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Um, they did, and published it in a whole lotta journals. But you didn't read them, did you?

Nope, haven't heard of it at all. Then again I did read about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in A Theory of Human Motivation and his book Motivation and Personality as well as several other scholarly texts on motivation.

I tried searching for a text version of the presentation and only came up with the animation, do you have a link to a non-multimedia version?

[...] how well nuclear safety engineers are doing: despite two disasters which were both literally ten times worse than they were ordered to prepare for.

And that is what we should be questioning, I think. Why weren't the plants designed to withstand a Mw 9.5 earthquake plus tsunami and fire? We know that happens, sooner or later*, and the risks are just to high to gamble on the possibility of those events not happening at a particular location during the lifetime of the plant. Better be on the safe side with such things.

* see e.g. McCaffrey, Global frequency of magnitude 9 earthquakes, for an estimate.

Ack!!

Sorry, I must have screwed up the html.

As far as your comparison of deaths caused by religion to those of atheism, I would simply point you to Communism & Socialism http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM with more here http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm which also includes other interesting categories to compare against.

A telescope of the NASA-sponsored Catalina Sky Survey north of Tucson, Arizona discovered 2010 TD54 on Oct. 9 at (12:55 a.m. PDT) during routine monitoring of the skies.

. . . if an asteroid can get this close to us without our knowledge until 3 days before a flyby, the Pan-STARRS isn't doing enough to detect NEOs in advance.

I am fortunate in working in an organisation with perhaps the best and most competent ops manager I have ever worked with, but even with well-written procedures and well-trained ops staff, errors still occur — but very rarely.

[...] remind me again why mere viewing of material should be illegal?

Because, obviously, the viewing of material makes you want more of that material. This has been scientifically analysed and shown to be TRUE. At least with
#define TRUE false
.

Milton Diamond, The Scientist magazine, March 2010. "Porn: Good for Us?"

This opinion piece takes a look at scientific research around pornography.

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. . . .

In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. . . .

In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless . . . .

Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies . . . .

Adapted from “Pornography, Public Acceptance and Sex Related Crime: A Review,” Int J Law Psychiatry, 32:304–14, 2009. http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2005to2009/2009-pornography-acceptance-crime.html

Actually, accumulation time for Pan-Starrs survey images is typically only around 30 seconds, which is not dramatically different from other surveys. At 2.8 gigabytes of data per image (16-bits per pixel) you are looking at a data rate of 1.50 gigabit per second.

Most of processing (calibration, star detection...) and object detection (asteroids, supernovae and other transient objects) is very automated, with minimal interference from humans. Next to the asteroid/supernova search the project will create a master sky image, adding all good images into one to create a comprehensive and deep survey of the cosmos.

Source: Pan-Starrs Website.

Better information, though not of great quantity is found on the Pan=Starrs website.

What is now online is the PS1 prototype on Haleakala. PS4 is the final goal of this project, which is basically 4 PS1 units each equipped with 1 1.4 Gigapixel camera, to be build on Mauna Kea. As usual there are delays and the project focus is now bringing PS1 to "full survey" status (which seems to be completed) and building the PS2 telescope, also on Haleakala.

Very touching description of the union movement in the United States. Complete bullshit of course, but touching just the same. Unions demanding better working conditions and higher wages were organizing and striking long before railroads were even invented.

Unions have a place, the problem is that they became too powerful and subsequently too greedy. Much of our economic problems today are the result.

Anyone with a good telescope available?!

Depends what you consider "good." If you're thinking of something in the $199-$15,999 price range, with an aperture of 4-16 inches (which should be plenty for just looking at a nearby supernova, then the 16" Meade or one of the 14" Celestrons where I stargaze should work.

If, on the other hand, you're thinking more in the $3,000,000-$400,000,000 range, then I'd have to schlep all the way up to the general vicinity of work.

But I'm relatively certain that even folks around work would be interested in looking at it. I think it'd be a Type II supernova, but I could ask if the Type Ia collaboration I'm in could look at it too... but unfortunately since it's pretty much up during the day this time of year, and "close to" the Sun in the sky, it'd be a hard target.

Anyone with a good telescope available?!

