Even the Unabomber used the U.S. mail...

A major issue here is that standard glass can wear down through abrasion pretty quickly. Glass is fairly hard stuff, with a Mohs hardness of 5 it's comparable to steel which is why you need specialized tools like diamond cutters to cut it. However, quartz- one of the most common minerals on earth and a major component of most sands and gravels- has a Mohs hardness of 7, so a bit of sand and grit can easily scratch and wear standard glass. Take a look at a piece of glass that's been on a rocky beach and you'll see that it's been worn down and frosted by the constant action of the waves and stones; thousands of cars a day driving over a surface and grinding pebbles and grit into it will have the same effect. It will wear grind down any texturing, and frost the glass such that it reduces the amount of light getting through to the solar cells. There are harder glasses out there, like the Gorilla Glass that smartphone screens are made out of, but it's unclear whether they've addressed this wear-and-tear issue or not.

That's not true. The homicide rate in the United Kingdom is 1.2 per 100,000. The homicide rate in Canada is 1.6. The homicide rate in Australia is 1.0 And the homicide rate for the US is 4.8 per 100,000. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you're so inclined ("List of Countries By Intentional Homicide Rate") but it's clear you've already made up your mind and are simply going to ignore any facts that don't support your preconceptions. Yes, the human tendency to murder other humans is a powerful force, and so a certain percentage of people who would otherwise be murdered by guns in the UK are murdered with knives, poison, or cricket bats, because those guns aren't available. But the end result of strict gun control is a per-capita homicide rate that is around 25% of the U.S. rate in the UK and 33% in Canada and 20% in Australia. The statistics don't lie, gun control saves lives.

I think it's time to start talking about real gun control in the United States. I'm not talking about banning a few models of assault rifles; I think the end goal of gun-control should be keeping rapid-fire weapons out of the public hands, which means requiring licensing for or simply banning all revolvers, semiautomatic pistols and semiautomatic rifles, creating something similar to the gun control laws seen in the UK. We've tried letting things run wild and all it's gotten us is thousands of deaths a year and an endless series of mass shootings. The next logical step is implementing the kinds of firearms controls seen in Canada and the United Kingdom, and I think the left needs to start pushing this seriously. No, Obama isn't out to get your guns... and it's a shame, because dammit, he SHOULD be. And if that takes a constitutional amendment, then we should pass a constitutional amendment- I'll line up to vote for that. Yes, it's in the constitution, but so was slavery, and we outgrew that. Times change, and a law written for muzzle-loaders is no longer useful in an age of machine guns. I'm tired of seeing thousands of people senselessly slaughtered every year because the political debate is held hostage by a handful of extremists. For too long we've played it the NRA's way and refused to talk about gun control. We need to start talking about gun control again, and nothing should be off the table.

Intelligent, informed speculation has a place and purpose. I remember Larry Niven's essay, "Bigger than Worlds" in this respect. He goes off into some metaphorical and literal deep-space territory here, but he's trying to constrain speculation in terms of the laws of physics. How would we build artificial worlds? He discusses Dyson spheres but can't figure out where the gravity comes from, so comes up with a compromise where you have a ring the diameter of Earth's orbit and spin it. This lead to the novel Ringworld; some engineering students later pointed out the structure's orbit was unstable, so in the sequel he adds in motors to stabilize the whole thing... obviously Niven's essays haven't led to any major, useful advances in building artifical worlds (although it did help give us the Halo franchise). But this sort of speculation- wondering what is possible, given the constraints of the real world, what is impossible and what is possible but just not realized yet- has led to major, useful advances. Arthur C. Clarke, another hard sci-fi author, was the first to sketch out the idea of orbital communications satellites. We don't have any cloned dinosaurs yet, but arguably Crichton's Jurassic Park helped spur people to do things like sequence the neanderthal genome. Virtual worlds are probably more advanced than they would be if Snow Crash hadn't sketched out what those worlds might look like and how they would function. Star Trek got people to think about how future computer interfaces might work. Perhaps more importantly, Star Trek got people to speculate about how future social and political structures might work in terms of sex, race, economics, and political boundaries. And soforth.

That being said, I don't think Adams really falls into that camp of informed speculators. He says at one point "If you put some scrubbers in the device I think there's a way to deal with pollution and climate change too. I saw some sort of tube-to-the-sky concept that was supposed to do that but I'm too lazy to search for the link." He's just screwing around. He's having fun playing with ideas, but can't actually be bothered to do the math or even Google something before saying it. It just comes across as self-indulgent and vain, not insightful or intelligent. For someone who spent so much time deriding people for being stupid or intellectually lazy, he's showing a lot of intellectual laziness himself.

