With 2 hands. You have to to be able to hold the darn thing.

dammnit haxer, you stole the joke out of my hands

Tools #86 and #87 should have been "extendable handle for right-hand" and "extendable handle for left-hand."

I guess the old adage "Jack of all trades, master of none" would be an appropriate by-line for this knife.

Wouldn't that make one heck of a gag gift, though? 

Gotta be quicker on the draw there. lol


Nice


I guess it would if you are into spending that much on a gag gift. (It would be a Bill Gates gag gift)

Someday I wanna get you guys gifts like that just to raise a smile. 

you will definitely get one here.

I think I'd have a beatific 'i could destroy the WORLD with this thing' grin on my face :p

A fun exercise; buy me the knife, then see how far i can walk with it in public before SWAT teams abseil from the rooftops and take me into custody for having such a tool. At least there's plausible deniabiliy - 'i just use this thing to illuminate blackboards and clean my golf club faces!'

Speaking about SWAT teams, there was this major shootout about a mile from my apartment here in Salt Lake City last night.  Someone went crazy at a mall and just started shooting everybody!  I've gotta check the news this morning and see what the final body count is.  Tragic   So close to home, too.

Wow, that's one of those reality checks. One minute you haven't a care in the world and the next you hear that something like that has happened so close and think about how random (I don't know if that is the right word for it.) life actually is.

I like to think the world is roughly deterministic - that is, if you built a quantum computer, you could figure out the next state of the world based on the current state of the world, so random isn't quite right...

Chaotic?

chaotic is good, but I don't personally think you could ever determine the state of the world in the future. To do that you would have to factor in human behavior which is entirely to complex to ever account for.

I'm a major proponent of chaos theory - it's all about entropy, right?

Speaking of entropy - Asimov's favorite story of his own authorship:  http://infohost.nmt.edu/~mlindsey/asimov/question.htm

Very interesting read!

The main reason the world would not be deterministic is because of Heisenberg's Law (or whatever it's called), which states that at some level there is true, utter randomness.

However, the human brain isn't really much more than a bunch of particular molecules arranged in a specific way with lots of little electrical impulses being stored and shot around - at least in my worldview. Assuming you can capture all the physical information about a person's brain and what they are seeing around them, you can problably calculate their next frame of thought. ymmv.

I thought Heisenberg's principle was something like "The more you try to study something the more you perturb it," - specifically in relation to studying electron cloud densities in atoms - the more detail you try to get, the more you interfere with the system and thus ruin the observable data.

Personally, I believe we'll never be able to completely map the brain.  Working very close to neurobiologist, if they can trap the neuronal activity of one neuron via patch-clamp experiments, they're pleased.  Unfortunately, that means either cracking open someone's skull to access the neuron, and the patch-clamp usually screws up whatever it's used on.  There is just no way to quantify which neurons are contacting which other neurons, how frequently they fire, what their resting and active potentials are, and how they grow new axons in response to various stimuli.  As a biological scientist, I believe this to be completely impossible, even with technology 10,000 years down the road.

Thusly, I used to believe in a deterministic hypothesis, but absolutely refute the notion now.  There are just too many variables, and infinite number of variables.

That said, the science that gets the closest to predicting human behavior is classical psychology, which I usually scoff at because it's so "black-box" - it's a science based on assumptions and observation, but you can never really know what's going on it someone else's head - you can only infer it based on what you see.

I have got to agree with you there. I recently read a very interesting lecture Michael Crichton gave about global warming that basically said the same thing, that we can't prove global warming because there are too many variables. If you want to take a read, the article is here: http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html