Suppose the US needs (like, *really* needs) some additional money, so they decide to float some new bonds.

China could dump all their investments, driving down the price, and making it difficult for the gov't to get any new money since everyone will just buy the stuff that China is selling.

I live in the Canadian prairies. The nearest city with over half a million people is 435mi away. Electric isn't going to cut it for that with current tech. My Matrix will do it without refueling if there is no headwind.

Normal distribution assumes a typical distribution, which isn't always the case.

I took Engineering Physics in university. Very tough course, 19 people in my year. We all came in as pretty much straight-A students out of first year, had straight A's in the non-engineering courses (english, psych, etc.), but there was one prof in Physics who insisted on grading on a curve and that the class average should be 70%.

I have friends who are teachers and there have been cases where the highest-paid were the ones that got laid off when times were tight.

If the kids can catch up without undue extra effort, I'm all about doing something interesting and educational outside the traditional school environment. Besides, most elementary schools the first few and last few days of any semester aren't particularly hardcore.

I've heard this before, but I don't understand it. Why can't the parents look at the kid's notes and textbook, understand the procedure, and then go over it with the kids?

Maybe I'm weird because I didn't have a hard time with math, but it seems like it's all just different ways of accomplishing the same task so anyone who understands what's going on should be able to pick up additional techniques of doing the same thing.

My mom is a midwife and can go 24hrs or more without coming home. Her work recently gave her an iphone 4S and she had to get extra chargers for car and office. Her old blackberry went for several days between charges.

I have a White Rogers touchscreen thermostat. I'm quite happy with it, though it's not remote controllable. I can set it to do auto heat/cool, or else leave them separate. I leave them separate.

The reason is that in spring and fall the temperature might vary a lot during the day. Rather than run the AC and the furnace on the same day (wasting energy both ways) I'll live with slightly more variation in temperature as long as the average temperature is okay.

That's what they did when I upgraded...

The problem is if we test it and it turns out to be true, we just screwed ourselves...