Well... it was 5% until Ralph Nader was polling 8%, at which point they changed it to 15% to make sure he didn't get heard. So there's not really any reason to believe that a third party polling 22% would actually get heard: they'd just change it to 25%. It's a rigged game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Debates#Criticism

I don't have any written records. I talked to a guy who was a glider pilot and he had lots of stories about how well they could have worked and how poorly they did work because of lousy surveying of landing ground. He'd seen ones get yanked into pieces in snatch pickups and was of the opinion that the reason it was rarely used was twofold: risk, and higher-ups were deliberately sabotaging the delivery of snatch-recovery equipment (poles and lines) because they thought the risk outweighed the benefit.

In WWII we were recovering entire gliders this way, not just people: http://www.silentwingsmuseum.com/pdf/RetrievalSystem.pdf -- a history of airplane/ground retrieval systems specifically relating to the effort to pull Waco CG4A gliders big enough to hold 15 people, from the fields where they'd landed back into the air and tow them back to the launch airbase without the tow plane landing. It was dangerous work and pretty often it ended up just tearing the glider into pieces but it was successful a fair amount of the time.

The other thing that's nice about cruising at high altitude is you go faster for the same fuel burn, since the power required to overcome air resistance varies as the cube of airspeed. An airplane that's doing 90 knots at 2000' will do 120 knots at 17,000' (if it can get there.) So even though your plane has less power at higher altitude, it goes faster -- and that, too, can reduce total fuel used, since you burn a bit more fuel but spend less time on the whole flight.

And by the way, burn-and-coast is actually a viable fuel economy strategy in cars if you don't gun it: if you accelerate gradually to somewhat above your best fuel economy speed, then coast (and get free distance) you can under some circumstances exceed the fuel mileage of constant-speed driving. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximization_of_fuel_economy#Burn_and_coast has more details.

They all get it, because what they're doing is sitting on the upwash of the air curling off the tip of the wing ahead of them, and that doesn't change. (Well, it's a tiny bit smaller for the second plane than the first, because the second plane is sitting on the upwash from the first one, but any subsequent planes will have their weight offset by the same amount and have the same resultant upwash.)
One interesting effect of this is that the same upwash is curling off the other wingtip, as well. So you could have two planes surfing on the lead plane's wake, and two planes surfing off each of those planes, and so forth. You run into geometry issues: there's not enough room to fit four planes in line behind the two planes following the leader. However, a single plane in that location might manage to be in the upwash of *both* planes ahead of it.
You could have a diamond/triangle of planes, with the lead plane expending the most energy, all the edge planes expending somewhat less, and all the planes in between spending 2x less.

That entirely disregards the jetwash/propwash problems of flying right behind another plane (which are _significant_ -- when you do a two-minute 360 degree turn and hit the disturbed air from two minutes ago it really jounces you around, and this would be more like the 0.1 second old turbulence) but it's possible in theory.
(Sometimes you'll see geese flying in multiple-armed v's as they're taking advantage of this.)

I vote this, and would add a couple of smoke and CO detectors.
I've also found that, for my lab at least, having several big boxes of baking soda around is really nice. They'll put out small fires with much less cleanup mess than a fire extinguisher, and they're much more attractive when the fire is flaming kerosine/gasoline, are quite handy when the spill is hydrochloric acid, and if it's a basement lab would probably help the mildew smell so many basements seem to have.

As other people have said: boom microscope. Available off ebay new for cheaper than many used scopes, with a working distance of almost half a meter, which is wonderful.

My work surface is a whole gigantic mass of pine 2x4's glued together face-to-face. It's very sturdy, resists burns well, and I don't feel the slightest bit of hesitation at putting screws into it to hold things down. I had a job involving lots of LED's, so I drilled a hole the size of a standard through-hole LED and would stick each LED in it and solder the wire harness onto it. I screw contoured oak bits onto it for tubing-bending, bolted the lathe and desktop mill directly to it, drilled a hole in a third-hand and nail that wherever I want it so it won't tip over. Awfully convenient. And if it finally has too many holes/burns/problems, it'll cost me about $40 to build a new one if I buy new framing studs, or a lot less if I just keep accumulating scrap lumber that I'd otherwise burn in the fireplace.

While I agree with your assessment, I think we need to have a Democrat as president to successfully address exactly the sort of civil rights issues you're talking about, because when a Republican is president, Republicans won't openly criticize what he's doing. It's my opinion, based on observation, that the only way to get reductions in the power of the executive branch is to have Republicans force it on an unwilling administration. Democrats are too scared of being seen as soft on crime and terrorism to ever effectively behave like this.

