Don Edwards

Alar, a fungicide once used on apples, was banned on a similar basis. They routinely test chemicals as possible carcinogens at a dosage level called "lethal dose 50" - which means that if you give that dosage to 100 laboratory animals, 50 of them will die of direct chemical overdose. It stands to reason that the other 50 will mostly be pretty sick. Now, out of those sick survivors, how many develop cancer?
With Alar, this test determined that it isn't a carcinogen. Then they did something pretty much unprecedented. They tested at "lethal dose 75" - you can figure out what that means. And at that dosage, it's a carcinogen. So it was banned.
Now the thing is, Alar was applied to the *outside* of apples, in very minute doses. You'd have to eat a few tons of apples in a short period to get even to "lethal dose 50". And that's assuming you don't wash the apples before peeling them. Washing in water will remove most of the Alar.
And the flip side is that many of the fungi that Alar keeps from growing on the apples, are themselves carcinogens - that would dramatically fail and be banned at "lethal dose 50" if they were industrial products rather than natural parasites.

Dang, I was trying to see how long I could go without knowing who won and the final score.

The horror stories of saccharin were a lie, or at best a serious misrepresentation, to begin with.
Kind of like the horror stories of birth control pills causing cancer in lab animals. (The claim was true... for one specific strain of lab animals, carefully selectively bred to have an elevated probability of developing cancer when injected with a nearly-lethal dose of the medication. You know, it's a lot easier to study cancer if you have a reliable way of getting cancers in front of you to study.)

For starters, pick up an object and toss it...

The solution to reliability issues: get rid of the scriptwriters.
And on the software side, you'd be amazed what percentage of code is dedicated to preventing the users from screwing things up. Software would be much easier without users.

The solution to reliability issues: get rid of the scriptwriters.
And on the software side, you'd be amazed what percentage of code is dedicated to preventing the users from screwing things up. Software would be much easier without users.

The solution to reliability issues: get rid of the scriptwriters.
And on the software side, you'd be amazed what percentage of code is dedicated to preventing the users from screwing things up. Software would be much easier without users.

The solution to reliability issues: get rid of the scriptwriters.
And on the software side, you'd be amazed what percentage of code is dedicated to preventing the users from screwing things up. Software would be much easier without users.

The solution to reliability issues: get rid of the scriptwriters.
And on the software side, you'd be amazed what percentage of code is dedicated to preventing the users from screwing things up. Software would be much easier without users.

Someone on another forum said something on the order of "it's disconcerting to have a Republican politician, once elected, show some inclination to do what he claimed he would do while campaigning... but I could get used to it".

My take on this is that you are basically creating an ability to launch a real rocket from an imaginary platform X feet above the ground - X being the altitude where the people on the ground can't *reliably* block the gravity lines - and with some small amount of upward momentum.
This will take less energy than launching from the ground - however, X would have to be quite large to make a BIG difference. Probably at least 30,000 feet, and the higher the better. (This also has the advantage of significantly reducing air resistance, because you're starting out with fewer miles of air above you and thinner air around you.)
So you might want to look at ways of enlarging X. Like, oh, make sure the rocket is well-lit even when its engine is not going full-blast, and launch on clear nights. Put some people in helicopters or specially-designed lighter-than-air craft (give them observation rooms on the *tops* of the craft, so they can look *up*) at a fairly high altitude in a ring around the launch site.
Starting the engine on/near the ground will kick up a lot of dust and smoke at ground level, which might be a problem for the blockers.
The other factor is that a huge amount of the energy spent on getting into orbit is not about getting *up* there, it's about getting up to orbital speed. Lots of things in low orbit have orbital periods of 3 hours or less, and they travel many more miles in one orbit than a spot on the equator travels in one day, so they have to move horizontally a LOT faster. Blocking gravity won't directly help on that, although it could indirectly. (If you can temporarily turn off gravity, the spacecraft - in space - will travel in a straight line at constant speed, and you can arrange for the direction to be away from earth. Then when you let gravity return, the spacecraft will fall toward earth and accelerate, at no energy cost. You'll still have some trickery to get it going in exactly the right direction at exactly the right speed at exactly the right altitude, but you have that *anyway*.)
(By the way, the above reveals one of the problems with antigravity. If you have antigravity, you have a perpetual-motion machine and free energy. There are a variety of reasons that physicists give a firm NOPE to that.)

Hugs for CK and Pippin.

Hugs for CK and Pippin.

Pockets are important for other reasons as well...

Pockets are important for other reasons as well...

Pockets are important for other reasons as well...

The answer to Kitty's question is, of course, "one that has just been cleaned out by a group of catgirl fans".

A few years ago, on one election day, the voters of the state of Washington approved both recreational marijuana and gay marriage.
Prompting some wag to suggest they were endorsing the Old Testament edict (which had been misinterpreted for centuries) that a man who lies with another man should be stoned.

A few years ago, on one election day, the voters of the state of Washington approved both recreational marijuana and gay marriage.
Prompting some wag to suggest they were endorsing the Old Testament edict (which had been misinterpreted for centuries) that a man who lies with another man should be stoned.

A few years ago, on one election day, the voters of the state of Washington approved both recreational marijuana and gay marriage.
Prompting some wag to suggest they were endorsing the Old Testament edict (which had been misinterpreted for centuries) that a man who lies with another man should be stoned.

 
 
That's one of the advantages of not claiming to follow any specific Pagan tradition. I practice my faith in the same way as my earliest predecessors: by making it up as I go.

 
 
That's one of the advantages of not claiming to follow any specific Pagan tradition. I practice my faith in the same way as my earliest predecessors: by making it up as I go.

Tea and obnoxious children, does not sound like a good repast.

I believe that there is one God that is beyond the possibility of human comprehension, so we divide that one God into myriad pieces that we can comprehend (about as well as we comprehend each other). No matter which one (or several) you choose to follow, you're partly right but leaving something out. Thus there cannot be "one true faith".

Prudence is the better part of valor sanity.