In addition to its great deals on bulk items , Costco also offers several services exclusively for members that could save you a bunch of money. We've heard about them before , but now we're taking a look at whether these services—like travel booking and auto insurance—are any good. Here's what we found.
A dog can be a loving companion, a goofy buddy, an exercise partner, and more, but dog ownership is also a lot of work. Training and caring for your pup requires time and money, and adopting a dog is a big decision that shouldn't be taken lightly.
We've all heard the tales of our cancer-causing cooking boxes we keep in the kitchen, but they really aren't dangerous to be around when they're running.
Your family probably has big traditions for things like holidays, but daily and weekly traditions can be just as useful for keeping your family tight. Meg Cox, author of The Book of New Family Traditions, recommends three types of traditions every family should have.
When a family members dies, the last thing you want to think about is their credit rating. But freezing their credit now may save you many hassles later.
With pumpkin carving season upon us, many dread the use of those dedicated, cheap-looking pumpkin carving blades. A study conducted with real human hands, however, suggests those dedicated pumpkin carvers are much more safe for the job.
It's not that hard to throw a sandwich together, but being more strategic in your sandwich layering strategy could make the difference between a sloppy sandwich and one that keeps its ingredients together as it should.
Having a mentor is a great way to gain experience and knowledge that's not easy to gain from formal education. Ironically, getting the most out of your mentor doesn't come with a handbook. So we wrote one.
If you stripped away all the rules of car racing and had a contest which was simply to get a human being around a track 200 times as fast as possible, what strategy would win? Let's say the racer has to survive.
Hunter Freyer
The best you'll be able to do is about 90 minutes.
There are lots of ways you could build your vehicle—an electric car,[1]With wheels designed to dig into the pavement on turns. a rocket sled, or a carriage that runs along a rail on the track—but in each case, it's pretty easy to develop the design to the point where the human is the weakest part.
The problem is acceleration. On the curved parts of the track, drivers will feel powerful G forces.[2]Which you can broadly call either "centrifugal" or "centripetal" forces, depending on exactly which type of pedant you want to annoy. The Daytona Speedway in Florida has two main curves, and if the vehicles go around them too fast, the drivers will die from the acceleration alone.
For extremely brief periods, such as during car accidents, people can experience hundreds of Gs and survive. (One G is the pull you feel when standing on the ground under Earth's gravity.) Fighter pilots can experience up to 10 Gs during maneuvers, and—perhaps because of that—10 Gs is often used as a rough limit for what people can handle. However, fighter pilots only experience 10 Gs very briefly. Our driver would be experiencing them, in pulses, for minutes and probably hours.
There's a good NASA document on the physical effects of acceleration here, and a particularly helpful chart in Figure 5 here.
But the most fun data comes from John Paul Stapp. Stapp was an Air Force officer who strapped himself into a rocket sled and pushed his body to the limit, taking careful notes after every run. You can read a great essay about him on the Ejection Site. The whole story is fascinating, but my favorite line is, "... Stapp was promoted to the rank of major [and] reminded of the 18 G limit of human survivability ..."
Stapp aside, the data shows that for periods on the order of an hour, normal humans can only handle 3-6 Gs of acceleration. If we limit our vehicle to 4 Gs, its top speed on the turns at Daytona will be about 240 mph. At this speed, the course will take about 2 hours to complete—which is definitely faster than anyone has driven it in an actual car, but not by that much.
But wait! What about the straightaways? The vehicle will be accelerating during the turns, but coasting on the straightaways. We could instead accelerate the vehicle up to a higher speed while on straight segments, then decelerate it back down when approaching the end. This would result in a speed profile like this:
This has the additional advantage that—with some clever back-and-forth maneuvering on the track—the driver can be kept at a relatively constant acceleration through the whole trip, hopefully making the forces easier to endure.
Keep in mind that the direction of the acceleration will keep changing. Humans can survive acceleration best if they're accelerated forward, in the direction of their chest, like a driver accelerating forward. The body is least capable of being accelerated downward toward the feet, which causes blood to pile up in the head. To keep our driver alive, we'll need to swivel them around so they're always being pressed against their back. (But we have to be careful not to change direction too fast, or the centrifᵫtal[3]Splitting the difference. force from the swiveling of the seat will itself become deadly!)
The fastest modern Daytona racers take about 3 hours to finish the 200 laps. If limited to 4 Gs, our driver will finish the course in a little under an hour and 45 minutes. If we raise the limit to 6 Gs, the time drops to an hour and 20. At 10 Gs—well past human tolerability—it would still take an hour. (It would also involve breaking the sound barrier on the backstretch.)
So, barring dubious concepts like liquid breathing, human biology limits us to Daytona finishing times over an hour. What if we drop the "survive" requirement? How fast can we get the vehicle to go around the track?
Imagine a "vehicle" anchored with Kevlar straps to a pivot in the center, reinforced with a counterweight on the other side. In effect, this is a giant centrifuge. This lets us apply one of my favorite weird equations,[4]See footnote [8] in article #86. which says that the edge of a spinning disc can't go faster than the square root of the specific strength[5](tensile strength divided by density) of the material it's made of. For strong materials like Kevlar, this speed is 1-2 km/s. At those speeds, a capsule could conceivably finish the race in about 10 minutes—although definitely not with a living driver inside.
Ok, forget the centrifuge. What if we build a solid chute, like a bobsled course, and send a ball bearing (our "vehicle") rocketing down it? Sadly, the disc equation strikes again—the ball bearing can't roll faster than a couple km/s or it will be spinning too fast and will tear itself apart.
