>Having an understanding of what a derivative or integral of a function is a good insight to have, no doubt.

Learning calculus is to statistics what getting undressed is to sex.

1] You have to learn algebra so that you can figure out how to take derivatives.
2] You have to learn derivatives to learn how to integrate.
3] Once you can integrate you can integrate y=1/x from 1 to x and then learn what a logarithm is (real, Naperian logarithms, not log10 that the engineers uze.)
4] Then you can evaluate the integral of y=1/x from 1 to infinity and discover from where arises 'e' the base of logarithms.
5] *NOW* you can contemplate e to the negative x squared and understand the distribution of men's chest sizes and distributions normal and otherwise.

To claim you know anything about statistics with out knowing integral calculus is to make the silly claim that you know all about sex from having seen a few copies of Playboy. To understand sex you and a partner must get out of you clothes, and once you get good at it you will need a shower afterwards. To understand statistics is just as much work, just as messy and just as rewarding; and just like sex, not something one brings up in every social circumstance.

Concrete puts out a lot of CO2, both making it, mixing it and hauling it, and as it decomposes. If we had flying cars we would not need concrete for roads so we could factor that in to the flying cars carbon footprint. I can't wait to get mine.

We attacked Iraq simply because we were not through killing people.

We had an army there, blood in our eyes, and the Taliban folded up like a cheep suit, and we just needed to kill some more people. It is not hard to understand. Syria was too small, Iran was what looked like a democracy and Iraq was playing grab ass. We decided to bust up the Arab Dictactor Frat-party which led to the Libyans to giving up their weapons and getting right with the human race.

20/20 hindsight is we probably should have picked Iran. There is as much oil in Brazil as in Saudi it turned out. It also turns out that Canada has as much energy in the tar sands as is in the oil elsewhere, and so does Venezuela in their tar sands.

All Santa has to do is go out and deliver presents to some number (M) of houses. Then he shifts over into the next dimension (like in the comics, not like in string theory) and delivers presents for another M houses. Santa does this until he has made deliveries in some number of different dimensions (N) and then he goes home.

For an infinite number of dimensions and Santas in those dimensions if M and N are greater than some number (I suggest it is 2 and 2) then everyone gets presents without Santa even having to break a sweat. I leave it as an exercise to the theorist to show that not all universes have to have the same number of homes.

Stranger in a Strange Land, The Stars My Destination, When Worlds Collide/After Worlds Collide, and the entire last season of Startrek Voyager.

Decades ago (literally) I trained my C64 to perform all the contour mapping algorithims in Davis, "Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology." I also had it doing log analysis computations and plots. I have an old copy of GEOS somewhere, I wonder if that would run on the emulator?

Eat the Canadians first!!!

Did you use the correct syntax with sed, grep and awk?

"I'm pretty sure we've never magically seen thermal radiation get blocked by a tank of warming air, then seen the CO2 concentration in that air spike as a result. Admittedly, I could be wrong since magic, sorcery, and thermodynamic witchcraft aren't fields I research in."

It is easy for me to conclude you probably never researched chemistry or geology either. The interaction between co2 buffered in sea water and water temperature can play this kind of game. Sorcery and witchraft are not necessary, but thermo may be useful for you to study.