I never understood the whole 'take your passport' thing. I was under impression that if I show up at the US embassy,

First you've got to get to the Embassy. If the country in question requires you to carry your ID card, visa and passport at all times, then the odds of you making it to the Embassy are pretty slender.

Remember, Dorothy, you're not in Kansas any more. The rules of home don't apply there because, uh, you're not at home any more.

It has the orbit of a comet and it may vent particles like a comet.

Citation required.

I do make a reasonable effort to keep up to date with the scientific literature, and i've not heard that claim.

Are you perhaps thinking of Chiron?

That way, maybe we will finally get to name its companion "Goofy", rather than that dumbass Charon moniker.

I'm going to assume that you don't know the origin of the name of Charon. It's quite a sophisticated semi-private joke between the rules of astronomical nomenclature and classical literature. "Goofy", on the other hand is just some stupid cartoon joke.

some sort of sensible criteria to separate them from asteroids

It does - gravity high enough to deform it into a sphere.

Making Ceres and Vesta planets.

That's OK, I'm cool with an 11-planet solar system. Given the near certainty of there being other spherical planets in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, I'm cool with a solar system of a couple of dozen planets.

when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft slingshots around the icy rock and sends us back a detailed picture of its composition.

For certain values of "slingshot" that include hardly any deflection at all.

Really, the only categorization issue that I'm adamant about is that Pluto-Charon is called a binary.

What does describing Pluto and Charon as a binary bring to the conversation? Does it allow you to describe the properties of the entire system without having to individually describe the component parts?

Then again, they're something approaching scientists of one form or another. They have more attachment to truth than to politics.

Hmmm, maybe not Benford. Nothing in his bibliography strikes a resonant tone. I'll have to fish it off the shelf (I remember feeling somewhat conflicted between the writer's reputation and my lack of engagement with the characters, scenario and underlying re-building of the laws of physics. So I don't think I've sent it off to the second-hand-bookshop in the street.)

I wonder how many comets it kicked out of the cloud and have cause some ruckus here on Terra.

Why do you think any comets etc that were perturbed have already arrived?

There's nothing to prevent (say) a 10km body from having been perturbed 70,000 years ago, into an orbit that brings it into close proximity to Quaor in 10 years time, which then perturbs it into the inner Solar System on a couple of hundred year drop into a field in Oklahoma.

The debris could still be arriving here in several million years.

Oh so that's why everyone in Europe and half of Asia are dead

From Kaos' figures (which I am taking as unadulterated bullshit) he's talking about killing pretty much everyone outside of Africa and South America.

The boy has the "thousand yard stare" : back away from him, while feeling around for useful tools like a clue-by-four. His original case may have had some merit, but by his deranged mumblings, he's tainted it by association.

There's even a few places here in Ontario where radon venting is mandatory in your house, most of the southern part of the province has 50-800m of limestone over the bedrock and that's not enough to prevent seepage.

I'd look at that as a geologist and think - there's a good chance that the limestones would help to concentrate the seepage of radon from the basement into particular areas.

True. Lead poisoning is well understood, and has been for thousands of years.

Hundreds, I'd live with. Thousands? Citation required, I think.

Yes, I did grow up in a house with lead piping. Which is why, to this day, I run the tap for a good 30 seconds before taking water to drink or cook with. There were coping strategies that evolved in the last few centuries when people did understand "lead" as an element (and so "lead poisoning" as a concept distinct from "arsenic poisoning" and "belladonna poisoning") which the Romans didn't seem to have.

I'm trying to remember when the hypothesis that lead poisoning is what did in the Romans originated. I think it's relatively recent - Gibbon in his "Decline & Fall" blamed the de-balling effect of Christianity for the decline and fall, and he was one of the first to try to come up with an overarching explanation. That would put the "lead poisoning" theory at being at most a couple of centuries old, as a disagreement with Gibbon.

Since natural uranium has a half life measured in billions of years, the only way it could kill you in five minutes is if a significantly large chunk of it fell on your head from a great height....

Video or it didn't happen.

Actually, since I'm sharing an office this month with the safety officer and a lifting-slinging-cranes instructor, I've seen more than enough "this is why you wear a hard hat and you still don't get anywhere near (30degree fall angle) of a suspended load" videos this week. the polite ones illustrate using a watermelon in place of a human head. The ones from surveillance cameras are kill porn.

A hard hat is good to around 1kg mass falling through 1m. Anything much more the hat may reduce injury, but there's still a good chance of serious injury or death.

A few days ago, someone had put a half-kilo water bottle on a ledge on a basket load for tubulars. When it was being boomed out over to the cargo boat, it fell from about 20m height - equivalent to about 10kilos through 1m or 1kilo through 10m. Well into serious injury territory.

Sorry, but I work with these dudes and Dropped Objects are a day-to-day conversation , meeting and email subject here.

Some people would rather that proper coders actually built something that worked properly, rather than having to do the fucking job yourself. (If that means allowing for user-configurable UI, then that's probably fine. But most people want to do their job without having to learn a complete new family of skills.

I asked the welder to build me a bracket last night. He built it. He didn't need to program the nearest CNC machine (120km away) to have it manufactured then shipped to location (3-4 days, plus paperwork). Instead he made me the bracket, dunked it in a bucket to cool the welds off, and passed it to me. He doesn't need to code, and it's unlikely that he ever will need to.

I actually have a driving license (about a 50% probability for a random person in this country), and only in the last couple of months down-graded to a photographic one. Naturally, I don't carry it with me, except when I'm going to hire a car. Otherwise, it's simply not necessary, and there is no way that I am going to let our local police get into the habit of thinking "you must carry THIS piece of ID with you at all times".

But then, it seems that Iowans obviously have got into the habit of valuing convenience (for the police) over the liberty of the individual.

Didn't some guy called Frank Benjamin say something about that once?