Gee, hundreds of generations of Mongols and other nomads can't be all that wrong.

Let's see. Christmas this year: spiral-cut ham? Check. The bones went into a pot of collards later, so we got two meals out of one ham.

Hope your remark gets approved, Numitron. Unless the proposed Lockheed fusion reactor pans out, we're looking at ITER based designs taking off after 2040, which isn't good. We needed them 20 years ago. Even worse, the nuclear power industry is looking for power plant designs that are no more complicated than…

Like this is a new problem? Film noir was invented in LA back most of a century ago, and there are whole books written about how the place is in eternal pre-Armageddon, what with the sunny weather/smog hiding horrible corruption, the place sucking the Owens Valley Dry (remember Chinatown?) like some bloated water…

Nope, mortality stats for the developing world, as well as medieval and early modern times. This is where we can dive into the statistical swamp big time, if you want. We can argue about the relative influence of childhood mortality, coronary disease (a major killer not so long ago, much as it is now),…

Statins are safe in the sense that they won't kill you if you overdose (as with aspirin). A very common side effect is pervasive muscle pain, and safe doesn't always mean pleasant or without problems. There's always a risk/reward calculation that you need to go through with your doctor.

Powering all this crap will be the interesting part. So far, it looks like we won't have even the possibility of "break-even" fusion before 2030, or working reactors before 2050 (assuming that they actually get fusion to work, which is, as usual, highly doubtful). Meanwhile, peak oil is still trudging towards us…