doesn't matter... they could still grip it by the husk stem

How big is Giant? and why am I now craving for a nice juicy peach. Any size ;)

I always wondered that about James and the Giant Peach. You know, Roald Dahl was a latent genius, so I wouldn't put it past him.

But since we are on geeky topics, let me put something out to THIS community specifically.

Do you ever wonder if we have some of THESE people [below, Astroturfing Internet Shills] here wandering among US?!

(rhetorical question, because other than flagging trolls-- and these people are trained not to "troll" per se, so they wouldn't be easily identifiable). The thought gives me pause because there was a time (was it about a year ago? About the time when Steve Benen took over MaddowBlog and brought a lot of new and unfamiliar faces into this community with him) when the Maddowfan poster/Troll ratio sort of exploded.

I know all these Benen enthusiasts trailed over with him, but maybe he brought his own set of trolls too. OR maybe some astroturfers used the opportunity to target this site and this forum.

Take a look at this article (before it gets taken down):

I Was a Paid Internet Shill: How Shadowy Groups Manipulate Internet Opinion and Debate

Some interesting quotes from it (and more links below, in case this one goes dead) (bold emphasis is mine):

If a poster wrote something close to "X," we were supposed to respond with something close to "Y." "You have to mix it up a bit, though," said my trainer. "Otherwise it gets too obvious. Learn to use a thesaurus." This section also contained a number of hints for de-railing conversations that went too far away from what we were attempting. These strategies included various forms of personal attacks, complaining to the forum moderators, smearing the characters of our opponents, using images and icons effectively, and even dragging the tone of the conversation down with sexual innuendo, links to pornography, or other such things. "Sometimes we have to fight dirty," or trainer told us. "Our opponents don't hesitate to, so we can't either."

The second binder was smaller, and it contained information specific to the web sites I would be assigned to. The sites I would work were: Godlike Productions, Lunatic Outpost, CNN news, Yahoo News, and a handful of smaller sites that rotated depending on need. [ ... ]

The site-specific info in the second binder included a brief history each site, including recent flame-wars, as well as info on what to avoid on each site so as not to get banned. It also had quite detailed info on the moderators and the most popular regged posters on each site: location (if known), personality type, topics of interest, background sketch, and even some notes on how to "push the psychological buttons" of different posters. [...]

"Focus on the popular posters," my trainer told me. "These are the influential ones. Each of these is worth 50 to 100 of the lesser known names."

Each popular poster was classified as "hostile," "friendly," or "indifferent" to my goal. We were supposed to cultivate friendship with the friendly posters as well as the mods (basically, by brownnosing and sucking up), and there were even notes on strategies for dealing with specific hostile posters. The info was pretty detailed, but not perfect in every case. "If you can convert one of the hostile posters from the enemy side to our side, you get a nice bonus. But this doesn't happen too often, sadly. So mostly you'll be attacking them and trying to smear them."

At first, like I said, my job was "meme-patrol." This was pretty simple and repetitive; it involved countering memes and introducing new memes, and didn't demand much in-depth knowledge of the subject. Mostly just repetitive posting based on the dialogue pairs in the "Strat" section of the first binder. A lot of my job was de-railing and spamming threads that didn't go our way, or making accusations of racism and anti-Semitism. Sometimes I had to simply lie and claim a poster said something or did something "in another thread" they really hadn't said or done I felt bad about this…but in the end I felt worse about the possibility of losing the first job I'd been able to get since losing my "real" job.

The "complex debate" part of the job involved a fair amount of additional training, including memorizing more specific information about the specific posters (friendly and hostile) I'd be sparring with. Here, too, there were scripts and suggested lines of argument, but we were given more freedom. There were a lot of details to this more advanced stage of the job – everything from how to select the right avatar to how to use "demotivationals" (humorous images with black borders that one finds floating around the web). Even the proper use of images of cats was discussed. Sometimes we used faked or photo-shopped images or doctored news reports (something else that bothered me).

Here's some other links:

Guardian: Astroturfing: what is it and why does it matter?

Alternet: Corporate-Funded Online 'Astroturfing' Is More Advanced and More Automated Than You Might Think

SmartPlanet: Online astroturfing gets sophisticated

Are peaches Migratory?

Regarding internet shills, I found the article interesting in that the purported shill writing the article went from apolitical on Israel to a supporter of Israel after promoting pro-Israel positions for 6 months.

Pharmaceutical companies have used a similar tactic to get doctors to promote their drugs. They hire doctors as "thought leaders" to give presentations to fellow doctors. The marketing target is the thought leader and not the other doctors.

http://ethicalnag.org/2010/10/31/is-your-doctor-a-thought-leader/

I wonder if these shill operations are sophisticated enough that they are targeting the shills and not the community the shills think they are targeting.

To a "die-hard" fan of AMC's The Walking Dead, the whole concept of the roach being truely "walking dead" is so poetic. It only makes me crave the return of the 3rd mid-season break of that amazing show.

BTW...

The parasitic wasp described here was the basis for Alien...

The alien's habit of laying eggs in the chest (which later burst out) was inspired by spider wasps, which are said to lay their eggs "in the abdomen of spiders." This image gave Dan O'Bannon nightmares, which he used to create the story. But spider wasps (pompilidae) lay eggs on their prey, not inside them, after which the wasp maggots simply snack on the sting-paralyzed spiders. O'Bannon may instead have been thinking of either ichneumon wasps or braconid wasps. The ichneumon drills a single egg into a wood-boring beetle larva, whereas braconids inject eggs inside certain caterpillars. Both result in fatal hatch-outs more alike to O'Bannon's alien.

Those wasps are the most perfect metaphor in nature for understanding how the private equity business works.

But if you don't know the EXACT weight if a Kg ( and therefore everything that relays on the Kg), how can you be sure that your 1g of water at 4c is really 1g?

Only way to be sure is to get an atom of known atomic weight do a bit of maths to find out how many atoms of that element = 1Kg and use nano-tech to construct a perfect sphere/cube using the precise number of atoms.

Construct a new one every few years and compare against the others to see if their is any change in density/weight/size etc...etc...

The DEFINITION of a gram is the MASS of one cubic centimeter of water at 4 degrees Centigrade. That is how they constructed the La Grande kilogram in the first place. The La Grande is convenient (used to be convenient?) since it does not need a refrigerator or a vessel to carry it in but if there is a problem with the standard kilogram any competent lab can pour 1,000cc of 4 degree water into one container and have an identical one to place objects in and make them balance to reproduce a 1kg weight as often as necessary. After that you can count the water molecules in the 1,000cc and set the standard kilogram as the number of water molecules in 1,000cc of distilled water.

It's rather unscientific to say that the light is powered by gravity.

The light is actually powered by human muscles, which must first provide potential energy to the system by lifting the bag of rocks. Then gravity converts the potential energy into kinetic energy in the form of electrical energy, powering the light or whatever else you plug into it.

The principle isn't much different from those radios that work from electricity generated from a wound-up spring. Or from a battery that is charged up a bit by the user first turning a crank. The power comes from human muscles. Which comes from chemical energy that we obtain from our food. Which comes from... you get the idea.

I don't really mean to nitpick, but these distinctions are important if we ever hope to educate the electorate sufficiently that they will stop voting for politicians who believe that evolution and earth science are "lies from the pit of Hell."