It's still the highest-flying and fastest *manned* aircraft available. Scramjets overtook the speed record not too long ago.

Nah, you're just doing it wrong: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.coworkforce.com/Skills/myskills.aspx

the Japanese hate our products. They're very biased towards home-grown stuff. They typically steer clear of imports. Imports are generally more expensive in Japan due to tariffs and such, too.

The Japanese language has a whole different alphabet for Western stuff - anything tainted with Western-ness uses the Katakana alphabet, which is very sharp and angly and, to the Japanese, ugly - you can even tell in the name itself. Japanese things are written in Hiragana, which is smooth and curvy and beautiful. The two alphabets are the same aside from appearance - they have the same letters, and you can write anything in Katakana that you can in Hiragana (and vice versa) - but things like "television" (and presumably "iPhone") are written in Katakana. It's a very cultural thing, to the point of being embedded in their language.

Thanks for clarifying - I was going to if you hadn't. From Wikipedia:

Aside from a polyglutamine tract, human FOXP2 differs from chimp FOXP2 by only two amino acids, mouse FOXP2 by only 3 amino acids, and zebra finch FOXP2 by only 7 amino acids. A recent extraction of DNA from Neanderthal bones indicates that Neanderthals had the same version (allele) of the FOXP2 gene as modern humans. Some researchers have speculated that the two amino acid differences between chimps and humans led to the evolution of language in humans.

Actually, I remember watching a Packers game a while back, and seeing the yellow line "paint over" some of the players in their green uniforms. It was probably a few years ago now, so they've probably improved it since, but it caught my eye then - and gave me a clue as to how they did it.

I was going to leave this alone, but...+1 informative? Really?
Hold the phone, let me call my friends at MIT and let them know that their wireless chargers are hopeless, because they don't have a core.

*facepalm*...air is still a core. And the effect is diminished with large coils, like these people are using. And smaller distances, which is the case with cell phones. I'm pretty sure the engineers at MIT have figured this stuff out.

The sun is the center of the universe? I though the sun orbited the Milkey Way Galaxy's central black hole?

Umm, Copernicus did say that the sun, not earth, was the center of the universe. Granted, he was still wrong, but he was more right than anyone else at that point, so he revolutionized stuff.

A question for you math geeks: can an object of infinite size even HAVE a center?

I would posit that I am the center of the universe. No matter where I am, I'm here. As I walk, the world moves beneath my feet.

Nope. If my Physics' teacher's overview of the universe is correct, the universe doesn't have a center. Everywhere is the center, and nowhere is the center. That's the paradox of relativity. So, in a way, your posit is actually correct.

You could construct an accurately moving model of the solar system, have the earth as the center, and still have it be accurate. The moon doesn't orbit the earth, both bodies orbit a spot somewhere beneath the earth's crust.

It's all a matter of how you look at it.

Yep. That's what Tycho Brahe did, actually. He simply couldn't concieve that the earth moved, so he came up with a system where the earth was still stationary, but the planets rotated around the sun, and the sun and the moon rotated around the earth. You can picture if you took one of those rotating solar system models and picked it up by the earth, it would still spin - just everything would spin around the earth. That was Tycho's theory. It may have been more popular except that Tycho died and Copernicus took over.

I'm going to have to reread Genesis. I don't recall seeing anywhere where it says the earth is the center of anything, let alone the universe.

The passages that got Copernicus in trouble weren't in Genesis, but in other places:

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose
Ecclesiastes 1:5

Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
--Joshua 10:12-13

Fear before him, all the earth: the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved.
--1 Chronicles 16:30

[God] (w)ho laid the foundations of the Earth, that it should not be removed for ever.
--Psalm 104:5

Verses like these claimed nothing about the centricity of the earth, but that the earth was stationary. By extension, this implies that everything moves around it, but Copernicus got in trouble for saying that the earth moved, not that it wasn't the center of the universe.