Tony Yarusso's Blog

Well, I'm doing the second portion of the ride today (and hoping some of you might get a chance to swing by the route or finish line), and after that will probably be resting as I work a full shift at Erik's tomorrow. Therefore instead of a real post today you just get a brain teaser, which should keep you occupied until Tuesday or so I hope.

Here it is, a self-referential multiple-choice test: http://www.drunkmenworkhere.org/170

While I was on my way to work today (approximately 9:40 AM), I noticed an unusual clustering of vehicles on County Road F, where the railroad crossing is, in Vadnais Heights. There were about seven company trucks from the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and maybe nine or so police vehicles, including the large Mobile Incident Command RV. I couldn't see anything obvious to explain it as I went by, but clearly something big was going on. There were still a few folks around when I went home (6:30 PM), partway up the tracks from the road, possibly working on something. Did anyone see on the local news what happened? I'd be almost inclined to guess that there may have been a derailment, but I didn't actually see a train anywhere, and I doubt it could have been taken care of all that quickly and the last train before this morning should have been at about 11 last night, which seems too long. Hints or speculations anyone?

So I was thinking, fingernails are much easier to cut when they've been wet, right? While I know they're not exactly the same, I figured in some ways bones are pretty similar to nails. Now, considering our bodies are mostly water, that could potentially be important. Thankfully it's not often that we're subjected to cutting-type forces like nail clippers, but more often bones are subject to impacts and misconfiguration. Given the increased pliability of a wet nail, I wonder if that sort of effect actually makes our skeletal structure hold up to those kinds of things better than it would otherwise. If that's true, it's a pretty cool adaptation, imo. Now, given that water content in organisms came before skeletons, how do you suppose something like that would evolve? Just by chance that it happens to work well, various types of materials and keeping the one that held up, or something else? Anybody know more about bone makeup to know if they are in fact affected by water saturation? I know a fully dry bone will crack easily, but that could be from other factors as well, or a similar, but ultimately unrelated process.

So I recently found out that there is a ridiculously easy way to circumvent MySpace's privacy "protections". You know how normally folks can mark their profile as "private", or allow viewing their profile, but not their friends or comments? Well, apparently MySpace is pretty lazy about it, and just uses some CSS tricks to hide parts of the page. If you use Firefox, all you have to do is view the page without interpreting the CSS, which can be done by clicking View > Page Style > No Style in the menu, then visit the "hidden" page you want to see. When you're done, you can just turn the formatting back on.

Note: You can also accomplish the same thing by using a browser that doesn't interpret CSS ever, such as links2.

Yet another reason I'm not missing the MySpace account, eh?

[Edit: It appears the hole has been patched now, actually - perhaps from a spike of attention? Let us know if you discover any new open ones!]