There have been hydrogen station explosions EVERY DAY since the first one blew up.

I can instantly light a log on fire with my ~2.5 x 3 ft Fresnel lense, and melt a penny within maybe 30 seconds to a minute. The delay is mostly from the fact that it's a big floppy piece of plastic that's hard to hold straight enough to focus. I bet you could melt some bronze or aluminum pretty easily with this!

If you mean the e-fuse, there was a lot of talk about how it "bricked your phone" if you loaded an unauthorized OS on there. What it REALLY did was that it kept the phone in a constant boot-check-reboot until an authorized OS was on there, at which point it worked just like normal. Not like the story above, which is discussing theft of phones, not jailbreaking them. (Then again you may be talking about something other than the e-fuse, in which case this post is totally irrelevant lol)

I wholeheartedly agree with this. While the education can certainly be better (not that it always is), most, but not all, of the homeschooled people I meet are just... off. Not all of them, for sure, but most. It seems to me that people have both a level of self confidence and a level of inhibition. Social experiences let you level those out- you need a healthy amount of both to survive. It seems to me that for a lot of homeschooled kids, they have a normal level of self confidence but none of the inhibition that comes from seeing how other people react to you- when you don't have a healthy peer group, it's hard to learn how to act normal.

But what is the cos of this insanity??

Virtually any time this is presented in a math book it's prefaced by "Figure out what goes in the parentheses to make this work". This is middle school math here- basically easing them into variables without having to explain how a letter can be ANY number. The summary just didn't include that instruction above since most people have seen that type of problem in middle school math texts. I say most because it was obviously confusing to some. The kids who were trying to solve this problem didn't get the whole "left side is the same as right side" thing, and instead (I assume) thought the equal sign meant "figure out what's on the left and write it to the right."

$50 is bettered than nothin!

The Columbia disaster happened while entering the atmosphere, which doesn't leave much debris in orbit.

Recycled paint chips, radioactive coolant, nuts, bolts, and that bag of tools that the astronaut lost that time *may* not have that much value in space. I wish it did, because if there was money in it then it would get done, but even if you find a giant block of gold up there how are you going to refine it? Not to mention just catch it in the first place- you'd have to match the orbit pretty well otherwise it would be going far too fast to catch. It's not like it's oh look at that rusty space toothbrush floating by, its more like a sharp piece of titanium moving at a billion miles per hour ripping up your satellites.

As some of the other posters have said, since "centrifugal" forces "technically don't exist" then no. What is perceived as centrifugal force is really the momentum of an object being acted on by the rotating vessel (in this case it would be the wall of the container). So while the rim experiences forces that look like forces pulling it to the center, the rubber band would not, since it's not rotating. However, the rubber band *itself* is rotating, so internally there would be "centrifugal" forces, which is where the peanut shape comes from.

No, it depends on how fast he was rolling. I think.

Of course their grades should be their concern. And my grades shouldn't be their concern. Sure, if just one person moves from a B to an A there isn't much effect, and no, I'm not a statistician. The fact remains that, in a given classroom of 30 people, there isn't a reason to force a curve on the grades. That's forcing a standard model on a system that doesn't necessarily follow that model- you have a group of 30 people who may or may not make up a statistically "average" group of people. I'll link to the wiki article that does a better job of explaining the shortcomings- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grading_on_a_curve From the article: "Conversely, if all students perform poorly relative to a larger population, even the highest graded students may be failing to meet standards. Thus, curved grading makes it difficult to compare groups of students to one another." So while curved grading might be very appropriate for grading *all* of the tests given in a standardized test across a whole state, saying that each and every single classroom should be graded on the bell curve will result in uneven comparison across classes." Another example: in my entry level engineering class from way back, there were about 50-60 students. Had they been graded on a curve, rather than on absolute performance, then a large number would have made it through. Since you weren't in my freshman engineering class, I'll just let you know that most of the people in that class were not cut out for an engineering major ;)

The bell curve doesn't necessarily represent a class full of students. Perhaps over a whole country, but almost certainly not in just one classroom. Why should the grades compare students to an arbitrary number of kids that happened to get in the same room? There are tons of other influences to the performance of the class. As an example, in one of my high school math classes I had a friend I was very competitive with. Because of this, I tried much harder in the class as a fun challenge between friends. If this means that both my friend and I get better grades, a bell curve would necessitate that other students were actually penalized by my extra efforts. Honestly, I would guess that the bell curve wouldn't start accurately describing students until you were at a state sized number of students- certainly not a classroom full and certainly not a single highschool full.

A slightly easier to remember version of that train of thought is to use a whole sentence- 'baconisgood' or 'ihaveacalculator' is made up of words in the dictionary, but the sentence structure won't be very easy to guess. Add capitals and punctuation to suit.

Might wanna reread the comment you quoted there...