Depends what you consider "good." If you're thinking of something in the $199-$15,999 price range, with an aperture of 4-16 inches (which should be plenty for just looking at a nearby supernova, then the 16" Meade or one of the 14" Celestrons where I stargaze should work.

If, on the other hand, you're thinking more in the $3,000,000-$400,000,000 range, then I'd have to schlep all the way up to the general vicinity of work.

But I'm relatively certain that even folks around work would be interested in looking at it. I think it'd be a Type II supernova, but I could ask if the Type Ia collaboration I'm in could look at it too... but unfortunately since it's pretty much up during the day this time of year, and "close to" the Sun in the sky, it'd be a hard target.

I'm not saying this is the case but it is possible. Anyone have research data either for or against this hypothesis?

Here you go.

Quite extensive, so I'll just pull a paragraph for you:

Within Japan itself, the dramatic increase in available pornography and sexually explicit materials is apparent to even a casual observer. This is concomitant with a general liberalization of restrictions on other sexual outlets as well. Also readily apparent from the information presented is that, over this period of change, sex crimes in every category, from rape to public indecency, sexual offenses from both ends of the criminal spectrum, significantly decreased in incidence.

Now obviously, this discussion is solely of Japan, which has a number of other factors going on that should be considered before trying to extrapolate, but frankly, I don't care about and am too lazy to look for any more data. If you're really interested, this study cites a few other studies which apparently had similar results.

Does your ass hurt from the constant excretion of "facts"?

http://hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

Looks like you're confusing the Sandanistas for the US backed Samoza dictatorship, which we left after we occupied the country from 1912 to 1933 [wikipedia.org]. The Sandanistas were no saints, but they were Nicaraguans.

The Sandinistas were worse than Somoza. Between 1937 and 1979, Somoza's regime murdered around 15,000 people. The Sandinistas murdered 5,000 in around eight years. Somoza's secret police was some 400 people. The Sandinistas expanded it by ten-fold.

Even if what you're saying was remotely true, you'd still be advocating direct material support for one terrorist organization to combat another terrorist organization.

I am not advocating support. The US began aiding a left-of-center military government which then transitioned into a centrist civilian-led government. However terrorist Salvadoran military forces and death squads were, they were fighting against a terrorist organization that probably would have killed more civilians and non-combatants in "peacetime" than were killed by the military and death squads during war.

I read the declassified "Growth and Prospects of Leftist Extremists in El Salvador", I believe from 1980, and the USSR is not even mentioned (though it may be in a redacted portion.) Leftist support is mentioned from throughout Central America, but that's to be expected. It did tally the death toll of leftist extremists at 450 from 1978 to 1979. After the US got involved in propping up the government against the largely native movement, the death toll eventually reached 75,000.

Actually, the timeline of US withdrawal is the one that matches more completely with moves towards peace. Turns out when you aren't having the CIA train every evil shithead at the School of the Americas, and then arming him to the teeth with drug money and weapons sales to sworn enemies in Iran, peace does have a chance.

US aid for anti-communist groups followed Soviet and Cuban aid to pro-communist groups. The anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua were fighting a totalitarian regime before they were aided by the US government. Absent external funding for one side or another in Nicaragua, it was the anti-communist side that won free and fair elections. After the civil war ended in El Salvador, it was the anti-communist side that won elections. This indicates that it was the pro-communist forces that were being propped up in the face of popular resistance.

And now, without further explanation, I will say that any political leader of any democratic and sovereign nation accused of anything can be overthrown by the American government because... well, just because.

I stated US rationale for overthrowing Mosaddegh, and it was hardly "just because".

Does mike know how to accidentally throw in the towel or what? But you still managed to even fuck that one up in three, two, one...

Chile 1973

The article alleges "Chile 1973", not "Chile 1970". The CIA opposed Allende, but was not involved in the 1973 coup.

I'll provide the links to the rest. Maybe you care to read them, but I kinda doubt it. Your perspective hinges entirely on things that you wish were true.

Argentina 1976

The Wikipedia article states that the big crime of the US was knowing about the coup two months ahead of time, with the junta being diplomatically supported by the US. No evidence that the CIA orchestrated and executed the coup.

