On top of this, at least in my city, you can get a big ass-free CRT TV for free,

My hobby...

I wouldn't call it wild speculation. I'd call that a likely scenario.

We're just a screen saver.

I guess it depends if they classify the Scientific Method as a "political theory", like creationists like to do.

The "irreversible" part is talking about Ice Sheets that can't reform unless we have another ice age. Even if we got the average yearly global temperature back down to pre-industrial levels the ice sheet won't reform because the winter snow would be falling at a lower altitude where it will melt in the summer. So either we get this climate change situation under control in a hurry, or we start building a whole lot of seawalls around our coastal cities and just learn to deal with flooding.

Expert spin doctor site, yes. Just don't confuse anything on there with reasoned analysis.

I see stories about bills like this all of the time, but they usually die in committee after fulfilling their purpose of giving the guy a bullet point for his next campaign poster. Is this one expected to actually have a shot in hell at passing? Sometimes they do slip through the cracks, especially in the bible belt.

Are you kidding? Hekla is the ashiest volcano in Europe. One study I saw estimated that a third of all of the volcanic ash in northern Europe came from Hekla alone. That's how she got the reputation in the middle ages of being the gateway to hell.

Indeed it does. I haven't published yet, but I detected one a few days ago (I work out of a valley in Iceland). I observed the brown dwarf in question (right ascension 08h 55m 10.83s, declination -07 14 42.5") and detected a large, earth-sized body occluding the star during my brief observations.

Like letting the air out of a balloon!

And how do magnets work, HMMM?????

The planet will be fine either way. Save the humans.

This doesn't really follow. Animals that suddenly find themselves an abudance of food don't grow massive, rather they reproduce in greater numbers. If food were always highly available then we might select for large size and big brains over time, but any one person with too much food is not going to suddenly become superman.

I'm not an expert in this, but my guess is that our energy hungry brains are one of the factors in the relatively long development period for our offspring, but it's not the only factor.

There was a report about an operation to rescue the hostages that failed because the hostages were not where the intelligence said they would be. Several of the ISIS folks were supposedly killed in the fight however.

But no, special forces don't get called out on a daily basis, and it causes political trouble if they're discovered in foreign countries. Pakistan's government is still mad that we didn't give them a heads up before we went after Osama Bin Laden. Plus, they're extremely valuable and no matter how good they are, if you keep sending them into combat eventually someone is going to get lucky and kill them. They have to be used sparingly.

I doubt too many people think a cast iron pan is cool. Yet it can be used to bake, broil, fry, sauté, reduce, and more.

Is mergesort cool? Are linked lists and hash tables cool? They are common building blocks, but are very useful.

Is DRAM cool? Are x86_64 processors sexy?

Is the Honda Accord or the Toyota Camry "bitchin'"?

Are asphalt shingles as impressive as a slate roof?

When your job calls for a sturdy workhorse, you don't need a thoroughbred racehorse. You don't haul gravel in a Huracan. If your project calls for Java, or C++, or Fortran, Ada, or even for COBOL then you use what gets the job done. If it calls for rapid deployment from a small team, you might use Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript, or even a shell script. If you need Erlang, Forth, Swift, some assembly language, or some Basic dialect due to platform, existing code, etc then you just suck it up and do that. If you have a chance to do greenfield development and can pick your language, pick anything that works.

If you're in a Java shop working on a Java project, you write and debug Java. Sometimes there's more than one right tool for the job, but you use the one everyone in your workshop has and can use.