DC Tom

The shortage is probably pure helium, not the "crude" helium in party balloons. Helium's not extremely rare, given that it's just a product of alpha decay. The problem is that it's difficult to retrieve. Usually, it's a byproduct of natural gas distillation - when natural gas is purified, helium is one of the remaining impurities. If you cryogenically distill those impurities (cool it to the point that other gasses precipitate out as liquids), you can eventually get pure helium. The problem being: that's really ***** cold - about 73 Kelvin. It takes a lot of energy to cool something to that temperature while maintaining a pressure high enough to condense impurities like methane and nitrogen to liquids. And while you can theoretically do that with regular air...helium's about 10,000 times more prevalent in natural gas (5ppm in atmospher, vs. ~5% in natural gas). Which means it's not just difficult to retrieve it from air, it's hideously difficult to retrieve from air.

It's just a rebranded March of the Penguins.

So...she's advocating abstinence?

Well...he's gay, and a Democrat, so I'm pretty sure having a sense of humor is forbidden...

They call me Mr. Tibbs.

No, you're not me. I'm you.

I pointed this out to someone today, and was told "But Congress makes the laws, so they can repeal it and hold Barr in contempt!" Yeah...can't even begin to understand how this country got so ***** up. It's a complete mystery.

They launched a satellite with an antenna specifically to study the antenna with the satellite, and tried and failed to name it something that would be a backronym of "R2D2." The only reason I won't complain about the waste of tax dollars is because DARPA is intended to waste small amounts of money on horseshit so other departments won't waste large amounts on the same thing.

No, because they don't. That graph is deviation from an established norm (how the norm is established isn't pertinent to this particular discussion) of the temperature of the entire planet. There's no standard temperature "gauge" or "gauges" that measures that. There's a basic methodology of taking sample temperatures at different, set points across the globe, then applying some sort of processing to them to establish an integrated global temperature. But there's quite a few different ways to calculate that integrated temperature - most of them probably use some sort of a "mesh grid" model, fixed or variable size (NASA and UK Met both use variable mesh grids.) But for all of them to be that similar, and all that similar to the "raw data," they'd all have to be using the same algorithms, and the same methodologies, identical boundary conditions, identical polynomial coefficients...and even "the consensus" isn't that strong a consensus. There's not enough divergence in those different graphs to account for what they call the "structural uncertainty" of the different methodologies. Of course, when I point that out - that results that exact are almost always bad science - I get called a "denier."

I'd offer Comet and Cupid. But nothing more.

You say that as though it's an accomplishment.

Between the first line and the title, it's already light-years better than "Don't Mess With the Zohan."

DR, can we get a TV series based on that line?

And Michael Jackson.

Really? You didn't know until today that no one's walked on the moon recently?

Actually, what I'm saying is that Rush did it better than Comey. And it was still kind-of juvenile when Rush did it.

Not half as awkward as dealing with Pirate Lawyer.

Like: I wonder why the maples can't be happy in their shade?

I wonder if this will end up tracing back to a certain person's email server...

That's enough guns to outfit an infantry regiment.

https://www.twobillsdrive.com/community/search/?&q=Nervous&type=core_members&joinedDate=any&group[4]=1&group[6]=1&group[3]=1&group[10]=1&group[14]=1 I'll admit to being "more than one" of those.

Bob's question was in no way a "fair question." Funny...I criticize Trump. I never get an #Orangemanbad meme. Here, I'll do it right now: the Oompa-Loompa-in-Chief is an overgrown man-child whose best trait is his incoherence. Watch me get no #orangemanbad memes for that. Want to know why? Because I didn't criticize him for made-up bull#### like treason, Naziism, hating immigrants, praising white supremacists, etc.

If a tree falls in the forest and it's not reported by one of the Big Seven (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, WaPo, NYT) does it make a sound?

Nope. What's wrong is: there's almost no variance between data sets. Less than 1%, between seven processed sets and the raw data. I can't think of a single scientific discipline where that wouldn't strongly suggest a methodological issue. And no, it's not "bias" or "faked," because they would have been smart enough to fake more variance.