I have a friend who did the same thing in the 90s. The missing piece of the picture was that he had a contact at the airline who would let him know which flights were oversold. He would then book that flight and volunteer to be bumped in exchange for a free ticket.

Sure, except weight isn't solely a factor of how thin or obese one is. What about tall people? They also weigh more. It's not enough that tall people are more uncomfortable on airplanes, they should have to pay more than shorter people too? How about muscular folks? Androids? Medieval knights? It's just not fair I tells ya!

Call me when someone makes a 1.21 Gigawatt electric race car.

I do a Mindstorms unit with my grade 4 class. The kids have a blast building the robots, doing little challenges, time trials, etc. In the mean time, they are learning about sequences, switches, loops and basic programming logic as well as how to trouble-shoot their programs. Granted the Mindstorms NXT Edu kits are not cheap. Other, cheaper (as in free) suggestions might include Scratch, or Khan Academy's JavaScript mini-courses.

The advantage a car autopilot has over an airplane autopilot is that in the event of all but the most extreme catastrophic failures, the car can just pull over and stop. Planes, not so much.

I do a robotics unit in my grade 4 class with Lego Mindstorm kits. They learn some basic programming concepts like loops and if-then statements. They love it, and in my experience age 9 is about the right developmental stage to start this. However, logical and critical reasoning skills can be taught at a much earlier age. Every child is different, of course, and some will be able to run with those concepts earlier, but that has been my observation.

African or European? I don't give 1.5 shitloa... AAAARRRGH

Then what's the conversion rate for people with only 2 arms?

I suppose an occasional shower is out of the question?

Doesn't an egg that contains a 100%-chicken count as the definition of a chicken egg?
Does the "chicken-ness" of the egg derive from the egg-layer or from the embryo within?

(Oh, and 'meh' is a philosophy unto itself.)

Buy Lowe.
Sell High School Musical.

From TFA:

...the extent of genetic diversity among hominins living one million years ago was between 1.7 and 2.9 times greater than among humans today

..and in the next paragraph:

Jorde thinks that the diminished genetic diversity one million years ago suggests human ancestors experienced a catastrophic event...

Um. What?

So, according to the research, 1 million years ago the human population was about 55,000 with a genetic diversity 2-3 times greater than that of modern humans. Can someone help me understand how they get to a near extinction conclusion? Is it just that the population is lower than expected? TFA is not very clear on the point...

Technically she's my fiancee. But I didn't want to show off.

Check with local schools. The one my girlfriend works at has a program where they take donated broken small appliances and let the students dismantle them to explore how they work. Once all the learning's been had out of an appliance, the parts are either given to the art department or to a local recycling depot.