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Of course Corporate America is supposed to rule America. What do you think the word "capital" in "Capitalism" means? Rule of those with capital., i.e. rule of the rich.

Apparently you fundamentally misunderstand it then. "Capitalism," or better Free Enterprise, refers to an economic system, not a political system. America isn't ruled by "capitalism." America's government constitutes a republic with democratic elections. Corporations or capitalists don't pay a direct role in that. A drunken bum or a prostitute can do something that GE, American Express, Walmart, Citibank can't do - they can vote. It is still votes that decide who is a member of the legislature and the executive.

The only surprise is how "capitalism" has been marketed to Americans such that generations of them defend the rule of the rich as some utopia or ideal.

Given your misunderstanding I can see how you think that, but it is nonsense. Besides, there is a far greater issue regarding utopias and ideals. That is the con job regarding socialism in general, and Marxist varieties specifically. The internationalist socialists comprising the Communist movement killed 100,000,000 people in the last century, and ruined country after country. All the while they were engaging in mass repression, mass murder, and malpractice. In more than one case they turned an that was a bread basket for an entire region to desolation. It is one of the great follies of man that there are still Marxists and communists in this day and age.

The invention was quite interesting, too -- a mechanical implementation of spread spectrum that was based on player piano technology.

Errr, no. And as someone who has studied Pol Pot a bit (due to family connections with some of his victims) it's clear that his atheism was not a significant motivating force in his rampage. And it's clear that neither Stalin nor Mao did anything due to their lack of belief, ...

The regimes of all three specifically targeted religious believers and institutions for heavy repression, including confiscation of property and death.

while o the other hand Hitler embraced the Catholic church and they embraced him back. Does "Gott Mitt Un" ring a bell?

The use of "Gott Mitt Un" predated Hitler's regime in German armies by hundreds of years. Hitler didn't "embrace" the Catholic church in any meaningful way, nor did the Catholic church embrace him back. The Nazis were bitter opponents of genuine Christian belief even while they worked to subvert the church for their own purposes. The christian churches were a source of considerable social resistance to the regime.

It's hard to murder millions of people just because you don't believe in something.

Atheists believe there is no god, some are extremists, and many of them hold religious belief in contempt. In the regimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot that often meant persecution and death.

Hard to do anything "because you don't believe in something"? League of Militant Atheists

For example, there are lots of people who don't believe in leprechauns, why aren't they out there committing atrocities? Why don't we label the "aleprechanists" and worry day and night about what they might do? Because it would be silly, that's why.

It would be silly because there belief in leprechauns does not constitute a mobilizing force in society and is at most a rare and quaint folk belief.

Your average atheist isn't going to be motivated to kill people in the name of his/her magical sky-daddy or the promise of an afterlife. Most of us atheists realize that we only get one life to live, and so we try to make the most of it here and now.

Individually that may be largely true. But in large numbers with support from the regime all bets are off.

Show me an example or two of atheists who've committed atrocities in the name of atheism (if you can), and I'll show you a hundred that have done it in the name of religion.
Seriously, show me some examples of people who have said "I'm killing people specifically because I don't believe in god!". Statistically there are probably some, but I can't think of any offhand.

League of Militant Atheists

... the League of Militant Atheists sometimes took a violent approach to those who would not accept the League's message. For example, "bishops, priests, and lay believers" were "arrested, shot, and sent to labour camps."[25]

The officially atheist communists killed 100,000,000 people in the last century. Religious persecution was only a portion of that, but it was there.

There are many fine people that are atheists, but atheism isn't a mark of good character, intelligence, or a guarantee of good conduct.

H1-Bs and green card holders are still guests, not Citizens.

And yet, by your own logic, simply because they can not vote, they don't have to pay taxes nor obey other laws.

On this new topic you raised:

Residents of D.C. do deserve to vote and it's well past time to fix that.

No, they don't "deserve" to vote in the slightest — their physical proximity to the seat of government already gives them undue advantage over the political process.

