Stephen Attempts To Convert Bill Maher has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579 on that post.

I thought $60k was high, then I realized they were in Australia, so I asked Google to convert: $60,000 AUD = $42,804 USD

still a lot for a lemon, sucks to be him. Definitely go for a Toyota next time.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Dad-Converts-Sons-Wheelchair-Into-Star-Wars-Snowspeeder#comments

Dad Converts Son's Wheelchair Into Star Wars Snowspeeder has been added as a related post - related requested by newtboy.

OK, his studies beat my anecdotal bias.

...That being said, I will continue to eat breakfast cereal with milk pretty much every day (as I have since I was very very young), and be strongly tempted to attribute my own lack of having ever broken a bone to that.

The other anecdote I have in my favor is coming from a farm family that raised chickens. I grew up in a prairie grassland area (converted to irrigated farmland thanks to aquifer access), while my cousins lived a couple hours away in limestone hills ranchland. Both of our families raised free range chickens.

Our chickens produced very thin-shelled eggs, and displayed behavior to suggest they were calcium-deprived. For example, our chickens wouldn't cannibalize their own viable eggs, but if we threw empty shells to them they would fight to eat the shells. Same but to a lesser extent for leftover bones, etc. (I assume they fought less over these because bones are harder to near impossible to break down with a beak). On the other side of the table, we sometimes exchanged eggs with my cousins, and their chicken's eggs were always extremely thick-shelled and hard to crack open.

When I asked about that, my folks told me (and later my Biology teacher confirmed) that was because the sod/soil around my home and flora and fauna growing from it contained very little natural calcium. Chickens raised in our area would often be supplemented with commercial feed that contained extra calcium, but we let ours range for food and eat table scraps; almost never supplementing their food with any commercial stuff. But the limestone (aka calcium carbonate) around my cousin's house contained very high amounts of natural calcium, which was naturally infused into the plants / grains / insects that their chickens ate, giving them incredibly thick shells.

So, I guess that while calcium intake apparently doesn't have a very statistically significant impact on human bone growth, I think that it must have a much more significant role to play in egg thickness if you happen to be a chicken... At least if you compare extremes of low natural calcium diet versus extremely high natural calcium diet.

I must guess her brand of religion does not have the 'thou shall not steal' clause, because at her rally they brought her out to 'eye of the tiger', with no permission from anyone in Survivor, and they're pissed. Taking someone else's property and converting it to your use is stealing in my mind, I don't know about hers.

I wondered how many people she refused licenses in the past because they were wearing blended fabrics, or had been seen eating shellfish, both of which are just as forbidden as homosexuality in the bible, actually those two are more clearly forbidden than homosexuality as I understand it, yet no one ever tries to legislate fabric choice or outlaw sea food restaurants. Hmmm.

This used to happen all the time at the rail bridge at the bottom of my road. Double-deckers used to try and take shortcuts from one depo/route to another and get themselves converted into open tops pretty regularly. There is plenty of signage, I just think it is just kind of inevitable. Hasn't happened since they replaced the bridge (was a pretty impressive feat that) with a more modern one that gives better clearance.

Two's compliment binary on their fingers? Nah, but I guess you could get good at that too. I guess you could go trinary with a semi-flexed finger, but I dunno how to convert the flip the bits and add one part to that. Also, I need a piece of paper even in binary.

Back when my dog was still with me (put to sleep at 17yrs for congestive heart failure, btw) when we went out in my convertible, and had to park somewhere, I brought along a big golf umbrella and left the roof down so he'd have some place out of the sun and still get cool air.

Pure quality by John, as usual.

There are a few points I'd like to add, in order of appearance.

5:10 – Greek default or Grexit could be manageable by the rest of the EZ, economically. Italy looks a bit shaky and Spain still looks like shit, so things could spiral out of control, but chances would be better now than they were in, say, 2010.

