The people who see blue/black only had boxes of crayons with eight colors when they were kids.

And my guess is the budget allocations would come out pretty close to what they are now. Tea Partiers would favor defense, liberals would favor social programs.

One of our major tragedies was failing to call a Constitutional Convention in 1987 to celebrate the Bicentennial of the Constitution.

Gotta love that British understatement. When an Allied fleet blew a Turkish fleet to bits in Navarino Bay in 1827, King George IV referred to it as “an untoward event.”

This is pushing it. One design proposal would create a 100-meter mirror fixed in place with all the observing hardware moving.

First, it will be a long time before we go to the stars, period, telescopes or not.

I think what makes humblebrag so irritating is that the person is downplaying something other people would love to have: being mistaken for a model, being hit on all the time, etc. “No matter how hard I try, I simply cannot gain weight” is good for a mob with torches and pitchforks any day.

The smell of mustard just about makes my eyes water. They put too much mayo on sandwiches so they drip. They skimp on the cheese. Really, tiling the cheese so you don’t accidentally get a square millimeter of overlap? We’re on a budget, here, folks.

The list includes a lot of trademarks. Microsoft and Nintendo, for example.

Problems with calling it a “she?” We call ships “she,” for heaven’s sake.

Most of what we do is close to optimum efficiency because waste is lost money. Every time someone proposes some radical new thing that will utterly transform the world, there turn out to be all sorts of hidden costs that make it not that much of an improvement on existing methods.

“But in the entire history of the world, there was only one brief moment, lasting about 70 years, where you could put something under lock and key—a chest, a safe, your home—and have complete, unwavering certainty that no intruder could get to it.”

Many levels below the technical discussions below: One day I locked myself out of my car, so security came by with a Slim Jim and popped the lock. I was astonished at how trivially easy it was.

Minor technicality: WE DIDN'T DO ANY OF THEM. A small subtlety you may have missed.

Subtitled: A list of proposals that were never implemented, to justify the belief in real "black flag" operations. Like it says in the Bible: "If a man thinks lustfully about overthrowing Castro, he has already invaded Cuba in his heart."

It IS possible to abolish National Parks. The second National Park, and the first east of the Mississippi (sorry, Acadia) was Mackinac Island in Michigan. It had been an army post, but, when we finally realized the British were unlikely to come back (in 1875), the Federal land was made a National Park (in those days,…

The 1995 earthquake is most remarkable because it predates the universal availability of digital video, when everyone has a video camera built in to their still camera or phone. The short snippet of actual earthquake footage is from a surveillance camera.

Do a screen shot, copy it into a drawing program, and read the color balance. You can use the smudge effect to average things out. For the last picture, I got R=55, G=75, B=115. Bluish gray. For the one where he's face down in the snow, I got R=44, G=47, B=51. Very close to neutral, but still closer to blue. That's…

It would help if you told us where it is (Peru). But my guess is it's a dipping layer of limestone or some other soluble rock dotted with sinkholes. I have a shot of an area in Turkey almost as densely dotted with holes. It's interesting (sadly, hardly surprising) that most links talk a lot about "who" dug the holes,…

The NSA is a distraction from all the corporate spying - the cookies, tracking apps, and adware. The NSA couldn’t care less about seeing you in your underwear, and as for seeing ME, they’d run for the cyanide pills. But corporations suck data on you all the time.