There are certainly deaths/years of life lost caused by excessive drinking.
But on the other hand, there are health benefits of moderate drinking.

There's some presentation of health benefits/problems on the Mayo Clinic web site:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/heal...

So, one question would be: how may years of life for the entire population are lost from excessive drinking, how many years
of life for the entire population are gained from moderate drinking? And how can moderate drinking be encouraged while
decreasing excessive drinking?
In general terms it appears that Russian men are very adversely affected by drinking (life expectancy ~64), and French women's long
life expectancies (~85) are helped by their moderate drinking.
But culture in general can be very hard to change!

That's what they do.

(I find it rather annoying, but less annoying than their global warming denial articles.)

Well, I do think the Drake equation does incorporate time correctly. It includes star formation rates (rather than numbers) and the lifetimes
of civilizations.
However, the Fermi paradox isn't really a paradox if you only think about sending signals, for the reasons you discuss.
As discussed in the wikipedia article (for example) it's based on the idea of colonizing, or visiting all of, the Galaxy.
A number of people expect such "colonization" to occur by mainly self-replicating autonomous spacecraft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

https://support.mozilla.org/en...

It's "space studies" because the studies are done (in many cases) from space.

We don't study "space" at NASA - we study stars, planets, galaxies, the universe as a whole, the Sun, and, yes, the Earth - all from space.

That's why the Hubble Space Telescope is a "space" telescope. Not because it looks at "space" but because the telescope itself is in space.

There's also Greg Egan's fascinating short story Glory.
A tiny anti-matter powered package traveling at near light speed is sent to an exo-planetary system.
That's used as a seed to generate humans + technology using data sent electromagnetically.
http://outofthiseos.typepad.co...
(And it's in the 25th Year's Best Science Fiction)

1.4 Msun is the maximum mass of a white dwarf not a neutron star.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
It's therefore basically the _minimum_ mass of a neutron star.

To show that something is a black hole you have to show that it's more than
the theoretical maximum mass of a neutron star which is higher. That's not very well determined but is something like 3 Msun.
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/d...

The usual estimate of how much you can withdraw from your savings per year without having too much chance
of drawing down your capital is 4%.
So, $1M gives you an annual income of $40,000, not exactly a high salary, even adding in ~$30k in social
security income won't make you especially well off.

The US justice system is unique in the world in completely throwing out a case if there is a procedural error:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07...
While I'm sure many will defend the way things are done in the US, it seems that this is something
that at least merits some discussion of the pluses and minuses of each way of doing things.

I don't believe 70 mph really counts as "incredibly fast".
If you're driving at 70 mph on may roads around here (Washington DC area), you'll be passed by many other vehicles.

Or else that you went to Oxford University (for example) which doesn't award a Bachelor of Science degree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
(And Oxford still managed to produce 5 physics and 11 chemistry Nobel prize winners.)

I think that;s probably more of a national conspiracy (in the US) than a global conspiracy...

Who thinks that "Jade Rabbit" sounds like it should be the name of a sex toy?

As somebody who became single in his mid-50s I strongly second the recommendation for meetup groups.
They aren't exclusively for single people, but singles are very "over-represented".
Obviously you want to choose the groups with a large number of people of your favorite gender group.
For me (looking for a woman) the hiking and the arts related groups were good.
Even if you don't find dates, you'll likely have a good time and meet new friends.
Meetup groups give you a low-stress way (because they're not primarily dating in general) to interact with many people
face-to-face.

Also, in response to a different comment. I think that lots of women in their 50s are actually rather
computer literate. (At least the educated women around the major city I live close to.)

(My personal experience is that I met someone via a meetup group, but I wasn't ready for something
as serious as she was looking for at that time. Shortly after that I met someone on OKC and we're still
together 2 years later.)

"A 2012 analysis of the human genome based on in vitro gene expression in multiple cell lines identified 20,687 protein-coding genes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome