h a l f b a k e r yThe mutter of invention.
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In the sport of curling, one person throws
a heavy stone along a lane of ice, and two
teammates sweep rapidly with brooms to
temporarily heat up the ice and thus
adjust the trajectory of the stone. A
senior team member, the "skip", guides
the efforts of the sweepers.
Instead of brooms,
give the sweepers laser
pointers. Your standard laser pointer
won't have much of an effect, which raises
the number of required sweepers, possibly
into the hundreds. So assign half of the
surrounding stadium to each team, equip
them all with laser pointers, and you have
a highly collaborative and somewhat
frantic sport.
The skip, standing near the apex of this
mayhem, is at risk of blindness and
possibly even spontaneous combustion.
So, in a reversal of standard curling, the
skip is the most dispensable player on
each team.
[link]
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piss on the ice. carling black label all round. |
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I like this. I recommend switching to black ice. |
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I don't think I like curling very much but I think the fact that maybe the skip might blow up or go blind might make the sport more entertaining. Kind of like NASCAR. Croissant. |
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Of course, there is the problem of aim. One person can aim a laser pointer just fine, using visual feedback from looking at the bright spot. A few thousand jiggling bright spots will remove this feedback. This phenomenon was demonstrated in Mythbusters when trying to recreate the theory that Roman warriors used the back sides of their shields to reflect sunlight and catch a ship on fire. |
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Everyone sure seems to love MythBusters. |
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All of a sudden I'm starting to like curling more. Despite [World]'s comments. |
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MythBusters is lovely because it porports
to be about semi-scientific debunking, but
it's primarily a showcase for the pyromania
of those involved. That is, at the end of
each "experiment", they invariably try to
blow things up. |
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Which is why we like it. Sadly, it seems to be more or less the public's only shared access to raw experimentation (or really any experimentation, or science for that matter). |
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I shall examine this MythBusters of which you speak. |
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"a few thousand jiggling bright spats will remove this fedback" |
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Well, that's easy - put scopes on the laser pointers. And some way of holding them steady, and a well positioned switch...
This event could be easy to sneak a gun into... |
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The sweeping heats up the ice??? Wow, I thought the point of it was to remove ice skating grooves and slush left by the previous skaters, making the ice smoother. I had no idea! |
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//I thought the point of it was to remove ice skating grooves and slush left by the previous skaters, making the ice smoother.// |
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Um, why doesn't each team dedicate one member to skating around behind the thrown stone, chipping and creating misleading grooves? Or half the audience could do the same thing by concentrating their beams, of course. |
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