Look at what happens every once in a while in countries, where capitals are regular cities, rather than ones created for the purpose of hosting the government (like in the US or Australia):

• Russia
• Ukraine
• Mexico
• Thailand

The physical proximity to the government allows residents of the capital to stage protests and demonstrations — if not outright coups/revolutions and assassinations — at far lower costs, than what residents of remote regions of the same country would have to bear. Disenfranchising capital-critters was a very wise decision by the Founding Fathers. No new arguments for "fixing it" have appeared since the founding of the Republic.

For Australia, the NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved. While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the NFA, resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.

The NFA also seems to have reduced firearm homicide outside of mass shootings, as well as firearm suicide. In the seven years before the NFA (1989-1995), the average annual firearm suicide death rate per 100,000 was 2.6 (with a yearly range of 2.2 to 2.9); in the seven years after the buyback was fully implemented (1998-2004), the average annual firearm suicide rate was 1.1 (yearly range 0.8 to 1.4). In the seven years before the NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 was .43 (range .27 to .60) while for the seven years post NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate was .25 (range .16 to .33).

https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/w...

I wish we lived in a world where regulators paid attention to astronomers. Astronomers were the ones who warned that implementing leap seconds was a bad idea (see the section "Coordinated Time" starting on page 345). Nobody listened to astronomers then, and astronomers have not gained such powers in the ensuing 45 years.

I have the ultimate solution, taken from the likes of OSS, lets make all of our textbooks setup with Creative Commons License

That will prevent authors from making perfectly legitimate profits from their writings. We don't need ultimate (nor "final") solutions — we already have one and have been using it for centuries: free market.

Though colleges still compete with each other for students, other aspects of a proper market are missing. When the actual consumers of a service or product aren't the same people as the payers for it, prices spiral through the roof: education, in the modern Western world, is similar in this regard to health-care.

Would you not choose a 64Gb version of a smart phone over a 16Gb one, if someone else were paying for it anyway? Would you not agree, that the nice janitor-lady should get a raise — as long as it does not come out of your pocket? Of course, you would.

Now, the deceptive pricing — a course may cost $1000, but the $180 book required for it is extra — is a disgusting trick, which would subject a car-dealer, for example, to Attorney General's scrutiny (and prosecution). But it is a relatively small manifestation of the much bigger problem. Big Ed ought to be grilled the way Big Tobacco once was.

*cough* Harvard Calculus *cough*

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/pedagogy/harvardcalculus/

10 sec Google search: http://www.health.harvard.edu/... It's pretty well established that excessive sugar, especially refined sugar, is all kinds of bad for you, regardless of age or weight. There's hippy holistic "science," and then there's actual science. The effects of sugar are pretty far into the latter.

> What these "women only" courses and programs are saying essentially is that women are too fragile or delicate or sensitive to survive in the usual job/school environment, which is kind of insulting if you think about it at all.

From experience and various literature: there are many problems. A notable and well documented difference is the willingness of men to speak up more then women in mixed gender courses. Even a casual search shows plenty of references:

                    http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/h...

I've certainly seen this in my career in mixed gender training at all levels,and certainly seen it when training groups of younger staff.

Because killing 2,606 in the WTC should just be forgotten.

Hey. American Exceptionalist. If the rest of the world held the U.S. to that standard, the entire American population would have been exterminated decades ago. Because you can take the above number, add four zeros to it, double that number, and you have a good approximation of the number of deaths the U.S. is responsible for since WWII.

Actually you're an "American Exceptionalist" too. The difference is that you seem to think that the US is "exceptionally" bad and has had an exceptionally evil influence and impact on the world. In fact you think it is so bad that you're resorting to imaginary numbers to describe it. It is completely understandable that you turn to desperate measures if you want to deflect attention from the horror that the internationalist socialists called Communists wrecked on the world. They killed 100,000,000 people while visiting untold misery and torment on countless others. Their actions dwarf anything that the US actually did (as opposed to your imaginary numbers).