I use Diaspora. I thought -- and think -- it's eerie just how much G+ looked like diaspora, and to some extent still does. They're both working off the same mindset about how networking should function. But once G+ came up, activity in my diaspora circles dropped to a standstill. It appears to me that most all the people who would use diaspora chose to spend their limited time on G+ because of the networking effect.

I can't prove anything. But the last two serious bike-car crashes I had in which my head was involved, the doctors had to put stitches in my jaw and ear right up to where my helmet was, but no stitches above that point. Now, it may just be coincidence that all the damage from glass cuts and abrasions stopped right where the helmet started, but I doubt that, insofar as, y'know, it's hard to get glass cuts through 3 cm of styrofoam and a hard shell covering.

Roads were made for bicycles, in a very literal sense. In the 1890's, cyclists pushed for legislation to get the first prepared-surface roads put in place. That's how the League of American Cyclists got started: as a lobbying group for getting better roads for cycling.
Cars then came along and took over those roads.
And yeah, ever since gas prices went through the roof more people are riding bikes. That trend is going to increase.
For the record, when I'm on a bike I stop for every stopsign and stoplight, and I've been hit twice by cars that didn't do the same. (Which is a large part of why I stop for every stopsign and stoplight.) Cars regularly violate traffic laws. So do bikes. One difference is that cyclists very rarely kill people when they violate traffic laws. That doesn't make it right, but part of the underlying cyclist/motorist tension is that cyclists think they're not going to hurt anyone by running lights, while the same action by motorists is seen as being murderous behavior, and as such motorists resent the hell out of seeing cyclists do it. (and that's another reason I don't run lights: because it pisses people off.)

Since none of the other commenters replying seem to have yet touched on this, I was involved in the design and manufacture of ultrasound imaging devices that were fed into the femoral artery and snaked up to image the heart from the inside, aka invasive ultrasound.

I'm in Colorado. My state rep showed up at my door, unannounced and unasked, to ask if we have any concerns with how well she was doing her job. Not her people -- she, herself. Going door-to-door in her district, on foot, talking to people, whenever she had time. I can get behind that kind of politician.

I don't know if this is precisely funny or not, but I have a raft of friends who are into alternative medicine and homeopathy, and they have unspoken lists of what conditions they'll try to treat with homeopathy and aromatherapy -- headaches, menstrual cramps, in one case eczema -- and what conditions mean drop all that junk and head for a doctor -- broken arms, whooping cough, yeast infections. What it says to me is that the problems that are life-threatening and that modern medicine can treat, are (generally(*)) ones that everyone will go for the modern medicine option, but the problems that are just flat-out difficult, they'll go for the woo-woo stuff because the effectiveness of the treatments (modern medicine, homeopathy) isn't that much different and the woo-woo stuff is administered in a somewhat more personally appealing/attractive way. From that standpoint, maybe it's not such a bad thing, aside from the fancy sugar-water being devilishly expensive. But if it makes people feel better -- or think they feel better -- I guess it's worth something.

(*) with that said, I had an idiot friend who tried to homeopathically treat a necrotizing brown recluse bite. She died. I'm not kidding or exaggerating. I also just read a book about BRCA-1 and people who have tried to treat breast cancer using naturopathy and electrostimulation. The description of untreated end-stage breast cancer was severely unappetizing.

The usual estimate is that if you can drive it in 5 hours, it's faster to drive than fly commercially. However, if your time is worth a lot -- and you won't save money doing this but you will save time -- you could buy a small airplane and get your pilot certificate. Small airplanes do about 100-120mph in a straight line and there are typically small airports within 20-ish miles of anywhere on both ends, so as long as your relatives are willing to pick you up at the far end you could have more like a 2 1/2 hour each way trip. And the view is great.

You _can_ file flight plans if you're flying under visual flight rules (and it's strongly recommended) but it's optional. There's also no enforcement mechanism with flight plans: if you file a flight plan that says you're going from X to Y and will be at Y in 3 hours, and instead fly to Z in two hours, nobody's going to notice until three hours has passed and you haven't called in to close your flight plan. (And you could even call in from Z and close your flight plan, claiming you'd flown to Y, and nobody would ever know or care that you'd done something different.)
If you're flying under instrument flight rules you need to file a flight plan and will be tracked with radar so they know where you are and can tell you where to fly. But even that's not the whole story: if you fly out of an airport through clouds, under instrument flight rules, and then get into clear sky you can talk to air traffic control and go to visual flight rules, cancel your flight plan, and go fly wherever you want with no radar tracking/flight following.