As a fellow machinist, I put a DRO on my lathe and a CNC controller on my mill. Now I hit a button and everything displays in metric. It's very nice, especially when I can have the mill machine ellipses while I'm busy using the lathe.

There are also people who move across that continuum. My wife has a lot of classical physical autism characteristics: rocking/spinning, inability to function with noise or bright/flashing lights, finds the touch of silk, moving water, grass completely unbearable, walks on her toes all the time, among others, but can usually manage to work a real job that involves dealing with problem children for eight hours a day because she has worked out a very precise, detailed system of how she approaches the work, and she's fantastically good at what she does. If an employer is willing to go to the effort to provide the specific work environment in which a borderline autistic person can function, it could be hugely beneficial for both the employer and the employee.

I'm starting my tomatoes under 10 Cree LED's mounted to a heatsink, with water-cooling on the heatsink running through a copper pipe in the water beneath the starts, so they get both light and heat. They're doing fine so far, is the best I can say: growing faster than last year's starts, which were getting full sun but no heat, whereas these are getting very indirect sun but 14 hours of LED per day. Because I'm a geek I have an arduino measuring/recording the temp of the LED heatsink, the water beneath the plants, and checking a realtime clock to decide when to turn things on and off, with control over the LED dimming (for overtemp) and pump speed (likewise). The Crees are cool white, putting out about 50 lumens each, which is a meaningless measure for growlights, but useful for comparison, I guess. Tomato starts at the edge of the array are growing much more slowly than the ones right under the lights (the LED's are packed all in one small array) so since the whole works is at the same temp, I presume that means the ones in the center are strongly benefitting from the LED light. If I did it again, I'd make an array that was planar rather than packed in at one point, for growing in a downstairs space with only small windows, but I'd stick with the single block of LED's for what I typically do, with them sitting in a south-facing window upstairs.

I'm not saying your grandmother was any more wrong than anyone else citing the bible for their beliefs, but a much more widespread belief is that black people were the descendents of Ham. Since Ham was cursed for the misfortune of having seen his father Noah naked, his offspring were also all cursed, which was used as an excuse for treating black people as second-class citizens or excusing slavery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham

Another competing theory for the wives of the sons of Adam was angels or other semi-divine creatures.

While you might not be able to buy any complete laser pointer over 5mW, you certainly can buy laser _modules_ waaaaaay over that. I've bought a 100mW red and a 200mW blue for use in CNC cutting from ebay. They shipped from Hong Kong and arrived here with no hassle. I'm about to get a 1.5 watt diode module. (Note to anyone thinking about this: buy a good set of goggles appropriate for the frequency of the laser you want, and _test_ it with a lower-power laser, by shining the lower-power laser through the goggles and measuring the reduction in intensity by, say, measuring the current coming out of a coin-sized solar cell as compared to direct illumination. That'll at least give you some idea you didn't buy junk. Also buy a whole module with glass lenses: trying to make your own optics system with a bare diode pressed into a heatsink and a separate fast axis/collimation lens is a waste of time. You can build your own supply using an LED driver chip, if you don't want the heat associated with typical cheap linear laser diode drivers.)

The Star Wars theme song, being played from a 3d printed disc on a vintage kids' Fisher-Price record player.
Someone's also printing Beastie Boys for Fisher-Price.

I'm not saying it's common, but it does happen. The Denver-Boulder Turnpike, aka US 36, was constructed as a toll road in 1952 and the tollposts were removed when it was paid off in 1967. http://www.aaroads.com/west/us-036_co.html
Similarly, pretty much all the Colorado passes were originally toll roads when they were originally chiseled out from the mountain rock in the 1870's. The only ones that still are, are the two roads that go to 14,000 feet: Pike's Peak and Mount Evans, and the rationale, of having to dig out 8-12 meters of snow on a regular basis, seems fairly sound.

Unfortunately, I don't have any experience with ready-to-print extrusion-type 3d printers, just DIY ones, and the ready-to-print photolithography printers I've worked with, I can't recommend anyone purchasing.

If you're thinking about making chess pieces for standard-sized boards, that's going to be at the edge of the resolution an extrusion-type printer can do, so in any case I'd recommend finding someone/a hackerspace with a printer that has a 0.5mm or 0.3mm nozzle and seeing what their prints look like, to see if it'll match what you're intending to do. There's a lot of research going on right now about using vapor-phase acetone to smooth the surfaces of ABS prints, which makes fine-resolution prints look great, but if the detail you need isn't there, that's not going to fix it. It just reduces the made-in-Minecraft appearance.