The Black Book of Communism

What's the difference?

It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available. .

Aha, happy to be mistaken and outdated on this one- I looked and found that now there is a web page via NOVA with a good interesting subset of the data. It's nicely done and at the DeepTree link at this link.

It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available. There is a lovely display, with graphical interface, which is just enchanting to wander through much of the tree of life. It does a great job conveying the scale of the diversity of life and the boggling number of species, and it's aimed at the general public. It has nice pinch/zoom/etc. touch-screen functionality on a table-sized display. Unfortunately, for years, there was exactly one place on earth where you could play with it: at the Harvard Natural History Museum. And unless you are there at a particularly empty time, you will have to squeeze a fair number of kids out of the way to actually play with it for more than about two minutes. Now, things have improved a bit and it looks like there are a grand total of four museums that have the exhibit. (You should visit if there is one near you, try to avoid a time when school field trips are likely to be there!) The development was supported by a $2.3 million US National Science Foundation grant so public money was used to develop it, and it seems feasible to implement it or at least a scaled-down version of it on what are now much more common multi-touch displays like tablets or at least be available on the web, but as far as I can tell, it's been years since the grant and still the only place you can use it is in these four museums. I see this as a missed opportunity for a dramatic broader impact on understanding evolution and the scale of the diversity of life.

It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available. There is a lovely display, with graphical interface, which is just enchanting to wander through much of the tree of life. It does a great job conveying the scale of the diversity of life and the boggling number of species, and it's aimed at the general public. It has nice pinch/zoom/etc. touch-screen functionality on a table-sized display. Unfortunately, for years, there was exactly one place on earth where you could play with it: at the Harvard Natural History Museum. And unless you are there at a particularly empty time, you will have to squeeze a fair number of kids out of the way to actually play with it for more than about two minutes. Now, things have improved a bit and it looks like there are a grand total of four museums that have the exhibit. (You should visit if there is one near you, try to avoid a time when school field trips are likely to be there!) The development was supported by a $2.3 million US National Science Foundation grant so public money was used to develop it, and it seems feasible to implement it or at least a scaled-down version of it on what are now much more common multi-touch displays like tablets or at least be available on the web, but as far as I can tell, it's been years since the grant and still the only place you can use it is in these four museums. I see this as a missed opportunity for a dramatic broader impact on understanding evolution and the scale of the diversity of life.

@Anonymous Coward: "Is history going to say "Steve Jobs invented the Apple computer"

No, because people think it was Bill Gates who single handed invented desktop computing and the software industry. I read it on a web site so it must be true.

The US military is the only entity that has actually ever carried out attacks like this

I would say his concern is well founded.

And your claim is nonsense. Consider the case of Vasili Blokhin, for instance. General Vasili Blokhin pressed a "button" (trigger) and killed the Polish army officer corp. (Admittedly he pressed that "button" repeatedly.) This was around the time that the Soviet Union confiscated food from the Ukraine to artificially create a famine and kill 7,000,000 people by the slow death of starvation. (Death was quicker for the people that walked into the grain fields to pluck some grain to eat - they were shot on the spot.)

The Katyn Massacre

In March 1940, General Blokhin personally executed all 8,000 of the captured Polish officers on 28 consecutive nights in a basement execution chamber at the Soviet secret police headquarters in Kalinin. The soundproof room was specially constructed for the murders, with a sloping concrete floor and a hose to wash away the blood.

One at a time – 250 a day – each of the Polish officers was led into the room in handcuffs, where Blokhin awaited in a butcher’s apron, cap and shoulder-length leather gloves. Each prisoner was then turned around to face a log wall, and Blokhin would shoot him in the back of the head . . .

The other 14,000 Polish intellectuals captured during the Soviet invasion met a similar fate, although not directly at the hand of General Blokhin.

