The Urban Etiquette Handbook

Rules of the underground: (1) Knees may be no more than six inches apart. (2) If you can't control your offspring, watch as a stranger does it for you. (3) What did we say about checking out the girls? (4) The Post is only 25 cents—buy your own. (5) Holding the subway door makes everyone on the train love you. (6) As does loud music. (7) Lie down on subway only if dead.

Have You Ever started dating someone you met online, at wondered at what point should you take down/hide your personal ad? or wondered At what point in a flirtatious conversation should you mention you have a significant other? If so I suggest you aquaint yourself with The Urban Etiquette Handbook. 

Where you'll find all the answers you'll need, like this one.


When can you get together with your friend’s ex?  
The simple answer is never, for the sake of simplicity, good karma, and world peace. However, if you suspect this could be a case of Romeo-and-Juliet love without the suicide, there are certain requirements that should still be met:


• The statute of limitations has passed on your friend’s right to be possessive (three months for every year they were together). A man should wait longer to do the asking, not out of politeness to his ex but so he doesn’t come off as a dog. A woman can always pretend she needs a shoulder to lean on when what she really needs is a tumble in the hay.


• The uncontrollable feelings have been discussed in a considerate and sensitive conversation with the friend. Initiating said conversation falls to the pursuing friend, not the ex.


• The friend has moved on and is in a wholly satisfying, happy, healthy relationship.

or

What’s the best way to get someone off the treadmill/bike/elliptical when they’ve gone over the 30-minute limit?


Unless it’s a known repeat offender who feels like he owns the gym, face-to-face is the first course of action. Cardio-trainers can enter a trancelike state of intense Just Do It–ness that leaves them unaware of the time, and will be perfectly obliging when snapped out of their cardio-delirium. But if you ask and are rebuffed, it’s perfectly acceptable to notify the front desk, which is usually staffed by someone with intimidatingly large pectoral muscles for this very reason.

homosexuality not just for humans anymore

The Gay Animal Kingdom  
Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection—she's no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can't explain the homosexuality that's been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality—long disparaged as a quirk of human culture—is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.

Male big horn sheep live in what are often called " homosexual societies." They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males "effeminate."

Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in "penis fencing," which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.

what happens if robots turn out to be sexy?

what happens if robots turn out to be sexy?

THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a “code of ethics” for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.

Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now — before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.

“There are two levels of priority,” said Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month. “We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.”

Verruggio and his colleagues have identified key areas that include: ensuring human control of robots; preventing illegal use; protecting data acquired by robots; and establishing clear identification and traceability of the machines.

“Scientists must start analysing these kinds of questions and seeing if laws or regulations are needed to protect the citizen,” said Verruggio. “Robots will develop strong intelligence, and in some ways it will be better than human intelligence.
“But it will be alien intelligence; I would prefer to give priority to humans.”

The analysis culminated at a meeting recently held in Genoa by the European Robotics Research Network (Euron) that examined the problems likely to arise as robots become smarter, faster, stronger and ubiquitous.

“Security, safety and sex are the big concerns,” said Henrik Christensen, a member of the Euron ethics group. How far should robots be allowed to influence people’s lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented? And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy? “The question is what authority are we going to delegate to these machines?” said Professor Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Are we, for example, going to give robots the ability to execute lethal force, or any force, like crowd control?” The forthcoming code is a sign of reality finally catching up with science fiction. Ethical problems involving machines were predicted in the 1950s by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov whose book I, Robot was recently turned into a Hollywood film. The Terminator and Robocop series of films also portrayed mechanical law enforcers running amok.

Check it

Powers of Ten

Powers of Ten

Someone has put Powers of Ten online. If you've never seen it, I can't recommend it enough: Powers of Ten is a short film by Charles and Ray Eames. The film starts on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out 10x every 10 seconds until the entire universe (more or less) is visible. And then they zoom all the way back down into the nucleus of an atom. A timeless classic.

Also Check: The Powers of Ten Simpsons couch.

Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: 1811 slang dictionary  
The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue is a reprint of "the Lexicon balatronicum; a dictionary of buckish slang, university wit, and pickpocket eloquence (and now considerably altered and enlarged, with the modern changes and improvements, by a member of the whip club.)" It is available in full for free on Project Gutenberg, and it's mind-croggling, with definitions like:

CHOAK PEAR. Figuratively, an unanswerable objection: also a machine formerly used in Holland by robbers; it was of iron, shaped like a pear; this they forced into the mouths of persons from whom they intended to extort money; and on turning a key, certain interior springs thrust forth a number of points, in all directions, which so enlarged it, that it could not be taken out of the mouth: and the iron, being case-hardened, could not be filed: the only methods of getting rid of it, were either by cutting the mouth, or advertizing a reward for the key, These pears were also called pears of agony.

rock paper scissors remixed

rock paper scissors remixed  
Here is the Earth-swallowing 25-gesture game. This is it... You will notice that there is some branching going on with the arrows in the diagram. Trust me, you wouldn't be able to even get close to reading it otherwise. Thick lines branch out to thinner ones, and I've had to actually go around the outside of the circle for the smaller paths. I will be the first to admit that this game is just too complicated and you might get lost unless you really squint. By playing this game you agree not to hold me responsible for blindness, seizures, or let's face it, madness.

And now, even worse news: after days and days struggling to come up with a web of valid logic, one which has a potential of over 15.5 OCTILLION layouts (around 350,000 times more complex than a Rubik's Cube!), and which would include all 300 outcomes (non-tie) in a graphically pleasing cyclical layout.

Anyway, many of the ten new symbols are taken from popular sources. Remember the "NUKE-COCKROACH-FOOT" game from "That '70s Show?" Well, it's in here somewhere, where their "foot" symbol is now simply MAN or WOMAN here. I even added the much-maligned DYNAMITE gesture. So now you can blow up ROCK and SCISSORS all you like, as long as you don't mind being ENCASED by PAPER, and not being able to "cut wick of" SCISSORS as you might have elsewhere. Also, I stuck in a claw-gestured MONKEY just for fun (and poop flinging)!

All of these hijinx don't even include the SUN and the MOON, and AXE and BOWL . Each gesture beats out twelve gestures, and is beaten by the remaining twelve. And with that, there is now only a 4% chance of a tie, making this the ultimate decision-making game! Well, aside from flipping a coin, I guess.

Check it!
the Rules...

The Power of Chocolate... Sorta...

Chocolate generates electrical power  
Willy Wonka could have powered his Great Glass Elevator on hydrogen produced from his chocolate factory.

Microbiologist Lynne Mackaskie and her colleagues at the University of Birmingham in the UK have powered a fuel cell by feeding sugar-loving bacteria chocolate-factory waste. "We wanted to see if we tipped chocolate into one end, could we get electricity out at the other?" she says.

The team fed Escherichia coli bacteria diluted caramel and nougat waste. The bacteria consumed the sugar and produced hydrogen, which they make with the enzyme hydrogenase, and organic acids. The researchers then used this hydrogen to power a fuel cell, which generated enough electricity to drive a small fan (Biochemical Society Transactions, vol 33, p 76).

The process could provide a use for chocolate waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill. What's more, the bacteria's job doesn't have to end once they have finished chomping on the sweet stuff. Mackaskie's team next put the bugs to work on a production line that recovers precious metal from the catalytic converters of old cars.

Check it!