You do NOT want to drink substantial amounts of distilled water. It will leech the salts out of your body through osmosis. Distilled water with a pinch of table salt is likely fine though.

And yet government contracts somehow continually manage to go over budget, and the government pays the cost instead of the contractor.

It is a regional dialectical usage, mostly in the midland US. It's spread, but is less common elsewhere, and pretty much absent in New England and outside the US. In most other places it requires a preceding negative construction, eg "Activists aren't as effective any more because they get caught up in this sort of shite, leaving important worries like electing good people to govern us laguishing on the back burner." It is often a rather confusing construction to people who haven't seen it before, because they're used to the negation beforehand. So it seems like you're trying to negate your own point, decreasing clarity.

It is a set number. It's not an integer, but real numbers are certainly numbers, and pi is a constant in Euclidean geometry.

No, if you want an easy and unbreakable encryption system for your text just use EBCDIC. No programmer has stayed sane long enough to implement it.

You just described the Everettian model. That model doesn't have any paradox for Schrodinger's cat. Several of the others (the ones Schrodinger was criticizing) do. EG de Broglie-Bohm theory, Transactional QM, and Objective Collapse theories don't have the issue, while von Neumann/Wigner does.

The cat is fully capable of observing its own state of being. It can't be in a superposition of alive and dead without collapsing it.

Actually, it was that if the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory was correct then that would be the absurd conclusion.

So the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong, as is any other interpretation that necessarily comes to the same absurd conclusion.

The interpretations that don't make such a conclusion are unaffected by the thought experiment.

Well, they're funded by Yahoo now, so if they take after the practices of their funding source I'd expect them to annoy and drive away their users.

Hope it's controlling a vacuum pump.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is just the Fourier uncertainty principle applied to QM. Position is the Fourier transform of momentum. You get an uncertainty principle between two things which are related by the Fourier transform, it's just a fact of math and not some mysterious property of quantum systems.

One way to passively burn more energy that I don't see mentioned enough is to simply lower the ambient temperature (and don't add more clothing). Staying in a cooler room (or not using a heavy blanket when sleeping, etc) can use a significant amount of extra energy. Sleeping humans use between 20 and 80 kCal/hour, depending on ambient temperature, blankets, etc. (80-20)*8=480kCal potential burn, per night of sleep. Over the course of a week that's 3360kCal, or nearly a pound of body fat's worth of energy. Use your basal metabolic rate to burn more energy by staying in cooler environments.

Massive morphine overdose is apparently also a rather humane way to execute people. But a painless death doesn't seem to be the desired outcome.

Entanglement can't transmit signals. This is often misunderstood, but it's a big part of the reason why it seems so strange.

What does gender and ethnicity have to do with ability as a programmer/designer?