j-beda

I kept thinking about how much all that money weighs! Each bill is 1 gram, so ten thousand $100 bills (which is a million bucks) weighs 10,000 grams = 10 Kg = 22 pounds. Seven million would be 154 lbs. That's pretty heavy for a backpack. That's way heavy for two gym bags.

Perhaps it is an over-generalization to say that a single parent always works twice as hard as an individual half of a two parent family. A more accurate statement might be "Parenting can be very difficult, and sharing responsibility with someone else for the raising of a child can be much less difficult than doing it completely alone." I have been fortunate enough to have a pretty secure home life both financially and socially, with kids who have presented very few challenges so parenting has been relatively straightforward, and yet I feel that my spouse takes significant weight off of my shoulders in terms of parenting. I am fairly confident that they feel similarly. I doubt we split things 50/50 - I feel they do more real "parenting" than I do - but if either of us was out of the picture, the other would need to do more. It might not be twice as much more, but it would be more. I also suspect that even if the remaining spouse did twice as much more, our kids would benefit less than they get now. With all that said, we do not see each and every interaction between Mike, Stacey, and Kaylee. What we have seen does have a taste of entitlement on Stacey's side, but how much of that is "real"? One of the strengths of this show is its ability to show some of the ambiguity of inter-personal interactions: how people can do awful things even with good intentions, or how people's past can poison their interpretations of the actions they see others take. Mike feels incredibly conflicted about almost everything in his life. Stacey's life is not without challenges. Pretty much the only thing we see them interact with each other are their relationships with Kaylee. Even without the strains of shift work at a stressful job or dealing with killing your drug-lab construction crew, my friends and families seem to come up with plenty of drama over work, children, school, and all sorts of "unforgivable" statements and actions. I find it perfectly believable that Mike both resents Stacey for asking for his help and at the same time feels guilt for not being more helpful and involved. Stacey in turn can feel guilty for relying on Mike as much as she does and resentful for him not being more involved in their lives, while at the same time being grateful for his company and irked by his presence. At its best, BCS is able to show all of these sorts of contradictions. Or maybe I am just projecting....

The following is extremely rough and hand-wavy, but not totally unreasonable. My distant memory from doing chapter problems from Jackson are that magnetic fields drop off with the cube of the distance (dipole fields at reasonable distances), so 40 feet would have fields something like 1/40^3 compared to fields at 1 foot, so a factor of around 1/640. The voltage of the electrical power at that exit sign is something like 120V, while the cell phone battery is around 3v or 6v, so you might think that at the same distances, the exit sign has fields that are something like 20 or 30 times as strong, so given the distances involved, one might think that the Exit sign would have a smaller effect. Think again! The fields are not a function of the voltage, but rather a function of the current. Incandescent bulbs at 100W have about 1 Amp of current running through them, while cell phones transmit around 1-3W, giving currents in the 1 to 2A range for 3-6V (which seem absurdly high for hand-held electronics). So at similar distances, they seem to be giving similar fields, but at the 40 foot distance, the closer source would be much more important. But of course, none of this makes any sense, since a disconnected battery has zero current flowing, and thus creates zero magnetic field beyond any intrinsic magnetism of its component parts. Magnetic fields from incandescent bulbs powered by 120V AC wiring are difficult to measure at 40 foot distances since they are so small, but they are still way bigger than zero.

The vast majority of life insurance policies will pay out after a suicide if the policy has been in place for more than a few years. See http://www.insurancequotes.org/life/the-truth-about-suicide-life-insurance/ for example.

I think Dunce Cap just "signed off on" the pouring, and wasn't the person who actually poured it. So killer pays off the people doing the actual pouring, and they do it late at night so nobody else will see the body, unaware that they should have waited until the pipes were laid before pouring, while foolish dunce cap just said "sure, go ahead" when they arrived to do the job in stead of checking the schedule to see if it was OK to do the pouring.