In other news, people who engage in certain social behaviours are more likely to engage in other social behaviours.

Brilliant. This device you've described would completely rectify the problem!

If 2.26% of the population is licensed, and those people are randomly distributed across the US population, and you know 200 people, then the probability that you know a licensed ham is 1 - (1 - 0.0226)^200 = 99%.

When I was 5 I leaped off the couch headfirst onto a pile of cushions. Except I underestimated my strength and flew right over the cushions, headfirst into the corner of a solid oak liquor cabinet.

It hurt like crazy but you know what? Agony is inescapable in life, and you have to learn how to deal with it through experience.

Two stitches later I had learned a pretty valuable lesson.

Actually in this case I think it would be a 2.5" hard.

Clearly you still don't have replacement opinions though. :)

It's not really that much. Delta-V from the surface of Mars to Earth return trajectory is ~8km/sec, which is about double the delta-V from the lunar surface to Earth orbit. Consider the size of the Apollo lander - and that had people in it!

Wow, I had no intention of sparking such a vigorous and pedantic debate.

I simply made the observation that as odd as it sounds to measure fuel economy in square metres, there does in fact exist a physically meaningful interpretation of that number.

I certainly don't think it's useful in any way, and neither does anyone else in this thread, so you're arguing against a strawman.

Kanji are words, they're just words whose "spelling" is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.

Hiragana or Katakana are the equivalent of English letters, and nobody's suggesting that those ever change.

My Accord gets about 10L/100km, or 0.01m^3/100000m or 1e-7 m^2. This is equivalent to one tenth of a square millimetre.

Which means a strip of gasoline down the centre of the lane, with a cross-sectional area of one tenth of a square millimetre, would be enough to power my car as it drives.

Do you also refer to people from West Virginia as "Virginians" and people from New Mexico and "Mexicans"?

It's also well known that children tend to have trouble with categorizing animals. Frequently they'll overgeneralize - calling every 4-legged animal a dog, for example - and it's only with constant correction that their category boundaries become adjusted properly.

Or you could just have pointers to letters in the English alphabet! Then you can store all your emails in only 26 bytes (plus some overhead for the pointers).

I need that much every second, at least!

So instead of a 6" layer of oil on the Gulf of Mexico's coastline, you'd rather have a 1" layer of oil on the Atlantic ocean's coastline? Both are very very damaging, but localizing the damage is the best way to help things recover quickly.