How about setting up an earth-made prefab hab inside a Martian cave/lava tube? Then you get the radiation shielding benefits without having to launch or move any regolith.

I would agree that a moon base is more plausible than a Mars base. However, both endeavors are gonna cost a shit ton of money anyways, so why not go for the cool option that offers more future returns?

Also an escape craft to bring you back to Earth is not an issue since people are signing up for a one-way trip. Not necessarily talking about the Mars One thing here, which seems to me like a scam to collect "registration fees" from gullible people. But generally speaking I think a NASA or ESA mission to Mars should be a one-way trip as well. And as we found out recently, there is no shortage of volunteers.

So you scout ahead of time instead of going there blind. And if you find one from a rover rolling on the surface, it obviously does not need considerable earth moving equipment to gain access. And the low gravity on Mars means structural strength is most likely a non-issue, since lava tubes are already plenty strong on earth.

Light bulbs, and vitamin D

That sounds like a much more plausible reason for spaceships crashing than "PowerPoint did it."

People look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them not to put words on their slides. Then, after I give a talk they can't believe there were no words on my slides.

Interrupt them with a question. It's even more hilarious to see their deer in a headlights look as they lose their place.

I have. They're invariably conducted standing up between two to four people though. Or perhaps between the same size group, sitting, drinking something alcoholic.

I have to disagree with the Challenger commission and the Army on their allocation of blame. If you're the kind of person who sits through a PowerPoint presentation and thinks you've understood something, you really shouldn't be building spaceships or waging war. You should be quietly led off to some marketing department somewhere, or a nice quiet retail job.

General McMaster seems like he has a good grasp of complexity though.

Simple solution: juse get rid of the text tool. That projector thing is supposed to be for visual aids, not conveying a bunch of language, either over simplified or unreadably complex. The latter is why you're standing up there sweating and unconsciously blinding people in the audience with the laser pointer. Also, if your slides have no words on them, if you send out notes they're actually notes!

We have a "human construct" called "green" that most of the human construct "us" pretty much agree upon. The human construct "grass" sometimes meets this criteria, and sometimes doesn't. If you truly believe that, in an absolute sense, there's no difference between water, air and dirt, I can suggest some experiments you might wish to conduct that are likely to convince you of the folly of that statement. You're right, they are made up of the same stuff, but arrangement of that stuff is rather important.

PS - you do realize we can actually turn lead into gold, right?

OMG, I can't leave my basement! Everything MUST come to me in a form I consider most convenient!

If you go to an appropriate library they have computers on which you download academic journals (funded by your tax dollars even!). If you go to the wrong library, they might have to order a paper copy for you, but paper does have a long and glorious history. Embrace it!

Or you can read the open access journals. Just don't, uh, believe everything you read. Or you can wait the six months until the authors have the right to release their paper freely. Or you can vote to actually fund scientists, so they can afford the $5200 to publish their paper in Nature as an open access article.

The OP seemed to be expressing a genuine interest in reading the paper. The option I suggested first (library) is by far the easiest, but I'd certainly recommend the last one (vote for proper funding).

They appear as soon as you scroll. Unless you've discovered completely hidden ones, in which case I'm glad I haven't stumbled upon those.

Pharmacists are trained to know about medications: that's the major reason why physicians can't usually dispense drugs directly.

Physicians are (or should be) well trained to practice medicine. They're good at diagnosing individual patients, choosing treatments, and monitoring progress. They're invaluable collaborators in medical research because they have direct contact with the patients, and they're the ones who you hope are ultimately going to be applying any advances. But an MD doesn't involve the necessary training to do science. Unfortunately society has confused the two.

I'm a medical scientist. It would be ridiculous, not to mention illegal, for me to diagnose and treat patients. I simply don't have the training. But it's equally ridiculous, though unfortunately not illegal, for an MD (absent specific scientific training like an earned PhD) to design, conduct and analyze a proper experiment. Yet major research grants today tend to go to MDs and it's getting extremely difficult to get a faculty job in medical research without an MD.

Interesting I like the hidden scroll bars. They free up some extra screen space and it's been years since I actually wanted to click on one. Using a trackpad or a mouse that has any sort of two axis scrolling interface makes them superfluous.