Figure out what you want to print. There's a fairly large variation in build area, so if you're wanting to print stuff the size of textbooks you're going to want a larger printer. Likewise, most extrusion printers have a minimum print resolution in the 0.5mm or thereabouts area, so if you want fine detail you may be wasting your money on an extrusion-type printer. Printers with better resolution are usually photolithography-based and an order of magnitude more expensive, at which point a commercial print service like shapeways seems a lot more attractive.
With any extrusion-type printer, I think the most important item is that it's popular, because you're going to spend time debugging and adjusting and generally fussing around with it; if you get a snazzy brand-new design you're the beta tester. If you get something that has three years of hundreds of people working with it, all the problems you can encounter have already been encountered and dealt with.
If you want to get more printer for less money you can build it yourself: there are a variety of plans where you buy a printed set of parts, source all the structural parts yourself, and make your own. What I said above about finding one where design and implementation issues are well-known and there's a support community in place goes double for this option.

I strongly recommend that you only start down the 3d printer path if you have projects for which you already have need for printed items; if you get one just because it's the hip thing to do for geeks, you're likely to be wasting your money. With that said, once you have one, you suddenly start printing a whole lot of things you never thought you would, because you can: I have friends who print live animal traps, plumbing parts, and light bulb fixture components now that they have 3d printers.

My understanding was that the primary drivers for using titanium in aerospace were heat and fatigue characteristics, and that otherwise aluminium was almost always a better choice, if the design was capable of using it well. (Similar specific modulus of elasticity, so if you have the space you can use large-diameter tubing to get lower weight for the same performance.) As such, I'd expect to see automotive titanium used only in areas where volume or fatigue is a big concern. Are there other areas in which it would do well?

If you don't already know this: you should consider the resolution you need pretty carefully. If you're printing stuff for 1:48 or larger models, an extrusion-based 3d printer will probably do okay for you and they're not too expensive: some exist under $500. But if you're working with smaller scales than that, you're likely to need some sort of photolithography setup and those are expensive to buy and surprisingly expensive to run because of the raw materials cost; it's hard to justify buying one for yourself compared to making the models and having shapeways.com actually print them.
But if you're working larger-scale stuff, it's amazing how much use you can get from a cheap extrusion printer; once you have one, you start using it for scads of other things you never thought about doing previously.

Well... it was 5% until Ralph Nader was polling 8%, at which point they changed it to 15% to make sure he didn't get heard. So there's not really any reason to believe that a third party polling 22% would actually get heard: they'd just change it to 25%. It's a rigged game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Debates#Criticism

I don't have any written records. I talked to a guy who was a glider pilot and he had lots of stories about how well they could have worked and how poorly they did work because of lousy surveying of landing ground. He'd seen ones get yanked into pieces in snatch pickups and was of the opinion that the reason it was rarely used was twofold: risk, and higher-ups were deliberately sabotaging the delivery of snatch-recovery equipment (poles and lines) because they thought the risk outweighed the benefit.

In WWII we were recovering entire gliders this way, not just people: http://www.silentwingsmuseum.com/pdf/RetrievalSystem.pdf -- a history of airplane/ground retrieval systems specifically relating to the effort to pull Waco CG4A gliders big enough to hold 15 people, from the fields where they'd landed back into the air and tow them back to the launch airbase without the tow plane landing. It was dangerous work and pretty often it ended up just tearing the glider into pieces but it was successful a fair amount of the time.

The other thing that's nice about cruising at high altitude is you go faster for the same fuel burn, since the power required to overcome air resistance varies as the cube of airspeed. An airplane that's doing 90 knots at 2000' will do 120 knots at 17,000' (if it can get there.) So even though your plane has less power at higher altitude, it goes faster -- and that, too, can reduce total fuel used, since you burn a bit more fuel but spend less time on the whole flight.

And by the way, burn-and-coast is actually a viable fuel economy strategy in cars if you don't gun it: if you accelerate gradually to somewhat above your best fuel economy speed, then coast (and get free distance) you can under some circumstances exceed the fuel mileage of constant-speed driving. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximization_of_fuel_economy#Burn_and_coast has more details.