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In other news Google has today announce they are rebranding Twitch.TV to Network XXIII (23 for the Roman Numeral illiterate)

The "Amazing" Sixfinger: the Most Disturbing Toy that You Probably Never Owned

Yes, actually.
(Link to paper.)

Might help.

Yup. One administrator should not be worth four professors: http://io9.com/professors-pran...

Golden age Superman is awesome because he was such a jerk to everyone, even his supposed friends.

You mean "Superdickery"?

This. This is what New York City looked like back in the Gilded Age that "free market capitalists" remember so fondly...

http://io9.com/slum-life-in-ne...

Here is a good summary of many excellent products with Radium added for extra marketability.

http://io9.com/seriously-scary...

The term man and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. The word developed into Old English man, mann meaning primarily "adult male human" but secondarily capable of designating a person of unspecified gender, "someone, one" or humanity at large.

Language pedantry from an Anonymous Coward? Aww, it feels like home...

I'll just leave this article here, since it will save me some typing: Think twice before using "mankind" to mean "all humanity," say scholars.

It's called 'motivated reasoning', but I doubt these idiots have ever heard of it.

Must be a conservative state, because this peculiar strain of stupidity is generally right-wing in nature. It's all about me! me!! me!! and screw the consequences, especially for the environment, our grandkids, or poor people.

Someone is winging it here. Right-wing left-wing it is necessary to read the 400+ pages.

I am only half way into this and it carves out an agenda ignoring any dialogue.
Many of the statements of fact are the current conclusions of science in progress.
As works in progress the conclusions should not be so boldly presented as fact.
This alone will cause people that know or think they know to reject the agenda.

Remember correlation is not proof of causality.
http://io9.com/our-new-favorit...

Omitted in this is a solid anchor to mathematics which is covered by others.
There is a bit of hand waving about iterative modeling and CO2 cycles,
weather and more but after discussing iterative modeling some conclusions
become fact.

I happen to be old enough to have been taught "geosynclinal theory of mountain building" as if it
was fact. Yet in the afternoon of my final exam I sat in a seminar by J. Tuzo Wilson and some
of his students on Plate Technics. I am also old enough to recall when 1inch was defined
as 2.54cm EXACTLY and the difference between the old and new can matter.

An old boss of mine (in Wyoming) kept a cartoon behind clear plastic on his desk. It had
one man with a gift package labeled "Truth"... the next panel had the same character
with a gift package labeled "New Truth". Stuff changes....

There is an interesting management problem that may apply to this. In an exercise
teams are given topics to advocate for and against. Then the team that "wins" gets to
debate another team up a ladder. The observation and point of the exercise is that
as an agenda moved up through the process the position gets less and less flexible.
In as little as three cycles some "managers" in this class got so invested in the position
they were given that fists get brandished.

The further folk get from the sciences and more invested they get with a position
the sillier they can appear to someone looking at it with the eyes of a child.

Watch the old and new Cosmos -- Neil deGrasse Tyson is MUCH more invested
in the same positions that Carl Sagan was. Neil transforms conclusions into facts.
Conclusions that I agree with but facts.... no.... the "New Truth" beckons tomorrow.

Enough rambling.
The US coal and natural gas resources are large. Ignore this and people will
die of heat or cold or lack of water (pumps, desalination). Other nations will
be happy and aggressive in their exploitation of fossil energy and climate
will be impacted no matter what this 400+ page document authors think they
know. I know that some of the computer codes involved use "PI=3.14" and iterate
for months on many cores to get a result to 19 places to the right of the dp.

answer: Space is really big.

A race could have populate half the galaxy's out there and we still wouldn't know.

Space is big but time is also vast. A civilization that build Von Neumann machines could occupy the entire galaxy is half a million years, even with travel at rather slow speeds.

And such a civilization could have arisen any time in last billion years.

That's funny that you express that there's no reason to put people on Mars, but you quote Carl Sagan in your tagline.

I ran across this a few days ago.

http://io9.com/5932534/carl-sa...

Maybe you're there because we've recognized we have to carefully move small asteroids around to avert the possibility of one impacting the Earth with catastrophic consequences, and, while we're up in near-Earth space, it's only a hop, skip and a jump to Mars. Or, maybe we're on Mars because we recognize that if there are human communities on many worlds, the chances of us being rendered extinct by some catastrophe on one world is much less. Or maybe we're on Mars because of the magnificent science that can be done there - the gates of the wonder world are opening in our time. Maybe we're on Mars because we have to be, because there's a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process, we come after all, from hunter gatherers, and for 99.9% of our tenure on Earth we've been wanderers. And, the next place to wander to, is Mars. But whatever the reason you're on Mars is, I'm glad you're there. And I wish I was with you.

