In hunter/gatherer societies, people typically have *more* leisure time than people in agrarian and industrial societies (where leisure time is understood to mean time that is not spent in the production or procurement of food and shelter). There are some developed nations---primarily in Europe---where people are beginning to approach the amount of leisure time that hunter/gatherers have. The nomadic lifestyle of a hunter/gatherer is simply not sustainable for a human population of 7 billion people; it has a certain brittleness with respect to natural disasters like a bad rainy season; and it doesn't provide the resources to maintain the standard of living that your average middle-class suburbanite has grown accustomed to, but you didn't make those arguments. ;)

I enjoy rock and ice climbing, sailing, and flying. And they are all done outside in the real world.

There's a certain satisfaction that comes from physical exertion that is not accomplished in a board game or a video game.

Although I have seen some people go crazy over flight sims. While they are good learning tools for some planes where it's hard (and expensive) to rack up hours, they're definitely no substitute for the real thing. That feeling of g's when you master an acrobatic maneuver or the joys of landing blind.

I've been there, first a grad student and now a professor. I also teach people about how to write, so I follow the research on this. First, as you age, this will happen some; it started for me in my early 40s. Second, you don't need a lot of these distractions. You might get push-back from people; you might think you need this stuff, but start aggressively using airplane mode on your phone. Use software on your computer that blocks distracting domains for a set period of time, or even go somewhere without internet access to work. Or leave your networked devices at home. Simple. Third, the body is part of this, nutrition, sleep, cardio exercise, are all shown to have significant impact on ability to concentrate. Fourth: pay attention to your moods, set work goals, don't whip up on yourself while making yourself work, etc. Fifth and final: keep all activity sustainable and form good habits (avoid bad habits like butt-chugging caffeine, popping Ritalin, or maintaining a marijuana fog).

What's with the "photo" of the 2nd stage / capsule separation? It looks distinctly like a 3D render, not an actual photo. Or if it is a real photo, how did they get it?

"People actually drove reasonably well and there weren't any major issues with it. "

Except for leading the nation in deaths per highway mile...yeah, I suppose?

Funny how the only person I know to be killed in a traffic collision was, in fact, killed by a drunk driver in Montana.

People don't drive "reasonably well" - ever. People have poorly maintained vehicles, especially in a by-and-large poor state like Montana with very little vehicle inspection. People stare at their cell phones, don't keep their windshields clean, don't use sunglasses, drink, spend too much time fiddling with the radio, get distracted by passengers. Our nation devotes virtually zero resources to any enforcement of traffic laws except speeding. Unless Montana starts doing roadside spot vehicle inspections when they are caught breaking some other law...

Guess who picks up the tab for the millions of dollars in medical care when Joe Cowboy slams his pickup truck into a family of four because he was doing 90mph and his bald tires couldn't stop him in time? The federal government, aka You and Me.

I've been a big believer in pen computing since reading Niven & Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ and using a Koala Pad graphics tablet attached to a Commodore 64 in high school.

Reasons I prefer tablets w/ a stylus:

  - drawing
  - note-taking
  - annotation
  - more efficient usage of some programs, esp. those which can be configured w/ pie menus or menu structures which can become gestural (Punch in Altsys Virtuoso was a gesture for me on my Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet attached to my NeXT Cube)
  - lighter weight / smaller --- currently trying to ``upgrade'' to a ThinkPad x61 Tablet (convertible) from a Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 slate and the former won't fit in my old laptop bag.

Almost bought an Asus Vivotab Note 8, and would've bought the Microsoft Surface 2 from sales this past weekend, but didn't. Concerns I had:

  - poor build quality for the Asus --- there's a DIY fix posted for the digitizer ceasing to work
  - standard LCD, not daylight viewable
  - the Surface 2 which was on sale was the RT model, so can't run Macromedia Freehand --- the Pro 2 was out-of-stock

I'd be sleeping on the couch tonight if someone would make a pen slate which:

  - ran either Mac OS X or Windows --- or if there was a drawing program for Android as nice as Macromedia Freehand
  - was a pen slate w/ a Wacom digitizer
  - had a daylight-viewable display (transflective LCD or better) --- I use my machine as a map reader when traveling and to control my CNC mill on the back porch
  - had a resolution higher than 1024 x 768 and was not much larger than a letter-sized notepad

Here I thought they meant a sub-Riemannian manifold.

While I agree that there are predatory journals out there and that authors need to be wary of them, I am not entirely sure that requiring authors to pay for publication is quite the correct criterion for determining whether or not a journal is predatory. Peer review, editing, and publication cost money. Traditionally, this cost is paid by subscribers to the journal, and these subscriptions can often be quite expensive (consider how Elsevier prices its journals). If the goal is to disseminate information, then an extremely costly subscription service is very likely detrimental to that goal. Hence the existence of open access journals which charge authors for publication but provide access to the material at no cost.

PDF was open enough from the beginning to have its specification available in print from the days of Acrobat 1.0: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pd...

Here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pd...

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/con... --- for some reason they don't have the first edition available (not that it's all that useful these days).

"Without the state protecting them, they will fall under their own overwhelming incompetence." - King Neckbeard.
"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." -- George Bernard Shaw

Actually, wood can be quite good at bearings --- one just has to use the correct sort of wood. Lignum vitae was used for the bearings for steam paddle boats and submarines and is now being used for bearings in hydroelectric plants:

http://www.core77.com/blog/mat...

Interestingly there was at least one bicycle design which claimed that frame shape could influence comfort:

http://gajitz.com/riding-a-rou...

"They're much like normal biles otherwise and I presume exactly as comfortable."

Comfort comes almost entirely from the tire size and pressure relative to rider weight and road conditions. The frame is largely irrelevant, at least for anything made in the last few decades by any half-competent company.

"Getting the bearings and power transmission were apparently the harddest bits."

Getting alignment on these items is the hardest bit. Bicycles require an incredible degree of proper alignment of a couple of key components in order for things to work right, mostly shifting, but also handling-wise.

"I'd guess that yet another disadvantage of a wooden bicycle, at least when sharing the road with motor vehicles, is that it's impossible to trigger a green traffic signal without enough metal surface to disturb the flux in the induction loop beneath the approach to the intersection."

1)Inductive loop sensors are much better than they used to be, and many can detect aluminum bike frames, metal in the wheels (almost all spokes are metal - carbon fiber spokes are very rare; many rims are still aluminum), or the metal in the drivetrain (chain, cables, derailleurs.)

2)A large percentage of bicycle frames are made from carbon fiber; even many wheels these days. No different from wood.

3)Many traffic lights now use camera-bases systems. They're cheaper and easier to set up/maintain, and can quantify the number of vehicles for better decisions regarding prioritization, etc. I think some can detect emergency vehicles, provide traffic statistics, and record video if there's a crash.

Some, but not all states, allow cyclists to go through a light if it doesn't change for them after X minutes. Idaho allows cyclists to treat red lights as stop signs, a law groups are trying to get passed here.

I'd take your post more seriously if you didn't make absurd generalizations like "steel is very stiff and wood is very flexible." From that alone it's obvious you understand nothing about materials.