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The helmet sounds interesting, but the testing apparatus (image from the study) in the linked study is really damned cool. I wish we could get something like that at the office, because it looks like it could one hell of an inverted choke-slam to those in need of such.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and claim that this is a product of bias and mental issues by the authors.
Much like how the authors of SuperFreakonomics couldn't have resisted their "one clever trick to fix global warming" chapter thanks to their personal biases. Which came back to bite them.
Also, the claim made in the paper is clearly false, even fraudulent.
Whether due to bias or to drum up publicity, I don't know. But they actually show that they are wrong.
More on that below. First a word or two on authors.

David W.Keith is a pusher of solar and geoengineering as a solution for climate change.
Also, best way to solve that climate change, according to him, is to start spraying sulfuric acid into air.
And he owns and runs a geoengineering company.
Which kinda runs on tar sands money.

Carbon Engineering is funded by several government and sustainability-focused agencies as well as by private investors, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and oil sands financier N. Murray Edwards.[5][6][7]

Lee Miller on the other hand really hates them windmills.
And both windmills and photovoltaics should be kept out of the cities, tucked away somewhere in the desert.

In fact, he's done resear... I mean he played with computer models to "prove" that installing windmills will basically... stop the wind. Well... slow it down.
Someone should have told him about all those sails we used to use globally, that we're no longer using.

I.e. That a reduction of things to preindustrial levels actually requires reduction of wind speeds as well.
Or remind him that the air moved by the wind is a fluid. Like water.
And just like how water in the sea doesn't stop moving because of all the boats blocking it from moving freely... neither will global air currents actually slow down.
And even if they do - we could just reduce the number of flags and start driving cars only downwind, while wearing more tight fitting clothes, right?
Or tell him about the chance that his model is NOT REALLY a completely accurate representation of reality.

As for the study... It claims the following:

generating today's US electricity demand (0.5 TWe) with wind power would warm Continental US surface temperatures by 0.24 C.
...
The warming effect is: small compared with projections of 21st century warming, approximately equivalent to the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing global electricity generation, and large compared with the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing US electricity with wind.

It also claims that solar effect would be smaller but that's besides the point, unless you're looking for more bias fodder.

The issue is that those "approximately equivalent" and "large compared with the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing US electricity" are COMPLETELY ignoring that the US is a part of a global system.
As seen from the graph they've provided.

They claim a warming of 0.24C over Continental US from 0.5TWe produced with wind power, by 2080, at which point it would level out.
At the same time they claim a cooling of about -0.48C over Continental US from

No idea why, but a physician friend of ours thinks it might have something to do with the number of proteins in modern wheat. 50 years ago, there were less than ten but now, in our effort to feed the world, there's more than 40. (I'm in the middle of a term paper, so you smug "citation needed" types can sod off.)

[citation needed], obviously.

Or are we supposed to simply accept the very specific claim you made (that actually sounds ridiculous to anyone who has ever done a proteomic analysis of ANY grain) without a single shred of anything to support it?

Come back again when you have something to say that either doesn't sound ridiculous to anyone who knows about proteins OR has some sort of scientific literature to back it up.

I'll be waiting while sitting down, ok?

Just for fun, here's an actual electrophoretic gel with wheat grain proteins: https://ars.els-cdn.com/conten... (note... you will NOT be able to see all proteins that exist in wheat with such technology). Can you even count the number of proteins in that gel?

Translation: You are off by a few orders of magnitude. Please try again.

Actually since the Flynn effect didn't alter ethnic differences, it verified that nurture failed to trump nature, which is flagrantly counter to your claim.

Let me get this straight: IQ scores of populations rise without changes to the ethnic composition of said populations, and this somehow proves that race is the main determiner of IQ? Sorry, buddy, but the Netherlands did not "whiten" between 1952 and 1982. Quite the opposite: immigrants began to flood in from Indonesia, Aruba and the Antilles, and Suriname. And yet IQ went up drastically. And if you look at 1960s Virginia, an unchanged population of a single race saw a dramatic changed by thirty points in just five years. 30 points is supposedly the difference between average (100) and mentally retarded (70). Do you want me to believe that as soon as the Virginia public schools shut down, radioactive spiders bit all the black students (and only the black students) to alter their DNA and turn them into retards over the span of five years? Or is it more likely that five years without schooling left their academic abilities rusty and atrophied?

Who "established that IQ tests are terrible measure of innate intelligence" and how exactly?

Binet (but you call that genetic fallacy, fine). But also Flynn and several professors of psychology. How? With scientific studies, but you'll probably just write them off as "PC."

IQ testing has certainly been updated since the long defunct original Standford-Binet test intended for predicting academic potential, and is far more robust than your reduction. Wechsler tests among others are different batteries for different indications, and the stats hold over large populations with a great many correlations over decades of study, regardless of your dislike.

