Commercials with people making gross eating and drinking noises are rampant here in the U.S. Nails on blackboards don't begin to compare.

So heliocentric astronomy and the Periodic Table are not facts? When exactly do we expect them to be proven wrong, and how?

I'd add diffraction grating. It spreads light into a spectrum but linearly. Only problem, it requires grooves 20,000 to the inch to do it. Henry Rowland of Renssalaer made a machine to do it. Since no machine can be rigid to within a 20,000th of an inch, he realized he had to regard the machine as being made of rubber…

He will go supersonic at very high altitude so the shock wave will be a lot less than lower down. As he enters denser air he'll decelerate so the parachute shock will not be very different from normal skydiving - 100+ mph.

The late and lamentably very underrated Art Hoppe of the San Francisco Chronicle once wrote about a scientist who discovered a drug to reverse people's skin color. He sold it to white people as a tanning aid and to black people as a skin lightener. So pretty soon all the black people were discriminating against the…

It seems that everyone is missing the point. This bug doesn't create gold. The gold is already in the chemical they feed it. It merely extracts the gold and converts it to metallic form. Still, the implications for natural gold formation are intriguing.

Nope. If the hole is a foot square and 50,000 feet deep, that's 50,000 cubic feet, or a volume 50 x 50 x 20 feet. The size of a house. Not very big on a global scale. Any gas they hit will be in the sediments above the oceanic crust.

I have a mole hole in my lawn. On the other hand, the Mohorovicic Discontinuity (or Moho) is at the base of the crust. The Soviets didn't launch Project Mohole, we did (it later evolved into the still-running Ocean Drilling Program). The Russians drilled 12 km into the crust in Karelia but had no intention of reaching…

Identify all the idiots over here who deny population growth is a problem. Move 30 or 40 Chinese oldsters in with them. After all, the more the merrier!

"What is the most annoying food to listen to someone eat?"

One of our local weathermen has been doing this for years: Boys' names, Girls' names, towns in the region, etc. I've always thought one year he should do adjectives to describe the practice: Awful, Boring, Childish, Dull, Execrable, Foolish, etc.

Specifically where in the Old Testament? I did a search and found 33 references to divorce. None prescribe any procedure. The only reference to a procedure is in Matthew where Jesus said that Moses allowed a husband to divorce his wife.

I always thought the requirement to fund Viagra was stupid, and I still think it's stupid. "If Viagra isn't funded, that means rich people get to have better sex lives than anyone else." Yes, that was something backers actually said. When is the last time Donald Trump went dateless?

A number of years ago we had the repressed-memory hysteria, where therapists supposedly dredged up horrible memories of ritual abuse that the "victims" had totally suppressed. People were arrested in some cases for non-existent crimes. After a few of these therapists got smacked with seven-figure judgements, the craze…

I have yet to find a photo storage system that meets my needs (including Picasa). I want to store images in several databases. I don't need my NASA downloads stored with my personal pictures. I want to be able to select folders to index without selecting every single folder or manually deselecting folders. In other…

What I've never seen is an explanation of why you sometimes get the play of colors without polarizing filters, especially in reflections. I suspect it has to do with the way reflections off non-metallic surfaces are polarized.

Cool. So if the camera is off and I suddenly see a bald eagle take wing I can aim and shoot and get the picture instantly. Right? I mean, my Pentax from 40 years ago could do that.

Give me instantaneous response when I press the button and a real infinity setting. Not auto-focus, actual infinity. Store the most recent exposure settings so if I whip up the camera for a quick shot, I get it. I can get an exposure in 1/1000 second with a mechanical SLR - there is no justification for digital…

I count three that are likely reproductions, and only the Superman frame is beyond doubt. Then I have a bunch where people are in positions vaguely similar to some comic panel. Out of the millions of comic panels ever drawn and the billions of film frames, how hard is it to find an approximate match?

I follow politics. Lime jello has the brain wave activity of the average voter? What a surprise.