The Off Topic Topic

[garbon]

I spent several weeks of my last job on twitter, I still don't have a firm grasp, though I've liked it for getting up-to-date local items. Sometimes you can get news before any media outlet has had time to put a piece together.

Wasn't the first report of the military action of whacking of OBL at his compound that night first reported by one of his neighbors in Pakistan?

Why would I know?

[derspiess]

Ah, garbon is playing Johnny from Police Squad.  Seedy: hand him a twenty.

[frunk]

Quick physics question: does the radiative cooling of an object moving at the near the speed of light operate on the object's clock or an outside clock?

Example: an indestructible watch is placed on the surface of a blue giant twenty light years from Earth the instant before it explodes in a supernova; the watch is accelerated according to Earth to a few meters per second below the speed of light.  When it arrives, has it experienced a few days of radiative cooling, or twenty years and change of radiative cooling?

I'm guessing since radiative cooling is blackbody radiation, photons being radiated by a warm object, it doesn't matter, since c is the same in all reference frames.  I guess my question is, is radiative cooling more complex than "excited electron emits photon" and therefore involves an element of time dilation?

The rate would be based on the reference frame of the object that is cooling.  To an external observer the cooling would be redshifted, way slower than they would expect for the object.  Think about if the reverse was true, an observer in the same reference frame as the .99999c object would see it literally explode with heat in their foreshortened time frame.

A useful shorthand for thinking about things like this is "For all objects traveling in the same reference frame at a constant speed, they won't really notice anything behaving differently unless they observe/interact with something external".

[garbon]

[FunkMonk]

Got a 98/100 on my accounting exam. 

Sorry just had to gloat. 

[jimmy olsen]

Is there anyone here not going to school for law or accounting!?   

[ulmont]

All the people who are currently working as lawyers, for a start.

[CountDeMoney]

Got a 98/100 on my accounting exam. 

What is that, like 98%? 

[MadImmortalMan]

Got a 98/100 on my accounting exam. 

What is that, like 98%?

It's a 2% discrepancy and maybe cause for an audit.

[Capetan Mihali]

I got a free T-shirt for the PD office picnic.  On the back is this year's slogan: "Confess To A Priest, Not The Police."

[FunkMonk]

Got a 98/100 on my accounting exam. 

What is that, like 98%?

It's a 2% discrepancy and maybe cause for an audit.

[Admiral Yi]

I got a free T-shirt for the PD office picnic.  On the back is this year's slogan: "Confess To A Priest, Not The Police."

Does anyone actually ever buy the interrogation line "tell us what happened now and things will go easier for you?"

[CountDeMoney]

ILKEEK-LEMEDUNG'I, Kenya — Crouching in the savannah's tall grass, the lions tore through the flesh of eight goats in the early morning invasion. Dogs barked, women screamed and the men with the rank of warrior in this village of Maasai tribesman gathered their spears.

Kenya Wildlife Service rangers responded to the attack, but without a vet, and no way to tranquilize the eight attacking lions and remove them from Ilkeek-Lemedung'I, a collection of mud, stone and iron-sheeting homes 25 miles outside Nairobi, not far from the edges of Nairobi National Park.

In the end, the Maasai men — who come from a tribe renowned for hunting skills — grew tired of waiting for the vet, said Charity Kingangir, whose father's goats were attacked. The men speared the lions, killing six: two adult lionesses, two younger lions and two cubs.

The lions had killed eight goats, each worth about $60.

The deaths Wednesday of the six lions came one week after residents from another village on Nairobi's outskirts killed a leopard that had eaten a goat. Last month KWS agents shot and killed a lion moving around the Nairobi suburb of Karen. And KWS said three lions attacked and killed three goats outside Nairobi National Park early Thursday. Rangers chased the lions back to the park.

Four days before the Maasai killed the six lions, KWS sent out a public notice pleading with people who encounter wild animals "to desist from killing them." Such animals are dangerous, it said.

KWS summed up the problem in a posting on its Facebook page on Thursday: "Do animals invade human space, or do humans invade animal space? How can we find tolerance for our wild neighbors? And how can we humanely remove them when they get a bit too close?"

