Your target audience is probably not Christian, but anything-mas is going to sound like a rip off of Christmas.

I would hesitate saying to my mother "I'm celebrating Baconmas with the kids". I'd rather say "I'm celebrating Francis Bacon Day with the kids". It's more descriptive, does not feel like an attack on Christmas, and has a natural followup question: "Who is Francis Bacon?"

See also absurdity bias and Yvain's "Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale".

Which is to say: you're right. I have updated in the direction of "this post was useless."

Are you still working with Alonzo Fyfe?

A small, but common related occurrence:

When you are checking out at a grocery store, or sometimes at fast food joints, they'll ask you to donate $1 to charity. Of course it is some sub-optimal charity, but the looming discomfort of saying no factors in far more than it should. Plus, it is really hard to tell some random person "sorry, but the utilon-to-dollar ratio is insufficient".

It seems to generalize to a category of 1-of things that arise in social situations. You know it is sub-optimal to along, you know it would be uncomfortable to speak up, but (at least personally) you find it difficult to gauge the actual cost of doing so (in socialons), and wonder if you aren't just overthinking the whole thing - by which point, of course, the decision is already in motion.

How would it negatively impact a search? I mean that in all earnest.

Some of the tags like "weaving" will not be helpful categories.

I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds.

These are the missing practical arguments: safeguarding the Earth from otherwise inevitable catastrophic impacts and hedging our bets on the many other threats, known and unknown, to the environment that sustains us. Without these arguments, a compelling case for sending humans to Mars and elsewhere might be lacking. But with them - and the buttressing arguments involving science, education, perspective, and hope - I think a strong case can be made. If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. -- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

The U.S. space budget is, I think, much too underfunded. European Space Agency is even smaller. I would put the money into space research and send a team to Mars.

I just finished the survey. My estimate for the Calibration Year was 200 years wrong. How embarrassing, I need to learn the basics.

Thanks for pointing that out. Needless to say I don't agree, but I respect her decision not to get in an endless internet argument about it.

Problems I Think I Have:

• I over-formalize things.
• I feel a need to anticipate and answer every possible objection, and so I lose the ability to say something simply the first time around.
• I write overly convoluted sentence structures.

Possible Remedies:

• I might be able to do NaNoWriMo, which would certainly train me to do without over-editing.
• I've been wanting to do an FAQ on some issue that's very basic and brief at first, and only summons more material when you click on a sentence that you object to.