If antidepressants are really the answer, why does America, with one of the highest rates of antidepressant use, also have one of the highest rates of depression in the world? If they were really effective, people should be less depressed, and in fact there's more depression and mental illness than ever. There's increasingly concern that antidepressants are actually making things worse. In the short term, antidepressants can be effective in managing the treatment of depression, for some people. The problem is that they can cause long-term changes in how the brain functions, such that the person becomes dependent upon the drug. This means that on quitting antidepressants, the depression is more likely to return than it would have been if it had simply been left to resolve itself. There have been a number of studies published that suggest that the long-term outcome of mental illness is worse when antidepressants are used. As far as I know, there isn't a single study that has shown that outcomes for depression are improved long-term- over the course of 5-10 years instead of 5-10 weeks- by the use of antidepressants.

Maybe antidepressants do have a role in treating mental illness, but given the risks- increased risk of suicide, the highly addictive nature of some of the drugs (especially ones with short half-lives) and the risk that they can make people worse than when they started, these should be a method of last resort for severe clinical depression, NOT a first-line treatment for everyone who seems moderately sad or anxious. There are a *lot* of things that have been shown to be potentially beneficial- cognitive behavioral therapy, exercise, light therapy, sleep therapy, and supplements like Omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin B, D, zinc and magnesium, cutting down on carbohydrates- which come without the risks posed by antidepressants.

Not a bubble, but maybe a froth, lot of little bubbles. We're not seeing the entire tech sector inflated, but we're seeing inflated prices in individual companies and within particular areas of the sector. At the height of the 1990's tech bubble, price/earnings ratios were about twice what they are now. Right now, buying $1 worth of earnings in a company costs about $19 worth of stock (Price/Earnings, or P/E, = 19). So if you buy $1 worth of a company, it will pay for itself in 19 years, assuming the earnings stay the same. At the peak of the dot com bubble in the late 1990s, buying $1 worth of earnings cost about $40 (P/E =40). So we'd have to see the prices of companies double to get back to where we were during the peak of the dot com bubble.

That being said, there are individual companies that are massively overvalued. Facebook is trading at 77 times earnings, Netflix is trading at 151 P/E, Amazon is trading at 489 P/E, which means that one dollar invested in Amazon will pay for itself if half a millennium at current earnings levels. That's pretty much the way stocks traded during the dot-com bubble. Tesla doesn't even have a P/E ratio since they can't actually turn a profit, but their stock soars none the less, which is again classic bubble behavior. So yes, these individual companies show bubble-level valuations of the sort we saw during the dot com bubble. But this isn't the case for all companies. Google is trading at a P/E of 30, Microsoft at a P/E of 15, Apple at a P/E of 14.67. Google is probably fairly priced given its rapid growth, Microsoft is underpriced assuming they ever manage to get their shit together (debatable), Apple is a bargain even if they manage to grow modestly in the next few years.

So yes, there are individual companies that are showing bubble-like behavior but it's not spread across the entire sector the way it was in the dot-com bubble. There are pockets of madness but it's not yet systemic. And even the companies that are wildly overvalued are solid companies. Maybe they're overpriced, but I don't think anyone doubts that Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook will continue to be important companies, we're not talking about Pets.com here.

How in the hell can you write an article called "The World's Worst Planes" and not include the massively over-budget and behind-schedule F-35 Lightning II?

The whole plan seems pretty sketchy. You can't just create a mashup of two distantly related animals and automatically expect to get something viable out of the mix. Mammoths and Asian elephants aren't actually that closely related- African elephant, Asian elephant, and mammoth are thought to have diverged around six million years ago, so mammoths are about as close to Asian elephants as chimps are to humans.

Hybridization can result in improved fitness if the parents aren't too distantly related. However, the more distant the relationship between the parents, the less likely the offspring are to be viable. Humans and Neanderthals split around 600,000 years ago and were able to successfully interbreed. However, horses and asses split around four million years ago. The offspring- mules and hinnies- are healthy, but they are either sterile or have reduced fertility. Breeding more distantly related animals produces non-viable offspring.

The article does mention that there have been hybrids between Asian and African elephants, which are slightly more distantly related than Asian elephant and mammoth. What the article neglects to mention is that the only known example of an African-Asian hybrid died several weeks after birth; there are other reports of hybrids being born but strikingly no reports of any surviving. This suggests that mixing mammoth and Asian elephant DNA is going to produce an unhealthy or non-viable offspring.

Wars are as much political conflicts as anything else, so acting in a moral fashion, or at a bare minimum appearing to do so, is vital to winning the war. Predator drones are a perfect example of this. In terms of the cold calculus of human lives, they are probably a good thing. They are highly precise, minimize American casualties, and probably minimize civilian casualties compared to more conventional methods like sending in bombers, tanks, platoons, etc. etc. That's cold comfort if your family is slaughtered of course, but Afghanistan is probably a much cleaner war than previous wars such as the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, or the U.S. war in Viet Nam.