Admittedly this is only a drop in the bucket of the 100,000,000 people killed by Communist regimes, but it is revealing.

http://today.law.harvard.edu/w...

as for your #2, that's ignorant hate. you imagine the motivations of people you dislike. you're the problem, to arrogantly assume that, makes you a worse kind of person than what you describe

Scientists have played pranks with co-author names. The famous Alpha-Beta-Gamma paper comes to mind. Low temp physicist Hetherington had included his dog as a co-author so that he could use "we" in the paper.

The spoof paper authored by S Candlestickmaker done by a student of S Chandrashekar was very famous. The student later lamented that spoof paper was his best known contribution to science than his PhD or his entire research career. It is telling I remember S Candlestickmaker but not the student's name.

Sorry about that. I didn't format them correctly.

Treating Pedophiles: Therapy Can Work, But It's a Challenge
It's time to reconsider how we treat pedophiles
Pessimism about pedophilia

Bird strikes frequently cause various levels of damage, sometimes resulting in fatalities. Quadcopters are made of considerably harder materials than birds generally, and something like a DJI Phantom 3 has a comparable mass to a Western Gull, which is a fairly good-sized bird.

What access to education and resources were women denied in the 1960s or '70s that men had access to? I'll wait...

Almost no engineering universities accepted female applicants in general admission until the late 1960's. There were females admitted, but those were admitted on exceptional basis and were often the child of a faculty member or large donor alumni.
Some schools admitted females in the late 1800's/early 1900's, but that was stopped after WWI. There were some later sporatic changes in admission policies,
but after WWII, there was strong lash-back against females taking up slots that should go to "our boys back from the war".
General open admissions did not begin until the late 1960's for most engineering schools
I believe that pretty much everyone allowed them in through open admission by the early 1970's (Caltech was 1970). Probably due to Title IX.

Medical schools for physicians (I'm not talking about nurses) was almost as bad regarding open admissions for females.
Harvard changed its policy in 1945, you may find some of their comments enlightening.
http://hms.harvard.edu/departm...

I do, however, fault those that chose to stay after the war and continue working on nukes.

I'm sure you do since you probably would never expect to be among the 100,000,000 people killed by Communist governments and don't appreciate the need and costs to defend a free society. After all, Stalin was going to stop all weapons research after he got the bomb, right?

The Soviet Story

You should look into what happened to "the old Bolsheviks" sometime. Left politics wasn't any protection.

http://scratched.gse.harvard.e...

Really? Where? Just because canned food is "processed" it does not make it bad for you.

There are countless studies out there regarding the health effects of processed foods. Twenty seconds on Google should answer your question.

And i have never seen a study to support this assertion in any way or form.

Then you haven't looked. You might want to actually study the issue before discussing.

After all bread is processed foods!

[facepalm]

cite an instance of Blizzard either demanding money for a tourney or denying someone a right to have a tourney.

From the article "Crafting an Industry: An Analysis of Korean Starcraft and Intellectual Properties Law" by Jacob Rogers:

From 2007 to 2011, Starcraft was actually involved in a controversy regarding its broadcasting rights. This began with requests for fees from Blizzard and culminated in a settled lawsuit in 2011.

The lawsuit began with a disagreement between Blizzard Entertainment and the Korean broadcasters over licensing rights to Starcraft television broadcasts. Shacknews, a games review and journalism website, reported that according to Blizzard CEO, Mike Morhaime, the company had begun to negotiate with KeSPA in 2007 in order to “get them to recognize [Blizzard’s] IP rights.” Blizzard further clarified the meaning of “IP rights” in an open letter written to the Korean e-sports community on May 27th, 2010. In this letter, Mike Morhaime explained that Blizzard was dismayed that KeSPA had sold broadcasting rights without Blizzard’s permission. Blizzard therefore chose to bypass KeSPA and license its rights to Starcraft and Starcraft II to Gretech Corporation, which broadcasted games under the name Gom TV.

