"I received a Pebble .... the battery life is such that I only need to recharge it a few times a week."

Îoey Pebble (1 year old) lasts an entire week on a charge, unless I have been using realtime apps (gps tracker). It helps to disable the "shake for backlight" setting.

"the only time the 5-star rating is going to go to a 3-star rating is if the national testing facilities start using these dummies. And if they do that..."

If they do that, you'll need twice the number of cars to sacrifice in crash tests and the dummies will wear out twice as fast. Likely, you'll need twice the number of testing facilities as well. A decision to make such tests mandatory should not be taken lightly.

My guess is that these dummies will be used to gain knowledge on how to translate standard test results to risks for nonstandard body types, and possibly to mandatory requirements on car/safety belt construction if the disadvantage of an obese person is large and preventable.

"4W charger can charge devices at the same rate as my 5 and 10 watt chargers! The last generation of phones use 5V 1A = 5 watt chargers"

That the charger is capable of delivering 5 W does not actually mean that the device will actually draw that amount. I have a dongle that measures the current and voltage of USB chargers and my smartphones rarely draw more than 0.8 A, and even then only if I use a low-resistance cable with a battery below 80%. Cables that are long enough to reach comfortably from the floor to my hands while I'm sitting usually do less than that.

Google "usb charger doctor", the dongle is only $7 or so.

"HAM radio operators have a statistically significant higher incident of cancer."

You seem to be selective in your interpretation of the data. From the second link:

"Among men, there were 14,630 deaths (SMR = 0.73 (95% CI = 0.71-0.74)) and among women, 760 (SMR = 0.72 (0.67-0.78)). There were 4,007 cancer deaths among males (SMR = 0.79 (0.76-0.81)) and 289 among females (SMR = 0.82 (0.72-0.92))."

Standardized mortality ratios (SMR) smaller than one for cancer mean that there are fewer cancer deaths among radio operators than among the total (US) population. The abstract continues to state that for some particular types of cancer, the SMR is slightly above one, but with very wide confidence intervals (CI), which indicate that there are too few cases for reliable statistics.

I think we need to resort to specifying listening volumes in dB(A) levels, since I can't imagine driving even a bad headphone to distortion levels at what I call 'normal listening volume'. For me, that's probably around 70 dBA, "normal speech at 3 ft".

"The problem with Bose has always been that they only sound "acceptably okay" at relatively low volumes, they tend to massively distort at what I would consider a normal listening volume. [...] especially if you'll be using them in very noisy environments"

Cranking up the volume to drown out envoronmental noise sounds like a good pathway towards a hearing aid by the time you're 50 years old.

There have been occasions that I actually asked co-travelers on the train to lower their volume because I could hear their hip hop beat over my own music that was playing through my own noise-isolating headphones. I suspect that those people are already semi-deaf...

"I use some fairly cheap Sennheiser in-ear monitors on aircraft now. The isolation is better than any noise cancelling headphones can ever hope to achieve"

What model? I have cx-300-2 noise-isolating earbuds, which I'd call fairly cheap at around EUR 35, but I wouldn't say they perform better than bose/beats noise cancelling headphones. Whatever else I see in a quick Google is several hundred dollars.

You are probably the only one in the world who uses that definition of 'exponential'. The exponential function has the property exp(x+1)=2.7*exp(x), which is completely analogous to your geometric series.

"the ebola death curve is exponential. Production and distribution of vaccines, and of antibodies by transfusion, is at best geometric."

Geometric is essentially the same as exponential. The only difference is that geometric is in discrete steps and exponential can also describe fractional steps. So, what did you really mean here?

Resting and waking heart rate are often confused

It would have been helpful if you explained the difference. Google is not very helpful for "waking heart rate", but "resting heart rate" seems to be the one that you have when you wake up in the morning.

It seems that I don't have a clue what you're trying to say. In lactose-tolerant people, lactose is broken down by enzymes produced by the human body, and the reaction product is absorbed. Lactose-intolerant people don't produce that enzyme. What specifically mutated bacteria that take care of the lactose in a benign or less pleasant way are you referring to? And what statement exactly do you wish to have a reference for?

What I was trying to say: if the intestine does not absorb nearly all the carbohydrates that are in the food, you will get sick. Since people don't get sick (bloating, flatulence, etc.) all the time from their normal diet, it must mean that the intestine absorbs nearly everything in their diet.

I was using an old netbook (Atom N270) as a home media server, keeping it running Ubuntu Desktop 9.something. But it was too much of a pain to maintain: keeping it on mains power for a year seems to break the battery-charge-level monitoring, which makes the internal battery useless as a UPS. Too many processes insisted on writing to files every 5 minutes, which was spinning up the hard disk all the time. Also, it got uncomfortably hot with the lid closed all the time.

So I got a second-hand thin client (Via 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB internal flash drive, 1 GB RAM, gigabit ethernet) for 75 euros, installed Ubuntu Server 12.04 and a USB hard disk that has a auto spin-down feature. The 1 GiB "SSD" turned out to be too small for OS and log files, so I augmented it with a 4 GB USB thumb drive, while cursing that it is very hard to find one that performs well on lots of small writes (With 4 kB random block write tests, the throughput of most sticks is less than 0.01 MB/s). This thing takes about 13 W of power while idle (26 euros/year at our rates) and last time I looked, there are no alternatives on the market that have comparable horsepower for much less watts. The server hosts media files (MiniDLNA) and backups (snapshots) of the various computers/tablets/phones. Once or twice a year, I sync the disk with an external USB drive. If my house goes up in flames, all will be gone.

Since my media storage is mostly audio, a 1 TB drive is plenty. When I read here from people that have 40 TB of storage in NAS arrays, I wonder what they are hoarding. At 5 GB per hour of video, that's 8000 hours!

Ubuntu 12.04 server sucks for a headless server. I think it was waiting for a keypress after an unclean boot. (There was a comment on a forum of a guy who had to drive 100 miles to a datacenter to attach a keyboard and press Enter). That one was solved, but now it just hangs during filesystem checking at boot time - some bad boot-order dependency.

Network: ethernet in living room (A/V center) and work room (desktop/printer); wifi elsewhere. Visitors get the wifi password. Non-media file transfers and backups are always over ssh. (It t1urns out that the gigabit ethernet was overkill; the VIA CPU can barely saturate a 100 Mbps ethernet line, with the faster SSH cipher (arcfour).

"your body isn't absorbing every calorie you put into it. Your body absorbs until it has what it needs"

Consider what happens if a lactose-intolerant person drinks a glass or two of milk: about 25 g of carbohydrates that their body can't absorb. It will lead to flatulence and diarrhea as a result of gut bacteria feasting on those unused calories and the inability of the body to extract water effectively from a sugar solution.

The fact that this is an abnormal response shows that the normal thing is to absorb every calorie.

"I don't know if the plant really needs the caffeine for something else"

I've been told that it's basically an insecticide. Arabica plants contain less caffeine than robusta plants, and are therefore more sensitive to pests. Naturally caffeine-free plants would be a pain to cultivate.