I worked at a company that made multiple layoff cuts over several months. It was really demoralizing. I hope for Microsoft and its employees' sake that this is the last layoff, else morale will plummet and people will start leaving of their own free will. They should have done just one larger cut and moved on.

Were you drinking a lot of sugary drinks before the switch to diet drinks? If so, it could be that the impact was more from what you were no longer doing, not what you started doing.

Aye. And I'll raise a Mumbai Sapphire martini to that!

Thanks.

I once got regular mod points. I think if you cross an invisible "Troll" achievement threshold, you get blocked.

This.

I read through the comments to find this comment so that I didn't just post a duplicate if someone else had covered the ground.

Let me be really blunt about the amount of time you are intending to invest in this project. If you were taking a college course, you should expect to spend 2 hours out of class for each hour you spend in class, and given that you only have 10 hours to dedicate to the idea, that's effectively 3 credit hours for every interval. So if you picked a community college, and they offered all the classes you needed, you should expect to have your Bachelor's of Science in any given degree field in about 23 years. That gets you to the necessary 210 credit hours for an Astronomy degree.

Let's say, though that you are a super genius, and can do 1:1 instead of 1:2 for in/out of class. That only cuts your time by 1/3, which means that you get that degree in 15 years instead.

Now add to this that most major contributions in any scientific field occur before someone hits their mid 20's; there are exceptions, but let's say again that you are exceptional. What contributions do you expect to be able to make after age 61 / 53, with your shiny new Bachelor's, since you're unlikely to find someone to hire you at that age, and you're unlikely to be able to afford instrument time on the necessary equipment on your own?

Burma Shave?

Be Low.

Below

Below...

Below

He's gone where the goblins go,

The Wicked Witch is dead!

Also, never be afraid to learn your math in a physics course. It's the best way.

That kinda depends...I found it was easier just taking more math courses than trying to figure out what the hell my EM professor was doing. Eventually I just switched majors to Math.

http://dan.hersam.com/tools/smart-quotes.html

'Zactly. There are PILES of PHP and Perl snippet that filter quotes, or allow Unicode.

I have tried typing Russian (Cyrillic) and Persian (Arabic-derived) into the site in the past. Ouch.