I not only never like the smell of smoke, I always found it noxious and I blamed getting colds and sinus infections on exposure to smoke that irritated my nasal passages something fierce.

But I remember once getting a real snootful from someone holding a cigarette close to me, and there was an unusual feeling of "Ah!" that contradicted my aversion to the smoke. Oh, so that's why people breathe this stuff in.

A family member has a geek sense of humor and offered that if there were a spray that made dog poo disappear, you certainly wouldn't want to use it.

Suppose the dog left a "present" on the carpet and you took a spray can to remove it, where did it go? Into the only place it could go, which is the air. Do you want to breathe in aerosolized dog excrement?

You had to have extracurricular activities to list on your college application since forever, and among other things, I attended Medical Club. I guess it attracted would be doctors, which was me in my parents' eye but I always wanted to be an engineer.

It was a fantastic experience on account of practicing medical doctors in specialized fields taking time out of their busy schedules to give an after-school talk to would be doctors. I vividly remember the Scared Straight lecture on VD that was accompanied with slides of male and female pudenda wracked with syphilitic sores, but somehow I think this was wasted on the type of earnest student attending Medical Club who was an ambitious grind with head down in the books instead of taking time to catch those diseases.

The other talk I remember was of a doctor who was in on the early use of coronary bypass surgery--this was in the early 1970s. What ran counter to all of the received wisdom on smoking was him saying, "Everyone talks about smoking will give you lung cancer, but that is not a certainty. What people don't tell you about cigarettes is that it is a certainty that you will get cardiovascular disease."

Oh, and the talk had many graphic slides of the lungs of dead cigarette smokers.

Think of it, President Eisenhower had his heart attacks and that is where we got the thing that we should be eating seed oils instead of animal fats and butter. But what no one talk about was Ike, at least in his war years, was a heavy smoker.

Mind you, Robert Noyce of the Fairchild Planar Process fame, the invention that to this day powers the microelectronics revolution, died in his early 60's of a heart attack. Sure shootin', his Wikipedia page mentions him to be a heavy smoker.

If you can answer 20 of these questions, your IQ is higher than 140.

On the other hand, if you click on the link, that pretty much puts your IQ well below that value.

Yeah, I read it 400 million years ago instead of 400 million years after the solar system formation, aligning it with the catastrophism theories of Tom Van Flandern.

that I didn't simply engage the first person from India I know and expect them to give me detailed information about the sacred writings in their religion.

I recall this was in the 1980s, and my informant was an Engineering professor who invited people he knew to join him in seeing a recent movie reenacting accounts in Hindu scriptures. This movie, by the way, had West Indian rather than Asian Indian actors playing those roles, if this helps identify it, but it was definitely a niche "art cinema work" than product of a large, commercial studio.

This is the context in which I asked him about Oppenheimer's "I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds" to which I was reassured that this must have been a very loose translation, which it could have been because it was Oppenheimer's. He was "cosmopolitan" enough to be aware of the Oppenheimer quote yet grounded in his native culture enough to offer an opinion about its accuracy.

An Evangelical Christian inviting their friends to an Easter play may not have a scholar's in-depth reading and knowledge of the Bible, but that person likely had what their religious denomination regards as key passages read to them, both in church services and in Sunday School along with those passages interpreted for them by their pastor or Sunday School teacher. My friend wasn't seeking to convert me to being a Hindu, rather, he wanted to share an important aspect of his culture and upbringing, so in asking him about Oppenheimer, I thought his knowledge of Hindu scripture was at least on the level of a church-going Christian.

I talked to about this quote have no idea what Dr. Oppenheimer was speaking about.

is a thing.

I have thought that long before electromagnetic-confinement fusion reaches power production, it will be useful and usable for isotope production. Tritium for "boosted" fission weapons and possibly breeding plutonium?

orcas may even learn how to format a Slashdot post into paragraphs?

That's great that you drink mostly water.

But the important question is which Linux distro did you install on your grandmother's computer?

And is Grandma still on speaking terms with you?

How being diplomatic works.

For all the attempts to correct the warts and remove limitations to make Pascal usable for large system development--Modula 2, Ada, Oberon, Component Pascal--it appears that Pascal World has coalesced around the Delphi 7 object Pascal dialect for which Free Pascal is the mullti-platform compiler?

Isn't a particle detector a form of gambling?

"C'mon, baby, give me another sigma that I can publish this paper!"

I see this as a way of dealing with owner anxiety of an unexpected battery replacement expense, maybe a major maintenance done every 5 years and 80,000 miles, not something done on a daily basis.