Instead of making it roll, what if we make it slide? We could imagine a diamond cube sliding along a smooth diamond chute. Since it doesn't need to rotate, it could potentially survive more accelerations than a rolling ball bearing. However, the sliding would result in substantially more friction than the ball bearing example, and our diamond might catch fire.
To defeat friction, we could levitate the capsule with magnetic fields, and make it progressively smaller and lighter to accelerate and steer it more easily. Oops—we've accidentally built a particle accelerator.
And while it doesn't exactly fit the criteria in Hunter's question, a particle accelerator makes for a neat comparison. The particles in the LHC's beam go very close to the speed of light. At that speed, they complete 500 miles (30 laps) in 2.7 milliseconds.
Wikipedia lists about 850 motor racing tracks. The LHC beam could run the equivalent of a full Daytona 500 on each of those 850 tracks, one after another, in about 2 seconds, before the drivers had made it to the first turn.
And that's really as fast as you can go.
Police investigating two robberies near Shopper's Food in Manassas Inside NoVA Prince William police are investigating two armed robberies reported near Shoppers Square in the Manassas area this week. The first happened at 7:05 p.m. Oct. 10 on the 8200 block of Shoppers Square, Prince William police spokesman Jonathan Perok ... |
WJLA |
Prince William County community calendar, Oct. 16-22, 2014 Washington Post Manassas farmers market, 7:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Thursdays, Loy E. Harris Pavilion, 9201 Center St., and 7:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturdays, Parking Lot B, West Street (next to the train station visitors center). 703-361-6599 or www.visitmanassas.org. “Masquerade ... Suspect sought for raping teen in WoodbridgeW*USA 9 Northern Va. mom arrested on DUI, child neglectLa Crosse Tribune all 36 news articles » |
I really like the new BMW 228i but it is out of my price range. It would seem that a CPO 128i might be a good alternative. I have a budget of about $25,ooo and would be willing to use 5 grand for a down payment. However, I don't drive that much and I'm thinking that leasing might be an option. What should I do?
Dear Lifehacker,
I understand how useful it is to have a mentor , or someone whose experience I can benefit from. Once I've found someone though, how do I ask them? Do you just email them and ask, or is there a better way to make your case?
The next time your potential supervisor interviews you, listen to the pronouns they use to decode their management style—and avoid a potentially bad boss .
(News.au)
The family auctioned off their five-bedroom home for $2,060,000 Australian dollars this weekend, reports News.com.au, and ended up with a surprising offer for more money while the deal was in the process of closing.
It turns out one of the bidders’ daughters saw the family’s cat Tiffany hanging out around during one of the inspections, and fell in love with her. The mom had joked about including Tiffany in the sale, since “she believes the house is her property,” and apparently the little girl wanted to take her up on that.
The bidders upped their offer to $2.2 million as long as Tiffany came along, and the family has decided to agree to sell their pet. Because $140,000.
Not so happy, however, is the family’s 19-year-old son, who bought four-year-old Tiffany from a pet store.
“She was at the pet shop, the last of the litter, and he felt sorry for her,” his mom said. “We’re thinking we’ll put $20,000 in a pile next to the cat and say to Sam: you choose.”
She did add that it’s not an easy decision to sell Tiffany, saying, “It is quite difficult to part with her.”
Tiffany the cat is worth $140,000. No kitten around [News.com.au]
(YoAmes)
Police are mulling possible motives for the theft of 36,000 pounds of vegetable shortening after a tractor-trailer was reported stolen early yesterday morning, reports the St. Petersburg Times.
Another tractor trailer nearby with merchandise from an Amazon distribution center was also looted, cops said, with boxes opened and items taken. It’s unclear what kind of stuff the Amazon truck was carrying.
The Crisco sticks were believed to be headed to a Publix distribution center, but they now have a new fate, it seems, one that we can’t resist wondering about.
Is there going to be a huge pie party? A bake sale of epic proportions? More fried chicken than you can shake a whole lot of sticks at? Some kind of wacky, extreme Slip ‘N Slide competition? The world may never know, but my vote is for some combination of all of the above suggestions.
Semi with 18 tons of Crisco stolen in St. Pete [St. Petersburg Tribune]
Not Nigel. (Keith Allison)
His owner isn’t sure where he went or what the African grey parrot did while he was away, but apparently he came into contact with Spanish because that’s his new language of choice, reports the Daily Breeze in Torrance, CA. He also likes talking about someone named “Larry.”
He and his owner were reunited last week, after a veterinarian who’d been running ads for her own lost parrot was contacted by a grooming business that thought they’d found the missing bird at their house.
“I heard somebody whistling and saying, ‘Hello? Hello?’ ” said the grooming business owner, adding that the sound brought her to the door. No one was there.
It happened again, and this time she saw the parrot.
“I own a dog-grooming business so we put him in a little cage and brought him with us to the store,” she said. “He was the happiest bird. He was singing and talking without control. … He was barking like the dogs. I’m from Panama and he was saying, ‘What happened?’ in Spanish.”
She and her husband started looking for his owner, and spotted the vet’s ad. The microchip didn’t match her bird, leading her to track down Nigel’s owner in a bit of a complicated chase.
Nigel’s owner was surprised to find his bird after all those years, and it seemed Nigel was a bit surprised too — the reunion was a bit bumpy at first as the bird bit his owner at first.
Things are smoother now, his owner said.
“He’s doing perfect,” he said. “It’s really weird, I knew it was him from minute I saw him.”
Talking parrot missing for four years reunited with Torrance owner [The Daily Breeze]
