Just on the IED front the ingenuity, sheer amount, and the different types of IEDs that have been found should get any pyro/electronics nerd excited. How the different tribal and religious militias interacted with themselves, the government, and the coalition is interesting as well. Hell, my Master's thesis was on the efficiency of using militia in counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd call that topic pretty nerdy. And don't forget, politics(Especially international politics) affects all of us, from the price of gas to the strength of your economy.

I was thinking more inline with the Reichstag fire. Especially since both events were fabricated by those who sought to gain power (and no, for anyone who is thinking it, 9/11 was not done by the US government). While most of the prequel trilogy is laughable, the one line Natalie Portman says about liberty dying to thunderous applause is probably one of the stronger lines of all 3 movies.

All you need to know about constitutional law is in Episode 3. A henious enough event can be exploited to the point where you can essentially invalidate an entire constitution and, instead of condemnation, you will hear only cheering.

I am actually hoping to be able to get something like the Elio in about 7 years or so when my current commuter car (a 2014 Focus) gets at or near end of life. I would love having an extremely cheap, efficient car like an Elio for my commute (40 miles each way), which would hopefully get my wife to let me have a jeep or motorcycle for the lifestyle/local driving

We use ours at least once, sometimes twice a week..Especially now that we got one with removable, dishwasher-safe plates.

There's plenty of room for competition when it comes to keurig-type machines and cats that would allow several companies to produce their own versions. Because everyone knows there's more than one way to skin a cat.

I know it's just an anecdote, but in my personal experience, at the higher levels of football (college and up: I played in college and have known several people that have moved on to the NFL) it takes a certain amount of intelligence to succeed, simply because the plays and the calls get more complicated. And while the stereotype of offensive linemen is that they are big and dumb, from what I have seen is that they actually tend to be smarter than other players. On my college team at least 2-3 out of our teams academic top 10 every year were offensive linemen, and a surprising number of our offensive linemen went on to graduate school, whether at our school or others. Of course, I may be slightly biased as I was an offensive lineman, I was one of those that went to grad school, and I was on my team's academic top 10 all 4 years.

Another interesting observation I have made is that certain personalities or characteristics seem to congregate to certain positions. For example, if you were to walk through a college or NFL locker room, more often than not you can tell if a player is offense or defense based solely on the state of their locker: offensive players tend to have cleaner, more organized lockers while defensive players tend to have messier, jumbled lockers.

Just buy white sapphire. Looks just like a diamond unless you compare them side by side (and then only by color of the light or by hardness) and about a third of the price.

Clearly what happened was that Ceres is in fact an alien covert research facility diquised as an asteroid. The facility had some kind of accident (hopefully it was just wiped out by an engineered, weaponized diesease and not full of zombified aliens) centuries ago and sometime between then and now a large impact damaged the coating all the way down to the metal wall of the facility itself. And of course, due to the inhabitiants at this point being nothing but dessicated (or animated!) corpses the damage to the camouflage was never repaired.

But how to you discern whether that 10% improvement is due to the work of the teacher or due to the work of a paid tutor outside the class? The poor kid might be stuck at home by himself watching tv and eating a McDonalds value meal while his single mom is working her 2nd shift job; meanwhile the rich kid is getting facts crammed into his head for 3 hours a day after school while his parents' personal chef is cooking a scientifically designed, nutritionally balanced dinner. It is pointless to base teacher performance on these standardized tests simply because there is no way to narrow it down solely to what the teacher actually taught them. And evaluating based on the difference between beginning and end year testing doesn't work either because (at least theoretically) both kids are being exposed to new material throughout the year, so the disparity only increases.

The only immortality man is likely to see any time soon is by putting your name on history or great things. You can fight for it like Lee, Washington, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan, etc. You can earn it through infamy: Hitler, Stalin, Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette. You can earn it through government like countless monarch, Churchill, Roosevelt. Or you can buy it like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, or anyone elected to a US national goverment office since the year 2000.

With even the earliest known examples of human burials having been found to contain objects that were deliberately placed with the deceased person I would argue that there is pretty strong evidence that humans have almost always had some sort of belief in a religion or afterlife. That would imply that it is in fact a biological (psychological at least, but that arises from the capacity of our brain, intelligence, and self-awareness) need, quite possibly as a reaction to the awareness that you will at some point cease to exist and allowing an individual to cope with that fact.

It actually has some good points to it. For example, one of the Cons is "There are easier ways to measure parents’ income". Students of wealthier families tend to do better due to a number of factors such as access to tutors, parents home more often(dont work 2 jobs/work normal business hours/etc), and just generally more stable family life. A "Pro" is the exact mirror of this: "Only biased against kids who couldn’t afford college anyway". Poorer kids (who would be less likely to afford to go to college) are more likely to not do as well as the wealthier kids. One of the more tongue in cheek Cons is that it fails to measure attractiveness, which unfortunately is a factor in how successful one can be and studies have shown more attractive people are percieved to be smarter or more qualified than they really are. People are jsut wired to be more trustful and drawn to attractive people.

Remember, the Onion is satire, and satire is always built on a foundation of truth.

Since these days corporations care more about their stockholders than just about anything else, if they are screwing over investors then it is a pretty safe bet they are screwing over their students too (and that is ignoring the fact that most for-profit "universities/educational insitutes/etc" tend to screw over their students with next to worthless degrees anyway).

I was able to call a cab company and ask for a pickup in Nashville, which is a medium-sized city in America. So yes, it can be done in the states as well.