What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

(this is a hint)

The author of one of my favorite web comics, xkcd.com, takes a few minutes to hypothesize about what would happen if...

California designs a high-speed rail system

"Our business plan is predicated on having private operations after the initial system is built," [Dan] Richard [chairman of the rail authority board] said. "Turning the design of the system over to a private operator would have been a bad financial move for California taxpayers. SNCF's proposal was self-serving and not in the public interest."

California says that they know how to do it and don't need help from a world-class business that actually makes money in a country (France) that doesn't generally shy away from subsidizing businesses that can't make it on their own (Airbus and Minitel come to mind). 

Hmmm...  What could possibly go wrong.

(Click the articles' pictures to go to the original material.)

Directed Lightning Weapons!!

Very cool!

"If a laser beam is intense enough, its electro-magnetic field is strong enough to rip electrons off of air molecules, creating plasma ... The plasma channel conducts electricity way better than un-ionized air, so ... a high voltage source, the electrical energy will travel ...

You may want to register with this...

Granted that I'm not one of the most eager people to get on a list, but this one interests me.

This does not give me much hope... It's probably why I supported Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, just about anybody who wasn't Mitt (except Newt, who might as well be).

Someone's watching you -- and it might be a good thing...

from ArsTechnicaEthnic biases were found when the authors of an article in the American Economic Review compared baseball games with automated pitch monitoring systems vs those without.

"A black pitcher throwing a nonterminal pitch in the early innings of poorly attended games in a non-QuesTec ballpark gains over 6 percentage points by matching [the umpire's ethnicity] (41.4 versus 35.2 percent called strikes)."

They also found that pitchers would throw in ways that would take advantage of the bias... Hmmm... Who wouldn't?

The government wants to see if you'll be annoyed...

It seems that it's expensive to synchronize the frequencies between different sectors of the national power grid. And it's only going to get worse as we add 'green', 'sustainable' technologies like wind.

So, why don't we just not do it, see if people really do depend on their wall clocks to be accurate and then make a decision (or not) later to turn the synching back on later.

He said there are alternatives if people have problems from the test: The federal government provides the official time by telephone and on the Interne