However, Grexit would be a political nightmare. EZ membership is supposed to be irreversible, so Grexit would reduce the Euro from a common currency to a peg when viewed from the outside. That's open season on the rest of the PIIGS. If Greek then rebounds, other people might very well decide to give Germany the finger and leave as well. If Greece fails, you have a NATO member turn into a failed state, which not only gives NATO the shivers, but also buries any notion of solidarity within the EU. This union survives because of the promises it makes, which include increasing standards of living and solidarity among different peoples. Without it, we're left with... what exactly?

And nevermind the humanitarian catastrophe taking part in Greece. We've conditioned ourselves to block out the pain and suffering of people in Africa. We even manage to shrug at the cesspool of corruption that is Kosovo. But if we do that to Greece as well, what little moral authority Europe might still have left would be gone then.

5:32 – The last payment Greece received was in August, long before Syriza took over. The previous government was in disagreement with the Troika and therefore transfers were frozen.

5:57 – Troika payments are required to service previous debt obligations. They are separate from what the Greek banks require to maintain their liquidity. That would be Emergency Liquidiy Assistance (ELA) from the ECB, which is a different thing entirely, even though it comes from a member of the Troika.

The ECB is bound by law to maintain and ensure the stability of the banking system(s) within the EZ. If a bank runs into liquidity problems, support is provided by the national bank of the respective country, which funnels funds from the ECB to the troubled bank. That's ELA, and a limit on ELA is a limit on the amount of funds that banks can draw from through this process. If an illiquid bank is cut off from ELA, it goes belly up. Bad idea.

Some argue that the ECB should not provide ELA to those Greek banks anymore, since they are insolvent, and ECB rules forbid ELA to insolvent banks. But as Varoufakis said, even the ECB's own Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) department, which is the new banking oversight, declares the four large Greek banks to be solvent. So there is no reason for the ECB to cut ELA to Greek banks. It's all political, and the ECB is designed to be outside of politics. That's also a reason why its membership in the Troika is so controversial.

The political argument for cutting off ELA is that Germany et al. are on the hook for the total amount should Greece itself go belly up. Somewhere along the line, someone made the glorious decision to install the ECB as a currency issuer without providing it with the attributes of a regular currency issuer. If the Bank of Japan or the Bank of England racks up losses, noone cares. They issue their own currency, they cannot go bankrupt, whatever debt they have in their books is irrelevant, for this discussion anyways. But the ECB has to balance its books, it has to receive funds from its members to balance losses, and in proportion to their economic size.

They made sure that politicians can scare the demos by pointing out how they have to foot the bill for this shit, even though it's the one entity where debt truly doesn't matter at all.

By the way, the funds that Greece is hoping to acquire are meant, primarily, for two purposes: making debt payments and to provide financial room to convert ECB(?) debt into EFSF debt (4% interest down to 1%). That's all. No spending.

6:54 – "Printing" money is generating demand out of thin air. There is a shortage of demand throughout the entire continent. So yeah, if the folks at the ECB could type in a few numbers, that would be swell.

Even Germany has a shortage of demand. We are merely hiding it behind the €200b+ of demand that we steal from other countries, i.e. our current account surplus. But the infrastructure and investment spending over here is at all time lows. We'd need an additional €200b+ just to get the infrastructure back to the state it was in a decade ago.

There is no productivity growth in Europe. The UK actually lost a lot of productivity by its introduction of zero hour jobs and other forms of slavery. Without sufficient demand, there is no need to improve production capacities – they can't even sell what they could produce right now.

Yep. One of the keys for me too. What good is He if the only thing He provides is salvation from the Hell He created to punish us for not loving Him to His satisfaction? What else have You done for me, or anyone else I know, in this present day life on Earth God? Nada, and sure some would say God saved so and so from an accident... then but then millions of good Christians die every year from accidents... it's almost like it's random who He helps or not... In fact, He indeed doesn't help any more than any other god does... He at one point had a better army, which allowed Him to spread around to Europe and force them to convert or integrate their holidays into His to make it seem better to those forced to convert.