Turkey 1980

Again, the big crime of the US here is being tipped off beforehand. No evidence that the CIA orchestrated or executed the coup

Your proposal that all religions are hoaxes is astounding.

I made no such proposal. I simply start from the premise that some are known to be (Scientology... Heaven's Gate... etc.), and since all theist religions are nonsense, and that religion is a first-order gateway to power in most societies, that intentional deceit is one of the very likely candidates for their origin. There is both motive and opportunity.

But your suggestion that this is how ALL the major religions of the world started is simply absurd.

Again, I made no such suggestion. You really need to work on those reading skills. I said that I was suggesting that Christianity may have started that way, and that it would not be either the first time, or the last, and that people had given their lives for a hoax, and laid out a few examples.

Again, please stop spreading false conspiracy theories and state something that's actually believable.

What's not believable about one possibility for Christianity's origin being a constructed religion? I mean, look at it: We have total nonsense stories about magic, and quite a few of them, told in the present tense -- not just creation stories, but stories about a magical man who walked among the people of the time (of whom there is no actual record.) We have direct conflicts in the associated myths, right in the cult's own book (for instance, Luke says Mary was being purified in Jerusalem at the same time that Matthew says Mary was hiding in Egypt, waiting for Herod to die -- one or the other... or both... of those statements is an untruth.) And Christianity has been, since it's very founding, a power base. It was used to oppose the Romans, to stand apart from the Jews, to found communities and secret societies and so forth. It has grown today into some of the wealthier entities on the planet - the Catholic church is a good example of one of those entities - and yet, the whole thing is based upon nonsense stories; furthermore, many components of those stories resemble previous religions almost to a 't.' Smells an awful lot like "borrowing."

As I said, (and please pay attention this time), I don't know how Christianity got started. There's no record of that except in the bible, and as the bible proves itself an unreliable record many times over, I won't accept the bible's account of anything as evidence by itself. I just consider it likely that it was an intentional construct. But hey, it might have been just bad bread... you can see amazing visions with a little fungus byproduct in your system. Or the whole thing might have been the result of a head injury. Or dreams. CS Lewis asks, "Liar, lunatic or lord?" I think he's being more than a little disingenuous there, as there certainly are other possibilities (such as entirely fictional, alien, or peacemaker) but as one can ask those questions about Jesus, one can also pose them about the religion itself. Lies are certainly not uncommon in human experience.

I confirmed the ~1.5E21 J/K estimate for the upper 1m, but Lukas 1991 estimates the depth of the upper mixing layer at ~30m in the Western Pacific. It may be more shallow elsewhere, but an area-weighted average is likely to be close to that of the Pacific. So the more relevant figure is likely to be ~4E22 J/K.

There has been quite a bit of work put into different 'icecretes', as a matter of fact. Here are a few examples, although I'm sure there's more that I'm not even aware of:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/31-70/Ch6.htm
Skip down to para 6-8.c and 6-10.b

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk

http://pisces.hilo.hawaii.edu/documents/VT-NIA-PISCESFinalReport.pdf
A *very* interesting paper on using lunar regolith icecrete for construction (among other topics)

-b

Mod parent up: it's a good, concise, balanced reply.

I'd also recommend that anyone interested in following up this story look up some of the stuff by (e.g.) John Bradley on this as well, to provide a bit of a counterpoint, as the headline-grabbing articles tend to lack scientifi balance. The following link's a good few years old, and the work has moved on a bit, but it is a pretty good potted summary of the arguments for and against a biological origin of these structures.

http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Dec97/LifeonMarsUpdate2.html

(Disclaimer: I'm an astrophysicist that works on astrochemistry, but I also don't personally do lab work on meteorites).

If there is a perception that by either imprisoning or killing a person will significantly increase a corporation's profits, and a realistic possibility that they can get away with it, most corporations would do either without much hesitation. Oh and under some circumstances "Big Brother" could just as easily be a corporate oligarchy.

Why would there be such a "perception"? The premise of the original poster was that if government wasn't doing some bad thing, then some private entity would do something at least as bad. So that implies if Nazi Germany weren't invading Russia or gas six million Jews, then some private enterprise would do something at least as bad. Believe me, the perception is not there.

