I'm a bit confused by the article. They say it's a consumptive use, where the cooling system evaporates 5% of its water on every pass. Doesn't that water go into the atmosphere and then condense and fall as rain eventually? If so then it's not really "lost" since it will pass back into the water table. Is the issue that the condensation and rainfall may not be a local process? I feel like I'm missing something here...

See I don't mind the escapist silly storylines that you get in games. For example, I love the storyline in the modern warfare series. I thought it was fantastic when they brought the fight to the American east coast. It was something totally new in FPS for me. I liked the story arcs with multiple characters over several games. Can I get better stories in a dime store? Sure. But just because the video game genre isn't great at writing beautiful stories yet doesn't mean they should just give up. We still watch stupid blockbuster movies despite there being better films out there, and for me it's the same thing with video games.

I bet they said the same thing about electrons, protons, and neutrons several decades ago. The positron is also an important particle in positron emission tomography, which has certainly saved lives. The research that went into the production of these facilities has also yielded very useful things, such as particle counting and cryogenics (neither of which was invented by particle physicists but certainly vastly improved upon by them).

Oh yeah, and the world wide web was invented at CERN, so I guess that was kind of important too...

Ok, not that I'm disagreeing with the conclusions in that study, but I can't understand how the Pharma companies are blowing $57B on advertising. That seems absurdly large to me, but maybe I'm just not calibrated to costs of advertising.

They also mention that 13.4% of sales revenue is being used for R&D. Is there any way that they're using non-sales revenue for this? I'm thinking investment returns, patent royalties, and maybe government grants could be used to support the R&D, and they're using sales money to pay for more marketing. I'm not saying that's what's going on, but I'm wondering if that's a possibility.

The EPA has a great page that tells you where your energy comes from based upon you zip code and electric company. Mine comes from 40.8% gas, 27.9% nuclear, and 15.1% coal. But I wasn't aware that I also used 4.5% hydro, 4.2% coal, and 5.9% non-hydro renewable.

I work in NYC, which interestingly is 0.0% coal and mostly gas/nuclear.

By that definition, I'm detained every time I come up to a red traffic light or a stop sign. I'm detained by every wall around me. That's not the "detain" to which they're referring. The common legal definition (which is the 1st of m-w's definitions) is "to hold or keep in or as if in custody". Point is that he just re-booked on another flight, and went through later anyway. There wasn't any time when Paul was held in custody.

He just refused a pat-down, so they turned him back from the checkpoint. The TSA has explicitly said that at no point was Paul detained. According to CNN he rebooked on another flight and went back through security without a problem. That makes the story a lot less interesting...