> The cameras can also work when the tank is moving.

Did anyone else envision a 1000 heat pixel display on moving tank being made to display an image of a **moving** cow when they read this sentence? Somehow just seems funny.

I've heard this too. I believe it was an NPR story. That story (whoever it was) was relayed by a friend of Frost's who said Frost was irritated at a colleague who behaved just as the commenter posted which inspired Frost (in part?) to write that poem. Sorry I can't find the link.

I'm sorry... should have mentioned that this was done with the cooperation of school officials.

So, we were NOT trespassing. Although I do wonder if someone called the school officials and double checked and that's what called off the 'copter.

Some minor harassment happens in the US too. We were doing a star viewing event at a local elementary school. There were perhaps 3 big dobsonians and 2 or so smaller scopes, 20-30 people in the ball field of this school at 10:00 in the fall (so it was very dark, well past sundown) and somehow a police helicopter started circling us. We figured some neighbor must have called about some activity in the school and maybe there was a helicopter already near by so the local authorities dispatched it instead of a squad car. Thing is, it wasn't a quick fly-by. It circled us about 10 times, but otherwise left us alone. No police lights, no spot light, no loud speaker announcement, just 10 very noisy circles of our location then it went away.

I think unusual activity of any kind gets noticed and "inspected" these days.

AND they have to practice it at night, in the dark too!

Although this may be going in a direction different than you intended, I wish the government took a longer view on many more things. In this situation it seems reasonable to let the person "own" this as compensation for his efforts at salvage but to restrict his ability to pass it along to his heirs and instead when he dies it reverts to the government.

I recognize there are a lot of practical difficulties with this, but in principle, there ought to be a middle ground between turn over immediately and keep forever and if the government can't take a longer view of a middle path, who can?

I read the article and it appears in this case it's NEITHER the TSA nor the CBP, but regular law enforcement. The article makes no mention that the woman traveled across country lines and the password was requested upon re-entering the country. It DOES make a reference to how revealing this password is similar to giving up the keys to a safe in your home (should the LEO have a court order I assume).

back when BioSphere 2 was the rage it was easy to calculate what that model would look like spread over the whole planet. IIRC if 8 people lived in an area the size of biosphere 2 then 60 Billion could live on the planet Earth. Granted there were flaws in the biosphere 2 experiment such that the folks actually lost weight and couldn't build open fires due to slow rate of oxygen replenishment, couldn't use pesticides because the food cycles were too short, but still as an "upper limit" (somewhat beyond actually) it's a useful benchmark.

If you don't recall, Biosphere 2 had an "ocean" and a "desert" which for my calculations above I assumed were in roughly equal proportions to what's on Earth.

But that said, doesn't mean we're not about to encounter some extremely unusual times for our planet and species. What happens to the housing industry when population is stable? How much spare capacity is there in our food supplies if say a current major source is hit with a calamity (drought, fire, flood, etc)?

And because of that I'm surprised they didn't just swap out the recipe and leave the title the same. At least that would have been a bit harder to detect and may have been even funnier

"Our bombs smell like cupcakes".

The original summary mentioned that clicking on the clock itself put the user into a clock-settings page from which it was hard to return to the original alarm screen. IMHO people of all ages would be more comfortable playing with settings and screens if the "maze of twisty little passages" had an easy route to return to the previous screen.

Yea, when I'm older I might have clicked on the clock thinking I'm already IN the alarm setting and want to change the numbers of this alarm, and if I do that I might easily discover my mistake, but if I'm unable to return to the previous screen as easily as hitting a "back" button then... yea I'm going to be demotivated to play with new screens. I gotta choose right the first time or get lost trying to return to this screen.

The threat of these gas prices here because legislators will seek to raise gas taxes is actually wrong/misleading in today's world. Here in WA State our legislators are considering MOVING AWAY FROM A GAS TAX to pay for road projects under the belief that hybrid/electric/high-efficiency owners aren't paying their fair share of road taxes if that is ONLY from gas taxes.

It's one thing to run away from gasoline because the core price of gas is high. It's quite another to run away from it because the taxes are high. In short that won't work here as legislators will merely find another way to tax you for the roads we all use.

Oh, I'm not EXCUSING it, I'm merely suggesting that the Oatmeal strategy may fail when there's other forces pushing people to misspelling. IDENTIFYING those additional reasons may ALSO help stop people from misspelling it.

loose choose moose

The loose lose misspelling, much as it irritates me, is understandable because of pronounciation. Consider

chose - choose
lose - loose.

Of the above, choose rhymes with lose, so I can certainly appreciate why people think choose rhymes with loose.

Perhaps if we had more moose around people would spell this correctly (moose rhymes with loose, but not choose)

That should motivate change.

To paraphrase Monty Python, this improvement of infrastructure is trickier than I thought.

I'm all for better, faster, cheaper, more efficient everything, BUT infrastructure spending is tricky to compare to STIMULUS spending. If we had more high speed rail transport, for example, wouldn't that be nearly a zero-sum game with airline travel today? I fail to see the stimulative effect of adding high speed rail to the US much as I'd personally like to see it (especially if it's one of those I can drive my car onto).

At this point I gotta say I'm more in favor of infrastructure spending that's also stimulative than on merely maintaining status-quo.