ngan: In that case, you WANT the wall to blow out, in order to dissipate the blast wave. Containing the blast is a good way to kill people. In most institutional settings where large compressed gas or explosive tanks are stored, they're kept on an outside wall specifically designed to channel the blast away from the building occupants.

This stuff is super elegant from a mechanical perspective, though it seems like it won't work well with existing construction where the most accessible layers are the thinnest. You'd need to have it stuck to a fairly thick wall to take full advantage of it.

@Neal: Accusing parents who, after trying most of the commercial options, found a drug that helps their severely autistic kid? I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you don't have a child with a condition that the medical establishment has been unsuccessful in treating.

I listen to one shy of half of those. :P

Other super podcasts that are nerdier than several of the ones listed:
NPR's Planet Money, Slate's Political Gabfest, WNYC's Radio Lab (easily my favorite), BBC's Thinking Allowed, BBC's In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg.

@pad2: "Dogs can understand our feelings than a 2 year old child."

Oddly enough, my 2 year old child can construct a better sentence than that.

Tragic accidents happen doing anything worthwhile.

Before we all go apeshit, do you know how many kids under 12 die every year in accidental shootings? About 40, compared to about 1200 per year in cars and 600 by murder.

I'd venture a guess that almost all children who grow up in rural areas have learned how to handle firearms by age 10. IMO, they're safer for it, simply because they'll know enough to stay out of trouble WHEN (not if) they come across a loaded firearm in a friend's house.

Would your kid be able to unload a semi-automatic handgun if a friend put it in his hands?

NASCAR consists of more than one race series. There's the Winston-then-Nextel-now-Sprint cup and then there are a few other national series and then there's a bunch of regional series.

This was a regional event so he wasn't competing against the big time guys. Still, I'd love to be him when I'm his age. GO OLD GUY.

The United States has had instant air superiority in every war since Vietnam. It's virtually guaranteed that any country we'd need to use this on would be easily dominated from the air.

This isn't being designed to take on countries like China or Russia; it's being designed to hit a country with very limited nuclear resources where you're taking out a few labs or weapons caches buried deep in a mountain or an isolated missile silo.

Shooting an ICBM as it takes off is a hell of a lot easier than it sounds. It's a LOT better to kill it on the ground.

And any alcohol will do this. Guiness's unique magic isn't its health qualities. :)

@#9: Saith Wikipedia: "Research in various countries has found the all-cause mortality rates range from 16 to 28% lower among moderate drinkers (1–2 drinks per day) than among abstainers."

Also, Re:
"If caloric restriction can delay aging, then there should have been significantly fewer deaths in the dieting group of monkeys than in the normally fed comparison group. But this is not the case. Though a smaller number of dieting monkeys have died, the difference is not statistically significant, the Wisconsin team reports."

That doesn't specifically disprove the theory behind CR. It means the study was null and we can't draw any conclusions from it. However, they _did_ see qualitative effects that were interesting and probably should be investigated further.

It's hardly junk science...just junk reporting.

A virus that brought us New York City! WOO! WOO!

We require licensing to drive a car or carry a hand gun, and dogs should be no different. Owners should be A) held VERY responsible for the actions of their dogs and B) forced to take some sort of training to prove they're not completely ignorant.

Any large breed has the potential to kill or seriously injure a person, and dogs are only being bred larger, so I don't trust _any_ dog I don't know. Obviously a bigger dog with stronger jaws is going to do more damage when it attacks. While I know of a lot more attacks by german shepherds and boxers than I do of pit bulls, but a pit is the last thing I want mad at me. Couple that with the fact that 80% of the owners are thug assholes, and duh, it makes the breed more dangerous than others.

I'd eat her. The best meat is all raised on high quality grains (or preferably grasses) with no low quality animal products going into the feed. She should be right up there with good Kobe beef. Certified organic.

@Earnest: Sounds great until every single one of your purchases is rounded up an average of $.125 to the nearest quarter. That'd probably cost me a buck a day or ~$350/yr.

Screw THAT idea.

I got some pictures of the same phenomenon a couple years ago. VERY crazy looking

http://flickr.com/photos/paanta/106611187/

@woogie: Do you understand where food comes from?

Food wise, you have two ways of going about things:
1) Gather or grow your own food
2) Pay someone else to do it and pretend to understand how the food system works, while actually not having a clue.

You're a hypocrite unless you're doing all your own farming, with all organic ingredients, and making sure that all your soil is turned by hand so that no adorable animals are killed by a tractor. MAYBE one in five hundred people in America live that way.

Eat eggs? What do you think happens to male chickens who are born on an egg farm? They're fed into a machine that grinds them up, alive, into feed.

Eat foods fertilized with organic fertilizers other than straight up compost? Where do you think all that animal shit comes from?

Eat vegetables you didn't grow and didn't come from a local CSA? Who do you think picked those peppers? Guys bringing in $70K a year and working in some sort of fantasy land where farming isn't horribly dangerous, dirty, exhausting work?

A deer is the ultimate local food source. It ate grains from the farm it lived near. It's a renewable resource. The guy that shoots it takes it home rather than shipping it cross country on a truck.

Have a little more respect for people who are willing to do things the hard way.