The hill, and then the other hill.

I live in Seattle. If the hill where my house is located existed back in the Midwest there would be a ski resort on it (really), and the Park and Ride is on the top of the taller hill on the other side of the valley. I only have to walk a mile or so, but it's a good 20 minutes.

And most companies require you to invest your money in the Ponzi scheme if you want them to help fund your retirement in any way at all. My statistics professor, whose day job was an actuary for the insurance industry, said, "Insurance is a big casino, and the companies have made sure everyone is required to play. And the house will always win." I'd have to say the same about the stock market.

Fruit juice concentrate and powdered alcohol on a backpacking trip, in the ISS, or shipped to Antarctica comes to mind. Sometimes weight really does matter a lot.

Synthehol was one of those dumbass things that can only exist in Star Trek fantasy land

Why would you say that? Humans have been testing random drugs in a rather scattershot manner for the last several tens of thousands of years. It's only recently that any sort of methodology has begun to be applied to studying chemical effects on the brain. I actually would be very surprised if something were not found in the next few years that gave a similar high to alcohol but without the nasty hangover.

Try something besides grapes for your wine. You have fairly decent peaches in that area if I'm not mistaken, and peach wine can be quite pleasant if you don't over-sugar it (which I tend to do). Just keep in mind that while commercial wines stop fermenting when the PH changes or they run out of sugar, homemade wines with wild yeasts stop fermenting when they've poisoned themselves with too much alcohol.

Everyone raise your hand if you're competent to analyze hardware-level firmware and the calls it makes to modules in the control and configuration software! That's right kiddies, if you're not a fairly high-level firmware programmer you're not going to be able to make heads or tails of the code even if you do attempt to read it.

They had a fairly good idea that the surface temperature was well above the boiling point of water by 1940, so I'd hardly say "the only one."

Just found out that Velikovsky was a proponent of the Electric Universe quackery as well. I guess if you're going to be wrong you may as well be extravagantly wrong.

Know what? I don't give a flying fuck, I'm not a coder so I still wouldn't know what it was doing. Even if I was, I wouldn't spend hours on end going over every line of every piece of software that I installed, so I still wouldn't know. And even if I did take that amount of time, there is no way that I could be so marvelously talented that I would recognize what every line of firmware did, especially when its calling some subroutine from some other portion of some other piece of software so I still wouldn't know.

Yet the books of bible have better attestation than any other works older than 1900 years.

Actually there are Buddhist and Hindu works of considerably older antiquity for which much better documentation. IIRC, Shinto as well. Of course Christians don't know about those.

The Drake Equation didn't come with any numbers pre-decided. Some of the numbers, such as rate of star formation, were known. Some, such as percentage of stars with planets and percentage of planets in the 'Goldilocks Zone', are only becoming known now. Others, such as the percentage of planets that give rise to life, are still unknown. You can plug any numbers you want into any of the variables.

Thanks, that makes more sense. I also was wondering how the hell they managed to crunch the numbers for a grid that size, which from TFS sounds like what they were doing.

Velikovsky? How does his foolishness fit with your 'Electric Universe' foolishness?

You've never spent any time with actual working animals, have you? You read your propaganda and decide you know, but really have no clue. I've raised hunting dogs, my dad grew up with draft horses, our friend raised sled dogs. You probably believe we must be horrible, cruel people, our animals would disagree.

Bush was a leftist? Who knew?