This idea of appliances calling in for their own repairs has been somebody's wet dream for a long time, and they even made a TV commercial showing supposedly how it would be a good thing for a repairman showing up at the door unannounced. That's not what I want, and I don't see why this idea has such legs.

It would be maybe interesting if the appliance could send just me a report, then I could shop it around for estimates, but having it automatically contact somebody without going through me first is unappealing.

I agree with most of your post (and maybe it is just because I don't care for solitaire), but I do have a pet peeve with solitaire. I find it annoying when I run across employees who have almost full internet access (gambling filtered and probably porn) sitting there playing solitaire.

It just seems like you could be doing something more interesting or productive for your personal life (e.g. reading a blog that you would otherwise spend your free time at home reading, reading the news, paying bills, etc...)

Maybe I just feel that I have a shortage of time to do stuff that I like to do, so if I am going to steal some extra time from work I want it to be worthwhile or enjoyable. I play games at home, but not solitaire.

It was a silly scheme, but from what I have read this is business as usual in SC politics. Republican operatives sometimes pay entry fees for black candidates just to "stir the pot" of racial division among the Democrats during the primaries so that blacks will be less likely to vote in the general election.

I have also read that this is often not much more than a practical joke, especially in this case when the candidate did nothing but pay the entry fee and did not even have campaign signs up in his own yard. I think the Republicans really don't want these candidates to win because it would bring national attention to the way SC politics work, and they were probably just as shocked that Greene won as everybody else was.

It was good advice. Most people with just a bachelors degree in physics go into IT, engineering support, or finance. An engineer could do any of these fields just as good as a physics major, and of course they would get paid way more for engineering.

Even if you seriously planned on going to grad school, it would still be a good idea to take some engineering classes as back-up. One of my physics "professors" was teaching the class for free so he could boost his resume and hopefully one day get a real physics job. He said every physics position he applied for had at least 100 other PhD applicants. His day-job was as a software engineer for a courier company. That was as close to physics he could get.

I don't think Google would have billions of dollars if there weren't a few people who click the ads.

After hearing some of the expert commentary during the competition, it does seem a lot more interesting than what I originally thought it would be. From what little I have seen, it looks like it is just as heavy linguistics as it is immaculate spelling. They use the meaning and origin of the word to figure out the likely way that individual parts of the word should be translated and spelled. It just seems like you would learn a lot about language in general and the different languages of the world.

I believe the really good McDonald's french fries used to be cooked in tallow (beef fat), and they were later pressured into using trans-fats because at one point some thought it was healthier.

As far as education, maybe we can educate people that animal fat isn't bad or a heart attack on a plate. Humans have eaten animal fat for about 2 million years. We only started eating processed omega-6 vegetable oils and margarine in the last 100 years or so (guess what century heart attacks became an epidemic).

I do question artificial foods like nanofoods that are supposed to make us healthier (like the trans-fats were supposed to) because eating unnatural foods usually come with problems.

I know you have an anti-Obama slant, but you forgot to mention paying for a long, pointless war in Iraq.

I thought that I heard that Obama was increasing funding for NASA, just cutting manned space flight for awhile until we figure out how to do it right.

I have problem with people making statements about how the pyramids could not be built with the technology available. So called crop circle experts said there was no way humans could be behind crop circles, until they were shown video of two retired guys and a wood plank in fact doing it. People used to talk about how it was scientifically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, but yet it does.

I think some people think too highly of their ability to figure things out, and they don't give other people enough credit for their ingenuity.

I had a professor once that pretty effectively argued that Crete was Atlantis. I have forgot most of the arguments, but I believe one of them was that if you assumed a common translation error in numbers that Plato might have committed, then the eruption of Thera would coincide very well with the (corrected) time period of Atlantis's fall.

Humans survived the Cold War. I'm not convinced that humanity did.

Alt still makes it temporarily appear, and you might as well just go all the way: Alt-T, O.

Fails to render the name correctly for me in FF but I'm not surprised. Now only if they would translate the /ar/default.aspx as well... the English legacy is still clearly visible.

American and British intelligence had already reached the conclusion that Japan would surrender the moment that Russia declared war on them, which is what happened; Japan surrendered as soon as Russia entered the war. The atomic bombings did not even provoke a meeting of Japan's war council. We were fire-bombing their cities at will anyway at that point.