So, IRTFOPMA (I Read The Fine Original PLoS Med Article), and it seems the problem is going to solve itself. According to this graph, we'll run out of Republicans if health reform doesn't get passed.

Bada Bing

Weirdly, this article about saline face modification in Bizarre magazine. Makes me want to reread Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic (but definitely not watch the movie again)

I don't remember that the US carpet bombed every large North Vietnamese city. Even Rolling Thunder had lots of restrictions what the USAF, Navy and Marines could hit.

Wow, bad astronomy indeed. For the odds of a meteorite striking one of many airplanes, the speed of the airplane is pretty much irrelevant. His calculation is sort-of correct(ish) for a single airplane and a single meteorite. But since we have thousands of airplanes and hundreds (or thousands)of meteorites in the atmosphere at any point in time, it evens out to the relative surface area of all planes.

A simple picture of it: all planes fly in a shell around the earth between 10000 and 13000 meters, all meteorites that don't break up in the upper atmosphere go through that shell. So the ones in the fraction covered by the combined surface area of planes hit planes. Strictly speaking, it would be the fraction of volumes in a shell that's as thick as the average plane is high, but would actually increase with slower meteorites, not decrease.

I hope the "Buy American" guy with his Hummer never walks into a Walmart. He might have a coronary.

Yes, I was also disappointed that they use bioelectricity as a euphemism for "burning crops in a power plant". Wiring together a huge field of cucumbers stuffed with zinc and copper disks would have been so much cooler.

Star Wars makes so much more sense now.

That this got modded Insightful is the best argument yet for adding tags to /.

...calculations to come up with "Oh, I'll bet you do, you Canadian ponch."?

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stupid subject character limit

I mean MLB even outlawed aluminum bats. So now they are going to allow Seattle to use lasers and stuff? And why only against Pittsburgh? They aren't even in the same league.

AWESOME!!!!

step 4: add a wireless satellite uplink

Apart from the abysmal track record of the BAA, here are a number of reasons why it won't work.

-Demand at airports is not smooth. Imagine two 747 and one 380 arriving simultaneously. There is no way to get 1200 passengers smoothly into individual pods. And if you want them to use credit cards, walking out a fire door, getting arrested by airport police, 3 hours of interrogation and getting taken to your departure gate in handcuffs will get you on your next plane faster. For added hilarity, add a few wheelchairs to the mix.

-Ripple effects...if any of the pods breaks down, traffic stops. Even if they had the same MTBF as trains, the system will break 500 times more often. By the way, trains are a well understood technology after 150 years, this isn't.

-Goofing off. It doesn't have to be vandalism, but will the pods work with 25 college students packed into one?