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Cheap electricity would go a long way to stabilize Africa.

The rule of law would go a long way to stablize Africa.

Unfortunately Africa is caught in a massive Prisoner's Dilemma: corruption is endemic, by most accounts, which means that there is very little upside to good government.

Figuring out how to deal with these situations is one of the big problems of the 21st century, particularly as places like the US become more corrupt.

India, on the other hand, seems to be becoming less corrupt, although god knows it has a lot of ground to make up. But it proves it is possible to move both ways along the continuum of corruption, and we need to be thinking about how to make that happen. Technolgy won't (necessarily) help, and wealth certainly won't.

Poetry might.

effect does this discovery have on the current estimates of the amount of dark matter in the universe?

The what?

The term "dark matter" on its own, unless you an scientist using it in a specific context, is not meaningful. When a layperson uses it as you have it is meaningless.

You have to specify which dark matter you mean. There is "missing matter" at all distance scales above some relatively modest threshold, but there are quite different constraints on what it might be depending on the scale you're observing.

When anti-scientific nutjobs on /. bitch out the purported arrogance of scientists who postulate "dark matter" they never mention which "dark matter" they are talking about, which does nothing but demonstrate their profound ignorance of the issue.

Galactic dark matter, which is what is relevant to this discovery, is potentially entirely baryonic. That means it could be made of the same stuff we are.

But the H/He ratio in the early universe, and other primoridal isotope ratios that we can estimate quite well based on numerous observations and very solid theory, puts a strong limit on the amount of baryonic matter the universe can contain.

Ergo, at larger scales there is evidence for non-baryonic dark matter, which is a quite different animal, and warrants more skepticism.

There is also "dark energy" on the largest scales, which acts as a cosmological constant and which personally I'm a good deal more skeptical about.

People who are dismissive of all dark matter hypotheses but who do not understand the different roles that different types of dark matter and dark energy play in different theories at different scales are simply enemies of scientific inquiry.

--
Poetry and pictures, inspired by the Doctor

I haven't figured out all the blame is trying to focus on Wikileaks/Assange.

People like Palin believe in the epistemology of violence, just like the persecutors of Galileo did. They think that by threatening anyone who fails to see things their way with torture and death they can actually make the world that way.

It's a tricky problem to deal with, because their condition is stable against empirical disproof: you can show them how it fails any number of times, and their only response will be to proclaim that the people demonstrating the falisity of their beliefs ought to be tortured and killed.

Still one can dream it might be otherwise.

If I woke up tomorrow and found out that deployment of this weapon allowed the precise termination of all combatants with no civilian casualties and the war was basically over, I'd be happy for being wrong.

Killing people (which for some reason I'm not clear on you've described as "termination", as if they were computer processes or something) is never precise, and it very rarely ends wars.

Killing everyone who is a combatant today will create a new batch of mothers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives and fathers who are combatants tomorrow. It's trivially obvious that killing everyone who is a combatant today won't end anything, anywhere.

So trivially obvious, in fact, that I have to wonder why anyone thinks it's a good idea. War makes no sense: in any conflict between two parties it is always rational to settle the dispute peacefully. Both parties will always get more out of a peaceful settlement than not. Fewer people would have died on all sides in Europe in 1914-1918 or 1939-1945 if the issues that faced the nations involved had been settled without warfare. Both the victors and the vanquished would have been better off.

Military occupation and puppet governance is expensive, wasteful, inefficient and ineffective. Just ask the Russians how well it worked in Poland.

Warfare is not wrong because it is immoral, but because it is ineffective and inefficient. It the the very best solution to any problem, except compared to all the others. Only extremely stupid people advocate it, and only extremely stupid people waste their lives building weapons to destroy and kill when they could instead be building machines to build and create.

It is good for making fun of, though.

COUNTLESS they say. countless as in, a few hundred, tops. compared to 66.000+ (official no, unofficial probably higher) dead in iraq, unknown number dead in afghanistan, unknown number lost in the hands of cia, nsa and ice. (even inside usa - http://www.thenation.com/article/americas-secret-ice-castles [thenation.com] )

Sure, but you have to realize that the lives of the patricians are worth more than the lives of the plebs, and the lives of the plebs are worth more than the lives of the subjet peoples.

Dead foreigners don't count because they aren't "real people", and detained Americans don't count because they aren't "Real Americans".

The notion that every single human being is free and equal in rights and dignity is too complex for the average person to grasp, and while it was defended vigorously for a while amongst academics neither the post-structuralist Left nor the post-traditionalist Right have any interest in it. Tribalism is the order of the day, as it always has been except for very brief interludes of quasi-legal peace and prosperity, which tribalists find intolerable because it is impossible to control peaceful, prosperous people through xenophobia and other forms of easily induced fear.

Personally, I believe that peace and prosperity are possible, but there is no doubt they have to be defended--mostly by ridicule--against tribalists of all kinds.

Just how fast can they switch from "Obama invading your rights" to "Obama making you vulnerable to terrorists" without causing cognitive dissonance in their audience.

Three point six seconds. Apparently the "now" is about that long, so any two thoughts separated by more than that have to be brought together by a deliberate or habitual process or rational inquiry.

Which is unfortunate, as it means they can't even tell when we are making fun of them.

Lazarus Long: "Armed society is a polite society".

A non-factual belief from a fictional character. For example: Canada is much less heavily armed than the United States, but Canadian society is widely held to be much more polite than American society. In my experience, as a Canadian who has lived and worked in the US, this is a fair characterization.

Different ways of thinking, not different laws, are primary. The laws follow from the thinking, not the other way around. Here's one of my attempts to influence thought through humour and poetry, which seem to me much more potent weapons than guns.

A truly erroneous hard-right outlook, but stupidity is fitting given your account name. Imperialists are very clear about their intentions. It has almost nothing to do with forcing our social democracies on them. The primary driver of imperialism is the desire to subjugate the entire world to the dictates of American hegemony. Radical imperialists view the non-American controlled parts of the globe as the world they are at war with, and the war they are waging is to impose their empire on all non-Americans. Other justifications for imperialism are at best secondary motivators. And shame on you for whitewashing and apologizing for the unquestionably evil, outrageously heinous campaign of misery and death waged by radical Imperialism.

Give peace a chance.