My wife passed away from a sudden illness so I didn't have this opportunity (she died from a pulmonary embolism while alone at home and was only 24 so we weren't prepared for either one of us passing away). However, I can tell you some things I would have loved to have been able to ask her before she died:

How would she want the funeral arrangements taken care of? You don't need details, just basics like if she wants to be cremated or buried and if she would prefer a big or small ceremony, etc.
How would she want her things disposed of.
I know those questions can be painful, but somebody needs to find that information out before she dies. In my case I had no idea and had to make many difficult decisions during the worst time in my life.

And, above all, be as open as possible with your feelings. Tell her how much she is loved. Ask her about some old stories. Talk about good times and family.

The grandparent is obviously mistaken. What is correct is it takes more coffee to reach an above-normal alertness. So if his baseline is 2 cups of coffee in the morning, he would need to drink 3 cups of coffee to have more alertness than someone else who never drinks coffee. If he drinks less than 2 cups of coffee then he won't be as alert as the guy who never drinks coffee.

There are some bad effects of caffeine, namely increased blood pressure and anxiety.

Then here's a better study for you: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm

In that study, they used placebos so they didn't know whether they were consuming caffeine or not and had them perform objective tests. Conclusion: regular consumption of caffeine provided no net benefit.

My boss also experienced awful headaches when he tried to quit drinking coffee. The headaches lasted for days until he finally gave in and started drinking coffee again. It's a very common withdraw symptom.

The problem with coffee is that not only do you build a tolerance for it, but the withdraw symptoms match the symptoms you were originally trying to treat, namely alertness. See this (for example, I've seen other studies that come to the same conclusion): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm

If you consume caffeine regularly, you won't receive any net benefit at all. With gum, at least you're getting fresh breath for a while.

What he said is based on several studies (not conducted by Mormons). Here's one, just for example: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm

Caffeine is highly addictive, and you cannot simply quit without severe side effects if you drink coffee daily. My boss tried to quit once years ago, and had the worst headaches of his life.

You can quit, but you have to ease off of it, not simply stop unless you want to experience terrible pain.

I would guess that he's a sociopath given his grandiose view of himself, can't do any wrong, lies constantly, is always the victim, etc. However, most sociopaths aren't that stupid. I've only ever known one personally, and he was brilliant--which is a hell of a lot worse than a guy like this turkey.

You don't need to convince me. While earning my aerospace engineering degree we were forced to use both imperial and metric units. Metric was far easier to use in many cases, especially when dealing with calculations of force and mass. The unit for mass in imperial is slugs. To see why it's so inconvenient, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_(mass)

That's not exactly the purpose of the electoral college. The primary purpose was two-fold:

1) For the federal government to not step on states' rights. Leaving the decision of how to allocate each state's votes to the individual state was a way of allowing them more power over federal elections.
2) To ensure only qualified candidates are elected. The hope was each state's legislature would be smart enough to only nominate people to the electoral college who wouldn't vote for a ridiculously unqualified person for president.

However, both of those points don't really apply any longer. The party system's primaries are now responsible for qualifying for president. Every state has essentially designated its ability to choose people for the electoral college to each party with the legislature having no role in the decision process.

I have no idea why we should continue to have an electoral college. It isn't serving the purpose it was originally created for. The only thing it's doing is giving less populous states more power towards choosing the president at the expense of larger states. IIRC, a vote cast in Wyoming has roughly the same power as 17 votes in California.

It's funny. The military, in some ways, is the most progressive part of the American government. Where was metric first widely adopted? Where was racial integration first introduced? Where did we first phase out the use of pennies?

Cut the politicians out of the bureaucracy and you can actually make some progress.

No, we didn't come from a single, common ancestor. However, that doesn't mean we aren't related to each other.

Think about it this way: You have two parents, four grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc. If you go back just a few dozen generations, you will reach a number that exceeds the population of the world. Obviously, you couldn't have that many individual ancestors at that generation. Instead, some of your ancestors were related to each other.

Geneticists have done a study of the smallest possible population of humans that could give rise to the current amount of diversity. Based on their study, the smallest population possible was a few 10s of thousands a few million years ago IIRC.

I argue that Al Gore had more votes. Your counter argument is something rather orthogonal to that. You're trying to argue whether one should vote for him (I'm guessing...). What does that have to do with him winning more votes?

I'm not sure that's any better. Many elections lately have been close enough that a single state could throw the result.

With a standard, national election system both parties would be interested in fairness. With each state in charge of their election with a member of one party or the other in charge of the election process, they have incentives and the ability to tamper with ballots.

They don't have mail-in ballots where you live? In Colorado, it's pretty easy to get your ballot mailed to you. Then you can either mail it back or drop it off. A heck of a lot more convenient than waiting in line to vote.

You seem to be forgetting about Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor in American history. Or the Wright Brothers and their rather handy invention. Einstein was greeted as a hero when he first visited the US in 1921 and was more than welcome to immigrate here later. The US certainly wasn't anti-science then.

They also didn't view it as a conflict between religion and science except for evolution. Many of the original NASA astronauts and engineers were deeply religious. That didn't stop them from figuring out how to make multi-stage rockets capable of landing on the moon.