Blizzard provided the other television stations a grace period lasting until August 2010, after which it would require them to cease broadcasting altogether. KeSPA prevented Gretech from running any leagues by forbidding all the teams from sending any players to the Gretech leagues. Blizzard responded to these moves by breaking off negotiations entirely, then filing suit in October 2010, first against MBC and then against OGN and KeSPA. The parties settled in mediation in the summer of 2011 and now the companies have a 2-year agreement in place for broadcasting rights.

So yes, Blizzard filed a lawsuit against a broadcaster of a tournament.

No one needs Blizzard's permission to have a SC tourney

Blizzard disagrees. It filed suit.

I disagree with the Lexra employee since a lot of effort and creativity goes into designing an instruction set.

In the US at least, "sweat of the brow" does not by itself allow copyright protection; it is irrelevant how much work is done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The NEC versus Intel case is illustrative though. There microcode was ruled to be copyrightable but reverse engineering and clean room implementation is protected.

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/ar...

We send spacecraft on comparable missions all the time. And it doesn't really take a spectacularly large payload to destroy (yes, destroy) an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter. 1/2-kilometer-wide Itokawa could be blown into tiny bits which would not recoalesce, via a 0,5-1,0 megatonne nuclear warhead, a typical size in modern nuclear arsenals (in addition, the little pieces would be pushed out of their current orbit).

I know it's a common misconception that "nuking" an asteroid would simply create a few large fragments that would hit Earth with even more devastation, but that's not backed by simulation data. And anyway, even if it didn't blow the asteroid to tiny bits (which simulations say it would) and even if it didn't push the remaining pieces off trajectory (which they say it does), anything that spreads an Earth impact out over a larger period of time is a good thing - it means the higher percentage of the energy that's absorbed high in the atmosphere rather than reaching the surface (less ejecta, lower ocean waves, a broader (weaker) distribution of the heat pulse, etc), the weaker the shockwaves, the weaker the total heat at any given point in time, and the more time for Earth to radiate away any imparted energy or precipitate out any ejecta cloud. If the choice is between 15 Chelyabink-sized impactor (most of which will strike places where they won't even be witnessed) or one Meteor Crater-sized impactor (same total mass), pick the Chelyabinsk ones. 50 10-megatonne meteor crater impactors or one 500-megatonne Upheaval Dome impactor? Pick the former. The asteroid impacts calculator shows the former generating a negligible fireball and 270mph wind burst at 2km distance, while the latter creates the same winds 25km away (156 times the area) and a fireball that even 25km away is 50 times brighter than the sun, hot enough to instantly set most materials on fire.

But that's all irrelevant because, quite simply, simulations show that nuclear weapons do work against asteroids.

What we need is enough detection lead time to be able to launch a nuclear strike a few months before the impact date (to give time for the debris to disperse). There is no need to "land" or "drill" for the warhead. There is no pressure wave; instead, an immense burst of X-rays is absorbed through the outer skin of the asteroid on the side of the explosion, causing it to vaporize (unevenly) from within, especially near the ground zero point, and creating powerful shockwaves throughout its body. In addition to ripping it apart, the vaporized material and higher energy ejecta flies off, predominantly on the side where the explosion was detonated, acting a broad planar thruster.

How do you think these decisions are made? Carl Sagan was involved with basically every NASA planetary mission (including Apollo) from 1960 through Voyager and Viking. He proposed that Titan might have a lot of hydrocarbons (it does) a thick atmosphere (it does), haze (check) and maybe a biosphere (the jury is still out). (He did propose a strong greenhouse for Titan, and struck out there. The surface is not as balmy as he hoped.) As far as I can remember, no one was proposing a biosphere for Pluto (we didn't even know Pluto had a moon at that point). The decision to do a Titan close approach was rational, and (while it certainly wasn't his decision alone) his advocacy for it carried a lot of weight.

Now Naomi Oreskes is a "scientist"??? You might want to tell other people that, because nobody else seems to know.