Granted private industry is hasn't gassed as many innocent people as the Nazis, but then again your comparison is using one of the most murderous governments that existed in the last few hundred years. However, I agree that it is highly unlikely a corporation would have invaded Russia or committed genocide, such things aren't profitable to most corporations. Yet, aren't workers who have been killed in preventable industrial accidents or bystanders fatally poisoned by toxic waste any less dead than the victims of the Nazis? Poor workplace safety and dumping of known hazardous materials is often rationalized by the perpetrators because it makes their businesses more profitable. Of course, if you really believe someone has to be killed by a thug with a gun and a uniform for their death to count, there are modern corporations based around that concept.

The main problem that I have with people like you is that while being honestly skeptical of the government is all well and good, you don't seem to think corporations are an appreciable threat to individual rights. The exact nature of the threat may differ, but the magnitude is at least as great. Not matter its source, power and influence can be abused! I'll leave you with some links about of how a group of economic interests stripped an entire ethnic group their voting rights, as well as many others that didn't meet arbitrary standards, and ultimately destroyed a sovereign nation with significant participation of the common people in government and replaced it with a de facto plutocracy.

Who said that? I don't believe that a private business, whether it be a corporation or some other type of business, can be, much less is, a threat on on the scale of government (unless it so happens to be a government). But it's obvious that businesses can be a threat to individual rights.

Did you bother to read my links at all? If not I'll summarize, the Committee for Public Safety was a sham political organization created by the local agricultural oligopoly which seized control of the government of Hawaii (which at the time was a constitutional Monarchy with a parliament and other forms of voter representation) and later entirely remade it based on predetermined goals. It's not like these well-intentioned plantation owners were corrupted after finding themselves in control of Hawaii, they plotted to disenfranchise most of the population well before they had political power!

Let's consider examples. There are four examples of some group killing 10 million or more people. All of these are governments (USSR, Communist China, Nazi Germany, and Nationalist China). There are eleven organizations thought to have killed more than a million people. All but one were a government (and the Chinese Communists later became a government that killed tens of millions). Rwanda isn't listed and might not have met the million death threshold, but they were a government as well.

I read some of your link and it appears that the author(s) of this work

If there is a perception that by either imprisoning or killing a person will significantly increase a corporation's profits, and a realistic possibility that they can get away with it, most corporations would do either without much hesitation. Oh and under some circumstances "Big Brother" could just as easily be a corporate oligarchy.

Why would there be such a "perception"? The premise of the original poster was that if government wasn't doing some bad thing, then some private entity would do something at least as bad. So that implies if Nazi Germany weren't invading Russia or gas six million Jews, then some private enterprise would do something at least as bad. Believe me, the perception is not there.

The main problem that I have with people like you is that while being honestly skeptical of the government is all well and good, you don't seem to think corporations are an appreciable threat to individual rights. The exact nature of the threat may differ, but the magnitude is at least as great. Not matter its source, power and influence can be abused! I'll leave you with some links about of how a group of economic interests stripped an entire ethnic group their voting rights, as well as many others that didn't meet arbitrary standards, and ultimately destroyed a sovereign nation with significant participation of the common people in government and replaced it with a de facto plutocracy.

Who said that? I don't believe that a private business, whether it be a corporation or some other type of business, can be, much less is, a threat on on the scale of government (unless it so happens to be a government). But it's obvious that businesses can be a threat to individual rights.

Let's consider examples. There are four examples of some group killing 10 million or more people. All of these are governments (USSR, Communist China, Nazi Germany, and Nationalist China). There are eleven organizations thought to have killed more than a million people. All but one were a government (and the Chinese Communists later became a government that killed tens of millions). Rwanda isn't listed and might not have met the million death threshold, but they were a government as well. In fact, of the largest mass murders and genocides of history, only one is a corporation, the Congo Free State (though a corporation run by the head of state of Belgium). It happens to demonstrate that a corporate state need not be even a whit better than any other form of government.

It boggles me that anyone can consider business as big as threat as government. You'd have to completely ignore who has been doing the killing for the past century and more.

