I'm contractually obliged to use this every time I can:

Mujo: "I saw a guy with a wooden leg!"

Haso: "That's nothing. I've got an aunt with a cedar chest."

I have an interesting story about him that I probably should not share

Since you seem to be a pretty forthcoming fella, let me ask you a question about your part of the country.

My wife's been offered a position at UVM in Brunswick, VT. You have any opinion about quality of life there? I'm a little worried about New England winters, but I can't imagine it's much nastier than Chicago. It looks beautiful and the wife's an avid skiier. We're probably pretty close in age to you, maybe 3 or 4 years younger. I'm semi-retired and teach Chinese martial arts now. I'd hope to do the same up there, even if just casually.

The reason why "global business leaders" don't know about technology is that they are completely divorced from the daily life that normal humans live. They don't have to know shit, so they don't know shit.

And Carly Fiorina, who Portfolio Magazine named as one of the 20 worst American CEOs in history, now wants to be President of the United States.

http://economictimes.indiatime...

We need Executives to be replaced with H1-B workers. The shareholders will be pleased. Capitalism demands it!

Yeah, but it appears that Capitalism is really demanding that executives be more highly compensated.

http://www.eveningsun.com/opin...

Pay for the top 200 executives has gone up 21%. The average in 2014 was $17.6 million.

Let's have executives compete in the global market!

I say we have them compete in the Octagon. Cage match. Two executives enter, one executive leaves.

and trailer parks. Anywhere you go you find them. I'm in Phoenix and we have million dollar homes across the street from them. Rich people don't like to pay top dollar for folks who can afford to live near them. I used to wonder how they kept all the poverty and human misery from spilling over until I realized that's what our drug policy is for. Any time the lower class gets out of line you can send the cops in to bust some heads and use the few ounces of pot that at least 1 person in your house probably has on hand as a pretext...

Potential DNA and fresh tissue is being found in dinosaur bones. From what we currently know about DNA and tissue, there is no way it should be able to survive millions of years. The simplest answer is that these bones are not millions of years old.

That's a really interesting discovery, and it has led to some work on what we know about how that stuff breaks down, but are you really sure that's the simplest answer? Given what we thought we knew about tissue, that material shouldn't have lasted thousands or even hundreds of years, so there's clearly something we don't understand at all going on. Simply moving the timeline doesn't do much for you--I don't think that soft dinosaur tissue comports with anybody's model of how old those bones are, so a more robust explanation that doesn't rely on our old assumptions about decay is necessary. It turns out that there are ways to preserve tissue for a lot longer than we thought, which is interesting, and that result makes a lot more sense than throwing out geology and radiometric dating.

2. Lucy (often deemed as one of the first missing links found) has recently been shown to possibly have at least one bone from a baboon.

"At least" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. That's one bone out of 89, which still leaves a lot of the skeleton unaccounted for. It's embarrassing for the researchers, but it's still an overall skeleton of something different. If the question is, "If one was a mistake, could everybody have made 88 more mistakes?" Sure, it's theoretically possible, but at some point you're just assuming that anthropologists can't do anything right.

The age of rock layers are generally determined by the fossils found in them, and the age of the fossils are generally determined by the age of the rock layers.

"Generally" is the key word here. It's not as though the whole process is bootstrapped that way. There are a lot of techniques that combine to create that textbook geological column. Index fossils are one piece of it, but there's also the fact that lower layers were laid down before higher layers and the use of radiometric dating to date layers independent of other references. If you can date a layer with an absolute method, you can be relatively certain that the layer below it is older than that absolute date, etc.

It's worth noting that the patterns in the geological column were noticed before the theory of evolution was ever suggested--there's very real stuff going on there that needs to be explained, and evolution over long periods of time explains it quite handily. Nothing else makes a lot of sense. I've heard claims of hydrological sorting and a worldwide flood, but the evidence against that is staggering. It just doesn't hold up.

These two posts are like reading a technical treatise written by Lewis Caroll.

At $45 a foot per cable.

If you're running Windows 8/8.1, why would even be running Netflix in a browser? The only time I run Netflix in a browser is when I'm on a Windows 7 machine, and even then, isn't Netflix running in a Silverlight plugin?

My PhD thesis defense was delayed for three years, but for a different reason:

https://youtu.be/WeYsTmIzjkw

The more details we uncover about evolutionary theory, the more we realize how much is actually missing for it to be true.

Who is "we" in this sentence, and what are they uncovering?

I think you're overthinking matters.

Of course, there's no way to be sure why people in the bible belt tend to be religious, but living here most of my life has given me some clues.

We've got 3.5 million people in Oklahoma. Half of those live in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The other half lives in smaller towns or rural areas.

The type of people who were able to survive and thrive here in the early days are the type of people that tend towards religion; hard-working, self-reliant, conservative types. Church was often the only social contact they had in a typical week. Education beyond the very basics wasn't readily available and generally deemed unnecessary. Hospitals were few and far between. Law enforcement was negligible - you protected your property and family yourself. Flooding, tornadoes, drought, violence, crime, and sickness would take loved ones and destroy the efforts of labor, sometimes taking entire towns. Then add the dust bowl and the depopulation of the western part of the state. If the only place to turn for help is God, then that's where people will turn.

Our current leaders are only a generation or two behind those events. We have access to good education and hospitals, and the towns are larger now, but attitudes change over generations. Give us time.

Kansas is a bit older, but its history just means that people were in the position that early Oklahomans were in for longer. Kansas didn't really begin to modernize until around the same time as Oklahoma. I suspect the same applies to much of Texas and Nebraska, although Texas has some older, larger cities where religion isn't necessarily the norm.

As far as Pat's comments (or Falwell's concerning Katrina), that's just the same old bullshit warmed over and re-served that religious leaders have been spouting forever. The oldest example of that I can think of is the obvious one - Sodom (there is archaeological evidence that it was a real city). It's unlikely to attract any followers, but it works on the believers. I doubt any of the mouthpieces will use the "mysterious ways" line - they'll just get people to pray for our poor, damp and bedraggled selves and play it off like it's a bigger deal than it is (while there is some major damage and loss of life, the vast majority of us are fine and we have systems in place to deal with it. Like I said before, this isn't exactly a rare occurrence.).

And those guys that paint messages on their fenceline? Yeah, I dunno about them. You see that more in Kansas than Oklahoma. My personal theory is that it's because the evangelical churches have flourished here, with their doctrine on "spreading the word." You know the old saying - the loudest aren't necessarily the majority.

How many of those phones, after receiving 2 or 3 major releases, will be so buggy or sluggish as to be unusable? Considering the amount of bitching every time it happens, I'd say non-zero.