I know! The title to this thread is sexist as hell!

Actually they're readily available, even in civilian circles:

http://www.inertproducts.com/i...

The above site is HUGELY overpriced, of course; the mine manufacturers could put out inert mines very cheaply if they wished. Most armed forces already have them, used for mine warfare training all the time.

But there may be other and better solutions. Not necessarily the goats in another comment, but maybe things like honeybees:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

Throw in a counting loop (1 to 50 .. or 0 to 49 if you wish), just to show off your l33t skills.
Make it 0.0 to 49.0 if you want to test your math coprocessor at the same time :-)

Remember, you read that word here first!

I missed what happened to it after the report of a successful soft landing.

"Unfortunately, they weren't able to recover it because it landed in the middle of a rough storm, which eventually destroyed the stage."

Well, if it's so damned smart and clever and capable and all, why didn't they tell it to land somewhere else?

Land at sea in the middle of a bloody storm, you get what you deserve!

They're gonna give it back .. when?

I've concluded for decades now that any shortage of med school students or graduates (and thus the number of doctors) is an artificial shortage, totally created by the medical profession itself. Wouldn't want to endanger those nice fat incomes, hmmmm?

http://healthland.time.com/201...

Finding the applicants is not the problem, as you can see by looking at the number of applicants for the very few seats.

Unless totally unqualified people were applying .. but that still begrudges the question: why aren't these Nawth Ca''lina universities teaching what the students want?

Oh .. yeah .. sorry, I forgot. All that money going for Black Studies.

http://espn.go.com/college-spo...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01...

http://www.britannica.com/EBch...

"The action depends upon the influence of gravity (not, as sometimes thought, on the difference in atmospheric pressure; a siphon will work in a vacuum) and upon the cohesive forces that prevent the columns of liquid in the legs of the siphon from breaking under their own weight."

Amazingly, it could be that the FDA actually listened to the howls of protest (not to mention the poor cattle: did no one consider the cattle?)

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/a...

"The Food and Drug Administration will redraft proposed rules for the use of brewery waste as animal feed after both brewers and farmers complained the plan would impose a burden on the centuries-old practice."

The article I read. The references I read, but didn't look up (since I don't subscribe to the Journal of Geophysical Research). If they were using reduced gravity data, they should've said so in the body of the article. They didn't. That's my point: we don't know WHAT they took into account.

Yeah! There are no gun nuts in the Klondike! It'll be ours for the taking! America, f*ck yes!

Iapetus has only a fraction of Earth's gravity (Iapetus radius 735 KM, Earth radius 6371 KM, you do the math, after figuring out the relative density for yourself). Wouldn't a hugely smaller gravity significantly affect the angle of repose they carry on about in that referenced scientific paper? I doubt you can compare the angle of repose of rounded particles (or snow and hail) on Earth with that of a very small _and airless!_ moon.

But I'll leave that to the astrophysicists to work out.

I watched part of "12 Years A Slave" last night.

The difference between the vocabulary and grammar of the uneducated slaves and that of the character Solomon Northup was striking.

Neither grammar nor spelling will be "picked up by exposure." Both are a discipline, and a discipline takes work.

Sorry, "teachers", we aren't giving you a slide on this one. Do your job, make the kids do their job. Teach, learn.

"and today's xkcd has the "for dummies" depiction of how it works."

Thank you, thank you, thank you! At last I get it. So simple. So fiendishly simple.