As I understand it, we know there's olivine on Mars and that there's water on Mars. Assuming the laws of physics operate the same on Mars as on Earth, then you have all the explanation you need for methane on Mars. Serpentinization is the process of reacting olivine with water. It generates methane as a byproduct.

The question isn't whether serpentinization is a source of methane, but rather whether it is the majority source or not. My take is that if the methane production was due to life on Mars, there'd be a lot more methane being produced than a few hundred tons a day. I don't see life on Mars staying in one place over millions much less hundreds of millions of years. But I suppose there's a chance it could happen that way (say if life on Mars is a relatively recent phenoma).

Google is your friend, and can help you find the answer. Ok, maybe not a specific answer, but pretty damned close. :)

    I suggest 10 24' diameter balloons, with breakaway tethers should one pop (no need to carry the extra weight of a dead balloon). If that can launch a compact car into LEO, it should be able to take a 6 year old high enough where you won't have to hear him scream. Well, at least until hypoxia kicks in, then it doesn't matter.

    Make sure you strap a camera to him, a little something like the Blair Witch Project, except in the daylight, with the only backdrop being the sky. Well, you may have the incidental aircraft in the background. I think a 6 year old and 10 24' balloons may ruin a perfectly good flight. What exactly put that Airbus A320 down in the Hudson? I think the whole bird thing was just a conspiracy to cover up the fact that it was a flock of school kids tethered to weather balloons with cameras strapped to their asses. Oh, imagine the bad press when you have to admit that your A320 just ingested a flock of school children in the engines. Oh, and the mess on the ground. I'd hate to be walking down the street just to get splattered by that. I thought it was nasty when PETA threw red paint on me for wearing a leather jacket? That would just be disgusting.

    And as a side note, based on those numbers, it would take about 80 24' diameter helium balloons to lift a 40' city bus. *THAT* would be something hilarious to see, but I'd hate to be under the landing zone. You know eventually they'll pop or leak. Some famous guy said "what comes up must come down", but I think he may have been full of shit. A flying 40' city bus could leave a little bit of a crater. I don't want to think of the logistics of filling the 80 balloons simultaneously though. That's a lot of helium. Just imagine if you got on the bus thinking "Oh, I'm just going to work", and then find that your bus is heading up towards 100,000 feet, and the driver keeps saying "Sir, please stay behind the white line." White line my ass, I'm on a flying bus!

    Maybe sometimes you shouldn't ask the questions, because they may be answered and then some. :)

First, let's look at a fair attempt to explain why quantum indeterminacy is not just the same thing as classical indeterminacy (like your two particles, which by your question were presumably determinate in the classical model, at least until they became entangled). You seem to be reasoning much as the following note claims early quantum physicists tried to, when they first grappled with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the question of knowing the position and velocity of an electron simultaneously. I give you someone deliberately trying to put the concept in normal, natural language and not use any actual math:

http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/~ronald/310/Quanta.htm

One point is, the interpretation that we can't know both position and velocity at the same instant, therefore the electron doesn't have both at the same instant, doesn't explain that thing you refer to as "with no regard to distance". This is what sometimes gets called "Spooky action" and is related to non-locality in general. Starting from the interpretation that it's not our not knowing that causes the indeterminacy but the indeterminacy which causes our not knowing turns out to be putting the horse back in front of the cart. Once people started working from the idea that the indeterminacy is fundamental and not like your example of the balls (where there is a definite color for each, and the observer just doesn't know it yet), they started making progress on figuring out how entanglement could be faster than light.

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Quantum_indeterminacy

This is about what non-locality really means: One consequence is that we can't assign a local cause (such as: a localized observer hasn't looked yet) to explain why something on the quantum level is determinate, or we lose the ability to explain how the faster than light part happens.

Just as the original QM problem was about determining position and velocity, talking about "non-localizable" (position), and instantanious/faster than light (velocity) is two ends of the same stick. The more you prove that the action happens much faster than the limitation of light-speed, the more you can't claim the action is caused by anything in a particular locale.

