Let's start with all the stuff you missed:

-As the google map flies, it's 289 miles from the D to the Big Mac. It's about 600 to NYC. (Although it is about the same distance from Detroit to Ironwood, MI, which sits on the Michigan / Wisconsin border. )

-Consumers Power handles most of the non-DTE grid space. DTE's western border is about 20 miles from Ann Arbor's west side

-During the Northeast blackout, plenty of (I dare say most of) the DTE grid went down. The cutoff was where the grids switched over in either Flint of Jackson. We were back online a little faster than most places, but we were down for 24+ hours.

The old screen saver became a breeding ground for people gaming the system in the name of cranking up their work unit totals. Their scientific vision suffered. The pretty screen saver was replaced by a framework that has been adopted by dozens of other projects that didn't have the wherewithal to create such a process on their own.

In terms of the ever famous slashdot-brand car analogy; You won't buy another Ford until they bring back the Pinto.

I remember reading (Apocryphal story alert.) that the Postmaster General (or Secretary of Veterans Affairs) was usually selected for this job, and they loved it. Usually it was an excuse to have a nice party offsite for the staff, but occasionally it meant a trip on Air Force One.

There was a great exchange (usually attributed to Hack Wilson) between a batter and umpire that eloquently describes the umpire's role in calling balls and strikes.

Wilson stepped to the plate and waited on the first pitch. He didn't swing, and the umpire called "strike." Wilson stepped back and said "That's a strike? Boy, you sure missed that one." The umpire didn't miss a beat and replied "I wouldn't have if I had your bat, Hack."

The strike zone is generally described as being the belt to the knees. When Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson broke into the majors, he brought an unorthodox batting stance that minimized the size of that space. (Picture a man standing in the batters box trying to touch his nipples to his knees, while simultaneously trying to scratch his butt by holding the bat over his shoulder.) Henderson's batting stance was so unorthodox and frustrating to some pitches that one major league pitcher threw his first pitch behind Henderson and barked at the umpire to "tell him to stand in there like a man."

The rules of baseball define the strike zone reasonably well. The practical interpretation is another matter...

There's medical research, then there's stem cell research. "Medical Research" into the next generation of viagra or lipitor is easy as pie to get funded. Drugs like that solve profitable problems, and don't piss off people with the "My Jesus is better than your Jesus" agenda.

I work for a top five engineering university. Our Biomed Engineering programs (which tend to lean more towards the "Med" side rather than the "engineering" side, but there's definite overlap) are having problems because the state politicians have decided to go sticking their noses into how research dollars can be spent re: stem cells. Prospective faculty are looking elsewhere, and existing research is having to walk a very fine line with the research they can do out of the very real fears that they'll have their funding pulled (or worse). It's a hamstring-ing that we didn't need.

I'm pretty convinced that if you could find a stem-cell based method of getting a 68 year old state senator a extra two inches of cock, or at least a regular hard-on, we'd have solid gold toilets and flying cars to carry us around campus by the end of the week. Instead we get bible thumpers that represent 500 people from West-Buttfuckia who pool together with like-lettered pals and get themselves convinced that unless they bravely throw themselves in front of us, we'll be shoving babies into blenders. Facts? Who needs them? My major donor's friend's pastor heard that stem cell research causes abortion rates to go up 783%!

Yeah, I'm bitter.

At least some of those regulations, as they pertain to stem cell research, are put in place by a cadre of puppet^H^H^H bureaucrats who have been ordered to believe by their cash handler^H^H^H 'constituents' (wink wink) that STEM CELLS == MOAR ABORTIONS.

You're right about the heavy part. The problem is, 35kts is a heck of a gust, not a sustained wind. Even if they were correcting to one side or the other, when a strong wind gets that much mass moving in one direction, there's not much you're gonna do. It has been proven time and again that Newton's laws > an infinite number of "oh shit oh shit oh shit" utterances.

