It's because the water's polluted with industrial waste producing PCBs for our motherboards, etc. drink it accidentally and you die, it's the same with the river Ganges in North India

A cousin of mine used to be in the Army, thanks that's great! Now he's a civilian and has a huge Mercedes which he loves.

As for the Stargate Universe soldier having sex - you should show that to your son, because it's an obvious plot line that he could be discovered and disciplined and/or blackmailed in later episodes, he should not absorb every act that an actor makes on TV, otherwise he just has to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando to work out it's ok to procure Army equipment and fight a private war by invading another country without orders to do so. If I was writing Stargate Universe I would have that crazy marine who was locked up going and discovering him having sex with the female soldier, taking a picture, and saying "Yeah now I got you" then he goes on some sort of rampage, going to other worlds and killing aliens for their technology, all the while blackmailing the soldier that had sex saying "I have a picture of you having sex while on duty - I'm going to show it to the Colonel unless you cover up my crimes". And then all 3 get discovered and then bam you have one hell of an intergalactic Court martial yes yes yes! And your son won't be able to understand any of that if/when it happens because you pressed the skip button.

I know a few people that can't control their violent urges when drunk, it's funny sometimes but they've come close to hurting themselves badly which is a shame cos when sober they're very nice people. I just tend to hug people when I get drunk so yeah I'm a bit of a wus unfortunately.

I know a guy that used to change the rules of the game whenever he lost a point, like "You have to double-check the ball, it's the rules" and I'm like "Dude, we've been playing basketball for the last hour, that's a new rule dumbass!". Honestly, I don't know how my kids are gonna turn out cos I don't have any yet.

Ah ha! Got ya there! Suppose it was just the military that ended up on that spaceship, then if the spaceship takes more than 100 years to return to Earth, then everybody on the spaceship would be dead, and unmanned perhaps the spaceship would crash into Earth killing millions of Americans. If the orders were relaxed and the chain of command was relaxed, then the soldiers could take procreative actions amongst themselves and some actual real living people would arrive back with the ship when it returns to Earth, and these grandsons and grandaughters of the military personnel can do a controlled re-entry saving millions of American civilian lives. It wasn't just the United States that broke of from Britain, it was almost all Empire states such as Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, China, and from France Quebec Montreal and various African states, and from Spain various South American states. All these empires recalled almost all troops to the originating country after the countries declared independence. One thing that all these colonised countries had in common was that as troops and people became more physically distant from the Empire-homeland that ruled them, they became resentful at the pointless rules being imposed by a distant command structure. This is immediately relevant - for the upcoming US space mission to Mars the astronauts might be placed into a different tweaked NASA-Martian command structure, which may be a blend of military command structure, and civilian corporate structure for example; cos it's easy to tell Big Brother to shove it and declare independence when you're 2 million miles away. You said you wanted to teach your children critical thought - but obviously not critical of the orders they receive, which is dangerous because rarely incorrect orders and/or information may be relayed. For example incorrect information, soldiers over-eager for a fight, and incorrect IFF Identification friend-or-foe codes and bad radar operation on USS Vincennes resulted in a civilian aircraft being shot down

I have spent time teaching my son that having sex is a major, life-changing decision. The repercussions of being sexually active are large and important. Were they to have shown a loving, caring, relationship, culminating in a physical relationship, I'd have had far less issue with it. What they chose to do, however, was to show, as acceptable and correct, what used to be called a "back-alley stand-up".

So you're teaching your children to be exactly like you, you are imposing a patriarchal system on them. You're also teaching your children to follow morality and rules to the letter, that's Communism - not US democracy and that is out of line with the spirit of the Constitution of the United States. Let me tell you after your kid leaves home and has a 8 beers he's gonna get his ass whooped. Even heroes have dark sides - just look at the atrocities committed by United States troops in torchering prisoners at Abu Gheraib prison in Iraq. Those soldiers that committed the torcher could just say "Heck I was just following orders", do you want your kid to end up like that?

Extremely interesting. You can be a historian yourself - just take the GPS locations of the tunnel entrances, use a compass to see their direction underground, and that should do it. It's really easy to build a tunnel, it's working out whether it goes to interesting places that's the thing. There are tunnels underneath London that people can wander around in - some contain steam and heating ducts, some for telecoms and power. In Russia there should be loads of tunnels for transmission of steam heating from CHP plants.

Gasoline engines have maximum efficiency in terms of power produced per drop of gasoline injected at about 75% throttle and between 1700rpm to 4000rpm. A bmep/bar chart (throttle opening on y axis versus rpm on x axis with a contour map of efficiency zones) will show you this, available at my local library. Accelerating hard is more fuel efficient. Accelerating harder than 75% results in fuel enrichment in modern cars (more gasoline in the fuel air mix) which decreases efficiency.