I expect your houseplant is not thirty-five years old. Probably too bad.

I'm on your side, but I'll argue with your third point, at least as far as police statistics are concerned, and for one crucial reason: They only get the driver's side of the story. People will hit "that big G" and get biased information and claim it's factual.

The first paved roads in the U.S. were paved at the demand of cyclists.

Easy there, big fella. Guess what? If the lane is not wide enough for a car to pass me with (in FL) a three foot gap, then, yes, I do have the right to "block" a full lane of traffic (hey, guess what else? I am traffic, so I'm not blocking it; I'm just slowing it). I also have the responsibility to signal my turns, stop for red lights (and in most states, stop signs; Google "Idaho stop"), and stay within the speed limit.

I don't know about your experience on the roads, but I see a far higher percentage of cars than bikes failing to signal and exceeding the speed limit, and about the same percentage rolling stop signs.

Palimpsest.

Even if the carbon dating is right, all we know is the sheep (or goat) on which it was written died before Mohammed was born.

Bad science journalists! No biscuit!

Would it kill you to add "a suburb of Granada, Spain" to the summary?

Right in line with my sig, I guess. How far do you have to drive to "save an hour" by going 85 mph instead of 75 mph? I get 637.5 miles (8.5 hours at 75, 7.5 at 85). That's about the distance from Helena (Montana's capital) to Bismarck, ND, purely on interstate highways. Bozeman is less than a hundred miles from Helena; that's over three round-trips a day to save an hour.

Perhaps two quotes got conflated, though; a round-trip out to the northeast of the state, where there might be Bakken shale work sites, could save an hour. Of course, that means you drove all day just to get back to Helena. No wonder we need that frackin' shale oil so badly.

A few other questions that went unasked (and I went to the actual study, not the blog-post summary): Length of engagement; pre-marital sexual relations; and parental marital status. My wife and I got engaged only six months after our first date, and only about three months after our second, but we were engaged nearly two years. Her parents are still married, and mine were married until my mother died a year ago. Both of my brothers are also still happily married (hers are still single, never married, but not necessarily for lack of trying). We celebrated our twenty-third anniversary this past spring.

To respond to just two of your straw men (three bullet points): Do you really think changing to metric means we'll stop using d/m/y dates? And for liquids, I've been buying 2L bottles for decades now, and you don't order "0.28L," you order (in Germany/Åustria) "kleine" (0.3L) or "grosse" (0.5L).

Clearly, we need to encourage more young people to go into STEM fields. Until then, more H1-Bs for the best and brightest biomed workers.

Three logs, not one, to break each of the four faces into three faces, making a dodecagonal prism.

Oh, yeah, that "someone smarter than you" is often future you! OTOH, I also get to look at the occasional bit of code I wrote ten years ago and think, "Well done, young padawan" (although maybe that means I haven't learned enough yet to know a better way).

Write like someone smarter than you will have to fix it ("Who wrote this crap? At least I can tell why he or she did that."), and like someone dumber than you will be adding features ("Bless him or her for making this easy."). You'll be both eventually.

I played a lot of bridge in college & grad school, but then only read about clubs playing in the middle of the day. Just six weeks ago, I found a local club that has evening games, and I'm getting back into the groove after two decades of playing only bad contract bridge every other year when Christmas was at my parents' house.

Check for local bridge clubs where you are; they love to have younger players, and most are happy to accommodate singletons until they find a regular partner.

This was posted back in March (in fact, I submitted it myself). Dupe dupe. C'mon, editors.