Although her Linkedin profile states that she has worked as an attorney in the past, the Texas bar website does not show her as a current member. She claims to have made a voluntary career change and left the practice of law to become an attorney marketing guru. That's somewhat plausible, except that NO attorney who has been admitted to the bar would allow their admission to lapse voluntarily except in VERY unusual circumstances. Even those who leave the practice of law almost always maintain their bar memberships. I would bet she was disbarred or suspended for an extended time.

Yes, but until today I thought that it would follow a bell curve, at least roughly.

Given these numbers, though, 46% of Americans have an IQ of at most 50, which leaves only 4% for the range between 50 and 100, and that gives quite a strange distribution.

That's called selection bias. A good study considers it, which is why it's done on a representative sample.

If I had kids, there would be a lot of stuff I'd be more worried about than porn. There is violence and other graphic images on the Internet that I find a lot more disgusting than all but the most extreme porn. And that will almost certainly have a much worse effect on children than watching someone naked doing strange stuff they don't understand.

But then again, that's America for you, a culture where half the population believes in creationism and shooting someone's brains out on afternoon TV is fine while a quarter-second glance at half of a breast nipple is a national scandal.

There's worse than porn on the Internet, and if you want to play the "for the chiiiiildren" card, then I'd like to see some evidence that porn actual does any damage to children first. You assumptions and gut feelings, see creationism, are not reliable and not evidence.

I support free soda sizes if you support legalizing all drugs.

The way you pose your question is sounds like "Why does software developers like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg get to make billions of dollars and be set for life? It's unfair, I as a plumber can't do that so it's only fair that I pirate everything I come across, particularly everything that says Microsoft on it." Star actors hit the lottery jackpot, that's why. Even in big Hollywood productions most the people are not getting paid millions. For example the LotR production employed 2400 people, of course two of them was Elijah Wood and Peter Jackson but most of them wasn't even on camera and most of the rest nameless extras on completely ordinary salaries, just like there's thousands of Microsoft developers working for ordinary pay. Pretending all actors are as rich as Elijah Wood is as stupid as pretending all software developers are as rich as Zuckerberg.

The movie you're thinking of is Song of the South.

Grocery stores used to have all the food behind a counter, and the customers had to ask a clerk to get it for them. The self-service model in which the customers retrieve their own items and take them to a clerk at the exit has almost entirely taken over, however. The losses from people shoplifting (which is vastly easier with self-serv) are more than made up for from the increased bandwidth and customer satisfaction; if this were not the case, the stores wouldn't've changed.

Just because a business model carries with it an increased risk of free riding, that doesn't mean it isn't better than the alternative. See also mass transit networks that use the honor system for ticket taking.

Just imagine if you could make an infinite number of free copies of the scotch. ;)

But, if I'm understanding correctly, one of the reasons that the entire structure set ablaze so fast was because the hydrogen combusted in its entirety very quickly, transferring the heat of the reaction to almost the entire structure practically in an instant.

No one actually knows why it burned so quickly.

An interesting fact is that hydrogen does not burn at a frequency the human eye can see, except maybe shifting a bit into blue. Whereas, although you can't tell from the black and white footage, all the big flames were red. So all the flames in the footage you see are something else burning.

However, you are probably correct, in that at least the initial hydrogen burning (Which almost no eyewitnesses seemed to have noticed, and we have no footage of, as the cameras hadn't started yet.) heated up the structure of the ship to the point that the flames spread very quickly. It's pretty much the only way the flames on the skin could have spread downward, which they clearly do.

As you say a hydrogen based airship can be made safe with modern techniques, limiting the effect of any ignition that does occur and using better materials for the rest of the design too.

A major problem is that the hydrogen bags were close enough to each other to damage the next one when they exploded, and that they were confined inside the skin together. So the heat of the explosion had nowhere else to go.

Put the hydrogen in long strong 'heat-retardant barrels' with a thin-ish top, without anything above them, and direct any explosion upward. And don't coat the skin with stupid flammable paint.

Problem solved.

Seriously, this was back in the day when no one bothered to protect against fire. Five years later, 492 people would die in a nightclub fire in Boston. No one suggested that nightclubs were untenable. No, we fixed building codes, and actually started enforcing it.

But a different gas being used to impart lift would also have made the day very different.

Well, yeah. For one thing, there would have been no Hindenburg in the first place. The Germans had no helium.