Scientists Create 'Fastest Man-Made Spinning Object' 159
dryriver sends this news from the BBC:
"A team of researchers claims to have created the world's fastest spinning man-made object. They were able to levitate and spin a microscopic sphere at speeds of up to 600 million revolutions per minute. This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine and more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill. The work by the University of St Andrews scientists is published in Nature Communications. Although there is much international research exploring what happens at the boundary between classical physics and quantum physics, most of this experimental work uses atoms or molecules. To do this they manufactured a microscopic sphere of calcium carbonate only four millionths of a meter in diameter. The team then used the minuscule forces of laser light to hold the sphere with the radiation pressure of light — rather like levitating a beach ball with a jet of water. They exploited the property of polarization of the laser light that changed as the light passed through the levitating sphere, exerting a small twist or torque. Placing the sphere in vacuum largely removed the drag due to any gas environment, allowing the team to achieve the very high rotation rates. In addition to the rotation, the team observed a 'compression' of the excursions or 'wobble' of the particle in all three dimensions, which can be understood as a 'cooling' of the motion. Essentially the particle behaved like the world's smallest gyroscope, stabilizing its motion around the axis of rotation."
Jay Carney is all: (Score:5, Funny)
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Summary wtf (Score:1, Troll)
They were able to levitate and spin a microscopic sphere at speeds of up to 600 million revolutions per minute. This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine
wtf? Washing machines spin at 599.5 million rpm?
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What exactly do you think the word "times" means?
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My washing machine runs at 1500rpm for it's extraction cycle. But most typically run at 1200rpm which multiplied by 500,000 gives you 600,000,000
It's amazing what math does when you actually run the numbers and then take the time to look up the target measurement.
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I'm afraid we're being trolled. I bit, too.
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What rpm does it need to run to extract that apostrophe?
600,000,001
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This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine
Similarly, I could say "30 is 10 times more than 3". The summary didn't claim that the sphere in question spun 500krpm faster than a washing machine, but 500k times faster, which is another claim entirely (i.e. that a washing machine spins at about 1200rpm).
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The summary says:
This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine
Similarly, I could say "30 is 10 times more than 3".
30 times is 27 times more than 3 times. Amirite?
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If you're going to play that game, 30 times is 10 times times 3.
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Even if 'times' is equivalent to revolutions, there is no way it is equivalent to revolutions per minute. Unless you really suck at math.
Re: Summary wtf (Score:1)
"Times" does not equal RPM.
Consider for example:
"How many times did you boink your wife last night? Two? That's impossible!"
On the other hand the "more" in 500 times more is redundant and confusing.
Re: Summary wtf (Score:1)
"Dr. I feel that sometimed I am obsessive about precision to a pathological degree"
"How often do you feel that way? "
"0.0007 Hz"
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Epic math fail! 600 million / 500,000 = 7500. Actually no, epic simple arithmetic fail.
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Hey I know! (Score:5, Funny)
"A team of researchers claims to have created the world's fastest spinning man-made object."
A politician?
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BMO
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"A team of researchers claims to have created the world's fastest spinning man-made object."
A politician?
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BMO
A marketer or political consultant - if they had quantum numbers, well, they'd be quantum!
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Nope, a Fox news talking head.
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Nope, a Fox news talking head.
No, they are talking assholes.
They are assholes that have been taught to talk and migrated to the top of their bodies.
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That was disturbing.
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Nope, a Fox news talking head.
Because the right are the only spinners out there.
I love idiots like you. Pick a side that makes you feel good and root for them. Hate the other guy and watch as the other side ruins the country. It does not matter. You are a fool. Neither side wants an informed, empowered public. They want you watching "So you think you can dance" on the left and "Duck Dynasty" on the right. While they pass laws that they are immune from.
You here all the talk about how Washington has exempted themselves from the very law
No political jokes please (Score:2)
Syriasly
Re:Hey I know! (Score:5, Funny)
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"The founding fathers (in their graves)?"
