Camping is about "pulling your weight" and "playing nice with others".

If you aren't a stressed out wreck then you kids are likely to be the same.

"Here we are now, entertain us" was a big hit when my kids were teenagers, but you are wrong about western civilization.

"Talking" simply means telling the kid what they did was wrong before you punish them, if you haven't told them beforehand then don't punish them. The worst thing you can do as a parent is to be inconsistent, the kids will soon learn the rules are based on your mood and by the tender age of five will be playing you like a fiddle.

I'm a grandfather, when it comes to things like kicking the cat a 2yo has a pretty good grasp of right and wrong, what they don't understand is that sound travels when they are up to no good. Also I would, and have, encouraged a 2yo to play with woodworking tools and a piece of wood. Yes, they will bang their fingers and scratch their hands, but they will persist because they are hard wired to mimic adults, and if the nail stands up by itself in the wood they get a natural rush of reward chemicals. You certainly don't give a 2yo a nail gun but at the end of the day there isn't a tradesman on earth who hasn't hit himself with a hammer.

If you honestly think it's a government conspiracy then you are at least a little bit "broken, psychotic, or socially maladjusted".

I'm a pretty good pool player, a few beers makes me a pool champion because it stops me overthinking the shots.

Yep, he bolts from the swivel chair in the background a split second after the dog takes off. Hindsight is 20/20, but they would all have been safer just standing next to the big pillar.

psst - Mr IT and Joe Sixpack are the same person!

You see ants moving eggs, maybe it will rain in the next day or two, but how much rain? How much wind? Any hail, tornados? King tide?

You see humans boarding up windows, sandbagging shops, anchoring boats away from the dock, etc, you know a destructive storm is on it's way.

Weather forecasts are pretty accurate to 5 days out even here in Melbourne which (like NYC) is notoriously fickle, but you don't need doppler radar and a supercomputer to match the forecasting skill of ants. With a bit of practice mentally tracking wind direction, looking at clouds and feeling/smelling the (fresh) air will give you a fair idea of tomorrow's weather.

Natural disasters happen to both species, by all reasonable standards humans are much better at predicting severe weather than animals since (at worst) we have the capacity to simultaneously observe many diverse species to make a statistically combined animal/plant forecast. Having said that, even the humble ants will have buried their dead and rebuilt their city in under a week.

That's what I was thinking, also how can a tornado make any type of noise 2 days before it forms? I can understand animals picking up things we can't, deer may hear the rumble of a quake that causes a tsunami, my dog routinely hears thunder 15-20 minutes before I do and looks for a hiding spot, but how the hell does any animal "hear" something that won't exist for another two days?

Having said that the animal kingdom is full of "mysterious knowledge", for example crocodiles in Northern Australia can somehow "calculate" when a king tide will occur, about an hour before the event they gather at a particular ford across a river where the unusually high tide spills over the ford leaving a bonanza of fish stranded on the rocks. Even Attenborough admits he doesn't have a clue how the crocodiles "know" when to gather at the ford.

There are exceptions - Calculus is a good example, That's why everyone knows the name Newton more than three centuries after his death, calculus and his laws of motion enabled the leap called the industrial revolution and inspired the social leap known as the enlightenment.

Meet Watson, it beat the best humans in the open ended problem domain of "game show trivia" using natural language processing. When it won the Jeopardy championship it had 20 tons of air-conditioning and a room full of servers. Today it runs on a "pizza box" server and you can try it out yourself. After Jeopardy it went back to working with various medical institutes where it was trained and fed on a steady diet of medical journals, it's now well past the point where it became knowledgeable enough to pass the test for a US GP's license.

True Watson is blind, but I suspect the problems with visual input is more about the human teacher's failure to provide the right context and experience than it is about the artificial students ability to learn.

What would it take to create a probe that could survive these conditions and send back data indefinitely? Is it even currently possible to engineer electronics that can either operate at those temperatures or be insulated and cooled sustainably? If you had infinite funding and the best engineers in the world, how would you even begin to address this?

If you understand how federal politics and the well-connected military-industrial complex actually works, you would know that costing lots of money would make it MORE likely, not less.

Yes, a global presence, especially (though not exclusively) because we just insist on constantly fucking with the Middle East. If we didn't have such a global presence feeding the military-industrial complex, we would have plenty of personnel to deal with the real national security issue of a wide-open border. We'd have far fewer enemies that way as well, but then the anti-terrorism propaganda would have to find another issue to excuse draconian laws.

The USA is a military and economic empire that doesn't like to call itself an empire because that might sound bad.