Not only that but, it might not be safe to try and rendez-vous: http://io9.com/5889628/warp-dr...

"Any people at the destination," the team's paper concludes, "would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for [forward] region particles."

sure, maybe we can use this new-fangled drive to meet up with them, but, when we do, we will release a gamma ray burst that will sterilize their entire ship.

Now maybe it might be possible to aim to "miss" them by enough that little gets to them and then the last gap can be closed as subluminal speeds, but.... that ah, sure would be one hell of an entrance.

1970's? Global cooling? Are you serious? The prevailing opinion at the time was 'we don't know', that is the science available at the time was not capable of modelling the effect of man's activities on climate.

In this essay written by Carl Sagan in 1980 he expresses exactly this and makes a plea for support for such work.

The idea that there was a 'global cooling' consensus in the 1970's is the sheerest poppycock. Complete wishful thinking by people with a political agenda back by no rigorous assessment of the situation.

If you really are interested in just facts, you have failed to accumulate many.

Unless you claim that story happend more than 40 years ago, I'd call BS.

Animals in the kitchen would be a reason to close a restaurant over here, too. even a flowerpot with fresh basil next to the stove might be a point in an audit. (soil contamination)

And I don't think food standards are higher in the US. What they may be seen as a possible higher hygienic standard only lead to more than questionable chemicals allowed in US food. Or use of irradiation.

The most absurd difference IMHO can be found here: http://io9.com/americans-why-d... Two completly valid ways to reduce salmonella infections from raw eggs, but completly diametral and uncompatible. (tldr: US eggs need to be kept in the fridge as washing of the "natural" salmonellas also removes the protection from further salmonella infection)

The Roman Empire stretched far beyond Rome, just FYI, and they smelted a LOT of lead all over the place. The lead contamination they cause was not runoff from corroding pipes, it was from the actual smelters themselves.

You don't know the half of it.

That the west, esp. USA, is dropping their emissions, but china alone, emits more each year that destroys those savings. IOW, China is increasing faster than what the entire west can cut. This does NOT include other nations.

What happens when you use a per head of population metric? A http://io9.com/this-map-shows-which-countries-are-contributing-the-mos-1502047155 ranks Australia as low, but our population is 22.7million (0.33%). Compare that with China (1.351 billion = 19.1%) or USA (317.5 million = 4.45%).

Is not just CO2, there are more greenhouse gases and other affecting factors like i.e. deforestation. Check this map on countries contributing to climate change. The elephant in the room is US, comfortably first with 0.151C, then comes far China with 0.063 and Russia with 0.059.

They're just trying to see what they can get away with with a Newtonian approximation of gravity.

This looked like a whole lot more fun!

http://io9.com/what-lava-looks-like-when-poured-over-ice-615928722

Get your SuperSoaker ready and snow your friends!

If you live to see 200 you will likely find yourself at some point with the option to abandon biology as we know it and its limitations. At the very least replace DNA with something more resilient: http://io9.com/5903221/meet-xna-the-first-synthetic-dna-that-evolves-like-the-real-thing

my parents had a dog that could tell when my brother (diabetic) had low blood sugar. They had three dogs at that time and one of them would bark in the middle of the night if he was low. He could somehow tell while sleeping in their bedroom that he was having trouble from across the house. My guess is that his scent changed and the dog was especially sensitive to it, but that is pure speculation on my part.

Not being argumentative here -- was is the same dog that barked all of the time? Maybe one detected it, alerting another who then actually alerted you? (Doesn't matter, I know.) More to the point: dogs have accurate noses, but how fast does smell travel? (One, two, three, four.) I presume it was quiet at night; it could also have been sounds that the dogs were hearing (breathing, coughing, slight moaning, whatever.) No way to test and doesn't really matter; I'm just glad you had a dog that would alert you of the problem. I've heard stories of dogs "acting strangely" and somehow alert their owners before a heart attack or other critical events, so not unheard of. And we're a chemical machine; it makes sense that we'd give off odd smells if things are going badly. My dog tells me of the critical problem that he thinks his stomach is almost empty -- but I think he learned that from the cat. Not nearly as impressive as yours.

Sorry I had meant to specify that it was the same dog every time. The other dogs did not seem to notice the difference, even though they slept closer to his room. The three dogs slept in different rooms, though this sometimes happened during the day when they were wandering around the house as well. After he alerted, if you opened the door to let that particular dog out, he would run to my brother's door and bark outside of it until someone went in to check on him. My current dog definitely does not do anything of that nature. She can definitely tell when I am not feeling well, though. Normally she is the neediest dog on the planet. When I am sick, she just lays at my feet and tries not to bother me. That is probably just her reading my body language, though.

my parents had a dog that could tell when my brother (diabetic) had low blood sugar. They had three dogs at that time and one of them would bark in the middle of the night if he was low. He could somehow tell while sleeping in their bedroom that he was having trouble from across the house. My guess is that his scent changed and the dog was especially sensitive to it, but that is pure speculation on my part.

