Try kissing boys?
What should a 25-year-old man do if he's never kissed a girl?
Day: August 1, 2011
Deano’s answer to: “How do you hula hoop?”
The easiest way to hoop is the simple waist hooping motion:
- stand in the middle of the hoop
- place the inside of the hoop against the small of your back
- place your dominant foot about a step ahead of your other foot, comfortably apart, no more than shoulder-length
- lean forward a bit, then push the hoop into a spin with your dominant hand forward (for right-handers, this will cause a counter-clockwise motion)
- gently rock back and forth between your two legs – NOT moving your hips/waist in a circle, but simply forward and back.
- The goal is to push back against the inside edge of the hoop as your weight is on your rear leg, and forward into it as your weight hits the front leg.
It can take a while to get used to, but the main key is to focus on that front-back rocking motion, and synchronizing with the hoop's rotation.
If you run into trouble, you may want to google "hoopdance", or perform a Youtube search on "hula hoop for beginners", for access to many straightforward video demonstrations like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o…
Good luck and good hooping!
Deano’s answer to: “In TRON: Legacy, how difficult would it be for Olivia Wilde (the actress who plays Quorra) to run around in her high heel boots?”
Theoretically? Impossible! In reality? Not all that hard. 
The photos still look pretty awkward, perhaps, so you might want to check out the video of one of the events: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f…
They're running pretty darn flat-out, with a minimum requirement of 3.5" heels on[*].
Quorra's heels don't look quite that high – and being wedges, they are probably much less fragile/dangerous than stilettos.
Thus, I would say that there's plenty of evidence that, with practice, Olivia Wilde could run quite easily in high heels – though the boots from her Tron: Legacy costume would be more challenging than regular daily-wear fashion stilts.
As Eunji Choi points out in her answer, if you're considering an actual run in the "real world", stilettos are probably your best bet all around, with stiletto boots leading the pack… One caveat – Quorra's wedge-style heels are going to have much greater potential ground-touch surface area, which will mean easier stopping once you're a skilled heel-runner. Also, the more heel there is on the boot, the harder it will be to accidentally break off (and when you do, broken boots will be the least of your problems).
[* Glamour ran a similar race in NYC, but the minimum heel was 2.75", hardly sporting! ]
Deano’s answer to: “Assuming you had a “super brain” (iq >1000) where everything you read just clicked in, how long would it take to amass enough knowledge to be able to build an iron man like suit?”
The other answers make several excellent points about the super brain's failure to reduce absolute R&D time on all the component parts of an Iron Man suit.
However, if a non-imprisoned Tony Stark wanted to make such a suit from his office under no physical duress, the tactics involved would likely be primarily the purview of his super-brain:
- Quickly generating a list of required components for the suit
- Identifying any components for which the technology did not exist
- Locating all of the patents, companies and people worldwide needed to create these "sci fi" components in the fastest manner possible
- Recruiting, purchasing, or licensing said personnel, materials, and organizations in a friendly manner
- Tricking/coercing any unwilling partners as needed by quickly determining their vulnerabilities and exploiting them
- And of course, all the while, sectioning off a small portion of brain activity to make the required financial investments and other business/social moves to generate the necessary funding and connections to pull everything off without significant competitor/government intervention.
Ultimately, whether you are a "regular" super-brain, or a comic hero like Tony Stark, you cannot actually invent/create everything on your own. Rather, you must use your "brain powers" to:
- manage a huge number of simultaneous initiatives at the highest possible levels,
- possess (and continually develop) a huge store of functional knowledge across almost every imaginable field,
- and quickly identify, vet, and persuade a great number of the world's best and brightest people to work on a challenge that in most likelihood cannot be fully or openly revealed to any of them.
Given this answer, it should be far less odd that Tony Stark is portrayed not only as brilliant, but also a party-loving playboy: super-brains make super-schmoozing that much more important and valuable. A lot of the most brilliant SV Tech CEOs could probably take a lesson from that.
deano.com 