Until the invention of the yoke, in about 400 AD, and its propagation to Europe in about 1000 AD, horses were nearly useless as draft animals. They're still less useful for ploughing and cart-pulling than oxen are in hot parasite-ridden countries because they're more delicate.

Funny you mention that: the bubonic plague is endemic throughout the American southwest and there are reported cases in people every year. Prairie dogs, among other rodents, carry it. (Most common cause of infection is outdoor cats getting plague-infected fleas that have left dead prairie dogs, then bringing the disease home to their owners.)

And as for the where-should-we-live, I made a map of natural disasters in the US a while ago when people were on about how anyone would be dumb enough to live in Norman, Oklahoma. Between hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, forest fires, flash floods, bubonic plague, volcanoes, and a couple of other things, the only place I've found that looks fairly safe in the entire US is somewhat east of Pocatello, Idaho.

If the expense/time is a bit daunting, mosquitoes are attracted to heat, so some incandescent bulbs in front of a fan, with a mesh bag behind it, will scoop them out of the air (along with lots of other insects.) I had a friend with one of these and she collected something like a pound of insects per night.
With that said, I don't think either one is going to make a dent in your local mosquito population unless you had two dozen of them running nonstop. Getting rid of stagnant water in your neighborhood will do far more than any amount of adult mosquito hunting.

If I remember right, the way a wheatstone strain gauge is set up, there are four ways to connect it. One is right, two are wrong but give you half the resolution you expected -- so you get data, just lousy data -- and one is completely wrong and you get no data whatsoever. It was hooked up in the completely wrong configuration. That was what made him so mad: there was only a 25% chance it would get hooked up in the completely worthless configuration, but that's what happened.

Slashdot isn't the place for a deep discussion of Shakespeare, but I'm going to, anyway. It's arguable (and is regularly argued) that Shakespeare was not actually anti-Semitic. Shylock is portrayed as a villain, it's true, but his speech, "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?" shows him (at least in that passage) as a sympathetic human, not a villain, and more generally, the rest of the speech, where he declares that he'll act just as horribly as his persecutors do (and proceeds to do so, driving the play) can be seen as a character's reaction to a bigoted society, rather than of the author's hatred of Jews. Shakespeare had some outright villains who did evil just to do evil, but generally his worst characters (and I'm thinking of Iago and Shylock specifically) had excellent, rational motivations for doing the evil things they did. His writing of them was not based on hatred of their races, but on how society had shaped them into tools for evil.

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?