Okay He created Hell for Lucifer and the angels who chose not to praise Him for a moment... which proves that angels do have free will... which goes against the teaching He created us to love Him of our own free will as the angels had no choice... so either He forced Lucifer and the third of all the angels to rebel, or they have free will. Then we get all those people in Asia, Africa and the Americas and all over the glove who are going to Hell before they heard about the gospel of Jesus as they never had a chance... but wait many Christians say, they won't go to Hell because they didn't know, they'll be judged on if they lived morally... which begs the question, if you are basically fully guaranteed of life in Heaven without the knowledge of Jesus, then why spread the message? Oh, the Great Commission... that command they apparently listen to, while the people like this ignore His command to Love and treat others as you'd have them treat you. How He hung around sinners and tax collectors and talked badly about those who were showing off how holy they were and prayed openly, trying to shame those who didn't do as they did. How He told the crowd who was about to stone a woman at the well "let those without sin toss the first stone" and then importantly doesn't toss any stones Himself, not because He's sinned, but because He's operating on a new covenant. Yet they love to toss stones of discrimination and hate towards those who sin differently than them. He commands us to heal the sick, and yet it is the Christians of this Nation that oppose guaranteeing everyone a minimum degree of universal health insurance, preferring only people with good jobs have affordable health care. And on and on...

And the Jesus is coming soon folks... Seriously I've head from family that even if Climate Change is real, the real damage doesn't come for hundred years or more, and Jesus will have come by then. Just look at the world, gay people can get married now. Clearly Jesus is coming soon. I had another family member note how after the election of Obama the first time that just means Jesus will come sooner now... as if the Bible doesn't say there's an appointed time, let alone that He appoints the leaders...

And then the whole help help we're being repressed attitude... when basically they are being denied special rights and privileges and just coming to equal legal ground with others. Basically they are coming into the situation that forced the Pilgrims to leave a Christian Nation to move to what would become America because they couldn't persecute others as they wanted to, as the theocracy that ruled that Nation didn't agree to go that far.

I could go on for ages. I covered the topic a billion times though... well not a billion...

@newtboy

#1 and #2, fine, if you won't go there to read it's now pasted in full for you:
Arctic tundra soils serve as potentially important but poorly understood sinks of atmospheric methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Numerical simulations project a net increase in methane consumption in soils in high northern latitudes as a consequence of warming in the past few decades3, 6. Advances have been made in quantifying hotspots of methane emissions in Arctic wetlands7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear. Here, we present measurements of rates of methane consumption in different vegetation types within the Zackenberg Valley in northeast Greenland over a full growing season. Field measurements show methane uptake in all non-water-saturated landforms studied, with seasonal averages of − 8.3 ± 3.7 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in dry tundra and − 3.1 ± 1.6 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in moist tundra. The fluxes were sensitive to temperature, with methane uptake increasing with increasing temperatures. We extrapolate our measurements and published measurements from wetlands with the help of remote-sensing land-cover classification using nine Landsat scenes. We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

#3, regardless of if it make's sense to you, and regardless of if it means a 10C warming by 2100, the IPCC scientists collaborative summary says it anyways. If you want to claim otherwise it's you opposing the science to make things seem worse than they are, not me.

#4, To tell them those things would sound like this. The IPCC current best estimates from climate models project 2100 to be 1.5C warmer than 2000. This has already resulted in 2000 being 0.8C warmer than 1900. Summer arctic sea ice extent has retreating significantly is the biggest current impact. By 2100 it is deemed extremely unlikely that the Greenland and Antarctic iccesheets will have meaningfully reduced and there is medium confidence that the warming will actually expand Antarctic ice cover owing to increased precipitation from the region. That's the results and expectations to be passed on from the 5th report from an international collaboration of scientists. Whether that fits your world view or not doesn't matter to the scientific evidence those views are founded on and supported by.

