The very many questions-not-worth-their-own-thread question thread XXIV

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Well for me it's that doing water polo has turbocharged my metabolism and I fear once I stop doing it for the winter I'll gain a bunch of weight.

Oh, yeah, that's a big problem a lot of sport people face. They stop playing, but they don't stop eating.
 
Oh, yeah, that's a big problem a lot of sport people face. They stop playing, but they don't stop eating.

Best thing to do is to continue doing similar exercises and wean off over the next couple months as you also reduce how much you eat. Figure out what muscle groups are being worked the most while playing/training for water polo and find something that can be done during the winter that's similar.
 
Does the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco branch in Los Angeles have hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold bullion?
 
How do you overcome Humean skepticism?
 
What ever happened to Fort Knox?


Still there. The US government stores a lot of gold there. But so far as I know the only place the Federal Reserve stores gold is New York. But most of the gold held by the Fed in New York does not belong to the US government. The gold held at Fort Knox does belong to the US government.

Main article: 33 Liberty Street

A public competition for design of the building was held and the architectural firm of York and Sawyer submitted the winning design. The bank moved to its current location in 1924.[6] The Federal Reserve Bank of New York maintains a vault that lies 80 feet (24 m) below street level and 50 feet (15 m) below sea level,[7] resting on Manhattan bedrock. By 1927, the vault contained 10% of the world's official gold reserves.[6] Currently, it is reputedly the largest gold repository in the world (though this cannot be confirmed as Swiss banks do not report their gold stocks) and holds approximately 7,000 tonnes (7,700 short tons) of gold bullion ($415 billion as of October 2011), more than Fort Knox. Nearly 98% of the gold at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is owned by the central banks of foreign nations.[8] The rest is owned by the United States and international organizations such as the IMF. The Federal Reserve Bank does not own the gold but serves as guardian of the precious metal, which it stores at no charge to the owners, but charging a $1.75 fee (in 2008) per bar to move the gold. Moving the bars requires special footwear for the staff, to protect their feet in case they drop one of the gold bars weighing 28 pounds (13 kg). The vault is open to tourists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank_of_New_York#Move_to_33_Liberty_Street

The United States Bullion Depository, often known as Fort Knox, is a fortified vault building located adjacent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, used to store a large portion of United States official gold reserves and occasionally other precious items belonging or entrusted to the federal government.

The United States Bullion Depository holds 4,578 metric tons (5,046.3 short tons) of gold bullion (147.2 million oz. troy). This is roughly 3 percent of all the gold ever refined throughout human history. Even so, the depository is second in the United States to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's underground vault in Manhattan, which holds 7,000 metric tons (7,716 tons) of gold bullion (225.1 million oz. troy), some of it in trust for foreign nations, central banks and official international organizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bullion_Depository
 
What's the purpose of dedicated slug guns? I know that there are some areas where rifles are not allowed for fear of overpenetration and range that could send the bullet flying into someone's home or body in the distance, but otherwise rifles seem superior in every way.
 
Rifles are superior. But by the same token, they are often too much so. Some people might just prefer the challenge of something which isn't effective to a mile range. Legal limits on the use of them are either because the risk to bystanders are too great, or for the purpose of reducing the range in order to prevent over hunting.

In Connecticut, for example, there's essentially no place you can stand that is beyond .308 range of somebody's house. So even though deer are getting pretty thick on the ground, allowing rifle hunting presents some significant danger to bystanders.
 
What's the purpose of dedicated slug guns? I know that there are some areas where rifles are not allowed for fear of overpenetration and range that could send the bullet flying into someone's home or body in the distance, but otherwise rifles seem superior in every way.

Dedicated slug guns? I think you're onto it already. High "thump" power at close range. It'll kill a deer since it's a solid and big enough projectile, but it won't penetrate a ton of stuff nor will it carry for miles(which rifles will. Even a .22 caliber can easily travel a mile and a half if it doesn't hit anything and you shoot it somewhat upwards). Accuracy will suffer over distance, but at a certain point carrying distance becomes more of a liability than accurate shots over long range are. Illinois, for example, where a lot of hunting takes place in relatively occupied areas, requires you do not hunt deer with high powered rifles. People will choose slugs instead. In northern Minnesota, where population density isn't an issue, people will tend to choose rifles for the effective range.

I don't know that I've seen a ton of guns that are designed to only shoot slugs, though. That would seem to be an antipersonnel urban weapon at first glace to me. Police might use them too for something heavier than a sidearm but without the "this thing shoots through entire houses" liability a rifle might bring. My shotgun has two interchangeable barrels(it's not super nice, but it functions). One barrel has a choke on the end to control a pattern of shot to be effective at a certain range(such as when shooting at birds or clay pigeons). Without some form of choke a shotgun firing shot tends to have the pattern scatter too fast to be very useful. However, since the choke narrows the barrel near the end it would be a very bad idea to shoot a solid slug through it, as the slug would fit in the barrel near the breech but be too large for the barrel at the tip, hence the slug barrel(no choke) I can attach instead if I want to shoot those. Cheap slug barrels will be smooth bore while nicer ones will have some rifling on the inside of the barrel, something totally useless when firing shot instead of slugs.
 
Ken Burns has some pretty good ones that are also popular. Or are you looking for a specific topic?
 
Ken Burns has some pretty good ones that are also popular. Or are you looking for a specific topic?

I guess either history or nature documentaries. Last Sunday I was told how only the BBC has the money to make documentaries, and so I mentioned the Discovery Channel. I got laughed at, and then told that Americans don't know how to make documentaries, saying that they always get an over-dramatic narrator, constant looping over the top music and bad, cheesy special effects.
 
Well, Ken Burns does mostly American history, so not sure if they'll care. His The Civil War is fantastic, but it uses a lot of period music to blend together the montages of still pictures so I'm certain that if they are truly dedicated to the proposition of not liking it, they'll find a way whether it makes good sense or not.
 
Nothing your "friends" say ever seems to have any value or friendliness, chukchi.

Can you recognize a pattern when you see it?
 
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