The issue is that there is just something deeply unnerving about the idea of a soulless, unfeeling machine piloted from thousands of miles away raining Hellfire missiles down on unsuspecting people below. It's not really any worse than getting killed by a soldier, but somehow it feels worse- the civilians never had a chance, and even the combatants are simply slaughtered without any chance to fight back. When you're killing someone who never even has a chance, it's more a form of murder than warfare. It feels, in a word, immoral. And that is costing the U.S. hugely. From a purely rational standpoint, the drones make sense. From a moral standpoint, there is something repugnant and indecent and hideous about them. That is swaying public opinion against the U.S. and helping to increase support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Maybe behaving in an amoral fashion wins you the battles. But you can win all the battles and turn everyone against you, in which case you may lose the war.

While it is the NSA's job to spy on people, that's traditionally been something you do against your adversaries, not your allies. I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about tapping the USSR's undersea cables. They had nuclear-tipped ICBMs pointed at us. It's quite another thing when we're talking about tapping the phone of Angela Merkel. She's the democratically elected president of an allied NATO state. I mean, up until that point she and Obama had a pretty good working relationship, so if he really wanted to know what she was thinking, he probably could have you, know, asked her.

What is your point precisely? Taxonomy is about determining the number of species and the boundaries between them- whether that means identifying a new population, or subdividing one group into two distinct species. Either one is taxonomy in action, the fact that we are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of species means that taxonomy is an active field, not a dying one.

If taxonomy is really a dying science, you'd have a hard time telling from the number of species being described. According to reptile-database.org, there were 3149 snake species in 2008, as of Feb 2014, there are 3458. That's 309 species, 51 species a year, roughly a 10% increase in six years- which is stunning when you consider that we have been naming species since the 1700s. There were 5079 lizards in 2008, and 5914 in 2014. That's 835 species,139 a year, and a 16% increase. This is just the reptiles; you'll see similar trends if you look at other groups like frogs, or fish, or insects. Given these numbers, you could argue that we are in fact in a golden age of taxonomy. DNA is a big part of this- using DNA it's possible to show that populations that may look superficially similar, even to an experienced taxonomist, stopped exchanging genes millions of years ago.

Bird and mammal taxonomy is a different story. Historically they have been really well studied, to the point that there simply aren't that many species left to be described. Only 44 birds have been described since 2010, which works out to around a dozen a year, around 10% the rate of discovery for reptiles. That's enough work to occupy a few taxonomists full-time, or a number of taxonomists part-time, but it suggests that we really don't need more bird taxonomists because there's just not much left for them to do.

Eventually, the bubble pops, the collective delusion ends, and gravity and other natural laws reassert themselves, the whole thing comes crashing down. The key word being "eventually". Bubbles are self-sustaining, there's a feedback loop. People buy in because the price goes up, as more people buy in, the price goes up more, and so on. Sober, rational people look at fools making money and eventually decide they've made a mistake and start jumping in even as the whole thing starts racing towards disaster and becoming more unstable, so the bubble converts more people over time. The media eventually start calling it a bubble, but lots of people stay in the game even though they know it's unsustainable because they think they can time the market. They know their luck can't last, but they money is too good so they stay in. Like a gambling addict at a casino, they tell themselves they'll just play one more hand...

The result of all these things is that bubbles take years to play out. If you look on Google Trends you'll see that "Housing Bubble" becomes popular in 2005, a full three years before the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing market. People realized we were in a housing bubble and yet the whole thing kept going, becoming more and more delusional, until it finally exploded. The same thing happened with the Internet Bubble- it popped in 2000, but in 1999 there was already a book called "The Internet Bubble."

Selling short into a bubble is a bit like being the one sane guy at a cult compound trying to tell everyone that no, the magical silver spaceships are not coming to take you to heaven when the world ends. Yes, eventually the whole thing will burn to the ground and the survivors will realize that the Shining Leader was just a creepy perv with serious mental health issues. But it's anybody's guess when that will happen.

I don't know if I'd call it a tech bubble, it's more of a froth- lots of little bubbles. During the original tech bubble that started in the late '90s, pretty much everything was massively overvalued, and pretty much every shitty startup would go public and see its stock rocket up, even (especially) if they didn't make a profit and didn't have a business plan. It was widespread financial insanity, collective economic madness. The average stock on the S&P 500 traded at 40 times earnings, versus about 18.8 today. In other words, the average company costs about twice as much (relative to its earning potential) then as now.

Today, there are definitely some overvalued tech stocks. Facebook has a P/E of 76, Netflix has a P/E of 128, Amazon has a P/E of 428. Which means that at current earnings levels, a dollar invested in Facebook will pay off in 76 years, that same dollar invested in Netflix will pay off in 128 years, and Amazon stock will pay for itself in a little over four centuries. You're speculating (i.e. gambling) if you buy any of those companies. But other tech stocks are more reasonably priced. Google has a P/E of 28, Microsoft's P/E ratio is 15, Apple's is only 14. We are seeing bubble-like behavior in certain companies and in certain industries (social media, for example) but it's going a little far to say that the entire industry is in a bubble.