Fingernails grow at a rate of one nanometer per second

And your toenails grow at a rate just under that, because they're thicker. Fun fact for the day. Dead people's fingernails do not grow and they do not breathe. The fingernails appear to grow because the skin of their fingers is shrinking around the bone, peeling the fleshy end of the finger away from where it was when one lived. The whole dead breathing theory is a result of chemical reactions continuing to take place inside the intestinal tract without directions from the body, so basically people's stomach still digest (without moving the stomach muscles, obviously) things, there's just nowhere for the goop to go so they get bloated, and when the pressure builds and is either expelled from the anterior or posterior orifice of the body, which one might mistake for breathing.

I want to say that Sydney is doing a fabulous job of making valid points in her blog, and I'd like to personally extend my thanks for these good discussion topics.

I once met a man who told me a story about WWII. When I think of WWII, I think of Hitler's vision of the future, I think of massive Panzer tanks, I think of Nazi scientists who were miles ahead of all the other scientists at the time, except maybe Einstein. I think about how uncomfortably close the Nazis came to something they would be able to exploit, maybe not a successful offensive, but just enough to establish an oligarchy in Europe, take a decade to regroup, and then start again where they left off. This man though, he told me of one small reason the Nazis lost. Most people look at Hitler's invasion of Russia as the straw that broke the Nazi camel's back, which is accurate, don't get me wrong. One thing people generally don't think about though is Hitler's engineers who developed all of his tanks, planes and other machines of war. These German minds, with their specialist training, designed these machines with precision measured to the femtometer (one quadrillionth of a meter), and these machines required a specialist who designed it to maintain it. Particularly infamous for this inconvenience were Hitler's elite tanks, the Tiger tanks, as well of course the Panzers, the Tiger tanks just being some BAMF Panzers. Whenever one of these rolling armies of six men stopped working, they were screwed. They couldn't fix it, not properly anyway, and they would have to relay a request for a mechanic to come to their aid. One can imagine this is impractical, a few thousand (if that) mechanics expected to move around literally in the middle of the bloodiest conflict human history has seen, to repair these broken tanks whose occupants can't repair because the engineering is beyond their knowledge. In polar contrast, American tanks were designed with ease of maintenance. Each American tank was outfitted with a welder and essentially a repairman's tool kit. When the tank broke down, they got out, fixed the track, repaired this or that, tinkered with the engine, what have you, and then went on their merry way. If you weigh one method against the other you come to the conclusion that generalist training is superior, as proven in the result of WWII. However the point in Sydney's blog, about not requiring kids to take classes they simply will not use, at least not happily, is massively logical. Honestly I already understand how the government of the US works, I don't need a class for that. Don't require people to take classes they are either bound to fail or will never, ever, ever, ever use ever. I want to learn about physics, so I take physics. If somebody doesn't want to take physics but the school says they need a science, they stick them in physics and say "Pass it or you don't graduate". I can see why exposure to such things can be advantageous for people going on the college, but generally people who are college-bound don't require arm-twisting from the school to take these types of classes. If the kid wants to fail at life and suck resources as a lethargic consumer working a dead-end job let them. It's not on your conscience, and it sheds dead weight from the system for those that want to be there, for the instructors who want to teach to those types of students, for the administration, and for everyone else in the short run. In the long run though we could be seeing a huge increase in illiterate dropouts, which makes society divided and burdens the system. This thing is huge mess and I need to stop writing about it for fear that I might be forced to cry deeply to my pillow tonight before drifting into a troubled sleep.