None in Polynesia? Tell that to the Polynesian Voyaging Society, http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/. Though not a daily form of transportation any longer, there is an ongoing, long-term collection of projects and groups throughout Polynesia rebuilding traditional wayfinding and sailing skills. GP has an interesting idea, though I don't think a double-hulled canoe, even a rather large one, and a few thousand of its twins, would make any difference whatsoever. And to let my political stripes show, I might question having some of the poorest folks in the world, already worrying about their island homes being inundated by sea-level rise, pick of the trash of the richest folks in the world.

Female-phenotype XXY seems to be very rare but has been reported.

Cases of individuals who had an XXY karyotype and a female phenotype have been reported [37].
[37] Schmid M, Guttenbach M, Endres H, Terruhn V. A 47,XXY female with unusual genitalia. Hum Genet 1992;90:346â"9.
source

47,XXY female with testicular feminization and positive SRY: a case report.

and even An SRY-negative 47,XXY mother and daughter

Further discussion, rather inconclusive: bodieslikeours forum - anecdotal references to an XXY female in New Zealand, and of Klinefelter himself saying that 1 of his original 9 patients was female

I'll raise you a Hawaii telescope site linky

The moon has 1 'trillionth' the atmospheric pressure as earth, that's just about as close to zero as you can get. So I'll agree there is *some* but it ain't gonna be moving anything.

That said, some additional reading shows how electrostatic charges can cause cycling of moon dust up and down the elevation range much like an atmosphere would do.

So I did indeed learn something ;-) But it isn't the atmosphere that's going to cause dust particles to get places they could cause problems on the solar panels.

You are mistaken, of course. You are merely trying to pretend that it is OK to steal. You know this. Your example is childish and disingenuous because you are ignoring the labor that went into a product. You are stuck in Piaget's Concrete stage, unable to understand events unless they are intrinsically associated with material objects. Since piracy of easily copyable items like digital media only involves not paying for the labor that went into producing the good, you are unable to understand that something was indeed stolen.

This, by the way, firmly places you in a clinically pre-adolescent stage of cognitive development.

They probably open a valve to let the helium out and try to reuse both the balloon and the electronics pack.

From http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/lift.html

A 7 foot dia balloon lifts about a dozen pounds and takes about two hundred cu feet to fill. At about a quarter a cubic foot, it's going to cost about fifty bucks for the helium.

Helium is NOT cheap... Looking at more than $2 per hour per balloon just for the helium. And helium is not a renewable resource.

Within Japan itself, the dramatic increase in available pornography and sexually explicit materials is apparent to even a casual observer. This is concomitant with a general liberalization of restrictions on other sexual outlets as well. Also readily apparent from the information presented is that, over this period of change, sex crimes in every category, from rape to public indecency, sexual offenses from both ends of the criminal spectrum, significantly decreased in incidence.

In extreme cases, it may even be a way for sexual misfits to satisfy their urges without harming actual, living people, letting them be functional members of society.

I'm gonna second that, and the statistics seem to back this.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap-crime-rapes-per-capita
http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/online_artcls/pornography/prngrphy_rape_jp.html

Uhm the Japanese probably freak the Chinese out because they invaded and slaughtered billions during the Sino-Japanese War?

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM

I can understand occupation and enslavement. But the brutality of killing women and children, skewing them and displaying them in fields. It wasn't systematic and clean genocide. It was slaughter in the cruelest manner they could think of.

China has it's history of Spirits and vengeful dead. They even have their lore of vampires, I think it was Guilty Gear X that made a character based on Chinese vamps. But if you look back to Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, not familiar with Vietnamese, "spirits" or "ghosts" are good lingers, once they start being evil or vengeful dead, they're called oni, or demons. Some traditionalist still make shrines, over food, light candles, and all that thing about honoured dead.

It depends... Children go through distinct mental phases where their capacity to analyze things is very different from other stages. Most of these children will still be in the pre-operational stage where they can only follow short chains of cause-effect. The older ones (changes at ~7) will be in the concrete operation stage where they can follow cause-effect chains but can't understand abstract things like `a pointer to a function that returns an array of...' so you should avoid certain things with them.

Personally, I'd give premade robots with a simple programing language (if statements, for loops and maybe functions).

