on Earth. The first one is you. The rest is everyone else.
The population of Earth as of June, 2006 is just over 6.5 billion, so that’s how many pixels there are.
I saw Al Gore’s movie. Now I’m concerned about high levels of CO2 in our atmosphere.
I want to avoid all the hype, and actually learn something about Climate Science. Not only that, but I want to learn Climate science from climate scientists.
That’s why I’m anxious for the TV Special “Global Warming” to Air July 16, 2006.
I want to start from a base of facts that we already know. For example, everyone knows that the Gulf Stream is the source of Europe’s mild climate. How will high levels of CO2 change this?
While it seems McDonald’s Interactive is doing something productive, I worry that some of the cures will end up being worse than the disease.
Mayflies date from the Carboniferous and Permian times and are the oldest of the extant (still living) winged insects
“Fly fast, mate quickly, die young.” If mayflies had a motto, that would probably be it. That’s because these elegant insects have among the shortest adult lives of any insect.
In some mayfly species, summer emergence of winged stages is a sudden and dramatic event that occurs almost simultaneously throughout the entire population. These mass emergences are often regarded as a major nuisance. The insects are attracted to city lights and blown inland by the wind. Their dead bodies pile up in drifts on porches and windowsills; they plaster car windshields and slicken highways. Europeans are often more sanguine than Americans about mass emergences — in some communities the dead insects are diligently gathered up, dried, and sold as bird food, fish bait, or fertilizer
In northeast Iowa, they even show up on National Weather Service radar.
My name is Kyle MacDonald and I traded one red paperclip for a house. I started with one red paperclip on July 12 2005 and 14 trades later, on July 12, 2006 I will trade with the Town of Kipling Saskatchewan for a house located at 503 Main Street.
Availabot plugs into your computer by USB, stands to attention when your chat buddy comes online, and falls down when they go away.
Big Horn is a rolling masterpiece, ready to dazzle your mind and intrigue your imagination. With a Verdin Bell carillon, Tangley Circus Calliope, 55 antique steam whistles, 46 air whistles, 18 train, boat, submarine and truck horns, 4 ships horns including – the world’s largest air horn, 21 fire alarms, emergency, railroad trolley, fire truck and train bells, 2 US Navy destroyer steam sirens, one diaphone fog horn, 175 feet of multi functioned neon lights in red, white, blue, green and purple, twenty-two high-powered strobe lights, accessory compressor and an air operated cockpit door, 164 cfm rotary screw compressor with 200 gallons of air storage capacity, billowing smoke machines, 300 amps of audio power, wireless PA system, remote control for audience participation, 66 electronic and mechanical gauges, 7500-watt Onan generator, a 2500-watt Heart inverter and seven 1450-amp batteries as used in the space shuttle