Good grief, Jane! Yeah, that's yet another good example of your baseless, unprovoked accusations. Harvard seems to know (emphasis added) that "Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences . She recently arrived at Harvard after spending 15 years as Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography."

So Harvard seems to know that Prof. Oreskes isn't "just" a science historian; she's also an Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences after being an Adjunct Professor of Geosciences.

But let me guess. Jane has "incontrovertible evidence" (like bananas) that Prof. Oreskes is a "false consensus lady" charlatan and famous purveyor of scientific bullshit with a bad reputation in regard to scientific integrity who's either incompetent or a liar and spreads statistical nonsense and a parody of good statistics and blatant & obvious falsehoods.

Naturally, Jane decrees that Prof. Oreskes is a laughing stock with no credibility.

For some reason, Harvard doesn't seem to agree with Jane/Lonny Eachus. A brief glance at Prof. Oreskes' CV shows why: she has a background in geology (like Richard Alley and many other scientists) and actually wrote her PhD thesis on the "false consensus" of American earth scientists in the early twentieth century, who were united in their opposition to continental drift.

So not only is Prof. Oreskes a scientist, her other field of expertise is critically evaluating consensus in science. That would seem to suggest yet another reason why Jane should think twice before lecturing a scientist who's also a science historian about how scientists think.

It's not clear why Jane/Lonny keeps lecturing scientists who are also science historians about what scientists think. Perhaps an analogy could help. Jane, suppose someone who had never professionally programmed using Ruby on Rails asked you how most Ruby programmers would solve a problem. Because you're a professional Ruby programmer and you generously assume this person is asking in good faith out of genuine curiosity, you tell him how most Ruby programmers would solve that problem.

In response, that person (who's not a professional Ruby programmer) accuses you of incompetence, and insists that he knows how most Ruby programmers would solve the problem better than you do.

At this point, if you're feeling generous, you might provide a link to a poll showing that most professional Ruby programmers do in fact solve the problem that way. In response, he accuses the professional programmers who organized the poll of being charlatan laughing stocks with no credibility who are either incompetent or liars.

Seriously, wouldn't that seem a little ridiculous?

"@NaomiOreskes How do you live with yourself? Do you sleep well, knowing the pseudo-science you have tried to pull off? Just curious." [Lonny Eachus, 2014-07-20]

Those poor rats. Why don't we put humans in cages and restrict their calories, and have a control group of humans with no exercise wheel for them? Because it would be unethical. Why is it ethical to treat fellow mortals such as rats in a way that's unethical to treat humans?

Let us cease testing animals, unless we can get their informed consent. Instead, let us research and develop things like organs on a chip. Then inform the rats of the findings too, so they can live happier, healthier, freer lives along with us.

We should be collaborating with animals to expand knowledge, not killing them in unreproducible experiments.

More than that not all of it hits you is that it doesn't all hit you at the same time. Earth has a massive radiative surface area; any delays between deposits of energy are hugely important.

Anyway, the AC who replied first got it exactly right. Nuclear weapons in space are X-ray weapons that deliver force by boiling away the surfaces of objects (even at a distance). Not only is there an immediate direct effect from the boiling off of mass, but you're also creating a coma around the object which will also have an effect by increasing the force of the solar wind on it. It's like giving the object a magnetic sail.

Redirection really isn't inconceivable.... given enough time. But "time" is really the key issue. You're not going to redirect a large asteroid days before impact. But years in advance, that's quite doable for reasonable sized bodies.

The linked-to article from the CDC accounts for that. In Figure 3, you'll see the heavily skewed distribution of sugar-drink consumption. About 50% of the population (myself included), consumes zero on any given day, but it goes waaaaay up from there. The 178/103 cal value I used is the average, reported by the authors, across the entire population.

I would argue, however, that this does not change my math, since I'm talking averages. If half of the population isn't drinking any, the way to cut the average consumption in half is for those that are doing the drinking to have a commensurate decrease in their consumption. The ones most affected by drinking would also be most affected by cutting back. (As you have said.) While the half that isn't consuming these drinks would see no weight loss because of others' cutting back (although there's evidence to suggest that your own weight is influenced by the weight of your friends), the ones that are drinking would see more substantial weight loss (and boy do they need it).

