RNA and mitochondrial DNA are two different things, I thought?

That was part of the stretch goals. The initial 1 million was to bring an updated version of the show to the web. At 5 million, they wanted to bring it to all platforms, including mobile devices, video game consoles and set top boxes too.

I'm about the same. Traveled two hours west for work this week and I basically just go to bed and wake up on my normal EST schedule, shifted thirty minutes or so. I call it moving to "grown up time." Back home I stay up til midnight and wake up at 7:30 AM. Here, I'll crash by 10PM and get up at 6AM. When I go back, resetting to my normal schedule takes no special effort at all.

I work my 45-50+ hours a week minimum like everyone else in tech land, but I also normally only have a 10 minute commute. (I'm currently visiting another office and the commute is 30 minutes from my hotel, bleah.)

I know people who are losing two hours of their life a day commuting each way, in addition to working our nasty hours, leaving fewer hours to actually live. It's either cut out eating or sleeping, and thus it's usually sleep that takes the hit.

I could make twice as much money if I committed to a horrible commute but I value my free time too much.

I've talked to plenty of educators about it. I'm married to one. It really does depend on how each individual school board is approaching the situation. Some teachers love it, others hate it, but it all boils down to implementation and how much support the school board is giving the teachers. (And support, as always, boils down to money in a lot of cases.)

Yep, the valedictorian of my high school went to Harvard under those terms. She was the eldest in an Army family. At best her father was pulling $40K/year.

I'm in GA, so my state university tuition was (at the time) completely covered as long as I maintained a B average. I was just on the hook for housing and food, and I committed to loans for that. I also worked, and had a VA stipend since my father was disabled, which covered what would have been my family's "expected contribution." My parents only really contributed about a thousand dollars over the course of my undergrad, mostly for furniture.

I also sat down when considering colleges and looked at my choices. Due to income levels, Ivy Leagues were out for me, as was any private school. That left state schools. In-state tuition is cheaper than out of state, so that left local state schools. I wanted something bigger and better than a small community college or tech school, so that left the Research I and II schools.

I narrowed it down to four state universities, and was accepted to them all. In the end, I went for the slightly more expensive Big State U because I could move away from home (loved my parents but I was being suffocated) and because the brand name on the school would look good on my resume as long as I stayed in the same state. (Huge alumni network here.)

The ROI on whole schools and on individual majors should absolutely be a point of discussion with high school seniors, and parents need to be frank about it. But it isn't the state schools that are the cause of the student loan crisis, it's the for-profit schools that prey on those who CAN'T get accepted to the state schools.

Common Core is being unnecessary vilified by people who don't understand it. All Common Core does is define a base line of standards for all children in all states that adopt it. It says, "This is what a US student should know at each grade level." The methods and curriculum for how to achieve that goal are still left up to the states and local school boards, but the educational companies who supply them with books are not helping them the way they should. Many books incorrectly state they are common core compliant.

The way it was handled could certainly have been better, but I see nothing wrong with saying all second grades should be able to do basic multiplication and all 7th grades should be able to find the primary theme of a passage of writing.

We've talked about getting a motorcycle for around town use. I work four miles from the office and I feel silly driving a mid-size sedan here daily, especially since I can avoid major highways (except for one traffic light controlled intersection.) I wouldn't take a motorcycle on anything bigger than a two lane road (too many idiots on highways).

Most importantly, the local Harley shop is about three blocks from my house. If it does something strange I can walk it to the shop for repairs.... assuming it has the electric equivalent of a neutral gear.

Many federal projects allocate funds to states and cities (less so since the ban of earmarks) for smaller local projects. We're paying our taxes in, why shouldn't we get them back? Granted, I-75's legendary potholes are a more pressing problem.

It's a state highway. And we tried very hard to raise our taxes with a TSPLOST (Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) and it did not succeed passing the state-wide referendum because everyone outside of the metro Atlanta area is allergic to taxes, apparently.

Walk? On what sidewalks? Our city did a cost estimate to put sidewalks in the most dangerous highway in town, and when the price exceeded three million, scrapped the idea.

And another pedestrian died just last month.

This is the first I've heard about "personal audits of leadership." The story and the scandal, when it broke, was that organizations filing for tax-exempt status were asked to provide additional details regarding the organization. That may have included asking for personal information regarding some of the members, but if a group trying to say it's a "social improvement" organization is being led by someone whose day job is working as a political speech writer, the IRS would like to know that. I would go so far as to say they have a right to know that, Citizen's United be damned.

These organizations are filing for tax exempt status because donors are giving them a lot of money, and in order to avoid paying taxes on that donated money, they're under burden of proof to show that it's not being used directly for political purposes. Taxes are not an opt-in thing.

I just had an 8 year old monitor die on me. So a coworker swapped it out with an identical 8 year old monitor that still functioned. We're getting new monitors later this year, but the old ones will be-reused and sent out to field offices - until they all die for good.

Unless you work for the Army, the government doesn't store your health records. Your doctor's office does.

My father worked in an Army hospital's records department for twelve years before electronic medical records became a thing. Holy moly, some veterans files were about two inches thick.