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nah, there aren't enough ugly people in LA.

Here I thought you were hoping for more topless tribeswomen pictures.

"Triumph of the Will" "Olympia" Technically excellent, morally repulsive. www.thefarshore.com the essence of travel

I was there in December/January/March/April cool places in/near the Argentine mountains: Bariloche, El Bolson (the brewery has a climbing wall!), Esquel. Mendoza, though it's only peripheral. cool places in/near the Chilean mountains: Puerto Williams (which will suck in winter), Chaiten (P. Pumalin is amazing!), Coihaique (take the Carreterra Austral between the two - AWESOME!) places overrun with gringo tourists and not high on my nice list: Pucon, P. Natales, Punta Anus, El Calafate Other places to see - Valparaiso, Chile. Sit in the sun, eat amazing seafood, look at public art everywhere, and listen to the Jazz shop blasting good tunes to the public Paraguay - It's one of the least touristed sections of S. America - the UNESCO heritage site Jesuit missions are awesome. I went to Encarnacion & C. del Este. C del Este is like Tijuana. If I'd had huevos I would have taken my camera out and shot the woman with a chicken coop on her head walking past the sign that said "No Live Animals allowed across the border into Paraguay" Encarnacion is a nice cool city - and as said, the missions are amazing. B. Aires - chill and drink with Gringos or enjoy the art and culture of a capital city at a fraction of what it'd cost you at home. The Art Museum, city museum, and Teatro Colon are worth a visit.

If you can tolerate TV mini series "The Prize" and "The World at War"

No, he's getting a wideon

Not climbing, but sick nonetheless: Dane Reynolds shredding: the new Taylor Steele film (showing up on my doorstep shortly)

I've left my heart offline and the rest of my body on. Things work better that way

furtively out of the flask stashed in the file cabinet?

Or you could go to Mendoza and get 5x the wine for the same $ and much better steak.

I hope the intern was worth the trouble

I can't, I'm in the same boat. Except for me unemployment will be spent traveling

you could be in an office instead.

there's no need to be an olymprick!

you never send me flowers anymore Olyclimber

Ah, to be young and drunk again. Old and drunk works too.

dechristo's a chubby chaser - who knew? olyclimber: I know you enjoy me raw

the middle class are much more nicely marbled now.

You are so right. I'll watch em lick yours. If they've got a good tongue, I've got a good imagination.

I think the fundamental problems with alternative energy sources are engineering JayB - namely none of them can currently compete with the tremendous advantages of packaging and availability that fossil fuels hold. Hell, even fossil fuel distribution is restricted by legal woes, not technological ones - a group I know was working on large diameter (think 3m by 15m or whatever cargo containers are) composite cylinders for transport of LNG. The major sticking point was liability for failure. Instead of massive terminals we could utilize our existing infrastructure - but that seemingly small item held it up. It's a few academics in the lab vs. the billion dollar resources of Exxon Mobil. In the past science was the activity of a few; activities of a few are modeled individually. Now science is a group activity; it's best modeled as a group - statistics would dictate the output of meaningful research given meaningful inputs.

I'd have them lick something else if I were you Archy. Might be more pleasurable for you (given the right dude)

Not linearly scalable - but most certainly scalable. Plot industrial innovation vs. number of companies and fiscal reward. Greater fiscal reward, more companies, more innovation. It applies to any industry. Rarely does much successful research occur in the modern era without fiscal rewards and substantial fiscal backing. I realize a conservative would consider honesty Utopian but that is the core of the Iraq war isn't it? Energy security? If they'd said that in the beginning it could have been a compelling case; we needn't have had the bullshit terror you demagogues lap up.

That is a reasonable question - would the money to secure America and the West's energy infrastructure have been better spent invading and occupying Iraq or developing alternative fuels?

I'm not sure what that thesis is, except perhaps your straw man argument that we couldn't be doing anything else useful with the money we are spending in Iraq! As for spending scientific capital - look around Cambridge boy! The biotech world may be different, but in the old industries Germany is still a substantial force.

Huh? German scientific & engineering output was massive during their next buildup as well. Until the last few years when their output became crippled by heavy bombing the sophistication of their weaponry far outclassed ours (perhaps excluding Nuclear weapons - when their ideological blinders crippled scientific progress) - as the postwar success of the American & Russian firms who stole their technology shows. Ever wonder why there's really good German food in Huntsville, AL? Because we needed the Germans to build ICBMs. Or why you can buy some really good Zeiss copy lenses from Ukraine? Because they stole the works wholesale from Jena. Yes, much military technology has migrated to the civilian sector. To be more "efficient" the military is more narrowly tailoring their current efforts leading to a decrease in such events.