Sisyphus

No, that's fairly well documented. Too much sleep very often results in similar symptoms as too little: lethargy, difficulty concentrating, etc. You definitely shouldn't be sleeping more than 10 hours or less than 5. 6-8 is generally recognized as ideal for adults.

You do NOT need calc AB before calc BC. In my school it wasn't even possible to take both. The difference between them is that BC covers roughly 50% more material, while still including everything in AB. Thus you have less time on each subject, and it is therefore more difficult. Also, different people learn differently, so do what works, but for myself I found the memorizing aspect to be less important and actually understanding and visualizing the concepts to be more important the faster you go, because it means new things make sense more quickly and are more easily remembered. I didn't consciously set out to memorize anything my whole time, and I got a perfect score on the BC exam. But again, do what works for you, and please don't slack off because some weirdo on the internet (any of us) told you to.

You and Lockheed share a single heart? Are you conjoined twins, or are you being poetic?

Bad bad bad. For everyone. Please, please let Musharef not be responsible.

They make up for with all the shows about ghosts, alien abductions, and the prophecies of Nostradamus.

I got nice antique editions of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding and Following the Equator by Mark Twain, a Robert Frost anthology, the Raj Quartet by Paul Scott, the new translation of the Histories of Herodotus, and an encyclopedia of scotch whisky. An excellent haul all around.

Neither side said the war was the federal government against state governments. From the U.S. perspective, it was a rebellion in which U.S. military bases and other federal properties were attacked and seized in a state of anarchy. From the Confederate perspective, they founded a new nation, which was then attacked by the foreign nation of the United States. Also, BS on Paul's reasoning. Lincoln did everything he could to prevent war. Also, the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

Great. Al Gore is a doody head. Good point.

The Time Person of the Year has always been about influence rather than approval, which generally makes it much less controversial. You might love Al Gore or you might hate him, but you have to agree he's made a splash.

I don't understand the question. Is there an artificially intelligent machine you're trying to communicate with?

The probability of being inhabited by life is as of yet completely unknowable, since we don't know all the ways in which life might exist. Can there be "life" inside superhot gas giants? Comets? We don't know. As for planets that WE could live on, they're probably EXTREMELY rare and unlikely to be found by us, but in the whole universe, nonetheless EXTREMELY numerous. However, when you expand that to planets that could be made habitable, that number rises enormously. Most of the objects in our own solar system could potentially be lived on with the right equipment, and Mars, at least, could potentially be terraformed to be quite Earthlike, indeed. I'm not actually convinced that that follows. Not saying it's wrong, just that there are a number of assumptions underlying that conclusion, such as there being a finite amount of variation that can exist, which is not necessarily the case. There are an unlimited amount of integers, for example, but there is only one five. Also, considering that our planet is not isolated, but is affected in some way by the entire hubble volume, the number of possible variations for a volume that size, even if it is finite, would be so ridiculously huge that even with faster-than-light and billions of years you could not possibly encounter one.

That's a shame. I actually quite like Ralph Nader, but I guess it was inevitable the crazies would take over sooner or later.

Reminds me of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion car. And only a mere 75 years later!

Indeed. We can't really have the Feats of Strength here, but maybe we could have an Airing of Grievances?

In the spirit of non-partisanship in a particularly wacky election year, tell me: who in the political realm, despite having very different views from your own, do you find yourself respecting anyway? For myself, I always pay close attention to what Pat Buchanan says (despite being what he would likely characterize as an enemy in the Culture War*), because he's not only very smart but also one of the very few politicians who (usually) refuses to play the political bullshit game. Antonin Scalia is one of my favorite SCOTUS justices despite consistently pushing a legal philosophy I disagree with, because he argues for the philosophy with rare wit and intelligence that demonstrates he understands the other side as well as his own (in other words, the opposite of Clarence Thomas). William Safire, for similar reasons, was my favorite NYTimes columnist, and is still my favorite etymology maven. *navel-gazing left-of-center arch-moderate antidisestablishmentarian moral-relativist pragmatist cosmopolitan technocrat ultra-secularist liberaltarian

Oh...

I dunno, I think the public has been aware that they don't want lead in children's toys for a long time now. What the public isn't aware of is what businesses don't advertise, and what they do that they're not supposed to be doing. That kind of protection is something that really only government oversight can accomplish. This, incidentally, is probably the issue on which I most strongly disagree with Dr. Paul.

I'm also a member, and iNow, how could you possibly not mention Cosmos 1?

That would be enough.

Well, we already have stupid precedents like "the American soldier" and "all of us," so my vote goes to Athena, goddess of wisdom and heroic endeavor.

I am forever, the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega.

Actually, the danger from lead paint was not in actually eating paint chips (which not even children generally do), but in the lead released during the normal processes of deterioration, which can be breathed in or absorbed into the skin from mere contact over time. I don't know whether the same thing happens with plastics, though.

Are they just warning about imported products, like from China, say? (Please say yes.) Anyway, I don't know if consumer awareness is irrelevant, per se - if more people read Consumer Reports (an outstanding publication) and actually were aware, it might work better. Also, agreed about Lehrer. Intelligent questions that are hard but fair, and actual context for the sound bytes. Nice.

More accurately, something like flying squirrels, i.e. gliding seems like the most likely precursor to flight, whether your talking about mammals, birds, insects, whatever.

Har har. Anyway, the best things we can do, I think, are to focus on efficiency and clean power. Efficiency does mean things like efficient architecture and automobiles, but what would make a much bigger difference, and is usually overlooked, is sensible urban planning: try to begin reversing suburban and exurban sprawl, build towns for pedestrians instead of cars, invest heavily in mass transit. Clean energy is something we need to take seriously, too, which right now we are NOT. It is all fogged by politics. We spend huge amounts on government subsidies for wildly inefficient ethanol whose main effect is to raise food prices, all to appease farmers with pork-barrel spending. We don't seriously try to break our addiction to oil, because the ones selling the oil are too influential. We don't build nuclear power plants, because we give in to irrational fears. And we think offshore wind farms are a great idea, just not where rich people might see them. Seriously, what has to happen before enough people get angry to blow away the bullshit?