Please note that some children go through these stages faster than other. This page seems to cover the topic decently.

Why ideologically align yourself with a mealy-mouthed, navel gazing future that would treat your profession as something in a zoo, barely tolerated for diversity purposes? When instead you could be in a future where your profession is highly valued because it allows civilization to exist?

I deal professionally with both the study of things beyond this planet and the study of how to exist sustainably on this planet, so I don't see this being a binary choice, or necessarily see the dichotomy existing at all. I'm not directly engaged in researching how to live in space, on the Moon, etc - those folks are down the hall from me - but I've seen their technology, heard the briefings from NASA folks, and so on.

Yes, there are risks to focusing entirely on this planet. But places like the Moon and Mars have their own drawbacks, in part due to their lower mass and resultant lack of a thick atmosphere. The atmosphere is annoying to us on the astronomy side, since it messes up the view, but it's quite handy for protecting us from radiation and falling rocks. If you really want a comparable new home, you'll be needing something closer to 1 Earth mass. And we who work in astronomy, with NASA or the folks who study exoplanets, are working on delivering that.

I have some experience with this from developing countries. Sometimes it's nice to have licensed software, such as when you're an international organisation, a government body, a joint venture, or when your country sometimes does care about licensing issues. So people buy the cheap version to prove that they have licensed software. Then they buy a copy of the full version for $2 on the street corner.

Hate to break the news, but if the law enforcement agency is knocking on your door because they think you broke the law they are going to check and make sure that your paid-for version matches your computer version. It really doesn't take that much time, all of 3-5 minutes. The first part of your message is correct, the last part is dillusional.

BTW our country happens to produce some pretty dumb people (out of HS). So we really shouldn't rag on emerging markets that much
http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2007/08/education-united-states-compared-to.html
http://kapio.kcc.hawaii.edu/upload/fullnews.php?id=52

as someone who claims to work in space science

Sorry for not providing full disclosure up front.

you surely must be aware that there's some locations in space that simply cannot be ruined, for example, the Moon.

"cannot be ruined" in the sense that there's a treaty saying it can't be done? or in the sense that there's nothing there to really ruin? :)

is it all the same

Variable. Remote sensing tech is pretty good - we'd know what's on the surface pretty well, even before we got there. Of course, deeper mineral deposits are harder to get at, but I'm not sure this is a problem, at this stage, considering the technology chain required for mining with anything more than a pick and shovel.

USA?

Actually all that volcanic ash could make the US even more productive agriculturally. Volcanic ash can significantly improve soil fertility and quality.

Falcon

I just came down from the (sadly penguin-free) summit of Mauna Kea - where we too are having a White Christmas this year - and would like to wish my fellow scientists in Antarctica a Merry (White) Christmas in Hawaiian. :)

http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/design-features/camera-small.htm

which is two clicks away from one of the links in the story, has lots of photos of the camera, including the one ol' Rolly is using to bring saps to his weblog

why the largest slaughters of humans have been in the names of religious deities.

They haven't.

genocides are a contemporary trademark of islam everywhere outside of Turkey

Probably they do not hide behind 'Religion'.

Statistics OfTurkey's Democide

CC.

Yes it probably applies to OpenOffice.org Calc as well. Spreadsheets are just not a good tool for sophisticated data analysis whether it be in the finacial or scientific fields. Have a look at the Don't Do It link posted above for some reasons. Also have a look at http://www.eusprig.org/ and click on Public Report of Errors or have a look at Ray Panko's Human Errors Website http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/HumanErr/index.htm. Some estimates say that even moderately complicated spreadsheets contain errors and are even more error prone when modified.

"Mass. man was arrested because he refused to leave a meeting until the school reached a compromise about teaching his child (a practicing Mormon) to accept gay marriage. The school didn't compromise."

Nor should they have.

It is nonsensical to think that any minority is entitled to a "compromise", "right of expression", etc., etc., etc., in an publicly funded institution, in contravention of the law of the land.

If that parent was so adamant that his child not be "subjected" to gay marriage "teachings", he is free to home school the child, or send them to a private school. He is also free to move to another state whose religious beliefs more closely mirror his own.

