Peterkin

I think he overstates the diagnosis. Delusion connotes mental illness. Belief in the supernatural, or in some Greater Good, or Higher Purpose or Ultimate Truth is quite normal in humans; they can be perfectly functional, even rational, in all aspects of life that do not impinge on their faith. I'm with Freud, that it's a response to distress over one's lack of power over the world: gods and magic give us the illusion of control.

Hey, at least he hasn't eaten the rinds - yet. Maybe they take too long to turn into chewing gum.

Social organization among other species, as well as early editions of humankind, is about what works - what best supports the survival and welfare of the community. In more recent editions, with entrenched elites and non-welfare directed agendas, the social organizations of humans tended toward imbalance of various kinds. War-like nations built their social structure around the needs of the military: produce replacement soldiers as efficiently as the generals could get them killed; indoctrinate the population with patriotic zeal, a habit of obedience and the virtues of self-sacrifice. Agrarian societies valued manual labour, humility and reverence for the landowner class. Each kind of social organization serves a discernible purpose; when it's no longer serviceable, it adapts - but not without strenuous resistance by those who benefit from the status quo.

Male humans may be losing some of the excess power they have had, simply due to their apparent gender, since urban civilizations began. In tribal societies, there was not always such disparity between the roles assigned to people according to sex. As enlightened societies realize that the unequal arrangement relegated half the creative, intelligent population to drudgery and servitude, and thus wasting half of the nation's potential productivity, while numbers increased faster than the economy could support. Thence the trend toward equal votes, education and employment opportunity for both sexes. It's not a question of relevance; merely of visibility.

That's a particularly bad video. The eclipse took over four minutes here and it wasn't even a total. That whole clip runs only two and half. So I have to assume they time-lapsed the boring bit when everything was just dark. You can try the National Geographic video on You Tube.

It's already owned by the same few people who already own everything else. And of course there is no switch-off, unless they abandon it for lack of profitability. When we reach 50% unemployment, everyone defaults on their loans and there is nobody left to buy all the goods and services, and there are no taxes left to collect, the whole economic and political structure collapses, because no provision has been made to change gradually from a debt/profit driven organization to whatever the next thing is. That's not likely to happen, though. Certainly, there will be riots long before then, bombings and burning of automated factories, maybe derailment of driverless freight trains, etc. Police will have to gas and shoot protesters, jail their leaders and all the usual rigamarole when the plebes get too restless. Maybe it will peter out in a cascade of financial and civil crises; maybe someone can start another war of distraction (though that one's wearing pretty transparent and can much too easily escalate to total annihilation) and deploy all the artificially intelligent weapons. No off-switch; no public domain; no contingency plans. We just have to hope AI gets smarter than we are and takes over the helm before we run it into the iceberg.

Very often. But then, the only recent pictures I have of myself were taken by an official at the Department of Transit, where I have to stand just so in poor light and look up that the camera. I imagine a professional portrait photographer would make me look better than the mirror.

How was pigmentation lost? Spending a long time underground will do it, but you need sunshine, not a cream to restore colour. If it's trough scarring, external application of substances won't help, as the melanocytes have been destroyed. Laser resurfacing can help lure some back. Silver nitrate ointment darkens the skin, but it's not recommended over long periods.

The volume of flesh still doesn't change, but the thickness of the padding adds to the chest measurement.

The volume has no reason to change when the shape changes. Try this with a pound of ground beef: shape it into a tower, a ball, a cone, then squash it flat. Chest measurement would vary according to the shape of the bra cups: a Vaudeville style cone sticks out farther than a Spandex sport bra. Without a bra, there is huge variation. A 17-year-old breast is the same, or nearly the same whether supported or not. A 70-year-old one sags dramatically and a nursing breast is very different from its size before pregnancy. If you remove a naturally shaped unpadded cup, the degree of sag affects the change in measurement.

Unless everyone else also starts later, yes.

Who would have to make what sacrifice if it were discontinued? They get up earlier to allow for travel time to daycare, the parents have the extra burden of waking them even earlier and taking them to daycare, then traveling to work. And you can't substitute an hour in the morning for an hour in the afternoon - it's a completely different situation. The school starting later is not zero improvement; it's a -2 improvement. Because it's been broke for decades. It's completely unnecessary, serves no useful purpose and upsets people. This isn't a question of interfering with something natural; it's a question of whether we should stop interfering with nature.

What would be the point? Besides the extra cost, which many people can't afford, the children wouldn't get that hour of sleep: they would have to get up even earlier, be rousted out, rushed through morning chores, and trucked off to daycare in the dark, in time for the parents to get to work after dropping them off - so they're tired even before school begins. What have they gained by eliminating DST in schools? In any case, why should parents and children be required to make sacrifices for the convenience of WWI industry? Just stop screwing with the time of day and let each business and school district decide on their optimal hours of operation.

Sorry - that's just the way it sounded. Personally, I think the idea is way past its sell-by date.

I sincerely doubt it, for the stated reasons. What if parents are not the only people who have a problem with DST. I'm not a parent, and I hate it. Lots of other people are affected. What I'm wondering now is why you are so staunch in its defence?