malloyd

That's normal.  Probably half of what politics is like will make sense to toddlers.  The more sophisticated stuff may require middle schoolers, or at least adult chimpanzees - there's some stuff that puberty influences.  Yeah OK, some of the *issues* can get pretty complicated, but once you peel away the technobabble (I guess for politics you call this rhetoric) the actual core mostly doesn't.

All presidents push up against their Constitutional limits about as hard as they can, but it slanders most of them to say they didn't stay within its limits.  You may disagree where those limits *should* be, but that's not the same thing at all.  They do have habit of changing their own opinions on where those are from their time in Congress.  Aside: have we had a President other than Taft who sat on the Supreme Court?  It'd be interesting to see if they switched back.  Obama is still fairly young and a former Constitutional Law professor....
And contributions affect policy?  Say it isn't so. 
Seriously with the bloody obvious influence exerted by donors to political campaigns, we're supposed to get worked up over contributions to a charity?  If donors to the Clinton campaign, or people paying them actual speaking fees, aren't getting more for their money than donors to the charity, the Clintons must be paragons of virtue as politicians go.  But nobody wants to call much attention to that sort of thing, might encourage campaign finance reform or something.
 
 

All presidents push up against their Constitutional limits about as hard as they can, but it slanders most of them to say they didn't stay within its limits.  You may disagree where those limits *should* be, but that's not the same thing at all.  They do have habit of changing their own opinions on where those are from their time in Congress.  Aside: have we had a President other than Taft who sat on the Supreme Court?  It'd be interesting to see if they switched back.  Obama is still fairly young and a former Constitutional Law professor....
And contributions affect policy?  Say it isn't so. 
Seriously with the bloody obvious influence exerted by donors to political campaigns, we're supposed to get worked up over contributions to a charity?  If donors to the Clinton campaign, or people paying them actual speaking fees, aren't getting more for their money than donors to the charity, the Clintons must be paragons of virtue as politicians go.  But nobody wants to call much attention to that sort of thing, might encourage campaign finance reform or something.
 
 

Fan ratings usually put Datalore or Arsenal of Freedom at the top of season one.  They're OK, but I wouldn't say great.
There's a LOT of wasted potential in NextGen, they had some genuinely talented actors, what with Stewart, Spiner and Burton in the main cast, and most of the rest of the cast and guests are at least competent.  Too bad they didn't get better scripts.  And of course if you have good actors, you naturally want to cast them as an emotionless robot and a character with a prop obscuring his face.  It's amazing someone didn't decide Picard had voice damage and make Stewart deliver his lines through a voder.  Maybe the prop budget didn't stretch.
 

Oh yes. Some consider it breaking with Gene Roddenberry's ideal. I personally believe that a flawed ideal is better than either no ideal at all or a completely perfect one. The flawed ideal forces you to think about it and to fight for it; in the case of no ideal at all there is nothing worth fighting for and in the case of the perfect ideal there is no need for either thinking or fighting. And that would promote a passivity and absence of creativity and ambition that I find frightening to contemplate.
As to the second season thing, rules of thumb are often flawed. Most of season two was bland at best and a huge loss of potential at worst. There may have been a good episode in season one but I cannot remember any offhand.

Eh, bouncing is about as good.  The Bernoulli effect is too small by about an order of magnitude lift an airplane.  Lift is probably better understood starting from the third law of motion as reaction from redirected airflow (works better for supersonic flight, though as reaction to shed vortexes that are given downward momentum it's not terrible even for subsonic lift), or from irrotational circulation (which is where aerodynamics texts usually start).  The children's book airplane version of the Bernoulli effect is usually nonsense anyway, seemingly built around some fantasy in which adjacent packets separated at the leading edge somehow need to be neighbors again when leaving the trailing edge.  Lift that and imagine air sucked around the trailing edge to the bottom of the wing and are on your way back to irrotational circulation (or generating those vortexes)

Now that I think about it, that probably includes a lot of stuff the DGB is in charge of covering up.  Aliens are out in the open there, so she likely knows a lot of the same kind of trivia about the major nearby alien worlds as we'd know about the major foreign countries.
One other thing that occurred to me back in Family Tree when she caught the Charlie's Angels reference and seemed excited about watching it with Nanase was how often that must *not* happen for her.  She's almost more out of touch with geek culture than Grace ever was - the world she by her own admission recalls more clearly diverges from ours with the open presence of aliens centuries in the past - there's no way anything remotely like the science fiction at the root of that is at all similar.  For that matter it's before most of the touchstones of our wider culture exist - it predates the actual Classical period of classical music for example, and is pushing on predating the invention of the *novel* as a literary form.  She must come out with allusions and famous quotes all the time that nobody understands, from great cultural works she can't even share because they don't exist here.

