I think you are vastly overestimating the chances that a giant rock from space will actually hit us.

Well, that doesn't say anything; that just described every neural network for the past couple of decades, except for the "rapid improvement" part. I haven't read TFA, so I don't know if there's more detail, but just describing the basics of how neural networks operate isn't an explanation for why they're suddenly improving.

My mother is a (retired) computer science professor and my father is a (retired) mathematician. I'm pretty sure that they would get into the geeky cooking as much as I would.

Mars-shaking seems much more likely than Earth-shaking, really.

Some decades back, the "past US military" option would have been larger, too -- we also used to have a draft.

At my workplace, we just all plug the same code style settings into our IDEs, and everyone's code gets formatted the same way automatically. And yes, it matters: having everyone's code formatted the same way makes it much easier to read.

Nice try, there's no chance this would work in Philadelphia -- they're still using tokens. (And magstripe for monthly/weekly passes, but definitely no NFC.)

Seems like a bunch of AlphaSmarts or equivalent would work pretty well -- they seem to be available for about $50 used. I learned to type on something very much like that in elementary school, though I have no idea what brand they were, just that they were red and had some simple typing games. They worked very well: I'm a pretty fast tough typist as a result.

You're not thinking about this the right way. Currently $13m is being spent annually on very expensive treatments for a very small number of people. Imagine if some of that money were instead spent on prevention, which according to TFA only costs a few hundred dollars per case if it's caught before it becomes severe. That means more money for treating more common ailments, not less.

Literally no one in recorded history has ever been killed by a meteorite. California has had a grand total of nine fatal shark attacks since 1926, so you're pretty safe on that count, too. You might still be right that tapeworms aren't that serious a problem, but you're way off base in your comparisons.

And just because it's not all volunteers doesn't mean anyone is getting rich off of it. I work for a small nonprofit, about fifteen employees total, and our combined compensation, including our president, is less than Brian Gallagher's. The president's salary is about twice what mine is as a developer.

Just to nitpick, lens flare has nothing to do with film vs. digital sensors: it's entirely due to the optics.

You're a little off (as is TFA): in type 1 diabetes, the beta cells are actually killed off by the immune system. That also means that transplanting in new beta cells is only half of the solution, even if they're genetically identical to the person's original beta cells, because you also need to stop the immune system from attacking the new cells. In TFA, the mice had suppressed immune systems, but current immunosuppression drugs are pretty nasty, and cause a lot of other problems, worse than the original disease in all but the most severe cases.

Yep, those are both excellent (well, if you skip The Last Battle...). While we're talking about great children's fantasy series, I'll also add The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander.

Also, pretty much anything by Bruce Coville; he has both fantasy and SF. There's the "My Teacher is an Alien" series, the Unicorn Chronicles, "Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher", and lots of others.