Roger Williams and William Penn when Tea Party idiots claim that the US is a "Christian Country."
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BMO
Re:Hey I know! (Score:4, Informative)
>The founding fathers were Christians.
No, they were deists at best, which if you describe this to today's "christians" you'd get a horrified reaction as if they were (horrors!) Unitarian Universalists or ... atheists! Today's "christians" believe that God has a direct hand in the lives of everyone. This is in direct opposition to the "clockwork universe" view espoused by the Deists - "God set everything in motion and then abandoned the work to run on its own."
Which is the only thing that makes sense if you're going to write papers on logic and reason, like the founders did. If you have a god that is fiddling around with everything, where is the room for reason?
The Letter to the Danbury Baptists by Jefferson where he says "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. and the letter to the Touro Synagogue by none other than George Washington himself prove that the US is not a "christian nation" - that every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid..
I suggest you read them. They're even short enough for a 4channer to read.
http://www.tourosynagogue.org/index.php/history-learning/gw-letter [tourosynagogue.org]
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html [loc.gov]
Jefferson's version of the New Testament Bible only came to 40 pages, after ripping out what he described as nonsense. "I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines."
People who think that the "founding fathers" were "christian" in the modern sense of the word are wrong. Paine was an atheist and proud of it.
"Hell, the Anti-Federalists argued against the US Constitution because it didn't mention God specifically."
This is also just plain wrong. Rhode Island's history was that of a refuge from the theocracy and other bullshit in the Massachusetts colony, where they did things like hang Quakers. The Charter of 1663 granted to Rhode Island by King Charles II a "lively experiment" in religious freedom - you could be anything you liked and not have to toe the line of Christianity or /version/ of Christianity, for example (since the natives were clearly not Christian). This was basically because of the efforts of people like Roger Williams, who didn't see the natives with the disdain that much of the English did. Go read "A Key into the Language of the Americas" for that and "The Bloudy Tenent" for his assertion that a state church "stinks in the nostrils of God," which was also cited by Jefferson when crafting the First Amendment to the Constitution.
There was an unfortunate time when troops from MA would come into RI chasing "heretics" like Anne Hutchinson.
Because of this history, RI was a hotbed of anti-federalism by the 1780s One of the prominent anti-federalists was from my hometown of North Kingstown, RI - William West. It's because of him (he marched an army of 1000 into Providence to protest ratification in 1788) and others like him that Rhode Island was the 13'th state, the last of the colonies to ratify the Constitution. The point of the anti-federalists was to be anti-central-government, because people like William West saw central government as antithetical to religious freedom, among other things.
And I haven't even mentioned William Penn yet. When you're thrown into prison because of your religious views, you tend to come out of prison severely pissed off and wary of state religion.
Don't try to tell me history. This is my back yard.
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BMO
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I typed:
"40 pages"
Clearly I was wrong, I meant 46 pages.
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BMO
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To say most of the founders were Deists is a disservice to the Founders.
Of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention there were 49 Protestants, and two Roman Catholics. There were 28 Church of England, 8 Presbyterians, 7 Congregationalists, 2 Lutherans, and 2 Methodists.
Increasing "founders" to include scholars and writers of political thought and philosophy, many were professedly Deists (by word and deed), such as Paine, Franklin, Madison. Some were influenced by Deistic philosophy, even if they we
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The short of it is that to try and rewrite it and say "no no, they werent christians" is insulting to the many founders who were.
The problem is that various revisionists have been evangelical christians trying to hold up the founders as if they too were evangelicals.
And it's still happening, even here. You conveniently ignored the first few sentences where I differentiated between modern "christianity" and the "christianity" of the founders, which was nearly atheism. Indeed if you ask a modern "christian"
Re: Hey I know! (Score:1)
The deists of that time were probably analogous to the "I'm a spiritual person but I don't believe in any organized religion" folks of today.
