"2026" and nevertheless "could be"?

So Her Majesty's government is certainly not preparing anything similar to what J.F. Cooper called a "hasty pudding"...

Thus, High Speed Rail may or may not reach the Scottish border before the end of the current century, anybody willing to place a bet against that?

"Airbus' actuaries tell them that the short-run cost of performing immediate repairs is greater than the long-run cost of their insurance rates after a mechanical failure."

Well, that puts things (read: the company`s preferences) into a very interesting perspective, doesn't it?

This might happen rather sooner than later.

My bet's on Mac OS X 10.8 "Common House Cat"
(or whatever the Code Name will be, the "Big Cat" series finally being done...)

There's at least 6 billion of "them" and counting...

On a more speculative side, there might be highly developed life forms elsewhere in the universe that we carbon-based blighters wouldn't even recognize as "life" if we stumbled over one of them (and perhaps vice versa).

In my opinion and in contrary to what the original posting suggests, anti-matter should not be viewed as particularly "dark".

E.g., anti-Hydrogen, consisting of an anti-proton and a positron, will readily absorb a quantum of energy (a photon, which happens to be one of the particles that are their own anti-particles) and re-emit a photon again, just like "plain old" hydrogen. Thus, a cloud of anti-hydrogen should be observable as easily (or difficultly) as a cloud of hydrogen, assuming their masses, their viewing distances and all other parameters like temperature, density etc. being equal.

So there should be no difference in observability here, due to the fact that photons are citizens of both realms, of "nornal" matter as well as of anti-matter, and will interact with mass particles of both realms in the same way.

Obviously, "dark matter" looks like a very different beast...

But then, a can of the _original_ Budweiser (i.e., the one from the Czech Republic) would certainly achieve the coolness goal as well.

Including the taste goal. Many of the beers from Belgium or Ireland would do.

Just make sure to avoid those U.S. beverages that pretend to be "beer". Don't drink them, don't use their cans for your projects. ;-)

First, you might start to enhance your understanding of advanced calculus.

At some early point along the road, get yourself a copy of
The ABC of Relativity, by Bertrand Russell, first ed. in 1925.
(Reading this book will just take the better part of a rainy day, breaks included. Enjoy it.)

Later on, read the Master's own writing:
Relativity. The Special and General Theory, by Albert Einstein, first ed. in 1920
http://www.bartleby.com/173/

Meanwhile, don't forget to continue your calculus efforts. ;-)

Remember, Einstein had a very pragmatic approach towards mathematics, he just used it.
To understand GR, you won't necessarily have to become more of a mathematician than Einstein wanted to be.

taking place a long time before humans living at high latitude finally learned how to produce - and consume - distilled liquor.

The latter of which being a completely different way to adapt to long, dark winter nights...