Let me tell you - between first chair euphonium, defense and prosecution lawyer for mock trial, and stage manager for the musical I hardly had to show up in high school.

Many years ago I read an article that stated spectators got the same surge of testosterone as the players when their side won. Suddenly athletic worship makes sense to me - when you're a when you're an addict the only thing that matters is your next fix.

I get this way sometimes, then I go and reread the 3rd act of Our Town. Something about the ending grabs me and reminds me even banality is immeasurably precious.

Getting a pilots license is freaking expensive. All average persons have little hope of becoming a pilot. That said, I've skirted the argument you were trying to make.

Horrible experiment - I'd say so: no control group, no parameter control, and horrible statistics.

Do you really think it is systematic, or was that a rhetorical flourish? I'm not saying it's any less comprehensive for being ad hoc, but I don't find culture's oppression through standards of beauty coherent enough or methodical enough to be systematic.

I couldn't pass the first line without pointing out that if, Crossfire is, "the ancestral home of partisan cable TV shouting," then The McLaughlin Group is the "Ur-partisan TV shouting" show. They've never been deservedly dressed down by Jon Stewart.

I promise you there is no power source that will be cleaner than the power you don't generate. I like nuclear energy myself (I've got an NE degree and everything) but even if fission plants became cheaper to build and decommission and more publicly popular you're still arguing something is less than nothing. …

This would be cute if it wasn't awful. Standby power (or vampire power if you prefer) already consumes 5-10% of household energy usage. We need more gadgets that are off when they are off, not toys actively watching for gestures to turn on a light bulb.

Sorry- I should have been more clear: 0.5g of *lateral* acceleration. More is acceptable in the vertical, but there are even difficulties there too. Canting will help, but then you're talking a stronger than usual acceleration.

Walking moves people too, and is cheaper than all of these proposals. Moving people is way to broad for fair comparisons. Beyond 'moving people', the only things HSR and hyperloop have in common are altitude, and neither can leave their path.

The thing is, the Hyperloop really doesn't replace CHR (even setting aside the mistakes and bad assumptions in the Hyperloop proposal). CHR has the benefit of servicing multiple stops between either end of the line; hyperloop really only services two points. CHR also has a much higher capacity than the Hyperloop. …

That being the case, it's rather disingenuous for Musk to compare the hyperloop at 35 minutes to a CHR ride at 2.5 hrs, when CHR takes you from downtown to downtown, while the hyperloop picks you up and drops you off at 1hr+ from downtown to station on both sides of the trip. Also, CHR has stops, serving more than…

Even Musk had to concede that CHR is neither the slowest or most expensive bullet train ever.

Oddly enough, as I think about it, that should be encouraging. From an incentives point of view, it's in the government's interest to continue discriminating against same sex couples. By granting them the marriage tax breaks the government has done the right thing in spite of the economic incentives.

I'm more than willing to let the Russians and Ukrainians fight it out amongst themselves over who was more instrumental to the Soviet space program. The relevant bureaus were in Russia, but I can not say definitively that the relevant engineers were Russian, but it isn't a bad bet either.

Your second point, and my story are not incompatible. Yes, NASA wanted a smaller shuttle, and the DoD wanted more cargo capacity for them to support the program, thus driving a larger vehicle. For the Shuttle's size (that is the size it needed to be to meet the expanded mission requirements) a wider wingspan would…

They very likely were both. Russia as a nation existed within the Soviet Union as a member nation. My wife was born in the Latvian SSR, so I'm aware of the distinction. To my knowledge, Russians made up the vast majority of the Soviet space program and its engineering core.

There were literally dozens of designs, before they settled on the SST we all knew and loved. The SST would have had wider wings if the VAB would have allowed it.

There's a funny story about that-