And just like in nearly every other area, Canada's efforts would have been utterly useless had America not done the heavy lifting. Great, thanks for Canadarm. There's no way we could have possibly manufactured such a modern marvel as that here in the US. We're just clueless pikers and you geniuses north of us are obviously our superiors in every way. Thank god for Canada, or we'd all be lost. It's called throwing you a bone, the least you could do is show gratitude instead of acting like you lot actually did something, because you didn't.

Do we have to be reminded nearly every time the shuttle is discussed that Canada built the arm? Is there some sort of CanCon regulation that when a Canadian sees the Space Shuttle mentioned they are obligated to bring up the arm, the same way that Canadian radio stations are forced to play Rush or Neil Young once an hour?

Familiarity breeds contempt.

News for nerds, _______

Spoiler: Stuff that matters

Petraeus' biographer Paula Broadwell under FBI investigation over access to his email, law enforcement officials say

Petraeus Resigns Over Affair With Biographer

He had an affair with his biographer, which apparently began while he was active duty military in Afghanistan. Extramarital affairs are illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He'll be lucky if the DoD doesn't bring him out of retirement just to take a star off his shoulder.

This is a travesty for which they should answer.

+1 yay!

Mars is a tough place to land, and the folks at JPL managed to do something magnificent. Here's to another decade of good science from the red planet!

It's not complete without

30 PRINT "PENIS"

40 GOTO 30

because that's what all of us preteens did when we first learned BASIC. I learned BASIC on a CoCo, and although I have never coded in BASIC since the 1980's, I still feel it was a very formative learning experience. Thanks, Radio Shack.

They should have used Monster Cables.

Or the Obama years and the word "sustainable?"

Battle of York, 1813

York (present-day Toronto) was the seat of the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada. After the American army won the battle, the guys got a little nutty and started torching stuff. The American army never reached Ottawa, but at that time they had no reason to, as Ottawa would not come to be a prominent Canadian city until decades later.

If we want to get all pop-statistical about it, half of them had two-digit IQ's.

Sure there's a selection bias since juries are pulled from the voter rolls and those people tend to be... oh fuck it I'm surrounded by assholes.

Thoughtcrime doubleplusungood

Former Navy sailor and a former #1 nozzleman here. You can't possibly have enough robots to fight fires in all the places a fire could be unless you make the ship a giant firefighting robot. As cool as that sounds, it kind of detracts from the actual mission, which is to fight and win wars at sea. The ship's crew are ultimately much better equipped to defeat fires than some automaton because they have native human intelligence and can use spur of the moment logic to reassess a situation. A robot might see a hotspot in a puddle of burning fuel oil and concentrate on it, where a human would say "that'll put itself out and I need to concentrate on this jet of flame erupting from the gas turbine engine." Someday, maybe, robots will be able to assess a main space casualty the way a human could, but until that day comes the Navy should continue to rely on the very good judgement of its human firefighting teams. The US Navy trains every single sailor to be a firefighter, the way the Marines and Army train everyone to be a rifleman. Damage control is a religion among the seagoing set. It will be a very long time before a robot can replace a motivated sailor as the best means to save the ship. There are too many variables to leave it to code.