yeah, like skepticalscience.com is a reliable source... hah hah hah hah hah hah...

Coke bottle glasses are referring to the thickness of the glass lenses when viewed from the edge, they looked quite a lot like the thick bottoms of the classic greenish glass Coca-Cola bottles before Coke moved to the plastic containers. Polycarbonate has severely reduced the thickness of lenses so it's rare to truly see those inch-thick (25.4 mm for you Euro folk) monstrosities nowadays. As to progressives (really just bifocals without the dividing line) and computer screens, I've had to suffer the indignity of age and have worn them for nearly a decade. Still bobbing and weaving to find the best focal position, but that's not really a major issue, there are other worse things in life.

8-track needs a comeback, too long since I heard that resounding *clack* interrupting the best song on any album

Takes a lot of faith to believe in those GCMs that continue to fail to predict warming

Citation on actual sea levels rising and inundating any place on the globe, please.

Actually, Google did *some* work for NASA but mainly enjoyed the perk of buying lower cost jet fuel through the NASA contracts, much less than they would have paid on the commercial market. When it came to light that the vast majority of their air flights weren't NASA work-related at all, the scandal ensued.

It's not just navigating in pitch darkness, echo location is useful for all manner of things. How many times have you talked to an auto mechanic about a problem and he asks you 'where did you hear the noise...' to narrow down the location of the issue? It is extraordinary to be able to control it and use it more directly.

California does indeed have this problem occasionally. During the recent summer, there were 3 or 4 hurricanes along the coast of Baja, which were quite powerful but not strong enough to travel all the way to the US coast of California. However, the enormous waves generated in those hurricanes were some of the largest seen in many decades, with swells over 20 ft (7 meters) for days at a stretch. These waves eroded great sections of beach sand, especially at the city of Seal Beach, allowing tides and swells to flood Seal Beach one night. Fortunately for Seal Beach, there was sand available from river dredging in Orange County which was given to rebuild the sand berms and levees to restore protection from future storms. Ordinarily that sand would have replenished itself as the rivers carry it to the deltas into the ocean, but that would have taken several years.

Yet, Mann & Hansen & Jones & Trenberth et al would expect you to believe their models are close to 100% accurate to predict inevitable catastrophe in the "future of a vastly complex system like the Earth", and even worse, you actually believe it.

ARGH!!! If I see Clippy popping up on the screens at Staples Center, I'm gonna walk out immediately.

I wonder if I can go dig out one of my old C=64 application dongles to use... of course it will be disconcerting if I heard the read/write heads slamming against the side of my disk drives

Except Hamilton brings a very keen perspective from an unexpected source, and 2012 is not that far in the past as solar cell efficiency hasn't made an exponential increase in the past year and a half so his points remain quite valid.

How many 'streamers' will they have at Solar Two? Could it surpass Ivanpah to take the number one spot as bird fryer champion of CA?

it would depend on your mpl, correct?

Just waiting for the EU food activists to decry these girls creating Frankenfood and hound them for their evil work