We most certainly *do* know why observation affects an experiment. It's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in action - if you make a measurement of the state of a system, that variable is known to some degree of precision. Its conjugate variable is thus made uncertain to a degree prescribed by the uncertainty principle. This has nothing to do with consciousness or a living observer.

A simple double-slit experiment works because of the uncertainty in the position of the particle. The wavefunction interferes with itself as it comes out of both slits and affects the possible positions it can be observed at on the detector. If you measure whether the particle passes through one of the slits, it's position is no longer uncertain, the wavefunction changes, and the experiment reflects that. This is well-understood quantum mechanics, although the popular press likes to pretend we don't know anything about it. And yes, IAAP (I am a physicist).

And that's exactly what the CPI does. Read the FAQ. It does include food, fuel, and housing, and weights the prices. There are a lot of smart, dedicated researchers working on these data series - there's no conspiracy. Trust me, the left is far too disorganized for there to be one.

You're very wrong. The CPI is exactly what you suggest we do - they check prices of common consumer goods in real stores. If the government bogeyman scares you, look at MIT's billion price index. It's an online survey of many prices, updated in real time. And it matches the CPI very accurately.

I can second the recommendation for Hartle (the title is Gravity: an Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity). It's a great introduction that I used as an undergrad, but be warned - it's still pretty complicated, even as an introduction. The nice part about it is that it develops the concepts of curved spacetime as you need them to investigate interesting physical systems, like the geometrized version of Special Relativity (which gets you time dilation and the Twin Paradox) or Schwarzschild black holes. My favorite section is where it discusses the metric of the entire universe, which describe the expansion of space and what happens to spacetime in the distant future.

As to Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler - avoid it until you've gone through some more introductory texts. It's really easy to get in over your head and get discouraged in that text, as they dive in head-first with hard-core math.

If you think that a "fat slob" paying more for his insurance means that you'll pay less, you have a very naive view of insurance companies. Or companies in general. Also, how diligent do you think they'll be to check that you're not a fat slob? Remember that banks have been foreclosing on houses that weren't even in default!

The irony here is that 0!=1 is a true statement. And yes, I do think factorials are exciting.

I'm a physicist; I work in a laser lab. I never capitalize 'laser', and I've never seen it capitalized in any contemporary publication. Frankly, explicitly capitalizing acronyms gets really annoying once they enter common usage. It just gets in the way of effective communication.

Actually, the waste is vastly *more* radioactive, but this is still a Good Thing. There is more radioactivity, but this causes a significantly shorter half-life, so you don't have to worry about waste that is hot for 30,000 years - only decades or centuries.