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Which is why I brought up Unitarian Universalists.
They're as close to the Deists you can get in modern times.
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BMO
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Because I didn't let the troll get away with his nonsense and instead gave him a smack upside the head with actual facts.
Nothing kills trolls dead better than facts with references from reputable sources.
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BMO
DAMN! You guys beat me to... (Score:1)
...the politician jokes!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_drill [wikipedia.org]
"Modern dental drills can rotate at up to 800,000 rpm"
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No, it spins at 666,666 RPM. Yeah, I know, all dentists are sadists.
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No, it spins at 666,666 RPM. Yeah, I know, all dentists are sadists.
Sadist != Satanist
Though I suspect there is quite a bit of overlap.
Re:Dental drill, 600k RPM? (Score:5, Informative)
Are you telling me a dental drill spins at 600,000 RPM? I seriously doubt that. That's ridiculous, it would burn your teeth and anything else it touched. You wouldn't even be able to hear the high pitch whine of the drill at that speed.
I guess that depends who you ask Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] the speed of a modern dental drill is up to 800,000rpm - but the source cited only supports up to 400,000 rpm. these guys [dentalaegis.com] say somewhere around 350,000rpm and 400,000rpm - which seems to agree with the other product results turned up by a google of "dental drill rpm."
So -- if you're looking for a quick fake fact and you accept wikipedia as gospel truth - yeah, dental drills operate at over 600,000rpm - apparently the folks that sell dental drills say 300,000rpm to 400,000rpm is more realistic - still in the range of 1/1000th - off by a factor of 33% - but its PR speak.
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Well, 300000rpm would be 5000Hz, which seems to be about the right frequency of the noise made by my dentist's drill. I'm pretty sure dental drills are compressed air driven, so yeah, another factor of 2 or so is probably reasonably achievable.
Re: Dental drill, 600k RPM? (Score:3, Insightful)
600,000 RPM is 10,000 revs/s. Depending on the nature of the whine, the bulk of the energy may be at harmonics, but given anything short of absolute perfect balance and symmetry, there will definitely be some at the fundamental. Most people have no problem hearing 10 kHz, and many young people will pick up the first harmonic at 20KHz.
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Most modern dentist drills do not utilize gears, since at the speeds that dentist drills must spin, utilizing gears would induce far too much heat from friction, requiring that they be made much larger (and more massive) to dissipate the heat more effectively, and they would probably also be extremely vulnerable to seizing up and could be unreliable. For something that is essentially used as a surgeon's tool, both of these issues would be problematic, but completely avoided by a dental drill's design.
In
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more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill
Reading comprehension.
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It's not as fast as you think. Some angle-grinders hit 20,000rpm easilly. RC car and plane motors can be rated from 10k up past 100,000 rpm depending on the application and load. I question their claim of "The fastest spinning object ever created" as it would be extremely simple to purchase a $100, 100k rpm motor and hook it up to 10 to 1 gear... viola - a million rpms. I'm not sure how long the bearings would hold out but it'd definitely hold out longer than their spec of baking soda.
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scuse my shitty math. 1000 to 1 gear ration. lol
Re:Dental drill, 600k RPM? (Score:5, Funny)
I used to have a brushless R/C motor that would turn 65,000 RPM, and I decided it would be cool to try and make a VCR head turn 250,000 RPM.
It would spin like a top for over an hour, and made for one awesome display of 'look the fuck out' if you let it fall on edge like a wheel.
The gyroscopic force was crazy, it was hard to move it all. I would let it slide out of the bearings and land upside down on my table and then lift the table up slightly and make it crawl uphill and try and drive it around as it spun on the stub of the shaft.
My quest for 500,000 RPM ended rather abruptly as the bearing stuck and pulled the head and very unbalanced lower part (where the head used to be mounted that contained the bearing) out of my hand and it began tearing chunks out of whatever got in the way as it bounced around my room and I ran like hell!
