The "Saturday Morning News" story that you are so proud of is not visible on my iPad. But that's cool, I'm sure I'm the only one left using an iPad, kind of like this guy in my office with a Zune.

@1 ..i have 2 zunes and.. and a landline too..and a fax /copier. i'm so contemporary.

I signed a receipt last week that had carbon copies, with real carbon paper.

@2 "contemporary" means modern ;)

I'm convinced that having a nice double boiler is worth it for making sauces.

Now, paleontologists estimate the whole body weighed the equivalent of 14 elephants

Interestingly enough, an African elephant weighs about the same as a T-rex and the largest elephant weighed more than the largest discovered T-rex. I think elephants are a bad measure to compare to other animals because they are a lot larger than they appear in pictures.

Titanosaurs are pretty much the only group of sauropods (long necks, long tails, the design basis for Littlefoot in "Land Before Time") to have much diversity in the Cretaceous; the Diplodocidae and allies, with their relatively low build and extremely long necks and tails, were pretty much confined to the Jurassic. Titanosaurs had longer legs and a comparatively shorter torso, like their ancestors the Brachiosaurs, and were commonly armored with bony plates across their backs.

What do dinosaurs know of friendship?

@8: Have you seen The Land Before Time or any of its sequels?

#6

Well elephants are ungulates, plant eating bovine types, so no doubt dense and meaty and slow moving (except during stampedes).

Whereas carnivorous dinos as we now know are birdlike and fast moving.

I will defer to #7 who obviously has his arms wrapped around this branch of knowledge, but the Sauropods sound more cow-like than bird-like.

Deportation:

“Despite being brought here as a child and having lived here for many years as an incredible member of his community and a bright student, he is facing removal from the United States,” said Leta Sanchez, Macedo de Alba’s attorney.

I hear that argument alot however, can't you say the same thing against bringing him here from Mexico when he was nine. Why was it ok back then to "uproot" him from his native land.

Side thought: I have this idea of flooding Americanized immigrants back to their home nations to take over, instill the use of English and bring Constitutional rule of law to those nations. Wouldn't we all be better off it the whole world was a United States of (Europe|Russia|Asia|Africa|Arabia|India).

JBITSMFOTP

@7/11: Yeah, I'm actually kind of interested in how the metabolism of an elephant would compare to a T-rex. XKCD noted a while back that while T-rexes were probably warm blooded, they would still have a slower metabolism than modern mammals. I'm guessing you are thinking what I'm thinking here: who would win in a T-rex vs. African elephant fight?

That Portland story is very disturbing. Are we to have politicians in charge of a city's investments (our tax money) based on political correctness rather than the best return on the investment? That's the kind of crappy government liberals yearn for yet complain that there's never enough 'revenue'.

@15 - sometimes the profit motive shouldn't be the sole determiner of value.

Holy shit, that video from papas fritas is fucking amazing. We are so conservative here. It's wonderful to see someone seriously questioning and taking action against capitalism.

@13: It's a close race between him and sgt_doom. See #18. (A building collapses after burning for several hours from fires started by the same debris that caused significant structural damage = "mysterious.")

@11: ELEPHANTS ARE:
-Afrotherians
-Proboscoideans
ELEPHANTS ARE NOT:
-Ungulates
-Bovines

JBITSMFOTP

NOT ALL (NON-AVIAN) DINOSAURS ARE THOUGHT TO BE BIRDLIKE. That description is typically applied only to theropods (two-legged meat-eaters, literally "beast-footed"), the group to which birds pertain. The theropods together with the sauropods ("lizard-footed") together make up the Saurischia ("lizard-hipped"). Most plant-eaters familiar to the public, such as ceratopsians ("horn-faced"), stegosaurids ("roofed lizards"), ankylosaurids ("fused lizards"), and hadrosaurids ("sturdy lizards"), belong to the Ornithischia ("bird-hipped"), the sister taxon to the Saurischia; the two collectively make up Dinosauria. Bear in mind, it was lizard-hipped, not bird-hipped, dinosaurs that gave rise to birds!
All dinosaurs are thought to have been homeothermic (keeping body temperature constant, "warm-blooded", as opposed to poikilothermic, "cold-blooded") to some extent, like mammals. However, many are likely to have been ectotherms (heated by their environment rather than by an elevated metabolism, "cold-blooded", as opposed to endothermic, "warm-blooded"). Sauropods are some of those. Like elephants, they are big enough that they lose heat fairly slowly relative to their mass (i.e., they have a high volume-to-surface-area ratio) and therefore can keep themselves warm without needing to burn lots of calories for that express purpose the way we do.
(For reference, we are endothermic homeotherms. Elephants are ectothermic homeotherms to some extent. Your average insect is an ectothermic poikilotherm. A small desert mammal is often an endothermic poikilotherm.)

@19

I can't remember the name, but there was a spoof on that 9/11 conspiracy film about how the destruction of the Death Star by a farm boy with no X-Wing Fighter experience was actually something engineered by a secret cabal of some sort. It was well done, though a bit repetitive after about five minutes, but it's worth youtubing.

I have to wonder if invoking the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Party's political stance some 65+ years ago isn't like asserting that, "Today's Republican Party must be pro-African-American because they were the party that freed the slaves, donchaknow?"

@21: Oh my God, thank you for sharing that. That was great. "Luke's Change: An Inside Job" for those interested.

@17: Funny, but your 'TVDinner' avatar seems to capture the delightful essence of capitalism for me. The family gathering around the TV, eating delicious Swanson TV dinners, watching new car commercials on the Ed Sullivan show.

@19: 47 stories of steel and concrete fall straight to the ground in several seconds, at free-fall speed, after fire from some other buildings a block or so away, set hours earlier, catches the carpet and chair stuffing on fire. Nothing to see here. Move along.

#20 almost

"Paenungulata ("almost ungulates") is a taxon that groups three extant mammal orders: Proboscidea (including elephants) ..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenungulat…

@25 - those were some pretty fucking big "other buildings." The controlled imploding the Kingdome had impacts over a block away and that was both 1) controlled and 2) a fraction of the size of WTC.

Building 7 also had a unique structural framework design since it was directly above a power substation. So yes, I think it's entirely plausible that it collapsed of it's own accord after it sustained structural damage and fires had been burning in it for hours and there was no water pressure for the fire suppression system.

@12, are you a native Salish, bro?

@27: You're probably right. And there probably was a thorough investigation launched immediately following the destruction that resulted in positive confirmation of such. Fire typically takes away every bit of the structural rigidity of steel-reinforced concrete, so that 47 stories of it can drop at free-fall speed, as if there was zero resistance from the lower floors. We see this happen all the time. Nothing to see here, folks. Stop asking questions.

@26: Do you know what the word "almost" means?
Paenungulata is NOT related to Perissodactyla or Artiodactyla; the former is a major part of the superorder Afrotheria, while the latter fit into Laurasiatheria. They were previously THOUGHT to be related on the basis of morphology, but that apparent similarity is now known to be a trick of convergent evolution; molecular evidence doesn't lie.
TL;DR: JBITSMFOTP