"around 40% of Americans do not believe that humans evolved from less advanced forms of life. That contrasts to 59% acceptance in Canada"

I lived in Livermore for a year and had high school classmates whose parents worked at the labs. It was a lovely town 50 years ago and still is, last I saw of it. So I'm delighted to see it get its own element. You can now say folks in Livermore are in their element.

Today's Latin lesson: words ending in -ndum (-nda in the plural) are called "gerundives" and carry the connotation that some action is supposed to be done. Memorandum means something is to be remembered, agenda means things that are to be done, addendum means something to be added, etc.

I think it's amusing that so many people claim to believe that ethics is situational, that context matters. But when it comes to war, ALL war is bad. Doesn't matter if you were with the Allies or the Nazis. The canard is that traditional ethics is rigid and doesn't recognize context whereas modern ethics are flexible…

I recall the era of de-institutionalization. It was a truly bipartisan effort. Conservatives, of course, merely wanted to cut funding. Liberals believed asylums were simply "warehouses" for the mentally ill (ironically, stuff in a warehouse is better protected than most homeless mentally ill folks are). They believed…

You know, you can check things like this at [BibleGateway.com] and avoid making a fool of yourself. I have heard this view came from Augustine, but it most definitely is NOT in the Bible.

Since when are sea birds not predators?

Considering that 14 astronauts died during the Shuttle era, I don't think NASA's overdoing it. A half-@$$ed mission to the moon would be a suicide mission.

Our puppy got into a candy bowl so we "had" to take him to an emergency vet clinic, where they gave him activated charcoal to scavenge the toxin. It was after midnight when they got done. Then I asked the vet what it would take to be harmful and it was something like half his body weight. Grrr.

PLEASE don't show this to Octomom!

Amazing how it just hangs in space, like it's ... Venus, or something.

I am still totally pi$$ed off at Bridge to Terebithia, which was THE worst case of bait and switch I've ever seen. The trailers made it look like a fantasy movie and literally every frame of fantasy footage was in the trailers.

She spent the night in the open 60 FEET from her vacation home?

So where's the lesbianism? Two friends with one holding her arm around the other's neck? Like non-lesbian female friends never do that?

Now whose idea was it to undercook the chips? Real potato chips are brown, not pale yellow. The best chips are the generic brands because they often are darker and saltier.

An eccentric orbit might make for a very long and cold winter, but summer would be very brief. The speed of a planet in its orbit varies inversely with distance. Halley's Comet spends half its time beyond Neptune, and whips through the same arc close to the sun in two years.

Sunlight on the Moon is no more intense than on the Earth. Any cooling was more to eliminate body heat than protect from lunar sunlight. The surrounding vacuum has no temperature at all. The lunar surface would be 200 degrees, but only at the end of two weeks of continuous sunlight. And geologists in terrestrial…

Color me far beyond impressed. Awe-struck is more like it. What an awesome technical achievement.

You included B-612. That's the important thing.

Remedy is simple: