for the physicists

[Thoth]

You're right

FTFY.

Who's DL are you anyway?

[Ramo]

That's not useless Ramo! When the poles stop spinning or are going to shift or whatever, you can use your knowledge to help us figure out where the nukes should be set to get it spinning properly again. (I did not see this in a movie... at least not a movie that wasn't so horrifically bad that I didn't subconsciously repress the memories of seeing it.)

Convection in the outer core is extremely poorly constrained, so we're pretty ****ed as far as trying to engineer, much less predict, the Earth's magnetic field. And I'm not the person to ask. My research didn't deal with the outer core (except as a boundary condition for the basal heating of the mantle). The equations that govern that system are a much more complicated business, and there's not a lot of seismic data to tell us what is going on (even the chemical composition is pretty mysterious). The most we can do is look at past behavior of the Earth's magnetic field over a limited region of the Earth and over a very coarse temporal resolution. Which is pretty useless.

[Mint]

FTFY.

Who's DL are you anyway?

Driver's license?

Waterproof, hence "Duck," tape was invented to keep ammunition crates dry in WW2. Look it up.

[Aeson]

Duck and duct tape have both been used to describe the stuff... and if Ramo wasn't such a whiney ass, either could probably help out on the mission to the center of the earth to blow up nukes and save us all from GLOBAL CATASTROPHE.

[Drake Tungsten]

Waterproof, hence "Duck," tape was invented to keep ammunition crates dry in WW2. Look it up.

Urban legend...

[Thoth]

Driver's license?

You know better than that Kidiculous.

Waterproof, hence "Duck," tape was invented to keep ammunition crates dry in WW2. Look it up.

I did.

The other view is that "duct tape" is the original term, since there are many documented uses of that term which pre-date all documented uses of the term "duck tape" for the adhesive-backed product, and that there is no written evidence supporting the WWII story.[16] Some proponents of this view accept the idea that there was an earlier non-adhesive "duck tape", but claim that people have just confused the similar pronunciation of two similar but unrelated products through the process of elision, and that the rest of the "duck" etymology is folklore or fabrication. This view was summarized most notably in a Boston Globe article by etymologist Jan Freeman, also in March 2003.[17]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape#Etymology

pwnd.

[Aeson]

Duck tape is a brand name, and possibly the original name J&J gave the stuff. No one seems to really know though, since the earliest recorded mentioning of the stuff was over 20 years later. Perhaps if Ramo really would like to do something useful in his career, he can change his studies towards determining the original name of the tape.

I propose we just use gaffer tape though, it doesn't leave a sticky residue when removed anyways.

[Mint]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape#Etymology

Nice of you to leave out the first paragraph.

Regardless of its origin, the fact that there is such a thing as Duck Tape makes your correcting of Heraclitus' usage wrong, which was exactly my point.

"pwnd."

[Ramo]

Duck and duct tape have both been used to describe the stuff... and if Ramo wasn't such a whiney ass, either could probably help out on the mission to the center of the earth to blow up nukes and save us all from GLOBAL CATASTROPHE.

Global catastrophe

It has to happen before we're saved by teh Jesus.

[Aeson]

So you're saying Jesus is an outer-core-convectionolologist with nukes?

[Drake Tungsten]

PRINCETON, NJ—A new report compiled by the Institute for Advanced Studies stated Monday that, aw, you probably wouldn't be interested and who really cares to begin with. "After careful analysis, our research indicates that it's not like any of it would matter to you people anyhow," said Dr. David M. Klein, one of the principal authors of the report that was pretty much just a big old waste of everyone's time. When pressed by reporters for at least a hint of the Institute's findings, Klein stated, "Well, it involves bosons, which, as it turns out, interact with—see, none of you are even listening anymore."

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/report_ugh_no_one_would

Exciting.