Personally, the "gross" part about eating insects is that they're too small to easily remove the guts and other undesirable portions from. With a large mammal it's (relatively) easy to chop off chunks of meat and fat and not much else. Even if it's not particularly harmful, I don't want to be eating insect brains, indigestible exoskeleton, and guts with my small amount of insect muscle.

All that stuff in atmosphere is presumably part of a recap of the invasion of Earth.

Transmission losses in the US are only about 7%.

I've been reading several SF novels per week for over a decade. Some are certainly garbage, but with the extremely large selection available, there's no reason to pick those.

Precisely. One has to think long term and be willing to accept a few years of spoiling effects in order to induce the larger political parties to change their policies to what one prefers.

"The boundary between cold water and warm, the Thermocline, has been important to undersea warfare for hundreds of years of man's history. Now we have found away to harness that power for constructive purposes. Once what cloaked us can now feed us. Once what shielded us from death, now brings us life."

Captain Ulrik Svensgaard, "The Ripple and the Wave"

I found Lovecraft's cosmic horrors to generally be interesting aliens or alien artifacts. I always feel sorry for the Old Ones when I read At the Mountains of Madness.

I took that to be "internal hard drive". I have both local internal and over-LAN internal HDD backups.

Yes. You can buy cheap rolls of velcro strap marketed for use as plant-ties in the gardening section of hardware stores.

I also prefer the Signo DX - while similar to the Hi-Tec-C, they're actually waterproof. The Hi-Tec-C ink smears in water. Signo DX pens also have a stronger nib that won't bend if you drop it. That said, either is pretty good for plain office writing.

Sounds like aurorae. Perhaps temporarily extending down to their latitudes as a result of a solar flare.

My bathroom has had few-dollar CFLs running fine for >6 years without a single replacement, and that includes moving apartments (and reusing the same bulbs). They just came from the cheapest Costco CFL-pack I could find. I have no idea how people are killing CFLs, I have never seen one die, and they're all I use.

If you move your cup up and down at the frequency of your pace, it will double the apparent frequency as seen by the mug. This is usually sufficient to prevent it from slopping.

The problem with constant acceleration is energy. It doesn't really matter how long or how hard you're accelerating, with 100% matter to energy conversion and a photon drive (100% energy to thrust), you would only be able to reach 0.6c by converting half your ship's mass. A constant 1g trip to anywhere interesting would take unimaginable amounts of energy.

This requirement can be slightly reduced via external acceleration (eg. laser boosting), but then you're talking planetary-scale focusing mirrors if you want to beam power out of your local Oort cloud. That would only get you a moderate gain, though: 0.7c for a ship-mass of beamed power at 100% efficiencies. All this is of course ignoring the interstellar medium, as well.