Yes. You can buy cheap rolls of velcro strap marketed for use as plant-ties in the gardening section of hardware stores.

I also prefer the Signo DX - while similar to the Hi-Tec-C, they're actually waterproof. The Hi-Tec-C ink smears in water. Signo DX pens also have a stronger nib that won't bend if you drop it. That said, either is pretty good for plain office writing.

Sounds like aurorae. Perhaps temporarily extending down to their latitudes as a result of a solar flare.

My bathroom has had few-dollar CFLs running fine for >6 years without a single replacement, and that includes moving apartments (and reusing the same bulbs). They just came from the cheapest Costco CFL-pack I could find. I have no idea how people are killing CFLs, I have never seen one die, and they're all I use.

If you move your cup up and down at the frequency of your pace, it will double the apparent frequency as seen by the mug. This is usually sufficient to prevent it from slopping.

The problem with constant acceleration is energy. It doesn't really matter how long or how hard you're accelerating, with 100% matter to energy conversion and a photon drive (100% energy to thrust), you would only be able to reach 0.6c by converting half your ship's mass. A constant 1g trip to anywhere interesting would take unimaginable amounts of energy.

This requirement can be slightly reduced via external acceleration (eg. laser boosting), but then you're talking planetary-scale focusing mirrors if you want to beam power out of your local Oort cloud. That would only get you a moderate gain, though: 0.7c for a ship-mass of beamed power at 100% efficiencies. All this is of course ignoring the interstellar medium, as well.

If one looks at similar statistics by state in the US, murder-by-firearm also does not correlate with gun ownership. Rather, it slightly tracks population density. I recently updated my murder and firearm statistics spreadsheet with the FBI's 2010 murder data.

Thanks, that data is somewhat more recent than what I previously had. I've used it to update my by-state US gun ownership and murder data. Conclusions:

• Gun ownership and gun murder are uncorrelated or slightly inversely correlated.
• Gun ownership is strongly inversely correlated with population density.
• Murder rates are slightly correlated with population density, gun murder slightly moreso. (I'd guess the relation would be stronger if I did a by-county comparison instead of by state)
• Gun ownership is weakly inversely correlated with overall murder rates.

Note, the gun ownership data is from 2001 - if someone can find something more recent, I'll update it.

Strangely there's no citation of the paper in that article. Here's the arXiv preprint.

That's an excellent point - there seems to be a certain timeframe beyond which futurists fail to consider the implications of progressive implementation. On only slightly shorter timeframes, they can actually do quite well - for example, AT&T had a series of "You Will" ads in 1993 that were strangely accurate in predicting modern technology. Presumably it has something to do with extending an existing technology in a logical way rather than trying to determine the intermediate uses of new concepts.

This looks quite similar to a European effort reported last year that successfully tested glucose fuel cells in rats in 2010. This MIT one can be fabricated in silicon, though, so hopefully has the potential to be cheaper.

Fun fact: Surgeons are 130 times more likely than gunowners to leave a foreign object in someone (assumptions: all gunshot wounds count, and surgeons never leave foreign objects in patients which do not undergo general anesthesia).

Higher education degrees in the US for science and engineering degrees (not usually mathematics, I don't know about non-science technology degrees) are generally paid for by working as a TA or research assistant half-time. This usually waives or pays tuition and provides a moderate stipend, often funded via grant money or similar from the research group the student is working for. This is less common for Masters than it is for Doctorates, though.

Perhaps you should do the math. Assuming a 3.6e8 km^2 surface area for the ocean, the largest reservoir alone, going by Wikipedia's 180km^3 figure, could account for 0.5mm of sea level. A trivial calculation. Others have posted similar further up the page.

Unfortunately, constant high acceleration is energetically impossible. By the time you get to ~0.7c, you've used up half the mass of your ship if you have a perfectly efficient matter to kinetic energy converter (eg. a 100% efficient photon drive). I.E. your kinetic energy is now equal to your rest mass. Good luck getting anywhere near that with conventional propulsion methods!