Looking at their stats their pilots can produce about 6W/kg for 2 minutes with the aid of those handcranks. That's not particularly impressive, to be honest. Wander down to a club cycling race and you'll find plenty of guys that can do better than that. If the point of the exercise was purely to break the record, the assistance of an elite athlete or two would make the job a whole lot easier.

Yes, supply and demand is important, but you may remember that a few other things happened in late 2008? Things that might have had a little more impact on the supply and demand balance than the piddling amount of oil that offshore drilling might produce.

Rubbish.

Storing large quantities of oil is very expensive, unlike, say, gold or diamonds. You can't hoard the stuff. Ultimately, the stuff has to be sold to consumers, and if high prices drive demand down (and demand for fuel is elastic, despite a lot of nonsense to the contrary) speculators will lose their shirt.

The reason why oil are prices are at historicallly high levels, and have been for the past few years, is that global demand has not kept up with global supply, mostly because China and to a lesser extent other parts of the developing world is buying more of it. Incidentally, this is exactly the same reason why a bunch of other commodities, including other fossil fuels, metals, and agricultural products, have gone up in price.

As in many areas, perhaps the United States doesn't need to invent anything radically new, just copy what works elsewhere.

As I understand it, a number of the academics in the firing line for this work outside science and engineering. I wouldn't proclaim to know what a reasonable minimum output of a history or music theory academic is.

It's an artifact of moderate inflation accumulating over a very long span of time without a rebasing of the currency.

If you really want valuable pennies, pass a law that says the official tender of the United States is changing to the "New Dollar" (or, to get the GOP on side, "the Reagan") and that the Federal Reserve will exchange 1 US dollar for a 1/100 of a Reagan.

I'm glad you and your endocrinologist are able to manage your health so effectively.

But I don't think I could possibly be happy with medical treatment provided under the terms you've described. What would be your reaction if your endocrinologist told you, say, you had to give up having orgasms because it increased your risk of blindness at age 70 by 1%?

If the US government decides it wants to go back to the moon, it can. A NASA moon program is small change in the context of the US federal budget.

The question is whether the money would be well spent compared to, I dunno, just about anything else.

Much of that is driven by demographics. As the population ages, health care and social security spending goes up. As health care technology improves, health care spending goes up. Military spending also went up, but that's actually relatively small beer.

The long-run US federal deficit is an issue because of health care costs. Social security will push things up a bit, but only a bit (in fraction of GDP terms) Everything else, including NASA, is essentially noise.

So if you're arguing for spending to be kept at current levels, you're essentially proposing to get rid of some part of Mediare, Medicaid, or VA health (the most cost-effective health care system in the US, by the way, and 100% socialized medicine).. But here's the great part. While the cost to government might go down - your "spending" sacred cow - costs to individuals are going to go up more, because that tax-eating behemoth the federal government buys healthcare a lot more efficiently than the private sector does.

Implicit in Republican proposals to cut healthcare costs is the notion that poor people should just fuck off and die. The only "death panel" necessary is the one that checks whether your credit card is good.. Which would indeed solve the healthcare cost issues. Try articulating that in public, though.

Some of the more alarmist comments about the A380 are coming from the aircraft engineers union IIRC.

There's a context here - the A380 heavy maintenance is not done in Australia (and so not done by their members) and Qantas and the union are currently in a massive industrial bunfight.

So any negative comments about A380 safety have to be taken in that context.

DSLRs have "point-and-click" modes that are as easy to use as a compact. The only possible reason I can see to buy something other than a DSLR camera if you're even moderately serious about photography is the size and weight of the camera (+ lenses).

For idiot-proof travel, a DSLR + a Sigma or Tamron "superzoom" will get you excellent pictures, and when you get home you can fit more specialized lenses for whatever it is you want to do.

The point of having an app like this, is not so much direct persuasion to vote for a candidate, it's to help motivate and organize committed supporters.

American elections are, in large part, decided not by persuading independents to vote for one candidate or the other, it's by which party can get its ideologically-aligned supporters to the polls.

Committed supporters can be very useful in that - you feed them what are in effect talking points to persuade their less committed friends to come and vote; it makes organizing volunteers to, say, drive likely voters to the polls easier, and so on and so forth. That's where a mobile app might be useful.

The Soyuz rocket family is now 45 years old, and liquid-fuelled rockets are of limited military utility. Virtually all modern missiles use solid-fuelled rockets because you don't have to sit there with the rocket on the launchpad waiting to fill it up. As such, the security implications of anyone getting a peek at a Soyuz would seem to be rather small.

Hydrogen makes up roughly 75% of the Milky Way, by mass, apparently. Oxygen is a little rarer, about 1% of the Milky Way, but it's the third-most common element. When you put the two of them together, they form water pretty readily.

If this firm had sold the Iranians the blueprints to something actually security-sensitive, there might be a reason to care. But, FFS, what's Iran going to do with this - inspect Israeli-origin IP packets to death?