bascule

Not at all. Many of their experiments are frustratingly ad hoc, or total (albeit inadvertent) strawmen of the ideas they're trying to present. On a (somewhat) recent episode they attempted to test out the use of an electrolysis device to inject gaseous hydrogen into your typical Otto engine. Except they forgot (or rather, didn't understand) something critically important: the engine still needs gas to run. The basic underlying principle of these devices is that an electrical current from the alternator is used to separate water into gaseous hydrogen and oxygen. Inject them into the cylinder with gasoline and you get a hotter, more efficient burn. However ultimately the energy driving the entire reaction comes from the gasoline. The MythBusters didn't understand this, and instead tried to drive a gasoline engine *ENTIRELY* on the hydrogen produced through electrolysis. Needless to say IT DIDN'T WORK. I was quite surprised when they got a tank of gaseous hydrogen and were able to run a gasoline engine entirely on it. It was entirely unsurprised when they encountered unexpected flameout that had them leaping away in terror.

Ostensibly, anything that secures them benefits?

Penn & Teller are the only libertarians I know of expressing views worth a damn on what can be considered relatively mainstream media, at least in this area of nicheification... Compared to the likes of them, I don't think Stossel can be considered so much a libertarian as a pathetic little whiner

I contacted the EPA regarding the presence of radionucleotides in cigarettes, namely polonium-210 and lead-210, asking why they weren't regulated. This is the response I received: What I can infer from this response: The EPA is fully aware there are radionucleotides present in cigarettes. Present laws do not allow them to regulate the radionucleotide content of cigarettes. Let's put the issue of how harmful these radionucleotides are for a second... Do you think, just as a matter of principle, that the EPA should have the power to regulate them? And as an aside, I contacted my senator about preventable safety problems in cigarettes, including both radionucleotides and nitrosamene content. I included Ed Martell's paper about deep tissue alpha radiation exposure from cigarette smoking and several other citations, with relevant passages already highlighted for easy reading! I didn't even receive a response It's hard to help but feeling that the cigarette companies control Washington and nearly a half million people die every year as a result...

I think you can drop the quotes now: http://uk.reuters.com/article/stocksAndSharesNews/idUKNOA34777120080423 But yeah, it does reaffirm what you're saying: The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch says: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/sp-sees-oil-91-year-end/story.aspx?guid=%7BBA5DA189-56FA-47D0-A468-71F9E9E5806E%7D&dist=hplatest So... recession now, better relatively soon?

I imagine a hypothetical future where Hillary beats Obama but loses to McCain, and drags the country through bitter agony in the middle of a recession.

...if you count Florida and Michigan. From her "Fact Hub": http://facts.hillaryhub.com/archive/?id=7265 Yes, if you count the states who did rogue primaries, including Michigan where Obama wasn't even on the ballot, Hillary leads the popular vote! If you don't count them, Obama is a half million votes ahead.

"Our clocks do not measure time. No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure." -- Seth Lloyd

Religious freedom isn't being violated here. This applies to businesses, not non-profit institutions like churches. When your religion is a business, you have Scientology. What if you're a car salesman who was genuinely mistaken about a car having a 50 MPG gas mileage when it really has a 20 MPG gas mileage? Even if you're "genuinely mistaken" you're misrepresenting a product to your customers.

Here's what I predict: McDonalds (or somewhere equally mundane) makes the announcement that they're going to start switching to factory-made beef for their paddies. The news media make a big hubbabub about it, getting plenty of interviews with sound bytes like "Factory meat? Gross! I wouldn't eat that!" Then the switch happens, and they start interviewing customers who are actually eating it. "Tastes fine to me" And the system moves forward... And it only takes the other fast food chain to advertise that their products are 50% cheaper

One thing is a lump of tissue cultured in a factory. The other is what used to be a living, breathing, feeling being. If you see the two as morally equivalent for your consumption, I don't really know what to say. That will never happen. For starters, I think many, many people will be averse to factory produced meat. I don't know about Scotland, but in the US, and particularly in the city I live in, people here are nuts for organic, and yes, that includes meat. I think many people will find factory produced meat unseemly. However, I would hope it will lead to the collapse of factory farms. That's one industry I can do without.

Godel found a way of encoding a statement to the effect of "This statement is unprovable" into the symbolic logic system defined in Principia Mathematica (PM). The notable aspect of the statement is that it is self-referential, which Godel managed to accomplish by encoding statements in PM into "Godel Numbers." Thus the actual statement in PM refers to its own Godel Number. To boil it down into a nutshell, I'd say it means that any system which is expressive enough to be consistent and complete is also expressive enough to contain self-referential statements which doom it to incompleteness.