Nice try, but the modern day IQ tests are exactly the ones that were debunked in those two articles I linked to. The Cell article I linked to specifically mentions Wechsler. They conclude that most general IQ tests are useless, but concede specific tests, such as the subtest component of Wechsler may still have some value (since they did not analyze the efficacy of subtests in this paper). But another paper that did analyze subtest scores concludes that they, too are entirely useless. Just Say No to Subtest Analysis: A Critique on Wechsler Theory and Practice.

You sound a lot like J. Philippe Rushton, who for years claimed that Africans were intellectually inferior to other races on a biological level. It almost sounded believable until he started claiming that there was an inverse relation between penis size and intelligence. My best guess is that you, like Rushton, are only engaged in this racial superiority pissing contest to because you want to lessen your insecurities about the size of certain appendages for which you are markedly below average.

Why does plastic make things so much cheaper? (I'm in software. With mechanical things, my IQ drops to 50. The answer is likely so obvious that will make me look even dumber.)

It doesn't necessarily have to be. Yes plastic is cheaper in terms of cost, but its material properties are significantly different from metal. Primarily, it has a much lower Young's modulus, meaning for a given stress it deflects a lot more. On the face of it that sounds like a bad thing, but you have to remember that when absorbing an impact, deceleration forces are inversely proportional to the time it takes to decelerate. Consequently a metal body which stops an impact quickly generates much higher forces than a plastic body which bends and spreads the deceleration over a greater distance (and thus time). The old HP office laser printers were a great example of this. They had a "cheap" plastic outer shell, but if you pushed them off a table they'd bounce off the floor and not suffer any damage. If you did the same thing with a metal frame, it'd probably deform and the printer wouldn't work anymore because the parts would be out of alignment.

Another way to absorb impacts is to fail in a pre-engineered manner. The reinforcing metal tubes which make up the crumple zones in your car are designed to fail in an accordion-like fashion which maximizes the amount of energy absorbed for the weight of the metal. (If a student ever asks why they need to study multi-variable partial differential equations, it's so they can do things like calculate and design the failure modes in the picture.) Unfortunately, due to metal's stiffness, that's the primary way to get metal to absorb energy - by permanently deforming.

Plastics can survive greater deflections so a common way to increase their survivability is to design them as snap-together parts which absorb energy by breaking apart. If when dropping a plastic phone, the back and some of the interior parts break apart, that's a good thing so long as you can snap them back together again. This is the same strategy used in race cars. The huge kinetic energies involved would mean a simple cage surrounded by crumple zones would be overwhelmed. So instead they design the non-essential parts to break apart upon impact. The breaking absorbs energy, as well as reduces the mass connected to the part they're trying to protect (passenger cage) thus reducing the energy the cage has to absorb. When you see a race car (or even a regular car) hit a wall and splinter into a thousand tiny pieces, that too is by design.

This is not to say that plastic phones are superior to metal phones. I haven't tested them so don't know. All I'm saying that just because it's plastic doesn't necessarily mean it's worse than metal. A plastic body can actually be made superior to a metal body. My candy-bar phone 10 years ago fell out of my pocket as I was closing the car door and was crushed. The plastic exterior survived it just fine - it deformed to absorb the energy of door closing, and bounced back to shape. Unfortunately it deformed so much the display inside it cracked making the phone useless. The electronics however were protected and still worked (I could make and receive calls, I just couldn't see anything on the display).

1. Economy: I think that regulations should be subject to cost-benefit analysis. I think subsidizing specific companies is a terrible idea. I'm opposed to the Farm Bill, too, but that's a bipartisan problem. It's a very vague plank, but I'll call it a "soft agree".
2. Defense: essentially nothing to distinguish the two here, so I'll limit myself to the platitude that the Navy is the most important force we have. Nobody wins this one.
3. Health care: Obamacare is a disaster in the making that is going to have large, negative, and far-reaching effects that most people have utterly failed to grasp. Major agree with GOP. I'm a doctor, so it's pretty natural I'd agree with them on this.
4. Education: I believe that school choice is a win. Agree.
5. Energy: I don't so much agree with the GOP as think that the Democrats don't have a serious energy policy at all. Soft agree.
6. Courts: I think that the Republican nominees have tended to be a little better on constitutional rights but really can't stand the obsequious deference toward cops and prosecutors. Very soft agree

That's their summation of what they think is important. Additionally, I think that the Republicans are wrong on gay marriage and the drug war, but I'm not very upset about it since the official stance of President Obama in 2008 was opposition to gay marriage - and I don't see a lot of people raking him over the coals on that stance. And the Democrats are no better on the Drug War.