Not being argumentative here -- was is the same dog that barked all of the time? Maybe one detected it, alerting another who then actually alerted you? (Doesn't matter, I know.) More to the point: dogs have accurate noses, but how fast does smell travel? (One, two, three, four.) I presume it was quiet at night; it could also have been sounds that the dogs were hearing (breathing, coughing, slight moaning, whatever.)

No way to test and doesn't really matter; I'm just glad you had a dog that would alert you of the problem. I've heard stories of dogs "acting strangely" and somehow alert their owners before a heart attack or other critical events, so not unheard of. And we're a chemical machine; it makes sense that we'd give off odd smells if things are going badly.

My dog tells me of the critical problem that he thinks his stomach is almost empty -- but I think he learned that from the cat. Not nearly as impressive as yours.

According to this page (which I do not know if the info is true or not)

http://io9.com/heres-what-chinas-yutu-rover-is-doing-on-the-moon-1483746967

it claims the following:

A. The Chang'e 3 lander has a powerful HD science cameras that can send at a rate of one image per second.

B. The Yutu rover will be sending high-definition images, including panoramas, back to Earth.

and

C. Ouyang Ziyuan, one of the chief scientists on the Chang'e-3 mission, said the in an interview: ( @ http://english.cntv.cn/program/newshour/20131130/102473.shtml )

"Number one: space observation from the moon. This is the dream of many astronomers because atmosphere, wind, snow and pollution don't obstruct visibility as they do on earth. The result is also better because of the longer periods of uninterrupted observation from the moon due to it orbiting the earth. One day of observation on the moon is equivalent to 14 days on earth.

Number two: we have an ultraviolet camera on the lander to monitor the earth. This camera is different from the one used by America's Apollo 16. Ours can see the formation of the earth's plasmasphere and its density change. It's better than a satellite, which can only record data section by section as it orbits around the earth. On the moon it can observe half of earth at a time without moving. This is something people have always wanted to do.

Number three: we will be the first to learn the structure and layers of the moon 100 meters below its surface with radars installed at the bottom of the rover. As the rover drives on the lunar surface, it will be as [if] it can cut and see what's 100 meters below. "

Okay, enough of the bickering.

There is a page claiming that CNSA (China National Space Administration) will share all the data it gathers from both the Chang'e 3 lander and the Yutu rover with scientists from all nations.

http://io9.com/heres-what-chinas-yutu-rover-is-doing-on-the-moon-1483746967

I do not know if the CNSA really will share all the data it gathers with the world. Time will tell.

But if it does (and I hope it will), that will be a plus for humanity.

And I sincerely hope that the ISS will be open for China's involvement as well.

It is utterly stupid to play politics in space.

This article reminded me of you: http://io9.com/why-you-think-youre-better-than-everyone-else-1479390165

There are some reports that while it was finished in that last invasion, the library was already pretty much dead from budget cuts and infighting long before then. http://io9.com/the-great-library-at-alexandria-was-destroyed-by-budget-1442659066

Sounds similar to some of the struggles in the US.

Ethanol and synthehol: http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/edible-innovations/synthehol.htm
Story from 2009: http://io9.com/5434752/real+life-synthehol-will-get-you-buzzed-but-never-drunk
Trekkie: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Synthehol

They analyzed Einstein's dead brain. After months of intense research, they discovered that it was no smarter than any other dead brain.

Amusing. Studies did show, however, why it might have been smarter than other live brains while it was alive:

http://io9.com/this-is-why-einsteins-brain-was-better-than-yours-1441971724

Are doomed to repeat it. Espionage is nothing new and it's been around for centuries. The plans for the Atomic Bomb were stolen by people who were sympathetic to the Soviets.

Sometimes technology can be given away, stupidly, when somebody is trying to build better relations or is reverse engineered like the TU-4 bomber.

While we've been concerned with Cyber Espionage it's still nice to see that old fashioned bribery and cunning are still in use and that countries and competitors will still go to whatever lengths are necessary to steal technology. We've allowed billions in technological innovations to be stolen and given away and it will come back to haunt us.

no scotch found yet, but would you settle for vodka?

http://io9.com/5911365/how-alcohol-is-formed-naturally-in-space

By the time typical terrrestrial radio/tv signals get about fifty light years out, they're almost indistinguishable from background noise. High-powered radar (the kind used by the military and in astronomy) has a lot more range, but isn't in the MPAA/RIAA's bailiwick.

http://io9.com/are-we-screwing-ourselves-by-transmitting-radio-signals-493800730

He brought an alternative timeline in the New Star Trek (two spok's and all that) which means it doesn't have to stick to the original or be loyal to mythology around it.

