Global thermonuclear war : 80% less economic output in developed countries, a nuclear winter, and a selection of the fittest specimens of the human race plus a few Pygmeas, Tibetans, Polynesians, Swedes and Swiss.

Well, for noise, you need to nitrogen cool your sensor...or use a DSLR, because the sensor is not heated and permanently subjected to photons like in a point & shoot or bridge. I am however quite satisfied by digital cameras for night shooting or high ISO pictures, with film grain or lack of reciprocity can make those situations tricky. However the main selling point of film for me is dynamic range as you point out : the nonlinearity of the response makes it possible to better resolve high contrast situations than digital ; for instance, a bright face in a dark room with natural lighting seems to always give me "hot" pixels and pizza effects on the cheeks in digital, as shown on the histogram with some bunching at 255, requiring manual adjustment, bracketing, ugly HDR postprocessing, whatever, when film adapts to this situation automatically. The wedding picture with black and white clothes side to side still necessitates some manual adjustment in postprocessing, but still...

Precisely ! Glass makes the difference..and so, due to the preeminence of digital these days, quality optics incompatible with digital are dime a dozen on ebay. I now use a cheap bridge digital for random shooting, but for quality stuff I have bought dirt cheap professional gear in 35mm and 6x6 and make incredibly good pictures, (at least technically...); as good as a pro level DSLR at least. The prices of processing and digitizing film, and film in bulk, are also way down compared to the past, with archiving guaranteed to last a hundred years . So, thanks a lot, digital cameras !

In "Explorers on the Moon" he mentions ice (recently discovered) and caves. Now if we build that atomic rocket (NERVA or Orion), we could send a V2 like rocket on the moon with 8 people aboard, a dog, a tank (more impressive to selenites than a buggy) and let them stay for some weeks at first.

I agree with you : maybe there is something wrong with me, but although I seem to see 3D in real life (I can easily put a thread in a sewing needle head, for instance), I never saw anything satisfying with those red/blue glasses, polarizer glasses, etc. The only thing which worked for me was the B&W stereoscope from the early XXth century, with glass plates giving directly a different picture for each eye through a binocular-like wooden contraption. However, when trying the wii trick in a VR lab, I was stunned by the 3D feeling I had, moving my head around and seeing the perspective change on the screen. This is the way to go since there is no color distorsion, horizontal lines from the polaroids, etc. A combination of this and VR glasses would be the only satisfying solution (not mentioning the privacy for certain kind of movies)

and what about Beethoven ?

that no one seems to have reposted, yet : I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru. Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I?m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge. I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don?t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me. I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me. I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis. But I have not yet gone to college.

The problem with GPS units (or google maps/etc) for that matter is that they tend to compute the fastest route respecting speed limits, unless you reprogram them by hand if it is possible. Since I usually drive about 10-20% above speed limit outside towns (it is a calculated risk taking into account the probability of law enforcement presence as a function of time, rain, taxi behavior, hills, obvious traps, and limiting risks as a function of extreme weather, traffic, tractors, etc) I have been caught 4 times in 18 years but still have my driving license. I know of certain routes which cut 10% time in comparison to GPS-recommended ones thanks to this.

what you forget here (with great irony) is that the human brain needs muscle and endurance. I watch football with a beer in hand on TV, I get the "meaning" as you say, and still I suck at it ; do you know why ? Because I did not spend 3 hours a day for 15 years running around the field and kicking and passing balls. Learning facts is useless until you see it as a stupid training for your brain, exactly like pointlessly running around a field in order to be able to play an hour-long game. You will then have plenty of automatic thinking which will help you visualize instantly the solution of a problem, with creativity. And you will get the meaning of things much more easily. Nowadays I see students who want to study math, CS or physics at college level and do not know basic derivatives, limited series expansions, trigonometry and so on. They claim to be able to find them if asked because they "understood the basic principles". Not surprinsingly, they fail when asked to do so. It is a lot easier if you have memorized some results...and then you can really attack interesting science. (post-Galileo, that is). Many students fail at SAT, TOEFL and so on, even when speaking very good english, because they do not have the basic facts memorized to help them understand a sophomore level course on any subject, from dinosaurs to epistomology or linguistics. They are not able to write a well structured essay for lack of training and basic facts to fill the blanks ; they have been only rewarded for "creativity", which is impossible to teach, most of the teachers themselves being not that creative, so the only thing they have been rewarded for is some kind of psychoanalytical stream-of-consciousness garbage thrown on paper without structure or real originality ; all this because of the hunt for rote memorization on my opinion.

If memory serves, the Joliot-Curies also secretely patented the nuclear pile and nuclear bomb in 1939 in France. They buried much of the material when the Germans arrived, and retrieved it after the war which allowed the french atomic pile ZOE to run as early as 1949. There was some kind of deal with the US about the patents.