It depends on the person. In my case, yes, I'm flat out telling you practice made no difference in how well I did in school. How many times do you need to add numbers to understand addition. For me - just once. Homework was a waste of my time, and I did as little of it as I possible could, so far as even not doing it at all if the teacher told us what percentage of the final grade it would be and I felt it worth the lower marks for skipping it.

"Practice" via homework is called learning by rote, but where the teacher is too lazy to do so in class. Excessive homework has ALWAYS been my first indicator of a BAD TEACHER. I've never had a good teacher who assigned a lot of homework.

I see you and the AC below will ignore scientists/doctors who write SciFi when their opinion goes against your own. That's no reason to disclaim them as mere "science fiction authors", as if their degrees and teaching positions are somehow negated by their writing of fiction. Do you also decry Benford and Sagan? They too are/were also mere "science fiction authors" as you like to put it. Obviously that makes them quacks who should be discounted. :P

Looking at the last page:

QUOTE

About the General Public Survey

Results for the general public survey are based on telephone interviews conducted under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International among a nationwide sample of 2,001 adults, 18 years of age or older, from April 28 to May 12, 2009 (1,500 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 501 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 198 who had no landline telephone).

About the Scientist Survey

Results for the scientist survey are based on 2,533 online interviews conducted from May 1 to June 14, 2009 with members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A sample of 9,998 members was drawn from the AAAS membership list excluding those who were not based in the United States or whose membership type identified them as primary or secondary-level educators.

END QUOTE

So what we see is 2,001 regular people were polled, while almost 10,000 "scientists" were polled. "Scientist" meaning someone who belongs to the AAAS who is not a grade school through high school teacher. That smaller public poll could easily be influenced to say anything the pollsters wanted. We also don't know anything about the "scientists" polled other than they aren't grade school through high school teachers. Maybe they're janitors... we don't have that information. I especially noticed this comment: "Membership in AAAS is open to all." So ANYONE (including functionally illiterate people) could be part of the AAAS sample of "scientists" polled... as long as they didn't mark teaching grade school through high school as their job.

Most people would define "profound" as meaning "of significant impact". That seems to be the definition used here - we're supposed to think that this ice thinning will impact us (the environment) significantly.

I LOVE your response. That would be an interesting way to try to deal with protesters. I wonder if anyone has ever tried it. :D

Dull info: Yes, bean bags like in the images, just much smaller so they can be fired by a hand-held weapon.
Google image link for dull info: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=police%20bean%20bag%20gun&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

- at this point NASA does not know how much Ares I and Orion will ultimately cost, and will not know until technical and design challenges have been addressed, the GAO concluded.

Isn't that NASA's function? To figure out how to overcome those "technical and design challenges"? How are they supposed to do the job when they'd denied the money needed on the basis that what they're MANDATED to do can't easily be estimated? That's why NASA is doing this instead of a company - because the government can more easily shoulder the unknown cost than any one company.

I vote about half the time... because I don't vote strategically, I vote my desires - which means I end up "throwing my vote away", which in turn discourages me enough that I don't vote the next time.

It's not the prom (which is in June), it's Spring Break (which is in March). High schools need to be banned from taking a Spring Break. It's the CLEAR solution. ;)

Well, if people would RTFA, they'd see the "brief periods" is not how long you stand in front of the weapon, but how long they use it. As mentioned in the article, riot police used a "brief blast" that caused the crowd to recoil, giving the riot police room to safely use tear gas and bean bag projectiles.

The police don't turn this thing on and leave it running. That WOULD cause deafness. They only use it as needed in brief bursts. I'm sure there's probably some "training" they make the users of the device go through, just like the training they do for the Taser.

Remember how many people on the planet think that just *believing* something is ok ("I believe in a god", "I believe in global warming" etc etc)

FTFY

Our solar system is one little tiny node that makes up part of one of the spiral arms, and we move with those arms as they rotate around the galactic center.

Your grade school called - they've revoked your graduation certificate. The arms don't rotate around the galactic center. We don't move with the arms. We're also not currently in one of the arms. So you're batting a thousand there - got everything in your statement completely wrong.

All the stars in the galaxy orbit the center. The arms are merely a density wave in the disc. As stars enter the wave, they slow down and "bunch up", forming the "arms". As they leave, they speed up and spread out. It exactly the same phenomenon as traffics jams on the freeway, and scientists use the same math when doing calculations on both.

Anywho, our solar system passes through the arms about once every 200 million years, and the last one we passed through was about 60 million years ago. Scientists don't think it's a coincidence that the last time we passed through an arm was also when the dinosaurs went extinct.

Err - no. You need to go back and take chemistry again. The difference between chemical and nuclear reactions is that chemical reactions DON'T lose mass, they just rearrange it. Chemistry works because certain combinations of chemicals are more stable than others. When two (or more) are brought into close proximity, they recombine the elements they have into a new arrangement that is more stable. The difference in bonding energy between the old compounds and the new ones determines how much energy is released in the chemical reaction. If it releases energy, that's called an exothermic reaction. If it absorbs energy from the surroundings, that's called endothermic.

They can bleach those rings around Uranus now.

I can buy meteorites from a half dozen shops within twenty miles of my house. If I know what to look for (and I do), I can FIND a meteorite within 20 miles of my house within a week's time. Having a meteorite proves nothing.

There is a POTHOLE in the street. There is a piece of metal someone CLAIMS to have found there, but could have easily be found elsewhere or purchased from a local rock collector (or online). There is a "witness" whose story makes no logical sense to anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence.

Now who's bending scientific views to suit there own mind?