Bungee Jumping seems stupider and more dangerous than many other thrilling activities I could name. I tried to search through the above to the physics answer as to how you knew you wouldn’t smack the underside of the bridge, and on this whole page so far, only TJ herself has even used the word “bridge”, and she used it THREE TIMES to describe the concern. Nobody else has used the word bridge since! I have to assume that although people can talk a blue streak, they simply don’t know. I sure don’t.

COMMERCIALS: Answered to death already.

SQUEAMISHNESS: The answer here is simple. The human mind is amazing and can adapt to anything. There are people who simply aren’t squeamish in the first place, but for the rest of us, there’s immersion. The stories told above confirm that even when you’re particularly apprehensive about a thing, with repetition it becomes mundane.

I used to work in a county jail. Day one, I felt an oppressive, choking stench when I walked in: The result of hundreds of men and women living in confined quarters without seperated restrooms, and rarely showering. It stank of sweat, of urine, and of apathy.

Day fifty, the smell had as much impact on me as the color paint of your office building has on most people. You might ignore it or look at it. You might wonder how it was chosen or how old it is. But you don’t really care.

The same could be said for other unpleasant aspects of life as a detention officer. At first I was terrified of having to break up an inmate fight. At first I was disgusted by strip-searching male inmates.

One new officer in our agency was squeamish. So when there was an event where a man blew his own head off, that officer was summoned all the way across the county so he could deliberately view the grisly remains.

When I was much younger, I used to obsess over the opportunity to see a naked woman — any naked woman. It seemed a magical and forbidden event that I personally might never experience.

As a married man, it’s pretty much a daily affair, and as anyone married — or thoroughly cohabitating — knows, nudity is not even as connected with sex as we might once have thought as children.

When you do something enough times, it loses any power it has over you.

3) When I was in Korea, the open air shopping malls always interested me. You didn’t go to an office supply store, you went to the pushpin store….the rubberband store. (I know, slightly off question, but your pushpin question made me think of the pushpin store.)

2) I think ‘dipped’ means different things depending on the process. I always heard dipped to mean cleaning the ring, but it apparently applies to the re-plating process as well.

3) Watch ‘How it’s Made’ on the Discovery/Science channel and you’ll see that similar products are made in the same factory.

4) Generally a little of both, I’m not a nurse, but I’ve been married to one for 4 years. They are generally not very squeemish by nature, and the schooling will quickly weed out those that are too squeemish to do the job. Even then you get odd circumstances like my wife being able to take care of critically ill patients and patients recovering from open heart surgery, yet I have to hold her hand when she gets her blood drawn.

You can wear your ring while doing anything, but when you pet the dog / wash the dished / take a shower (I thought you wore a mitten the whole time…) you build up crap in the holes. Dunk the ring in windex every few weeks and scrub it with a soft bristled tooth brush. It will clean all the crap out of the nooks in the ring and re brighten it.

Better yet… if you have an expresso machine you can just hold it under the steam jet thing… cleans it right up. Although if I had to bet money you don’t have one of those.

Like yesterday the big conversation piece was how much a aircraft carrier could cost (22 biljons during it’s whole life). And that lead to how many containers a container ship could carry (biggest: 11 0000 containers).

Wikipedia is da bomb!