Again, on average, the math works out in the way that I have described

some unsubstantiated health claims

Absolutely false. The claims were substantiated, the problem with it was, the claims that Omega-3 Fatty Acids cross over into claims ONLY drugs can make. Therein lies the rub.

omega-3 fatty acids, using claims such as “fatty acids your body needs for promoting heart health.”

If you look at the research on Omega-3 Fatty Acids, the claims are true, the problem is no drug company can make a profit selling something that occurs in nature, without modification.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nu...

The problem wasn't the claims, the problem was that the claims are only allowed by the FDA for "Drugs" See the following link for details the FDA is lying about ...

http://articles.mercola.com/si...

Please make sure you follow all the references at the bottom of this article.

Here is the quote, From the FDA, which makes clear that it is the CLAIMS they have a problem with, not the science behind the claims ..

We have determined that your walnut products are promoted for conditions that cause them to be drugs because these products are intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease.

If eating healthy "prevents, mitigates and treats" disease, then any claims that eating healthy would classify it as a drug. THAT is the problem.

It's not as simple as "butter is good for you", but here is a decent link:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ma...

I'm not sure what you've been eating instead of butter, but if it's margarine, by all means ditch the stuff and buy a pound of butter. Margarine is full of trans fats (or at least, it used to be), and while most nutrition studies are full of caveats and qualifications, it really is pretty damn near universal that the trans fats are just horrible for you. Margarine makers have been switching away from trans fats for some years, precisely because of this, though this announcement is the final nail in that coffin.

The actual healthiness of butter is still heavily qualified, so we don't really know. The biggest problem, as always, is calories: high-fat foods (deep fried or otherwise) make it really easy to consume more calories than you need. Eaten in moderation, with half an eye on the bottom line (you don't need to count if you have a bias towards mimimizing the junk), you can go ahead and eat pretty much whatever you like, in small amounts.

We still don't really have a good handle on exactly what is "healthy". Many people thrive on a variety of different diets, some of which include fried foods. There is no magic bullet; removing saturated fats didn't turn out to be it. (The history of that is complicated and ugly, involving some really horrific biases and conflicts of interest.) The real consensus is that if you eat a diverse diet with a very large proportion of vegetables and your body will not begrudge you the occasional deep-fried treat. The rest is too murky for specific advice, especially since most people aren't even following that simple plan, so it's hard to optimize further.

(ii) in the case of a food service or drinking establishment, either the establishment in which the communication occurs has less than 3,750 gross square feet of space (excluding space used for customer parking and for no other purpose), or the establishment in which the communication occurs has 3,750 gross square feet of space or more (excluding space used for customer parking and for no other purpose) and--

(I) if the performance is by audio means only, the performance is communicated by means of a total of not more than 6 loudspeakers, of which not more than 4 loudspeakers are located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space;

So most establishments have a defense. Maybe this one did. But the judge heard from only one side since the restaurant never showed up to court. Too bad.

The Black Book of Communism

It is well-known that the Earth is in an unusually cold period with historically low atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

A transit from an icehouse to a greenhouse phase would likely involve profound (and potentially destructive) changes for human civilization, but the planet has undergone this cycle many times before, and we are profoundly foolish to think that our impact has been significant - it has not.

Well, thanks for telling us. I'll inform the IPCC.

It is well-known that the Earth is in an unusually cold period with historically low atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

A transit from an icehouse to a greenhouse phase would likely involve profound (and potentially destructive) changes for human civilization, but the planet has undergone this cycle many times before, and we are profoundly foolish to think that our impact has been significant - it has not.

Is Harvard known for engineering?

