Just an anecdote. One of my best friend was a poor kid with no formal education. He works as a janitor. But he's also one of the best coders around, having done tens of dynamic websites in the '90s, a mapmaker (better than the state maps) and plenty of other things that bring in extra money but usually just for friends. And he's also and above all a great guy.

In the context I described: he's all over the 'net making memes. Letterman isn't. Or I've never noticed.

Well, there was at least two attempted murders that I know off in Antarctica, google "McMurdo hammer incident" for one in '96. The other one was a cook in the '50s who put broken glass in the soup of a crewmate who would wake him up every night when noisily going to bed.

Am I the only one who, as a foreigner, has no idea who David Letterman is ? I've seen plenty of clips of gifs of Colbert on the 'Net though. He certainly is a lot more relevant than whoever Letterman is/was.

From my dim recollection, it's the CO2 in the air which gets in the water, acidifies it and make it more conducive by orders of magnitude.

Well, in all honesty it depends on the CH. Above 6CH (10^(2*6)) there's hardly anything (that's already one part per trillion, nothing works at that low dose except maybe plutonium), and above 11CH you can be sure that there is less than one atom per mole according to Avogadro's number (~10^23). But the low CH such as 1 to 4 actually do contain something. The problem is that hardly any homeopathic 'remedy' contains those doses.

Just type this (or variant) in a console: $ syndaemon -i 2 &

Huh ? My cheap plastic watch is hermetic to 4 atm, and for years. Plenty of things are. And for a HD you don't have to stand more than 1/3 atm of pressure differential, something trivial. Having used hard drives at high altitude and seen them die quickly, I always wondered why they don't simply seal the damn things with air at 1 atm inside.

Much better system: tax it in reverse to the time it is held. Something like 10 years 0%, 1 year 5%, 1 hour 50%, 1us 90%.

I already had my mind blown when active mirrors managed to get rid of turbulence. But this is another thing entirely, getting rid of diffraction !?!

I don't understand why the solution "some parts of the universe are made of matter, other parts of antimatter" is rarely discussed. If some galaxies were entirely made of antimatter, would we even notice ?

Oh come on, that was funny. You usually have more insightful things to contribute...

True story: at work (in the US), we'd all pile up in a few cars to go out to lunch. One day we get in the car of our new hire and she steps on it in reverse to get out of her spot. Someone blurts: "Don't you look before reversing ?!?". Her: "And how do you suggest I do that ?". "Well, either turn around or look in the mirror...". "Nah, they do that in the movies !"

Maybe when you are poor (=ethnic) you can't afford as many lessons before trying the test, hence a higher fail rate.