Now that I think about it, that probably includes a lot of stuff the DGB is in charge of covering up.  Aliens are out in the open there, so she likely knows a lot of the same kind of trivia about the major nearby alien worlds as we'd know about the major foreign countries.
One other thing that occurred to me back in Family Tree when she caught the Charlie's Angels reference and seemed excited about watching it with Nanase was how often that must *not* happen for her.  She's almost more out of touch with geek culture than Grace ever was - the world she by her own admission recalls more clearly diverges from ours with the open presence of aliens centuries in the past - there's no way anything remotely like the science fiction at the root of that is at all similar.  For that matter it's before most of the touchstones of our wider culture exist - it predates the actual Classical period of classical music for example, and is pushing on predating the invention of the *novel* as a literary form.  She must come out with allusions and famous quotes all the time that nobody understands, from great cultural works she can't even share because they don't exist here.

There's a lot we don't know about Ellen's second life.  For all we know Oktoberfest has been a widespread American custom for centuries there. 
But yeah, there is a lot of potential for Ellen to know stuff Elliot does not (outside of music, which is already confirmed).  I still think the most likely one would be languages - when aliens who can teach languages in a couple seconds have been an open part of society for two centuries, language classes will be *different*.  There's at least one good joke to be had in the cast discovering Ellen speaks a dozen languages (apparently not including Japanese, though Nanase could still be startled to discover she's fluent in French....).  I think the other good joke based on world differences would be some understanding of magic theory (e.g. Tedd exposits on his latest discovery. Oh yeah, that's one of those Nuzquora's equations things we learned in 10th grade science right?  No wait that was the other you....) 
 

Held up by liability concerns.  If you think incompetent or drunk drivers are a problem, you don't even want to think about jetpack pilots.
 

Held up by liability concerns.  If you think incompetent or drunk drivers are a problem, you don't even want to think about jetpack pilots.
 

Would they even have them?  The point of divergence after all is well before sports leagues are a thing.  We have enough trouble now with ambiguities about who can compete in gender or age brackets defined leagues, or what to do about artificial hormones vs. people who naturally have abnormal levels.  I've been half expecting some professional sport to implode under the stress of body modification technologies for a while now, add that sort of issue from the beginning and the para-religious "fair play" thing falls apart, and that's something that played a big role in early development of modern sport.
 

It's worth remembering that Europeans were expanding everywhere else in the world at the same time, and weren't nicer about it, but didn't manage much in the way of population replacement anywhere the natives didn't drop dead from disease.  South Africa is about the closest they came, and it's less European than the Valley of Mexico, and nowhere close to North America.  I suppose the genes of the population of Singapore are less than half indigenous - of course they mostly aren't *European* either, but still, a marginal success.  There aren't many others in the Old World.
 

That's actually not true.  He had only a single company of Spaniards.  When he arrived at Tenochtitlan he also had a few thousand Cholulans and quite a lot (Diaz says 100,000, but that's probably exaggerating even for just the number of troops they had, let alone sent along) of Tlaxcalans too.  Cortes was a skilled political player, and not just in Mexico, he won most of his political battles in Cuba and back in Spain to.
 

Oddly that may make it less likely to be non-random, though Dan may or may not know that.  In the US anyway scheduled births, or ones that can reasonably be hastened or delayed a day, generally don't happen on holidays, to the extent that January 1 is the second least common birthday, following December 25 and followed by December 24 and July 4.  Birth rates for the entire two week period from the end of December to the beginning of January is actually noticeably depressed, as is the week Thanksgiving will fall in in late November. 

That seems pretty likely really.  Edward has a real point about poor acoustics and background noise.  Between that and nobody likely to be standing real close to a fight between a superhero and a monster, and neither Elliot or Dunkel being exactly common names.  I wouldn't be too startled if the press were currently all camped out in front of the house of somebody names Leah Duncan, because her Facebook page shows her with pink hair.
 