As Kenya's capital enjoys a boom in apartment and road construction, an expanding population center is putting heavy pressure on Kenya's famed wildlife, especially its big cats. Nairobi National Park is the only wildlife park in the world that lies in a country's capital city.

Humans have killed about 100 lions a year over each of the last seven years, leaving the country with 2,000. Killing lions in Kenya is a crime, but Kenyans who lose livestock to big cats frequently retaliate. Lions, especially ones who leave Nairobi National Park, which is not completely fenced in, are at risk. After the killing of the six, KWS believes the park has 37 left.

As Nairobi continues to grow, small towns on its outskirts are cropping up and expanding, in part fuelled by the demand for low-cost housing from the city's working class.

Humans are settling in traditional migratory corridors that wildlife from Nairobi's park have long used to access the plains to the south around Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro, or to travel to Kenya's Maasai Mara in the country's southwest, said Peter M. Ngau, a professor in the department of urban and regional planning at the University of Nairobi.

The herbivores migrate from the park in search of pasture during the dry season and the carnivores follow, KWS official Ann Kahihia said.

"Unfortunately the carnivores do not know the difference between livestock and wild animals. Once they get livestock they just kill them," Kahihia said.

KWS Director Julius Kipngetich has said the human population in the Kitengela area, where the six lions were killed, was low in the 1990s but following the establishment of an export processing zone, where raw imported goods are made into products, the number of people living there grew dramatically.

The second biggest migration of animals in Kenya — the biggest being the migration between Serengeti National Park in neighboring Tanzania and Maasai Mara — was that of the wildebeests from Nairobi National Park to the Athi plains to Nairobi's east. But that migration has been squeezed because of human settlement, he said.

If parliament approves, the Kenyan government will start compensating those whose animals are maimed or killed by wildlife as an incentive to spare the attacking animals. KWS spokesman Paul Udoto said the government stopped compensation for wildlife attacks in 1987 after the program was abused.

Kipngetich said other ways of avoiding human-wildlife conflict is to fence parks and compensate at market rates people whose land may be used for conservation purposes.

Jackson Sikeet, who was present during Wednesday's killing of the lions, said the government should compensate the Maasai for the loss of the goats.

"Otherwise if they don't, this problem is going to continue every other time," Sikeet said.

[Capetan Mihali]

I got a free T-shirt for the PD office picnic.  On the back is this year's slogan: "Confess To A Priest, Not The Police."

Does anyone actually ever buy the interrogation line "tell us what happened now and things will go easier for you?"

All the time.  Most people are quite rightly scared shitless by an interrogation, or even some hard-hitting questions during a traffic stop.  After watching tons of DWI stop videos, I've seen people cave to that line all the time.  With DWIs and otherwise, half the work is finding a way in the law to overcome the confession or incriminating statement that's already in place.

[CountDeMoney]

All the time.  Most people are quite rightly scared shitless by an interrogation, or even some hard-hitting questions during a traffic stop.  After watching tons of DWI stop videos, I've seen people cave to that line all the time.  With DWIs and otherwise, half the work is finding a way in the law to overcome the confession or incriminating statement that's already in place.

Never ceased to amaze me how many people would let themselves get searched simply by asking them, even the street pros.  It's as if they think Jedi mind tricks would actually work, or that agreeing would be good enough for me.  Then again, even when I did find something on them, they were never their pants to begin with.

Never had too many DWIs in the city but back in my day, long before dashcams, you just had to hope somebody in the sector was free and close enough to assist as a witness, and you had to be specific as hell with your SFSTs.  If she stepped off on the 3rd step, say the 3rd step, right foot, etc.  She fucks up on the letter T, make sure that was in the statement of charges. 
Secure the car, call for the tow, and get them down to Central District ASAP, because that was the only District with a breathalyzer machine, and you had to get there before the breathalyzer tech went on his fucking lunch break,or that fucker would be gone for hour and a half.

Although I've decided that corporate security investigations and interviews are even more fun:  your average Accounts Payable schmuck downloading porn at work is shitting his pants well before you even start.