After looking at the pictures, it's not like the Brooklyn bridge just jumped out in front of the barge carrying the shuttle. It was transiting a fairly narrow bridge. The wingspan on the shuttle is 78 feet, and a google map distance measurement of where the shuttle clipped the bridge says the space they had to work with was about 100 feet, give or take. That means if you absolutely threaded the needle, you should have had 11 feet (That's about 3.3 meters for you folks unfamiliar with a proper unit of measurement =) ) to work with on either side of the bird. That seems like a lot, but on a windy day.....very touchy.

https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=J+F+K+Airport,+New+York,+NY&aq=0&oq=JFK+&sll=40.639749,-73.824348&sspn=0.097239,0.057421&vpsrc=0&t=h&ie=UTF8&hq=J+F+K+Airport,+New+York,+NY&z=13&cid=17028024512003641840&iwloc=A

(if the link is jacked up, just go to JFK and work your way south east)

It looks like, from the pictures upthread, the shuttle hit the railroad bridge that sits between Cross Bay Blvd and JFK airport. I've ground handled large aircraft on the tarmac, and 11 feet is too close for comfort in my book. I don't envy the guys who had to try and make that work.

This made me think of think of a recent wired article

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/all/1

TL;DR The dirty bomb scanners at the port of Naples went ape shit over a container from Saudi Arabia. Turns out it was a container of scrap metal that an old radioactive element from a medical scanner had found its way into. Good times.

The apocryphal story is that of my old boss. When he started with my old employer (a medical testing lab) he was in the x-ray lab, and as such had to wear a radiation badge. After a while he began forgetting to take the badge off when he left for the day, and his walk home (always the same route) tended to take him past a couple of the busier streets. No big deal, since he'd just swap out his badge in the morning before starting a new shift. One morning he comes in and the lab is shut down, and everyone has their serious faces on.

Turns out the badge he'd turned in from the day before had come back as hot. Not the "bad badge" type of hot, but the "you were definitely exposed to a pretty solid dose of radiation" type of hot. Per protocol everything had to be shut down, tested, procedures reviewed, yadda yadda. In the end, everything in the lab tested fine, and his was the only bad badge found. Best guess was that a truck that went past him on his walk home that day was (knowingly or unknowingly) carrying something nasty.

There's a lot of pretty foul stuff out there. The boy scout who build his breeder reactor a few years ago used radium paint that he found when his gieger counter tripped when driving past an antiques store. One of the post Fukushima radioactivity scares in Tokyo was caused by stored bottles of radium paint that had been forgotten decades ago. We'll probably see more stories like this, and I don't feel that's a bad thing. When it comes to stuff like this, stuff that causes cancer (actually causes cancer. Not like Cell Phones or wifi.), fuck your civil liberties. Public health & safety wins, even if its getting bought in the name of fighting "the terrrrrer"

"Sad, sad world. Where's the next Steve Wozniak?"

Watching video's like this and saying to him or herself "I can do better than that!" then heading down to their work space and doing so.

That is by far my favorite design. Great for letting loose in the office, and it's easily customizable. You can easily add ailerons with just a couple of scissor snips.

This is the best possible news for freedom in the here in the US. What? You want to cut off parts of the internet, why that would make us just like Iran! We can't have that! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph!

There's a fine line between "these pedantic assholes who get off on correcting people" and people who disagree with you and are therefore wrong.

Grandparent has a decent point, but the fact that he whiffed on several key points detracts from his argument. No, the army doesn't have fighters. Also, No, the president can't declare war. You might call it a pendantic asshole point when I say that we haven't gone to "war" in 70 years. But, calling every military action a "war" is incorrect. Just as the president using the military as his personal pop-gun squad without the approval of the people (or more accurately, their elected representatives.) is incorrect. It's not that hard to double check something, especially here on ye olde intertubes. Doing so kinda fits with that whole "Do it right the first time" ethic that has died off in society these days.

If you want to make your point heard, don't run around screaming half-assed, half remembered sound bites. Make a simple, well thought out, perhaps even slightly researched point. It's harder to refute. You also find out interesting things like the fact that it costs a mere $2.5 million dollars per year to run the Allen Seti array (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/10/success-seti-array-back-on-track/), and that the government accounting office was estimating a cost of $412 million per unit for the F-22 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22_Raptor#Production_and_procurement). So you could run the array for about 165 years on the cost of "one army fighter." 165 years vs. 1 year? Gosh, that argument just gained some interesting new perspective, and I did it without sounding like your drunk uncle who spent thanksgiving bleating out Rush Limbaugh's fascinating rhetoric and explaining how liberals are ruining the country.

But if you're not keeping the pendant on a Monster(tm) brand lanyard, you're missing out. I can offer you one with silver connectors for 69.99, Gold for 79.99, but for a true audiophile such as yourself I recommend the platinum connectors for 99.99 (with an extended warranty available for 19.99)