There are also speculations that the core of Jupiter might be some exotic material like metallic Hydrogenium (compressed so much that normal Hydrogenium changes into a metallic state with the electrons freely floating between the Hydrogenium cores e.g. protons).

The first "e" in the French word tête has that funny hat on it, technically called a circumflex. This tells us that this vowel used to be followed by an "s" in earlier stages of the French language. So tête derives from older form teste.

The word tête is also feminine, so any adjectives must also use the feminine form. French gros (from Latin grossus) in the feminine form becomes grosse.

So, just as expected, gros + tête == grosse tête as spelled in modern French, and grosse teste in Old French, whence the Norman French language and names of 1200s England, courtesy William the Conqueror.

Cheers,

Six of one...

I prefer seven of nine, myself.

:-P

No, not just arithmetic, you also learn algebra by rote memorization and constant exercise. With time this helps you to spot regularities and later you are able to see possible solutions in complex mathematical problems.

There are experiments about what helps pupils best to get better with mathematics, and it has been shown that drill and constant exercise is the most effective way, even for complexer mathematical problems.

Actually, you do learn math by rote memorization. Those of us who were interested in math from the beginning were training it all the time by playing around with numbers or geometrical objects, which is just rote memorization with spices on top. And you get really good at math by doing math chores all the time.

You seem to misunderstand the "consumption of water" concept used in the article. If you irrigate an arid region like California, you increase the amount of water evaporating. Since evaporated water can't be used anymore, it is lost for local production (except you create some big ass industry to get evaporated water back from air). That's why in the case of an arid region, we really have water consumption (e.g. less water than before), other than in a humid region, where there is a surplus of water from rainfall compared with the possible evaporation, and thus any water used can be recycled or replaced by fresh water.

When the article talks about "exporting water", it actually means that this water used to grow the alfalfa is lost for any other uses, because it is long evaporated. It's not the actual water that gets exported to China (except if the wind blows the vapor to China where it adds to local rainfalls), it's the consumption of water necessary to actually grow enough alfalfa to export it.

The main question is: Where does the water California is watering its crops come from, and what will California do if the source is exhausted?

I just read the Wikipedia entry again, it seems to be a horrible attempt at automatically translating the german entry. You can tell from the fact that the station Kaiserdamm is called "Emperor dam", and that "Olympische Strasse" is still in the german grammar form ("Olympischen Strasse") of the original german sentence.

Yes, there is the Berlin S-Bahn, but that's a completely different track system, and that's not what I am talking about.

Take the U2 for instance, it is a line listed as U-Bahn (as you can see from the line number). It runs above ground from Ruhleben to Olympiastadion. Then it disappears in a tunnel until Wittenbergplatz. There it goes up a ramp, and then runs as elevated railway until Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Park, where it goes down again in a tunnel. At Eberswalder Strasse, it appears again above ground and runs on an elevated railway along Schoenhauser Allee for two stops, and then disappears again in a tunnel until the terminal.

Ironically it might be still a subway. London and Berlin, two towns with very large subway systems, have them running in part above ground. And they are still called subways. It would be strange if a transport system changes names when it leaves a tunnel and changes it again when it enters the next one, as it happens several times on some lines in Berlin or London.

As it is the Sword of Damocles, and it was hanging on a single hair of a horse's tail above Damocles' head, the correct metapher would be the judical Sword of Damocles.

You got something wrong. "Being in favor of QT" is something quite different than "contribution to QT". Albert Einstein always saw QT as some clumsy patch to explain some weird observations (e.g. the non-existance of the ultraviolett catastrophe). He was always believing that QT should and will be replaced with something much more deterministic, more in the lines of the Field Theory he was working on in his later years. Yes, Albert Einstein contributed some important details to QT (the external photoelectric effect, for which he got awarded the Nobel prize, the Bose-Einstein-statistics and even the prediction of the properties of supraconduction). But ironically, at least the last two were created by Albert Einstein partly to show the problems with QT, because it predicted some really counterintuitive results. Albert Einstein was convinced that both would not exist in reality, for him, for him, they were examples of how fundamentally wrong QT must be. The Bose-Einstein-condensate and supraconduction were proven to exist only after Albert Einstein's death. I wonder how he would have reacted if those "monstrosities of the brain" had been created during his lifetime.

With the exception of 1998 (which was an incredibly hot year), we had constant warming. TFA even has the graphics. If you start your trending graph with any year before 1998 or with any year later, you get a clear trend. Only if you start it with exactly 1998, the tendency is weaker. You don't even need to exclude 1998 as an outlier to still keep the trend.

I wouldn't give much on a statistic that only works if you arbitrarily choose a specified starting point. And yes, you can manipulate every trend by choosing your starting point accordingly. So I call all claims that "since 1998, we don't have a warming trend anymore" manipulated statistics.

I dunno, I always get a big belly laugh whenever I log into something and see that horrible 1980s B&W X11 desktop, complete with ugly 'X' cursor.

Try flying on a Virgin America plane with the LCD screen inflight entertainment systems in the seat-backs. They'll often mass-reboot the things before or after a flight, briefly revealing that retro-fantastic, monochrome stippled background with 'X' cursor...