I wish I had another VCR;)
(I'm not responsible for any injuries if you try this yourself)
Cheers!
lucky son of a gun (Score:2)
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I made pulleys out of aluminum and tried to use an o-ring as a belt, but it could not get enough grip to run the motor over 20,000 RPM, so I glued an o-ring around the motor pulley and drove the head shaft pulley directly. I just held the motor in one hand, and the VCR head in the other hand and used my toe to slowly run the throttle stick up on the R/C remote.
Getting the o-ring to stay on that way was kinda challenging, and fun too! As the pulley sped up it would expand and start to hula hoop, and eventual
Re:Dental drill, 600k RPM? (Score:5, Funny)
Per minute? You Americans use some odd units. The correct unit for dental drill rotational speed is Hurts.
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You owe me a beer, I just spilled mine laughing.
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Well done sir.
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And washing machines spun at over 30 trillion RPM! The dirt photons are removed with general relativity!
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Look at some earlier comments -- wikipedia was wrong according to their own citation.
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Okay, not specifically 600,000 rpm, but still pretty darn close, relatively speaking.
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Re: Thanks for the units, comparison man! (Score:1)
Obligatory XKCD (Score:1)
Today's XKCD is strangely applicable to the summary.
http://xkcd.com/1257/
They read the Patriot Act over Jefferson's grave? (Score:5, Funny)
n/t
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His body doesn't count as a man-made object, or this wouldn't have broken the record.
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His body doesn't count as a man-made object, or this wouldn't have broken the record.
Indeed -- we aren't discussing woman-made objects here.
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Indeed -- we aren't discussing woman-made objects here.
In Jefferson's era, men took all the credit and "man-made" certainly had to be the accepted phrase regardless of the gender that made it. In any event, he was a cooperative effort. Furthermore, he believed that we were endowed by a Creator, whose gender was commonly male. So. I think he qualified as "man-made" if you're willing to piss off the politically correct, which I certainly am.
While "man" was definitely the gender-neutral term at the time, I think he would have considered you a heretic to consider him "man-made" -- made in God's image by God, who while he spent time as a man, was God. He'd consider himself created, not man-made, no matter how much a humanist he was.
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just to play Nancy NoFun: Jefferson expected these kinds of abuses and advocated appropriate responses to it. That's why he's classified as an extremist by DoD these days.
I tried... (Score:3)
I spent most of the time I was reading the summary trying to come up with some really clever/sarcastic/funny comment (Electrons spin faster! -- um, no that's lame. I got it, if you spin it backwards, it just says "Paul is dead" in a chipmunk voice.)
But then I got to this:
The team then used the minuscule forces of laser light to hold the sphere with the radiation pressure of light — rather like levitating a beach ball with a jet of water. They exploited the property of polarization of the laser light that changed as the light passed through the levitating sphere, exerting a small twist or torque.
That is so indescribably cool I just had to let that stand on its own. There is so much physics wrapped up in this one experiment.
I'll just leave it at an obligatory XKCD:
Science, it works bitches. [xkcd.com]
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> I got it, if you spin it backwards, it just says "Paul is dead" in a chipmunk voice.
I dunno, I think that's pretty funny.
Backstory (Score:4, Interesting)
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I know the team member who first suggested this research. As a kid, he was obsessed with spinning tops, bicycle wheels and everything else he could find that spins really fast. Looks like that passion of his spun out of control as he grew older!
I could you could say it... spun out of control.
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I know the team member who first suggested this research. As a kid, he was obsessed with spinning tops, bicycle wheels and everything else he could find that spins really fast. Looks like that passion of his spun out of control as he grew older!
I could you could say it... spun out of control.
I did he did say that.
So Then What (Score:3)
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Probably a Pulsar or something like that.
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Re:So Then What (Score:5, Informative)
Well, once you get into the quantum mechanical realm, you can get things "spinning" pretty darn fast, though you require increasingly "nuanced" definitions of what "spin" means as you transition from the familiar world of classical mechanics to quantum-mechanical systems.