Scientists have long experimented with growing meat in-vitro, now PETA has apparently borrowed a page from the X-Prize and is offering a $1 million reward for production of commercially viable quantities of meat produced through the method. Personally I think this is the greatest thing PETA's ever done. As a pescetarian I am still concerned with the way the meat I eat is produced. Fish farms have promoted diseases, and commercial fishing is on the verge of wiping out species like king salmon and ahi tuna (ahi tuna being an apex predator), plus there's the human cost to consider in regard to harvesting species like king crab. It's hard to eat king crab legs knowing that somebody might have died to bring them to you. In vitro production ensures that the meat can be formulated specifically with human nutrition in mind, something that cannot be said about any meat in existence today (although I would argue salmon comes close). It should also ensure that meat is produced without the massive negative environmental effects that typically come from ranching (e.g. rainforest destruction), factory farms (i.e. massive smelly antibiotic-laced pink ponds of pig waste), or fish farms (sea lice which have spread from fish farms and decimated wild salmon populations). Hopefully, it should also cut down on disease provided proper maintenance and cleaning is performed on the equipment. That's not to mention the massive cost benefits that in vitro meat production could potentially have over conventional means. Turnaround on the process would be days or weeks rather than months or years required by the "conventional" approach of enslaving, fattening up, then slaughtering animals. Furthermore, in vitro meat production would be substantially more efficient, as there's, uhh, no poop, since there's no animal. The majority of the population seems unwilling to stop eating meat entirely. This is the most practicable solution I am aware of. I'm glad to see PETA endorsing it.

Generally because photovoltaic cells are produced with traditional integrated circuit manufacturing technologies, which means it takes a lot of energy to produce photovoltaic panels in the first place and also means it's expensive. Several companies are attempting to use different manufacturing approaches to lower manufacturing costs. Several are experimenting with technologies similar to inkjet printing: http://www.njit.edu/publicinfo/press_releases/release_1040.php http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/10/researchers-create-printed-solar-cells/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4253464.html

Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation (PDF) The book is the textbook for the programming languages course at Brown University, and over 25 universities use part or all of the book. It's released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. I've been using it in conjunction with some other books to improve my knowledge of languages and compilers. This is definitely the best free resource on the subject I've found. Enjoy!

Erlang's ability to run N times faster on N CPU cores is generally coupled with the idea that modern CPUs (including ones based on Intel's QuickConnect and AMD's HyperTransport interconnect) use a cache coherent interconnect to allow many caches and many memory controllers to be accessed by many CPU cores. This is effectively the NUMA approach pioneered by companies like SGI (i.e. one of those technologies like RISC that's been around forever but finally embraced universally by the mainstream). When using a crossbar topology for the interconnect, the aggregate bandwidth scales exponentially with the number of CPUs, which is sufficient to prevent performance degradation. In other words, you can simply just keep adding cores and caches/memory controllers and the architecture will scale endlessly.

Good plan I feel the same way

Not quite for the reasons insane_alien stated... However, the goal of Erlang is for your program to automagically run N times faster on N CPU cores.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7354089.stm Parliament is about to debate measures that will see all forms of paid-for paranormal activities fall under the new Consumer Protection Regulations. Personally I'd love to see this happen in America as well.

Exactly what I'm saying! Except it's not, it's... implied? Okay, let me deconstruct what I'm saying here for you since apparently you can't see it except through Pangloss-colored glasses: You argued directly against the validity of climate science. People responded to your arguments and defended the science. But rather than actually try to defend your viewpoint, you change the subject and start blustering about politics. This after going so far as to dismiss the ability of science to determine causality from statistical analysis... Is science this abstract concept to you, or does it actually mean something?

Not what I said... Who's saying that? Especially in this thread... All I'm seeing are scientific rebuttals to your arguments' date=' Pangloss, and you're trying to interject politics into it. That's just one big fat red herring.[/quote'] Yes, an ad hominem attack on The Inconvenient Truth by opponents of its message. I can't speak for those people... Water vulnerability is a political issue? When did you do that? Again, not what I said:

Flaming isn't exactly a politically correct activity, and people aren't flaming you, they're just pointing out why you're wrong. That sounds like a politically correct mindset. Who's saying that? Especially in this thread... All I'm seeing are scientific rebuttals to your arguments, Pangloss, and you're trying to interject politics into it. That's just one big fat red herring.

You could use algae: http://solixbiofuels.com/ Or kudzu: http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_strauss/20070904.html

Nice, ordinarily I'd get pissed at this kind of thing as being spam, but I happen to have quite an interest in biomodeling (to the point that I started a Wikipedia article on it) I see biomodeling as a surefire path to computer consciousness, although I'm not going to speculate as to whether or not people will be able to solve the problem before both computing power and biomodeling advance to the point that we can actually simulate an entire human being at the cellular level inside a computer. I'm not even going to venture a guess as to when that might happen... I'll just say not any time in the immediate future.

Each core is running at a clock speed of 2.4GHz. It's not like they're each 600MHz and become 2.4GHz when you add them all together or something. Threads are the standard answer, however using multithreaded programming to effectively leverage multi-core CPUs is difficult. There are languages which try to solve this problem by providing better concurrency primitives than threads. Some examples are Erlang and Scala. Scala is notable in that it can run on the .NET platform.