True story:
When I lived in Huntsville I was once stuck in traffic behind an old pickup truck with two bumper stickers. One was for a local country music station, but the second one read "My other vehicle is unmanned."

The sulfuric acid itself might be useful. It shouldn't be too hard to split into SO3 and H2O.

SO2 was used as a refrigerant prior to WWII, and could be produced by reducing the SO3, then used to cool the airship to temperatures more suitable for electronics/experiments/humans.

I hear you. Back when I was looking for a job I had similar problems.

I'm a chemist. I've spent years studying various types of chemistry. Chemistry is something I do--sometimes in the lab with actual chemicals, and other times on paper when I'm thinking about what to do in the lab. So naturally the word "chemistry" will be part of several phrases on my resume, and will be used in search engines to find matching jobs.

Now, you've had problems with touchy-feely HR people demanding that you be "enthusiastic" or even "in love with" you chosen work. But me? I got a crapload of irrelevant "matches" based on the word "chemistry".
Apparently this same school of touchy-feely HR thought gives me a 99% false positive rate on job searches, because everyone is looking for someone "with the right chemistry to join us."

Attention HR people: You expect a certain amount of professionalism from me if I'll be working for your company. I expect the same from you. Quit writing job descriptions like you're planning to use them as an OKCupid profile.

There's incompetent, and then there's just plain lazy.

Why do research or analysis when you can just Google "Comcast torrent"?

Why waste time filtering the results when most hosting providers will cave in to your demands without checking their validity?

I take it you don't live in a state where anyone has tried to drag the "ID vs. evolution" issue into political debate recently. The problem is that for most people "true" means "I want to believe this", not "This can be independently verified".

I'm not convinced. In principle it sounds great, but in practice you'll have a lot of resistance coming from several different groups:

)1) Christian fundamentalists who have no room for uncertainty in their model of the universe. To them, you might as well be reading from the Necronomicon, because anything that's unknown can't be declared true, anything that isn't true must be a lie, and all lies come from Satan.

2) New age crystal wavers who are still convinced that quantum mechanics proves there are many celestial planes (many worlds interpretation), sympathetic magic really works (entanglement), and that reality is shaped by our consciousness (Copenhagen interpretation). Never mind that the associations they make are utterly baseless, and the interpretations they're based upon actually contradict one another to some extent...

3) All the people who got sold on poorly written work that was dumbed down "for the public" in the past, (Pretty much anyone who's convinced that entanglement means FTL communication and Star Trek-style teleportation are just around the corner)

What's in common here? These people think they already know, and your attempts to enlighten them will initially only reveal how confused they are. This works aqainst you, because for them certainty and truth are not objective (but abstract) measures of how well a theory does or doesn't work, but feelings... and you just made them feel uncertain/bad, so what you are telling them is "less true than what they already know", which makes you clearly a "Satanic deceiver" / "conspirator suppressing the truth" / "clueless idiot who didn't read the Quantum Physics for Complete Morons sidebar in their favorite gaming magazine last month".

Not to say this isn't worth doing, just that you need to set your expectations very low.

See, now we know you're faking it. If you could actually remember when the Columbine and Hellmouth stories were posted here, your nostalgia would be tainted by the memories of JonKatz articles.

One of the reasons silicon is great for mass-produced anything: silicon simply happens to be one of the most common and easily refined elements on Earth.

The fact that pure silicon is an intrinsic semiconductor doesn't hurt, either. Just try making intrinsic GaAs...the amount of precision required to avoid making p-type or n-type material is ridiculous.

I've got no evidence to back it up, so you can take this as a conspiracy theory if you like:

My pet theory about the sudden popularity of UFOs from the middle of the 20th century onwards is that we actually had some foreign incursions into our airspace during the cold war. The cover-ups were real, but the whole "extraterrestrials are coming to earth" bit was just a second level of obfuscation--If you don't want people investigating how enemies slipped past our defenses, convince the general public that only crackpots are looking past the surface level explanation for sightings.

That said, there are UFO-like sightings dating back for centuries, and some people are highly susceptible to suggestion, so the second level of deception was wildly successful. In fact, a bit too successful, since it spawned another controversy that has persisted decades after the usefulness of the cover-up expired.

Rather missing the point.

The right-wingers weren't trying to smear Clinton by painting him as some kind of sex fiend, they were trying to paint him as a perjurer so they could reopen the Whitewater investigation.

They had a legitimate point, but it became a major case of "not seeing the forest for the trees", and they spent entirely too much of the public's time and money trying to pin down inconsequential details.

They stopped sending men to the moon about the time I learned to talk. You should pay more attention to my posts.

Don't rush into judgement on this. There can be several reasons why you have difficulty with math.

First, it could be as you say, but consider the alternatives:

Second, it could be that you just need to review the background material, or even that you overlooked something early in a course. Whenever I reach the "I'm lost" stage, I try to back up to where I first became slightly confused...then back up one or two steps further.

It could be a motivation issue. Try looking ahead to see where you're trying to go--for instance, the seemingly pointless epsilon-delta definition of limits that most calculus textbooks starts off with is only there because they intend to use the concept of limits in explaining integrals, derivatives, and infinite series. Without seeing where you're going, half of the first semester of calculus will seem like pointless bullshit.

It can also be that the instructor isn't good at teaching large groups. First, I would try asking the instructor for help in class--it may be he needs a nudge to remind him he's skipped over something important. If that doesn't help, try contacting him outside of class--odds are good you'll get better communication when he's trying to help one or two students as opposed to 120. If that still doesn't work for you, see if another professor or even another student can explain what you're having trouble with.