I once watched an interview of Bob Woodward about his book All the President's Men. He mentioned that it had been translated into other languages, including French, but the title for the translations had been changed to "Nixon and Watergate". The interviewer asked why, and he replied "Because the French don't have Humpty Dumpty".

Some languages use cultural idioms more than others. English has many idioms that refer to our common culturall heritage, but Chinese has far more. You can get by in English without studying idioms specifically. In Chinese, there is no way. You have to learn them or you will fail to comprehend almost every conversation.

You are far more likely to die in a car accident while driving to WalMart than you are from any natural disaster.

Or, alternatively, hire a lawyer, and sue x.org for violating the ADA. That is the American way.

Vacuum, of course, has less mass than either H2 or He. But mass is the wrong way to look at it. You should be looking at "bouyancy". H2 is half the weight of helium, so twice as good, right? Wrong. H2 is 7% the mass of air, so it gives a buoyancy of 93%. Helium gives a buoyancy of 86%. So that is only a 7% difference in lifting capacity. Vacuum gives a buoyancy of 100%, but that is only 7% better than H2. All the problems that come with maintaining the vacuum, and dealing with the pressure difference, is not going to be worth it for just a 7% gain. This is the reason that vacuum airships have never been built, and likely never will.

Basically, yes. H2 has a bigger radius than monoatomic helium. But H2 can be absorbed into metal, embrittling the metal in the process. The electrons will disassociate, and the protons can then drift through the metal and diffuse out the other side. So if the container is metal, the H2 will leak out faster, otherwise the helium will.

Disclaimer: I am a programmer, not a chemist. So if you are building a blimp or hydrogen storage facility, you might want to double check all of this.

They are deployed first where electricity is $1/kwh, but if they can be scaled up and mass produced, we could use them everywhere. If you go up high enough, you can almost always find strong winds. Unlike many other renewables, these could be used for steady baseload power. There is a lot of potential for this technology.

But less easily than helium through non-metallic materials. Even a party balloon will hold hydrogen for days. This thing will have less permeable material, and a much higher volume/surface ratio, so it should be able to stay up for weeks before needing a hydrogen top up. It might even be able to make its own H2 by collecting condensation and doing electrolysis.

It is suspended in a gale force wind. It is extremely unlikely that the hydrogen slowly diffusing through the covering will build up enough to ignite.

Read the study. There were a lot more than 2 data points. Wal-Mart was cheaper, month after month. Then, for one month, due to some sales, Target was cheaper. So the headline is about the "myth" of lower prices at Wal-Mart. The author of the article also blames Wal-Mart for killing Bangladeshi seamstresses, so she may be a little biased.

Unlikely. Raising the minimum wage would result in more automation, more outsourcing, and higher unemployment. Most people on food stamps have at least one household adult that is unemployed or underemployed. Young black men have an unemployment rate of 40%. The problem is not "low wages" but "lack of entry level jobs". It is unrealistic to expect an unskilled and poorly educated young man with no work history to compete for a $15/hour job. He isn't going to get it. Instead, he needs an $8/hour job to gain some experience, and learn some basic job skills, like showing up on time and dressing appropriately. Then he can move up. But that won't happen in you remove the bottom rung from the ladder.

If you drill down to the actual study, what they found was that Target was cheaper than Wal-Mart by 0.46% for ONE MONTH. The preceding months, Wal-Mart had been cheaper by over 2%. So this was apparently a blip caused by some one-off sales at Target.

These are unmanned. So even if a tiny fraction burn up (due to lightning or whatever), I don't see how that would be much of a problem. Hydrogen burns very quickly, so would be consumed before it hit the ground. Just make sure they are tethered so they don't fall on a populated area.

If they raised wages, we would have to pay more on food stamps, because they would hire different people, and their current employees would likely be unemployed. Have you ever been to Wal-Mart? My local store employs a woman in a wheelchair, and two people that appear to have Down's Syndrome. Most of their other employees don't look much brighter. These people get paid $10 per hour because that is what they are worth. If Wal-Mart is forced to raise wages, then they will pull more capable people from other more useful employment, and their current employees would get pink slips.

Citation? There is a Safeway, Lucky's, and Wal-Mart equidistant from my house. I went to all three and priced out a typical cart of groceries, and Wal-Mart was significantly cheaper on EVERY SINGLE ITEM. Overall, I save about 20% by shopping there.

There would be millions of volunteers. If you need a thousand, you could pick the top 0.1%. I would definitely want to go. If you look at history, there has never been a problem getting people to volunteer for dangerous, one-way missions. In the 1500's, there was no shortage of colonists heading out of Europe. The Polynesians colonized every speck of land in he Pacific. The Japanese Kamikaze attacks stopped because they ran out of planes, not pilots. In the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, of the dozens of astronaut candidates, ONE dropped out.

You have a very dim view of humanity if you think there would be a problem staffing a starship.

True, but he could still get a job as a PHP developer.