Hah! I've actually stopped in Buford at that gas station. It's a pretty remote stretch of country and the winters are pretty impressively desolate.

A quasar *is* a black hole. What we're seeing is a disk of very hot material being ripped apart and spiraling into a monstrous black hole at the center of a galaxy.

Ah! But are they retractable? A friend made a spring-loaded set in our machine shop one year. He had to wear a long-sleeved plaid shirt to conceal the mechanism, though, so this design has it's merits, too ;-)

Why we tolerate fundamentalist Christians and Jews when we decry fundamentalist Muslims at every opportunity is beyond me.

"We're probably not at the center". No, there *isn't* a center.

Meh. I see more special flips like that from the junior high kids at the skate park.

That's nifty, but Redbull is such a poser drink. I know plenty of athletes, extreme and otherwise, and I don't know of any who actually drink that nasty stuff.

Classy, but only if they bought a round of drinks for the entire plane.

This is really high-end stuff. I wish we had this kind of equipment in some of the limestone caves in Virginia.

This is utter twaddle. Cryptozoology is all fine and good and I'd be willing to believe there are still some large animals out there waiting to be discovered, but none of them are dinosaurs.

Sigh, it's not the world's biggest cave. It's a really big passage, no doubt about that, but there are many caves out there which are longer, higher-volume, and so forth.

Nevertheless, it's some astonishing photography and a significant discovery.

There appears to be a systematic effect in play here. Why are the boundaries of certain states so apparent in the map? Surely the diabetes rates in eastern NM and western TX must be nearly the same. I can't believe the cultural differences between northern Missouri and southern Iowa are that extreme. Could different states report their numbers differently?

Much is being made of this, but there are plenty of non-edible hot peppers in the world. Is this the hottest of any kind of pepper?

That's quite awesome. But I wonder how he simulates idiots on their cell phones?

Any of us (former) D&D geeks are familiar with many of these, though I note he's got non-standard 20 and 12 sided ones. These are shapes other than platonic solids. I have serious doubts as to whether a lot of the others would be fair, particularly the ones with shapes of different faces.