The magnetic moment of a proton in a 1T magnetic field precesses at ~2.7*10^8 Hz (which produces the signals that NMR looks at).
Put an electron in a 1T magnetic field, and it is precessing at ~2.7*10^11 Hz.
A proton's "intrinsic spin" of hbar/2, for an object with the mass and radius of a proton (~1GeV/c^2, ~10^-15m), would "classically" be equivalent to something spinning at hbar/(2*r^2*m) ~ 6.3*10^22 Hz. An electron has an intrinsic spin oh hbar/2, and a size of 0, "equivalent" to an object "spinning" infinitely fast... of course, at this point, it doesn't make much sense to describe the quantum mechanical spin as though it were a "classical" spinning object.
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definitions of what "spin" means
OK Bill...
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This isn't a subatomic particle, it's multiple atoms. The "spin" here is like a top spinning, not "spin" as when you're talking about subatomic particles.
You knew that, but people reading your comment might not have.
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The point, though, is that asking "what's the fastest spinning object" is a subtle question without a well-defined answer if by "fastest" you mean "rotations per unit time." You can move from a big, spinning ensemble of atoms, to a rotating diatomic molecule, to electrons "orbiting" an atom, to intrinsic spin in subatomic particles --- getting "faster and faster," but moving at each step from where the "classical limit" of quantum mechanics is a sensible description to where it isn't (and where "rotations p
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The "spin" here is like a top spinning, not "spin" as when you're talking about subatomic particles.
Of all the examples... At first I thought it was just strange, but I decided I wasn't down with the way you're trying to confuse people; those who want to get to the bottom of this can look it up, so don't expect to charm your way out of this one!
Not "manmade" object, but Chuck Norris is faster (Score:2)
Not trapped by radiation pressure (Score:4, Informative)
Optical trapping can sometimes make use of radiation pressure, but that's generally not how you optically trap a particle, nor is that how they did it. Radiation pressure is characterized by absorption and reflection (like tennis balls hitting a wall). To trap a particle, you use refraction (when modeling the system with ray optics).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers [wikipedia.org]
The change in index of refraction between water (or air) and your particle causes the light rays to "change direction" as they enter and leave the particle. There is a net momentum transferred to the particle in the direction of the focus of the laser beam, thus trapping the particle at the focus.
RLY? (Score:2)
This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine and more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill.
ORLY?
Obligatory xkcd: (from today, no less) http://xkcd.com/1257/ [xkcd.com]
Keep at it (Score:2)
Levitates like a beach ball? (Score:1)
Now I can understand that the BBC felt the need to fill the article with stupid comparisons [xkcd.com], but why can't the summary here just replace them with ellipses for the sake of the presumably more technical readership here? One would think that the typical slashdot reader would understand 600 Mrpm just fine and wouldn't need such twaddle as "This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine and more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill" for edification.
Yeah, yea
How did they measure it? (Score:1)
seriously, how do you measure 600 000 000 revolutions per minute on a microscopic sized ball?
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a teensy weensy sharpie mark along one side, of course.
Yes, but... (Score:2)
...will it drain all the mana in vicinity?
wtf? (Score:1)
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Yup. I saw it too in the byline and user Slashbox areas. Gone after a page refresh.
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It's been happening off and on all afternoon.
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When I was home for lunch today slashdot went down, giving a blank page right before I went back to work, butt it worked from work.
Someone called with a computer problem last night; his computer froze. I told him how to restart it and he called 20 minutes later saying his facebook account was locked because of an unauthorized entry attempt and I had to explain that his account (probably his computer, he's an idiot) had been hacked. Possibly coincidental but strange anyway.
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No, it explains that you wasted some poor teacher's time.
Re: Like My Head (Score:1)
We don't understand why a sick bird of prey would be relocating to the US.