Your math isn't correct. The question is how many 2nd cousins, 9 times removed do you have. You only calculated how many great-great-great...grandparents you have. What blows up the number is the 2nd cousin. How many great-grand children did those 4096 ancestors have? That's how many 2nd cousins 9 times removed you have. I estimated that each one had 4 children who went on to have more children on average, giving 4096*4*4*4 giving 262,000. Given how rough these numbers are, I rounded it to 300,000. Given how many people of the time had 4-10 children (not all of whom survived long enough to reproduce), I think that's a reasonable guess.

That's not worse. I saw a guy with Lou Gehrig's disease (a friend of my boss). He could only make a grunting noises and move his eyes, yet his brain worked as well as ever. He was completely trapped within his body with almost no way to communicate to the world. He was also in enormous pain all the time because of a problem that formed with his neck due to it not being properly stabilized for months.

My boss was with him once. The guy started making noises and it took a few minutes for my boss to get over to him. He didn't know what was wrong and was trying to tell by just looking at his eyes. He then looked over him and found that a large spider had crawled onto him. The guy was terrified of spiders but couldn't do anything while watching one slowly land on him then crawl around.

He needed 24 hour care and was costing his family a fortune while 'living' in this state. Rather than waiting for his lungs to stop working, he opted to have his feeding tube removed so that he could die. Nobody blamed him at all. It was terrible for his family and friends watch him living such a torturous existence and it was obviously terrible for him.

Then what's the difference when comparing to nicotine? It also forms a physical dependency and strong habits. Where would you draw the line between a 'habit' vs 'addictive'? Many smokers for years just called it a habit.

There was an idea by a Republican congressman that was included in the original healthcare reform bill. The idea was based on what one hospital is already doing, which is to have doctors talk about end of life care with patients and their families so that their families could make informed decisions. Unfortunately, this was labeled 'death panels' and subsequently removed from the bill.

Try spending some time with someone with Lou Gehrig's disease or alzheimer's. You may change your tune.

Age is definitely a factor. If I was 75+ years old, I would hope not as much effort is spent trying to keep me alive as there would be if I was 30.

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.