Dumb and Stupid Quotes Thread: Idiotic Source and Context are Key.

[r16]

They could be reverse-engineered. But it would take some time to get the people up to speed on how to do it. And much of the infrastructure would have to be recreated as well. Battleships were immensely expensive in their day. They'd be far worse now.

in a similar vein , there's this old rocket (fuels ?) specialist in some aviation site who maintains that the capacity of his former employers to do some specific type effectively ended when he and a colleague of his left . For some two years or so no AMRAAMs were delivered because of some issues with the propellant and due to narrowsness of the base of expertise nothing could be done .

as for the infrastucture , ı vaguely remember some oil company needed very large diameter pipes for a line and the steel companies could not do it . Until the discussion came up in a pub and coincidentally one of the lower level engineers knew a foreman who knew such people and that the material was collecting dust in a warehouse . My re-collection that whether those pipes ended in Iraq as the barrels for Bull's latest gun is even more vague .

 

[Cutlass]

"A lot of people think that all of us used to be gorillas...The evolution crowd...If we were the original apes, then how come Harambe is still an ape, and how come he didn't become one of us?...If we were baboons, if we evolved from that, what happened to them? Why didn't they evolve? How come they got stuck still being idiot gorillas and stuff, and we got to be humans?"
—

Rush Limbaugh

 

[Dachs]

"We just blew £183 million on a five inch gun, but it's 'good value for taxpayers'

The Ministry of Defence have just splashed out on a £183 million contract for a FIVE INCH gun - claiming it's "good value for taxpayers". The weapon - which is the length of a toothbrush - will be placed on combat ships that are still in the factory."

- headline on a story in the Daily Star yesterday that confused the caliber of a weapon with its length

The story has since been corrected.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

"I live on a continent because its more stable than an island."
-TotoCatcher, comment on "The Saddest Olympic Celebration", The Atlantic

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Not how genetics works...
"The idea is that you take a gene, say for pig noses, or ostrich anuses, or aardvark tongue, and you paste that into a human sperm, a human egg, a human zygote. A baby starts to form. Developmentally, the baby is mostly human, but it has an aardvark tongue, a pig nose, and an ostrich anus. That makes for difference––bodily difference, and surely metabolic difference, but it also makes for a version of ourselves that is based on collage, so it is literally gene collage. What’s weird is once you get that started, if it stabilizes, if you can find partners, if you’re still fertile, if you’re still into it, you go ahead and reproduce, then you’ll have children who are born with ostrich anuses and aardvark tongues and pig noses."
-Adam Zaretsky, interview in "The Limits of Diversity", The Atlantic

 

[FriendlyFire]

"We just blew £183 million on a five inch gun, but it's 'good value for taxpayers'
The Ministry of Defence have just splashed out on a £183 million contract for a FIVE INCH gun - claiming it's "good value for taxpayers". The weapon - which is the length of a toothbrush - will be placed on combat ships that are still in the factory."
- headline on a story in the Daily Star yesterday that confused the caliber of a weapon with its length

The story has since been corrected.

How do you get the caliber mixed up with its length ?
This is why you should go full metric instead of trying to use both systems at the same time

 

[Bugfatty300]

The Ministry of Defence have just splashed out on a £183 million contract for a FIVE INCH gun - claiming it's "good value for taxpayers". The weapon - which is the length of a toothbrush - will be placed on combat ships that are still in the factory."

- headline on a story in the Daily Star yesterday that confused the caliber of a weapon with its length.

That still doesn't explain how a £60 gun ends up costing £183 million.

 

[W|M]

Not how genetics works...
"The idea is that you take a gene, say for pig noses, or ostrich anuses, or aardvark tongue, and you paste that into a human sperm, a human egg, a human zygote. A baby starts to form. Developmentally, the baby is mostly human, but it has an aardvark tongue, a pig nose, and an ostrich anus. That makes for difference––bodily difference, and surely metabolic difference, but it also makes for a version of ourselves that is based on collage, so it is literally gene collage. What’s weird is once you get that started, if it stabilizes, if you can find partners, if you’re still fertile, if you’re still into it, you go ahead and reproduce, then you’ll have children who are born with ostrich anuses and aardvark tongues and pig noses."
-Adam Zaretsky, interview in "The Limits of Diversity", The Atlantic

Must be playing too much Spore

 

[r16]

That still doesn't explain how a £60 gun ends up costing £183 million.

and don't forget the ships still in the factory ...

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Must be playing too much Spore

Or not nearly enough late 90's strategy games.

Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. For instance, we can in theory splice the native plants' talent for nitrogen fixation into a terran plant.
Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Nonlinear Genetics"

 

[Cutlass]

How do you get the caliber mixed up with its length ?
This is why you should go full metric instead of trying to use both systems at the same time

It's worse than that. Because in this system "caliber" can be used both as a measure of diameter, and as a measure length to width ratio. So for example a formerly common US Navy gun was a 5" 38 caliber.

 

[AppleDumplingHead]

"We just blew £183 million on a five inch gun, but it's 'good value for taxpayers'

The Ministry of Defence have just splashed out on a £183 million contract for a FIVE INCH gun - claiming it's "good value for taxpayers". The weapon - which is the length of a toothbrush - will be placed on combat ships that are still in the factory."

- headline on a story in the Daily Star yesterday that confused the caliber of a weapon with its length

The story has since been corrected.

This. is. hilarious. It's my favorite thing I've read all week. Here's the original.

http://imgur.com/2Q30cT6

Someone owes me a new pair of sides.

 

[Arakhor]

What would we ever do without the good old Daily Fail?

 

[shadowplay]

What would we ever do without the good old Daily Fail?

Obligatory link to Daily Mail-o-matic: http://www.qwghlm.co.uk/toys/dailymail/

 

[The_J]

Not how genetics works...
"The idea is that you take a gene, say for pig noses, or ostrich anuses, or aardvark tongue, and you paste that into a human sperm, a human egg, a human zygote. A baby starts to form. Developmentally, the baby is mostly human, but it has an aardvark tongue, a pig nose, and an ostrich anus. That makes for difference––bodily difference, and surely metabolic difference, but it also makes for a version of ourselves that is based on collage, so it is literally gene collage. What’s weird is once you get that started, if it stabilizes, if you can find partners, if you’re still fertile, if you’re still into it, you go ahead and reproduce, then you’ll have children who are born with ostrich anuses and aardvark tongues and pig noses."
-Adam Zaretsky, interview in "The Limits of Diversity", The Atlantic

Why not? I mean it's a gross oversimplification, but it's sort of how it works.

 

[warpus]

There is no ostrich anus gene though. There is no 1:1 correspondence between genes and traits.

 

[The_J]

I work with DNA every day (at the computer).
You take a gene (or multiple; if you can find them), which are responsible for a trait (not necessarily an anus), and you implement it in an organism.
If the organism produces asexual, there's not even a need for a partner, and for sexual reproduction, yes, you still need someone who's compatible (which shouldn't be a problem with single genes; whole chromosomes would be though). The trait also needs to be beneficial enough to be retained, but you can force that in too.

EDIT: Yes, the phrasing of the quote is terrible though. Goes fishing for emotions, nothing else. And that's bad, obviously.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Your new Science-Advisor-apparent, America.
"If I were loosely gathering topics of study into categories, I might call them arts, religion, scholarship, and science. As important as scholarship and science are, arts and religion are more important. Those were my main goals (my wife’s, too) in educating our two boys, who are now both in their 20s. Arts and religion define, in a sense, a single spectrum rather than two topics. And this spectrum is where you find mankind's deepest attempts to figure out what's going on in the universe. A student who doesn't know the slow movement of Schubert's B-flat major op post sonata, or the story of David and Absalom, needs to go back to school and learn better."
-David Gelernter, 'There's Enough Time to Change Everything', The Atlantic

 

[Kyriakos]

Your new Science-Advisor-apparent, America.
"If I were loosely gathering topics of study into categories, I might call them arts, religion, scholarship, and science. As important as scholarship and science are, arts and religion are more important. Those were my main goals (my wife’s, too) in educating our two boys, who are now both in their 20s. Arts and religion define, in a sense, a single spectrum rather than two topics. And this spectrum is where you find mankind's deepest attempts to figure out what's going on in the universe. A student who doesn't know the slow movement of Schubert's B-flat major op post sonata, or the story of David and Absalom, needs to go back to school and learn better."
-David Gelernter, 'There's Enough Time to Change Everything', The Atlantic

Nice that he inserted "art" too there, when he just means religion.
And how is "scholarship" a category alongside art, science, and even religion? Even if one supposes he tried to mean "art, as in just liking art, religion as in practicing religion, scholarship as in all university degrees, and science as a career in science but not in academia" it sounds very dumb and problematic, and generally indistinct from what someone would say if they are confused.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

My thoughts exactly. The artcle contains more of his "wisdom", such as declaring that America should have intervened in Iran's 1979 revolution immediately followed by saying war is bad. Did I mention the part where he says atheist parents don't raise their children with a strong moral compass?