Wrong. Nuclear power can load follow (ramp up and down rapidly to meet instantaneous demand) perfectly fine. They just typically do not because they are large baseload plants and there is no reason to run them anything lower than 100% when you need fossil fuel plants to make up the difference. IAANE.

Applying this analogy to AGW, your model predicts the outcome of 15 coin tosses will be 15 heads +/- 15 tails.

The most egregious example of administrator disconnect, as uncovered by Feynman, was the notion that the O-rings had a safety factor of 3 because they were on burned through 1/3 of the way on previous launches:

Instead of being very concerned that variations of poorly understood conditions might reasonably create a deeper erosion this time, it was asserted, there was "a safety factor of three." This is a strange use of the engineer's term ,"safety factor." If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This "safety factor" is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.

"I was told by voting section management that cases are not going to be brought against black defendants on [behalf] of white victims."

--J. Christian Adams, US Department of Justice under Eric Holder (link)

The issue is not the average energy price across the country. The problem is local, where natural gas is produced in such abundance but cannot be stored or transported, they practically give it away, which nuclear (nor coal or any other generation method aside from hydro) can compete with.

Oops forgot to clarify, the decays are beta decay, where a neutron in the nucleus turns into a proton and ejects an electron and antineutrino.

After U-238 absorbs a neutron it becomes U-239, which decays (half life = 23 m) to Np-239, which decays (half life = 2 d) again to Pu-239.

If we built fast reactors, we would have enough fuel, in the form of depleted uranium sitting around idle in barrels at enrichment plants, to supply the entire planet's energy for about 1000 years.

The small increase in nuclear fuel price due to the ending of this program is insignificant. Fuel price is only a small cost of nuclear power, and enrichment cost only a fraction of that. The real problem for nuclear power is the bottoming out of energy prices due to the huge oversupply of natural gas from fracking. The latter being responsible for the closing of two power plants this year.

The vast majority of gun crime in the US is related to drugs or gang related. 50% of the gun crime in the US is perpetrated by 4% of the population in the 7 largest major cities (several of which have total gun bans already - New York, Chicago, etc). The gun crime in these areas is similar to that of other countries which have total gun bans, such as Mexico, Russia, Brazil, etc. These countries (and parts of the US) have high gun crime not because of lax gun laws, but because of a degradation of the rule of law and civil society. Most parts of the US, especially rural areas, have far less crime than anywhere in Europe.

Why do police carry guns then?

Spoilerish. Two astronauts tied together falling past a structure, once one of them grabs on and withstands the shock of the other astronaut snapping the tether taut, he should rebound back towards the secured astronaut, not dangle as if still being pulled by gravity. This would not be the case if, say, they were on a rotating structure or on a rocket making a significant burn but neither is the case.

My impression of that scene was that the cords tangling Bullocks' character were barely taught enough to stop her momentum and rebound, and if Clooney did not let go the cords would have broken at the other end leaving them both floating away. Like two people bungee jumping, while decelerating under tension, they notice the cord start to break due to excessive weight, so one guy detaches himself and falls to his death while the remaining elasticity of the cord is enough to save the other.

For the amount of money we spent on one year of so-called stimulus, we could have built ~300 new gen 4 nuclear reactors, converting the country to 80% nuclear power (the remaining being hydro in areas where it already exists). We have enough depleted uranium sitting around refined and unused in barrels at enrichment plants to supply fast reactors for about 10,000-50,000 years, without having to mine a single lump of ore. With all the leftover coal and natural gas, we could convert to fuel for transportation use. 100% energy independence for a 1000 years and tens of millions of new jobs. What did we get instead? Bailouts for unsustainable government union pensions and crony kickbacks. And guess who's going to be running our healthcare from now on? Lol.

If you recall, they did have the chance to not pass it in the first place and did not! The democrats used "budget reconciliation" and "deemed the bill passed" after they lost their crucial last senate seat vote when Scott Brown won Kennedy's seat!

Actually no, this isn't just a loophole, it is by design. Cutting budgets for programs is the principle way the house of representatives has to exercise their power. For example, if the President decided to unilaterally declare war, the only way congress would have to stop him is to defund the military.