You just ruined my weekend with that "Red button" comment.

Japanese workers are extremely hard working and incredibly unproductive. I hope they serve as a warning on the importance of work/life balance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radiocarbon_dating_calibration.svg To anyone more knowledgeable than me, shouldn't see some major movement on the c14 calibration graph around 775AD? Looks like a pretty boring period to me.

I don't understand this hype. I can /almost/ see how you'd want this in a few situations over CFL, but how can it possibly compete with the competing bulbs from LG and GE that are in the $10~20 range with pretty equivalent specs?

I was considering that possibility, but I'm reasonably confident I had pretty decent adding and subtracting capability even as a six year old. Regardless, the way to handle the situation was certainly not "Let's check the answer key!", but rather "Hmm... why don't we count out ten marbles on the desk here, now if we take away seven of them, how many are left?" -- You know, actually teach.

This sort of thing was the start of my disaffection with school in about the first grade. Up to this point I was really excited to come and learn, and then we got a math workbook that had a tremendous error rate in the answer key. I pointed some of these out to my teacher and she actually went back to check the answer key again to tell me I was wrong. I don't think it would have been possible to design a better way to show me that:

1. The teacher didn't care.
2. The system (IE the textbook writers) didn't care.
3. The teacher was so caught up in the system that she depended on an answer key for checking rather than performing the simple addition herself and seeing what was obvious.
4. School was irrelevant. Even in elementary the teachers were dumber than the students, and grades didn't necessarily correlate with anything important in reality.

I bought a Nook Color last Christmas and have been pretty disappointed. The eBook prices are ridiculously high. They are often higher than the physical book in the store or Amazon. They also seem to be consistently higher than Amazon's prices for the same eBook (which are also too high). The reader's behavior doesn't really seem to match up to the specs. It feels pretty slow, and the screen response is extremely poor. Many of the applications that come with (such as crosswords) are not functional because the touchscreen response is inaccurate. Battery life is pretty good when you're using it, but if it's set aside for a couple of weeks and not used, the battery will drain in the meantime.

Also signed.

Really? This one seemed a little worse to me. It's pretty obvious at this point that he doesn't intend to meaningfully respond to any petition that isn't an automatic home run for him.

That's not contradictory at all. He says that not only do we not have a shortage, but that many good engineers have had to take up other careers. Why is that difficult to understand?

Bombs or bandages? Wave to the plane and find out!

We're all cosmonauts now, comrade.

Not sure what your link had to do with anything, but it /has/ been done before: http://www.fabathome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Materials:Chocolate

Massive amounts of caffeine are often effective for me. I take Excedrin Migraine (mostly caffeine) and then chew coffee beans or drink several cans of soda. If I can do this immediately when the aura starts, pretty often I'll avoid the headache. Still end up just a bit "off" for days though.

From his comments I don't think Obama would have a problem signing this. My impression of his opinion is "Yeah. It shouldn't be illegal, but it's not worth spending political capital to make that happen." If it didn't cost him anything, he'd approve.