I have found that the best way to respond when someone suggests 'we' need to do something is, "Sure, go ahead. Knock yer-self out!" Keep telling them, "Sure, go ahead. Knock yer-self out!" ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times if necessary. Eventually they will come out of denial and realize you are not thier thrall. Really, it works.

I saw Shatner live, solo, in a very small venue in the mid 70's. The man can perform. He defined performance that night. Do not forget, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," or his performance in the Hallmark version of "The Glass Menangerie." Shatner is an elemental.

My high school teacher wife added up the days they wasted on standardized testing, pre-testing, re-pre-testing, coaching for the testing, blah-blah-bla and it was *ONE FOURTH* of the steenking school year. Fact, not making it up.

Flushing the standardized testing would allow us to cut the school budget, and taxes presumablly, by 25%. I would buy that for a dollar.

(Or, we could spend more on the football team, this is Texas :)

"Texas" is an old native-american word meaning, 'Once you cross over into this territory the Law will stop chasing you because if they caught you nothing they could do would be worse than to leave you here.' People can handle drinking a little piss.

>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.