Old Man

Why not both?

For once, the weather cooperated and I was able to see an astronomical event. The lunar eclipse, in conjunction with Mars in opposition, really highlighted the sheer scale of the solar system. Frankly it was a little eerie--I almost don't blame the people in the news who seem to think it could portend the end of the world. Almost.

Kill Wonder Woman with a volley of Invisible Hellfires.

On the contrary, NASA is well aware that the Martian atmosphere is "too thick for an unshielded entry but too thin to slow anything down". That's why Curiosity had that insanely complicated entry/landing sequence that involved heatshields, rockets, winches, and parachutes that (in my opinion) was almost guaranteed to fail. The whole point of this particular exercise is that if we want to send anything heavier than Curiosity, even its ludicrous landing system won't work.

No, that causes it to vomit forth the Water of Life™! It grants superpowers if you drink it.

Sex, of course. With multiple lycanthropes. Bondage and human sacrifice optional.

I note that to make up for a ten-point disadvantage in SPD here, you propose buying 10+ points of martial maneuvers. Converting STR to an AOE attack has had its own share of discussions elsewhere, but it's less likely in a fantasy setting. Of course you want to act strategically in Hero combat, but it's not as though the character with the higher SPD can't act strategically too. I don't think anyone is saying SPD is broken. What I'm saying is that in heroic games you might not miss it if you chose to ignore it.

For scale, a picture of my junk:

That one was overheard from the Ben 10 episode the kids were watching.

You saw it?

At low levels typical of (for example) Fantasy Hero games, I've seriously toyed with the idea of dispensing with SPD altogether, or at least fixing all PCs at SPD 3. It's a huge advantage to be SPD 4 when the rest of the group is SPD 3--compared to the same point value of combat levels or stats, it's almost a no brainer to put those ten points into SPD and get a free phase to stop dodging and throw a haymaker.

I thought that was tkdguy's gig. As for myself, I might have bump of direction and a high pain tolerance. No idea where all the other points from the complications went. Certainly nothing useful.

"Resistance is futile... but encouraged. "

That is some really nice light painting, better than the vast majority of what I see on the net.

Yes, but it should be fully committed to memory by this point.

In my case, it's not a boat so much as a supertanker.

I got a CPA back when my taxes got complicated and they haven't gotten any less complicated over the past eight years or so. This year is especially fantastic, because we requested an identity protection PIN after the 2012 burglary, and while we got a PIN last year, they failed to send us one this year. So we can't send in our returns until we get that straightened out. Joy.

Well, I certainly could. I dunno about you.

Okay, I found a better article: http://www.nrl.navy.mil/media/news-releases/2014/scale-model-wwii-craft-takes-flight-with-fuel-from-the-sea-concept . With a headline about a model airplane. Anyway, the new development seems to be a new electrolytic cation exchange module (E-CEM). I can't find any details on how it works, but producing gaseous CO2 and H2 from seawater at 92% efficiency is unreal.

Well, not the hot female ones, right?

Did some digging and found a 2009 report on the same people. What they were doing then was experimenting with the Fischer-Tropsch process, using an iron-based catalyst to reduce the amount of unwanted methane in the output hydrocarbons. But it appears that this latest breakthrough occurs before that process, in getting the CO2 and H2 out of the water to begin with. No details on that that I can find yet.

I think the atmospheric-oceanic diffusion is pretty well known, at least at the surface; shallow water CO2 concentrations appear to follow atmospheric changes on the order of 3-4 years. How CO2 diffuses vertically through the water column is less well known, so we don't know how long or how well the seas will continue to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. But most of the reefs and fish I'm concerned with are in shallow water anyway. I'm probably dreaming, given the sheer amount of CO2 that gets shot into the air on an annual basis. But I've reached the conclusion that just reducing or eliminating fossil fuels probably isn't going to be enough, even if it were possible, and that mankind will have to remove CO2 from the atmosphere directly. So far the most efficient means of doing that that I've found is through sequestration of biochar--taking crop waste, which removed a great deal of CO2 from the air during growth, burning it for energy, and capturing the resulting char and gaseous CO2. But using this seawater process as an energy-positive method of extracting and containing CO2 could add to that. If it scales up.

I don't think that's how it works.

I wonder if the seawater-fuel technology could be scaled up to the point where it could be used to remove significant amounts of greenhouse gases from the sea, which absorbs it from the air.

Speaking of railguns, http://bgr.com/2014/04/08/u-s-navy-railgun-video/ Deploying in 2016.