Short answer is yes. They have a rather distinguished list of alumni. Some of the ones people here might know of include Bob Metcalf (inventor of ethernet), Dennis Ritchie (inventor of C), Fred Brooks (director of development for OS/360), Steve Balmer (yeah I know), Trip Hawkins (founder of Electronic Arts) and Bill Gates (didn't graduate but attended and yeah I know...)

Harvard engineering might not be on the level with MIT but it doesn't suck.

You're doing the wrong math.

"No correlation" means you get admitted at the same rate as everyone else because your application is the same as everyone else. Asian Americans make up 20% of Harvard admissions and roughly 6% of the population.

Which means that Harvard is telling the world Asians are 133% more qualified then everyone else. So you just proved that they should admit less Asians, not more, because you showed that Asians are just as qualified rather then showing they're 250% qualified.

There are no left parties in the US.

You are one of the ignorant majority I see.

There seem to be one or more gaps between what you believe and what actually is. Unpopularity and non-existence are not the same.

"Left" parties do in fact exist in the US, more than one in fact. Here are a couple:

Communist Party USA
Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

And they work hard to move their agendas forward.

Communist Party USA: 'Working with the Democratic Party' is key

Thankfully there are few Americans that are given to this ideology which has proven so murderous over the last century.

The Black Book of Communism

But you still have two problems there. Firstly, when the US has had cold winters, Europe has had mild winters, yet suffered the exact same problem. So your argument of a correlation of cold winters is also false - it only correlates if you take an arbitrary subset of known data.

Secondly, you argue that usage of neonicotinoids don't correlate - at best you can say they don't appear to correlate in the data you have seen, but plenty of studies show otherwise. For example, this study finds a correlation between the use of imidacloprid and cold winters, rather than varroa mite and cold winters:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ne...

One could equally argue from this, and the European experience of mild winters, actually shows that neonicotinoids are in fact the common factor in the problem.

If only there was some sort of test that people could take to unearth their biases...

Oh, here are some! https://implicit.harvard.edu/i...

*All* Asians make up ~5.6% of the population of the United States, but they make up 20% of those admitted to Harvard. Discrimination?! https://college.harvard.edu/ad... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

It's a ghastly arighmetic, but it ought to be done: a nuclear strike against Iran would kill many, but it can decisively bring the country to its knees and nip in the bud a coming clash of civilizations that would in the long run result in far more deaths and suffering.

This would work best if it's part of an operation against Iran's larger and even more dangerous ally, Russia. Don't forget that the US has come to be in a position where it can execute a pre-emptive counterforce nuclear strike against Russia: http://belfercenter.hks.harvar... The silo locations are known and the mobile katyusha launchers are being tracked. That only leaves submarine launches as a retaliatory possibility for the russkies, which would be sufficiently few to be mopped up by missile defense. Given the Russian populace's fervent nationalism, their deep-seated need to be ruled by tyrants -- from the tzars through the commies to Putin, and their propensity to export their brotherly love to their unfortunate neighbors, justification for neutering the evil now is easy to come by.

Any fellow Canadians reading my post: lest you disagree, I remind you the Russian bear has its eye on the whole arctic, and the current framework under which negotiations over territory are unfolding is but a game: a signature to any resultant agreement will be no more binding to the Russians than their signature was on the Budapest Memorandum of 1995 which gave Ukraine security assurances in exchange for them giving up their nuclear arsenal. The Russian doesn't understand diplomacy, agreements, international law, or honor -- he only understands force, and perceives the lack of aggression as weakness.

Resurgent? You're like the bully that keeps asking, "why are you hitting yourself?

First that doesn't mean what you thought it meant. You really need to rework it a bit to make it an insult directed at me .

Second here you go

http://hir.harvard.edu/archive...

Maybe you should get together with the guy who thinks all slavs view each other as brothers (pro tip ask the Poles about that) and form a reading circle.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ne...

The idea of using lasers to de-orbit space debris has been around for a while.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/...
Back when I was working on lasers for power beaming, the idea was discussed as an alternate use for the ground-based lasers.