Taxable interest is a line-item on the 1040. It's not treated as "investment income."

Well, most retirement accounts (IRA, Roth, 401(k)) won't trigger a Schedule D, so it's only if you're investing outside of that, which many people may not need to.

Both my kids actually have sound soothers that are programmed to play white noise to muffle background sounds.

Last spring I was watching 'Uncle Buck', a John Candy movie that features multiple car backfires, and I commented that it was an aging joke because it's something you never hear. The next day a car backfired driving by my house, and I've heard a couple since then. I had to laugh at the coincidence, but I also wonder if maybe we tune them out rather than they never happen.

I'm sure I'd recognize it, but I'm struggling to actually pull that sound out of my memory--it's just gone. What's still there, though, is the sound of an older Macintosh ejecting a disk. That one has stuck with me.

I still hear that sound at least weekly. Durango, Colorado has a thriving narrow gauge railroad that runs between here and Silverton. Runs from downtown up into the mountains several times every day. My little girl is nuts for it so we ride occasionally and go out of our way to see it drive by all the time.

I've had good luck with that, too. I'd say over the past couple of years the ratio is about 20:1 for Pandora:Radio in terms of useful recommendations. One of my main problems with the radio is even when I hear something new that I like I either 1) miss who the artist was in the first place, or 2) hear but fail to remember the name later, when I'm out of the car and capable of doing something about it. With Pandora at least I'm already on the computer, and can just copy/paste, or at worst thumbs-up the song, and increase the chances it'll come back around a second time.

Both of those have been available for sale on GOG for years, FYI.

No kidding. I never notice "poor quality" from mp3's. Frankly, even if I could tell, I don't think I'd care. I mostly listen to music at an office (plenty of background sounds and I'm focused on work), in the car (tons of noise), or at home with the family making so much chaos the music is at best an accent and at worst a distraction I have to turn off. I'm trying to imagine a scenario where I've got enough quiet and focus that I could be so absorbed in the tunes the encoding quality would tarnish the experience.

I think more atheists get it than you give credit for. There's lots of (in my mind unnecessary and unproductive) quibbling over semantics here. There's many self-identified atheists who take the soft position ("I don't believe in god") rather than the hard position ("I believe there is no god"). The soft position is basically equivalent with what you are assuming is strictly the realm of agnosticism. I've seen so many words thrown around over what's basically a disagreement as to whether soft atheism exists and is or isn't really agnosticism, it seems like a real waste.

Metaxas' entire article seems to hinge on a failure to understand the anthropic principle. It's not even remotely a novel argument, either. Why the WSJ decided it was worth printing in the first place, I'm not sure.

Descartes presented an argument. Philosophers since then have been poking holes in that argument. I have never heard a modern philosopher state that they consider his argument a valid proof.

Sounds interesting; thanks for the recommendation.

Don't tell me it was our system's seventh planet ...

I can remember a couple of sessions where we never even got fully equipped before getting into trouble because the party thief tried to rip off the shopkeep or someone in the bar where all the characters met to start, but I can't think of many cases where the thief didn't have at least a little respect for his party. The rest of them knew where he slept, after all.