I live in a poor state. I have friends who are coastal liberals, and their ideas are great if you live somewhere that everyone is upper middle class - cue the old Friedman saw about "in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either". But most poor people are not poor because they are unlucky, although some are. They are poor because they are dumb - not uneducated and not even lazy, just dumb. All the education spending in the world will not get someone who cannot manage abstract thought to become a college graduate.

As an anesthesiologist, I ask every patient I examine to do the following three things: "Tilt your head all the way back, open your mouth all the way, and stick out your tongue." Try it yourself right now. If done correctly, I should be staring at something that looks like this. It is the single most difficult thing I ask people to do and at least ten percent of ostensibly normal people (i.e., high school graduates/GED holders) can't do it at all. They cannot do it after I demonstrate how to do it and repeat each step until they participate - yes, there are people who literally will not stick out their tongue in response to four or five requests to do so. "Stick your tongue out, please. Just like your mother always told you not to. No, stick it out. No, keep your mouth open and stick it out. No, I don't want to see your tongue, I'm trying to look at the back of your throat. No, you need to stick your tongue out." Ad nauseam. If you cannot get a (theoretically) mentally competent adult to do that, is it really a lack of education that's the problem?

Ultimately, as the old joke goes, liberals think conservatives are evil and conservatives think liberals are hopelessly naïve. Based on my experience with humanity, I fall where I do.

So for you, and for JosephTX, I'd say that refusal to means-test SS is a sign of a lack of seriousness (and I will apply that label to the GOP, too). Cutting defense is probably a good idea but should be done primarily by winding down expensive wars rather than retrenching a peacetime commitment. Healthcare in the US is a long argument that I am not interested in typing out, but the very short version is that if we wanted everyone to be covered we could have expanded Medicaid to cover all citizens and been done with it - no new rules

The request was for an example of an AGW disaster - of course it's cherry-picked. Nobody's claiming the sea level is rising this fast in all places (quite the opposite).

What's also bald-faced cherry-picking is a statement like "basically no net gain since a peak of the early 80s". You have to really try hard to ignore the clear and continuing upwards trend (more importantly for the Tuvaluans, the all-important seasonal peaks keep getting higher, resulting in worse flooding each time). You also have to carefully ignore the altimetry data, which clearly shows a 5mm/year rise since 1993 at Funafuti.

Even more impressive is how you blithely imply that a peer-reviewed study's conclusions are completely wrong, without seeing the underlying data or challenging their methodology, even though the study confirms earlier work like Church 2006. You smoothly fill in the missing GPS data with assumptions of your own that it would naturally support your pre-conceived conclusions instead. This despite your admission that you're still baffled by the long-established connection between rising CO2 levels and rising sea levels.

Did I mention that Tuvalu is cited in at least three different studies on climate change disasters? Maybe you should reassure the Tuvaluan Government that the experts are lying and/or incompetant, AGW is a massive conspiracy, and all that salt water they're seeing must be a figment of their imagination, because your glance at a graph proved that rising sea levels and subsidence "mostly stopped by 1980".

The static-vs-kinetic friction is kind of simplistic compared to real world cases, but still pretty much applicable to most road conditions. A more complicated look would be to look at the force-slip curve. In almost all cases, too much slip lowers the stopping ability (exceptions being loose gravel or snow that can pile up in front of the wheel, some people argue for ice too, but actual data seems to show shorter stopping distances on ice for proper non-locking braking). The goal for braking would be to brake at the peak of those curves. ABS does this with some oscillatory behavior as it tries to find and maintain that point at the top. A professional driver can find and stay at the top point, which can out do consumer ABS systems if the professional driver knows where that point is (e.g. on a closed track with much braking being done). However, if conditions are uncertain because of changing roads & weather, the response time of even professionals to finding the peak of that curve is slower than ABS. Additionally, ABS can handle cases where the conditions are different for different tires.

I thought this was well understood and have explained it to my nieces/nephews and many others.

Corn starch as packaged for sale consists of VERY small grains (see http://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0144861705005059-gr3.jpg). When mixed with water in appropriate proportions, they exhibit the same behavior as sand at the beach's edge where it will apear to dry when stepped on and when the pressure is removed will return to being very wet.

This has to do with dense packing behavior: When undisturbed, the particles naturally form a relatively dense packing due to it's low energy configuration. watter fills the space beween the particles. By disturbing the dense packing by applying an external force, the space beween particles increases alowing for more water to be stored in the inter-particle space. The natural dense packing will occur once the disruptive forces have disipated, so to remain in the more 'solid' state, the dense-packing arangement must constantly be disturbed.

If this research is aimed at the reason for the natural dense-packing in the first place, I thought that was also well understood. Am I missing something?