Anything else only serves to further fracture public education into ever tinier islets of political/religious/ethnic correctness to appease someones desires, rather than actually educating the students.

Is it any wonder we continue to fall behind other industrialized nations in educational rankings?

It's amazing to me that you can totally distrust your government to do anything right, yet think that private enterprise overseeing parts of your life is somehow better.

Well, let's check the numbers:

Deaths from Unconstrained Government: 133,147,000 Murdered, and Counting

Deaths due to Criminals (corporate or individual): a far, far smaller number.

And you find the distrust of government "amazing"? I find *that* amazing.

The alternative, by the way, is not between government or "private enterprise" overseeing parts of my life; it's between having the final say over who oversees what part of MY life... or not.

The article included a lot of details on the immense Large Synoptic Survey Telescope which will dwarf Pan-STARRS when it's done in ~2016. (LSST is in the south, Pan-STARRS is in the north, so they don't really compete) The specs for the LSST data boggle the mind- the thing will cover the entire southern sky every 3 days down to 24th magnitude, generating 30TB of data a night or ~13petabytes per year and having over 100 TFLOPS of computers devoted to sorting it. Read the specs here: http://www.lsst.org/About/lsst_baseline.shtml

...Looks over at his little 6" and 8" scopes and sighs...

Never mind, should have read the website

Each raw image from a single Pan-STARRS camera will contain 2 Gbytes (2 bytes per pixel). In full survey mode, typical exposures last 30 seconds, so the raw data rate is several terabytes per night for the full telescope. The amount of data produced by Pan-STARRS is so large that it will not be practical to archive every image. Software techniques are therefore being developed to extract the important information from the images, while allowing less crucial information to be discarded.

Start here: http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/online_artcls/pornography/prngrphy_ovrvw.html

Then go to to the APA: http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov07/webporn.html

Take the chip off your shoulder and go here: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/BIB/DIAM/effects_pornography.htm

None of these are right-wing, or faith-based or in other ways crazed observations. YMMV.

Ummmm, right. Who is it that has popularized "suicide bombings"?

Please provide links to these websites and evidence or proof of this "community support". Recall, the article you cited doesn't even mention a religion, much less the culprit or the websites and community support he received. In fact, I contend it was a Muslim or atheist that committed the abortion clinic bombing -- please prove otherwise. For evidence of Muslim community support, here is a nice article about those peace loving Muslims (article title: "Poll finds some U.S. Muslim support for suicide attacks"):

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2244293620070522/

I guess the positive side is that only "some" support it.

You do realize that "Muslim" is not a race, right? Even if I did hate all Muslims, which I don't, how exactly does that make me a racist? I would have to be racist against my own race. In reality, I couldn't care less about the so-called moderate Muslims (to me, "moderate" means they at least do not support suicide bombings). You, on the contrary, appear to harbor some serious hate and resentment toward Christians, which is seriously counter to your signature "I never have frustrations". I think you do have frustrations.

Also note that religion doesn't have the monopoly on violence -- atheism, in the form of communism, has killed more people than all religions combined over all time. You can find your own favorite article on that subject, but below is one that adds up atheist/communist murders to over 100 million. With China, Cuba, and Venezuela around, that number will continue to increase.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM/

Only for recreational purposes.

Any evidence of this? Can you prove that in any given 23 year period (the period of time Batista ruled Cuba) Castro killed more people? Can you prove that during his entire reign Castro killed more people than Batista?

This gives democide estimates for both Batista and Castro. Between 1952 and 1959, about 1,000 people are thought to have been outright murdered by the Batista regime. Between 1959 and 1987, between 35,000 and 73,000 people are thought to have been victims of democide by Castro's regime.

Your rule simply isn't true. Hitler and Pol Pot killed an awful lot of people and they weren't communist.

Hitler wasn't communist, but rather an adherent of fascism, a form of guild socialism. Pol Pot was a communist, who imposed the purest implementation of Marxism ever seen, and was the most murderous as a result, in terms of percentage of population killed.

The bloodiest conflict in the world, Congo, has nothing to do with communism.

Conflict in wartime, where both sides are armed, is different from democide, where the victims have been disarmed.