That seems pretty likely really.  Edward has a real point about poor acoustics and background noise.  Between that and nobody likely to be standing real close to a fight between a superhero and a monster, and neither Elliot or Dunkel being exactly common names.  I wouldn't be too startled if the press were currently all camped out in front of the house of somebody names Leah Duncan, because her Facebook page shows her with pink hair.
 

Or she could be something like "Jennifer Elliot Dunkel", perhaps with "Elliot Dunkel" being one of those hyphenated names without the hyphen, like Duff Cooper or Spencer Churchill (The male line of Churchills descendent from the Duke of Marlborough died out some generations ago. BTW, this is why the late Princess Diana was related to Winston Churchill.)
However, this isn't the big reason why "This is a thing that can happen" isn't likely to be an very effective solution to the problem. At least two witnesses at the Mall who are not Tensaided, Catalina, or Rhoda know who Elliot Dunkel is because they go to Moperville North. And unless Carol is incredibly clueless, she's going to remember that her little sister Sarah had a childhood friend named "Elliot" even if she wasn't interested enough to ask who Sarah's been dating. To really make the pink-haired-girl-Elliot-who-is-not-Elliot-Dunkel dodge work, Edward would have to set up falsified records for Mall Elliot. This is something he did for Ellen and Grace, but that was before he got booted upstairs.
Presuming Edward does that, there still has to be a "real" Mall Elliot to seal the deal. This is as doable as Justin's plan to conceal Cheerleadra's secret identity by having Grace pose as Elliot.
Of course, this doesn't cover the interesting factoid that "classic Cheerleadra" looks like Ellen. Do you think there could have been any students from Moperville South at the mall who maybe thought Floating Jesus said "Ellen Dunkel"?

It generally wouldn't.  People expect a lot more from genetic testing than it can deliver.  Places offering to find your relatives from mitochondrial or Y-chromosome samples are exaggerating a lot, or outright scams.
Mitochondrial DNA doesn't change that fast.  If you aren't a mutant (and you probably aren't) you have the same mitochondria as any other children of your mother (and the children of those of them that are girls).  Likewise your mother likely wasn't a mutant either, so you have the same mitochondria as your maternal grandmother and female line aunts, first cousins and first cousins removed descended from her.  Repeat for your grandmother and more distant cousins back to whoever was the last mutant.  In a matrilocal culture it wouldn't be too astonishing if most of the woman in the village to had the same mitochondrial DNA.
 

Third option, their pregnant mother was cursed and touched the diamond.  For added plot convolution, the "other woman" is the separated cursed form or vice versa.
 

The "whale" is clearly one of the whale avatars of Ebisu, the kami Tara expected Nanase to be the hime-miko of, who'd thus naturally be interested in Tedd as part of his priestly family.
Well OK, probably not, Dan has moved away from anime and Japanese culture references a bit, but at one time I think that could have been a serious theory here.
 

You aren't a parent are you?  The estimated birth date the doctor gives you is the midpoint of a two week range, and there's probably a 25% chance the birth will be outside that window.  Being born on the same day doesn't guarantee you were conceived in the same *month* let alone the same day.
 

Our first computer was a TRS-80 Model III, which my dad probably got an "educators' discount" on, they used to give such things to teachers back then.  After you typed a program in by hand, from a book or magazine, you could save it onto a cassette recorder.  Eventually we sent it in for ugrading, including both a floppy disk drive (Yay Random Access Memory!  No more rewinding!) and a whopping 16k of RAM.  I think I wrote my first fanfic on LazyWriter, about finding a clutch of firelizard eggs in the sandbox.  A few years later, when my school got two TRaSh-80's, I got to show all the teachers how to use them.
Now, my iPad is probably far more powerful a computer than the Cray XMP they used to do the special effects in The Last Starfighter, then referred to as a "supercomputer."  Thank you, Science, for bringing us such miracles! :-)

But there are no magicians named Harry in those are there? 
Hm, perhaps the Incomplete Enchanter (de Camp and Pratt).  That's about a magician named Harold, maybe close enough.  I think there is some overlap with de Camp's sense of humor too.
 

At least part of the reason Ashley comes across so nice is that Susan had already seen through Tom.  If she hadn't, well, jealous ex-girlfriend trying to mess up her ex's future relationship starts doesn't come across as a particularly nice person, even if she later proves to be right.  She does seem to be a nice person, and to have a case of the same compulsion to save others Elliot suffers from, but even in the little we've seen she has character flaws.