Except that I was referring to all the things beyond merely being a bit lucky in the competition. It's the same argument why some groups shouldn't merely get admission standards lowered for affirmative action: nobody knowledgeable about the situation is going to treat them as equals when being aware of the background.

Well, one obvious use case is high-bandwidth connection using upper cellular bands when you're outside and using WiFi when you're inside, with low-bandwidth connection using lower cellular bands as a fallback. That may or may not be useful to everyone, but for me, that would be enough.

That reminds me of the old joke about the male athlete who planted someone else's urine to clear himself of doping charges. "We have two good news for you; first, you've been cleared of the charges, and second, you're pregnant."

It depends. It depends on whether you consider "look what happened to me!" to be worthier than "look at what I achieved in my life through my own skills and determination".

Oh, please. Tereshkova was nothing but a political stunt (easily demonstrated by the fact that it took twenty years to get another woman into space). She wasn't even a pilot at all at the time when every astronaut candidate was expected to be an already accomplished test pilot. Cobb has more bragging rights that Tereshkova ever had. The same goes for the "Meanwhile, NASA wouldn’t open its astronaut ranks to women until 1978" sentence. The astronaut ranks in the USSR weren't really much better.

It's ambiguous whether this means "practically all of the male candidates" or "practically all of the Mercury 7". The former is obvious, the latter isn't mentioned anywhere in TFA, and judging from the numbers ("the top 2% of all candidates", which counted five hundred), it's far from clear that this was the case.

A pistol? I thought handguns were banned for good in England. What about those Olympic shooters that had to train in Switzerland or some other place like that?

Oh, scratch #1...

They actually calculate the insolation of a tracker. But that's perhaps even more illuminating (pardon the pun) since you can clearly see that on the pole, you can get up to 18 kWh/m2 of tracker insulation per day. Try playing with the sliders, you can't get more 24h insolation than that! Not even the equator gives you that much during any day, although it gives you more insolation throughout the year. (That's not important for the thermal behavior of a system with time constants on the order of hours or at most dozens of hours, though.)

Sorry, that should have been "look at the area under the curve".

If you're referring to the topmost chart, then keep in mind that:

1) This chart shows values for horizontal surfaces. It's inapplicable to heating the inside of a car because it's not a flat object. (In fact, a car has windows on its side, making it more interesting when illuminated from the side if the heat gets absorbed by the inside surfaces rather than the outside surfaces which get cooled down pretty quickly.)

2) Your Washington example may reach higher level-surface insolation for a short while, but your North Pole object will get insolated constantly. Look at the are under the curve rather than the maximum value. For a dynamic system, the spike may be irrelevant provided that the time constants are long. If the car were well insulated to cope with average arctic conditions, then constant radiation through the windows plus low heat flow out of an insulated volume could cause problems regardless of outside temperatures. (Outer space is colder than the North Pole but you get this problem as well.)

Why should they be less intense? In the far north, you're approximately as far away from the Sun as you're on the equator, so the solar constant doesn't change. The north is cold because of the prevailing incidence angle of the light hitting the terrain (hence the low integrated insolation) but that has little influence on cars acting as greenhouses, seeing as they actually have their windows on the sides and not on the roof. If anything, thermal losses are much more interesting here.

liberal, a. and n. A. adj.: 5. Of political opinions: Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy.

Yeah, this is a hilarious non-sequitur reaction that you're guaranteed to get from most Muslims...

X: "This Allah guy sure is a major douchebag."

A Muslim: "Actually, it's the same as your Christian god, so shut up, you ignorant moron."

...they usually don't realize the major fallacies involved in that response.

That sounds about as useful as "knowing much about astrology". :-p I'm also quite sure there are people who have comic book stories memorized. It must be fun, hiding from the real world, judging from how many people do that.

Well, see my other comments: JVM makes such assumptions about the code being run that anything actually interesting is difficult to implement on top of the JVM. And that includes interesting dynamic languages, namely Common Lisp, Scheme, Self, Smalltalk.

That's mighty nice, but I'd expect people with higher CS degrees to work chiefly as researchers, not as security hole pluggers. Unless of course their CS specialization was principled security bases on formal methods, in which case they could actually replace a large number of the security hole pluggers.