I know you specifically asked for museums in North America, but you'd save a lot of travel time and get to see some of the best museums in the world within walking distance of each other if you go to London. I spent a week there once, just going to museums and I wanted to stay for a month. Hyde Park is the best place to start IMHO.

That's because you're dumb.

Hmmm, that opens up the possibility of a new business model. It should now be profitable to sell $100 bills for $120 dollars. Get all your friends/family in on the act and get them to use bing to find your website. At 35% cashback, they will get $48 for each purchase so the real cost to them is $78, leaving them with $22 profit. In the meantime you are making $20 clear profit on each sale. No manufacturing costs. An almost infinite supply of new product... I think it's a winner.

It was discovered today that newborn humans still grow teeth. Scientists are baffled because the human species developed the technology to build smoothie machines 3 generations ago.

If only we had a cheap way to create this "hydrocarbon" liquid. The ideal thing would be some kind of self-replicating nano-machines that run on solar energy.

Sorry but I completely disagree with you. And I slightly resent being told that I'm playing Nethack the wrong way. I've been playing since it was called Hack and I needed to use 2x5.25" floppies get in running on a HDD-less machine. I still haven't ascended, but I have got the AoY several times, and most importantly of all, I've had uncountable hours of fun. For me the best buzz is when I find myself in an apparently fatal situation but somehow I still manage to pull through. Sometimes this requires luck to be on my side, but life can be like that too. I've fallen through trapdoors into zoo rooms where I was certain I was toast but sometimes I somehow managed to escape. It's the richness of detail in the game that keeps me coming back, the engraving, the dipping, the praying, the polymorphing, the sacrificing, the taming, the stealing, the corpse eating, the attributes, the random maps, the unidentified objects, all those easter eggs, and lets not forget the tombstone. It's a different game every time.

To take your way of playing to an extreme, I could just record a macro of "left arrow, right arrow", find a suitable corridor on level 1 and run the macro for a month until I'm level eleventyfive. That sounds like more fun than sitting in front of the PC for a week playing conservatively.

I've tried a lot of modern MMOJOBs and I always get bored with them within a couple of months. But I know plenty of people that are happy to play the same raids, with the same groups, on the same night each week, over and over and over again. To each their own, but I'd like to suggest that if you don't appreciate Nethack, you are the one who is playing it wrong. Life is a journey, not a destination.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some gridbugs to squash.

While I accept that a lot of people think that all life on Earth comes from a common ancestor, I personally think it's unlikely. Richard Dawkins explanation of the origins of life in The Selfish Gene and other books, leaves room for life to have started as a number of different replicating molecules which competed with each other. Since the Earth was not a homogenous environment, it's likely that there were many genesis events in a variety of different conditions. It's possible that bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes all arose from different genesis events. It's also possible that the parts of a eukaryote cell such as mitochondria were initially different organisms that formed a symbiotic relationship with each other. It's even possible that these organelles were also the descendants of discrete genesis events.

If you over-simplify an explanation, it can become contradictory when the subject is examined in more depth. Electrical engineers know this.
 

How do Ring Species fit into your understanding of the barriers between species?

Bzzzt! Wrong. Thanks for playing anyway.
There was no original debate on which path to take after the shuttle. The DIRECT design is a result of a grassroots movement which developed AFTER the Ares designs had been unveiled. During the intervening period the top brass have never entered into discussion with the DIRECT team.
Real engineers were appalled at the braindead decisions taken during the initial Ares design phase. Ares 1 is an impossible to implement design. Well maybe "impossible" is too strong a word to use but "impractical" just doesn't cover how bad it is. It's top-heavy, both in terms of mass and aerodynamic stability. It relies solely on a solid rocket for the first stage of it's ascent! WFT! No vectoring capability, no throttling capability and no evidence that the required extra segment can be produced using the existing shuttle support infrastructure. This thing is basically a dangerous bottle rocket and it's supposed to be man-rated!
Ares V isn't quite as bad as Ares 1, but that's only because they share very little in common. That's the other major booger hanging out of the Ares nose. Reuse of common elements would help to keep down costs, but it seems that no attempt has been made to do this.

tl;dr. You don't have a clue what you're talking about, but you'dlike people to believe you do. You're just a conservative that wants to keep the status quo. I didn't know W posted on slashdot.

Do I win a prize

If this really works there might even be enough people around to eat all that surplus food that's available in 3rd world countries. Not to mention the water and energy surpluses that we've been trying to get rid of for decades. People even try to dispose of their excess water by flushing it down the toilets in some countries.

ALERT! ALERT!
Female detected on slashdot

Me too. For years I had a problem with my right hip. I went to a few GPs over the years and they never did anything that helped. After 3 visits to a chiropractor the pain stopped, and over the next few months and several more visits my overall strength improved by approx 50%. She told me I would have to keep coming back for treatments but I haven't been to see her in about 5 years and the problem hasn't come back.

Just my experience, I know it's not enough of a dataset to base any scientific study on.