You said the ocean's may be unfishable in 20 years, and the best support you came up with was a news article quote claiming that by 2040 most of the Arctic would be too acidic for Shell forming fish. Cherry picked by the news article that also earlier noted that was dependent on CO2 concentrations exceeding 1000ppm in 2100, and even that some forms of plankton under study actually faired better in higher acidity in some case. In a news article that also noted that the uneven distribution of acidity makes predicting the effects very challenging. If news articles count as evidence I then want to claim we'll have working fusion power to convert to in 5 years time from Lockheed Martin. I'll agree with your news post on one count, the world they talk about, where CO2 emissions continue accelerating year on year, even by 2100, is bad. It's also a bit hard to fathom with electric cars just around the corner, and if not solar and wind, fusion sometime before then too, that we'll still be using anywhere near today's emissions let alone still accelerating our use.

by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
And you link to a blog, and a blog that provides exactly zero references to any scientific sources for the claim. Better yet, even the blog does NOT claim that the access to water will be limited because of climate change, the blog even mentions multiple times how other forms of pollution are destroying huge amounts of fresh water(again with zero attributions).

Here's the IPCC best estimates for 2100 impacts regionally:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter14_FINAL.pdf

You'll find it's a largely mixed bag if you can be bothered to read what the actual scientists are predicting. Just bare in mind they regularly note that climate models still have a lot of challenges with accurate regional estimates. I guess your blogger isn't hindered by such problems though. If you don't want to bother I'll summarize for you and note they observe a mixed bag of increased precipitation in some regions, notably monsoons generally increasing, and other areas lowering, but it's all no higher than at medium confidences. But hey, why should uncertainty about 2100 prevent us from panicking today about more than half the world losing their drinking water in 10 years. I'll make you a deal, in ten years we can come back to this thread and see whether or not climate change has cause 2/3 of the world to lose their drinking water already or not. I'm pretty confident on this one.

Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
Lost 50% since 2005? That'd be scary, oh wait, you heard that from the same blog you say? I've got a hunch maybe they aren't being straight with you...
Here are a pair of links I found in google scholar to scientific articles on the Himalaya's glaciers:
http://cires1.colorado.edu/~braup/himalaya/Science13Nov2009.pdf
I you can't be bothered to read:
Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Riana, whose report notes that the glacier has "not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years" Which looks likely that your blogger found a popular press piece about that single glacier and then went off as though it were fact, and across the entire mountain range .

http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/glaciers%20and%20climate.pdf
Here's another article noting that since 1962 Himalayan glacier reduction is actually about 21%.

If you go back and read the IPCC links I gave earlier you can also find many of the regional rivers and glaciers in India/East China are very dependent on monsoons and will persist as long as monsoons do. Which the IPCC additionally notes are expected to, on the whole, actually increase through 2100 warming.

I've stated before up thread that things are warming and we are the major contribution, but merely differed from your position be also observing the best evidence science has for predictions isn't catastrophic. That is compounded by high uncertainties, notably that TOA energy levels are still not able to be predicted well. The good news there is the latest IPCC estimated temps exceed the observed trends of both temperature and TOA imbalance, so there's reason for optimism. That's obviously not license for recklessly carrying on our merry way, as I've noted a couple times already about roads away from emissions that we are going to adopt one way or another long before 2100.

Except, most meat tastes good, and most vegetables do not.

I'm a meatatarian. Why must my way of living constantly be criticized by Vegans. Why can't they celebrate their choices to themselves? Why must they come knocking on my door, asking me to convert?

It's a tricky one. On one hand it could be improved, but on the other hand I'm happy with a system that converted UKIP's (Team Purple) 13% into 0%.

Well happy with that part, less happy about being stuck with the bloody Tories for another five years.

I like this one. Convertible. Can't stand all the plastic and airbags and catalytic converters and the other useless shit on new ones.