I have only seen the original too. But I saw where it was setting up the ability run off in any direction it wanted to. From what other people have told me, the other movie has taken advantage of that. Imagine a prequil that can ignore the future that has already happened. But it gets pretty stupid in the process. A better critique can be found here with a lot of spoiler information and a jackass who doesn't like the movie at all it seems.

http://io9.com/star-trek-into-darkness-the-spoiler-faq-508927844

Meh, all the same, he has a point. World leaders aren't going to enact any significant environmental regulation this until people start dying. Regulating CFCs to help restore the ozone hole was the only piece of environmental regulation in my limited knowledge of recent history that I'm aware of that was enacted without anyone dying. I'd like to attribute that to a brief time in the 80s when people actually trusted scientists, but it was probably more public fear of scientists and radioactivity against a weak aerosol manufacturer lobby.

All I can say is never in a million years did I think I would ever search for "wombat turds." Even more surreal is this video. I'm just astounded. Fuck the iPhone tritone, this is far more interesting....

Berries have a little bit of sucrose. But I've not seen any real evidence that they are good for you.
Nutritionists like them because they can't fault them. They don't have many calories, they have 'antioxidants' and they don't have much fructose.

But nutritionists aren't the ones who paid attention in science class. There is no evidence that antioxidants do anything to help you. There is strong evidence that the opposite is true. That didn't get a mention in the press until Watson (of DNA fame) said it, but it was already common currency amongst the scientists.
http://io9.com/5975002/james-watson-says-antioxidants-may-actually-be-causing-cancer

The antioxidants in plants are there to help the plant protect itself against the poisons it evolved to stop you eating it. Humans and other animals have adpated in kind and can tolerate them to some extent.

We don't know berries are good for you. We have reason to believe they are bad for you, but they're small so you don't get a lot.

I wonder if any of the regenerated worms maintain the learned behavior.

Yes, they can.

Glass bubbles do no rise in panes of glass. Glass is not a liquid.
http://io9.com/the-glass-is-a-liquid-myth-has-finally-been-destroyed-496190894

I've given this a lot of thought, and compiled a solid rant on the subject.

My thesis about privacy in 2013 - 2020:

Lets start with some facts:
1. The Spy agencies in NZ, UK, USA, Australia and Canada spy on everyone, even their own citizens. 2. The UK copies literally everything that traverses the Internet and keeps it for 3 days for analysis (EVERYTHING!) 3. The USA shares this information (including commercial secrets) with its private enterprises to help them win international business. 4. So many people work for these agencies that from time to time this information is made public. 5. Nobody really cares. 6. The chances of any of these organisations giving up such a valuable source of power are about the same as global nuclear disarmament 7. It’s only a matter of time until the local police have access to all this information. 8 . In 2001, as sysadmin of BSSC I could read the email of every teacher and every student at that school, without leaving a trace of evidence, nor with any fear of punishment for wrongdoing.

So, I assert: You have no privacy online. You never really did. It was only by unspoken rule of sysadmins that we let you have the illusion of privacy. Ed Snowden betrayed sysadmins.

Strangely, Google poise to release the most important advancement toward our goal of total access to information - a video camera strapped to every second person’s head (Google Glass), and people are up in arms (9) and so are the governments best poised to take advantage! (10).
I think we’ve got it all wrong. Let’s stop bitching about this rampant surveillance and embrace it.

Let’s get our spy agencies to make everything they’ve got available to everyone! Let’s mandate that every Google glass camera must be on all the time, every phone must have its microphone on all the time, every GPS recording its location and all this content uploading to the cloud!

Information WANTS to be free! EVERYONE should have access to EVERYTHING!

Then it will hardly be accessed, because if Facebook status updates have proven anything it’s that it’s no fun spying on all your friends if all they do all day is play Farmville.

Finally, these civil libertarians realise that nobody really cares about them, or their “right to privacy”, and we will be able to make the most out of google glass (11).

Sources:
1. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-whistleblower-edward-snowden-on-global-spying-a-910006.html
2. http://mashable.com/2013/06/21/gchq-spy-agency-taps-global-internet/
3. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html
4. Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden
5. http://www.news.com.au/
6. http://io9.com/5969204/could-nuclear-disarmament-actually-increase-our-chance-of-an-apocalypse
7. “if the information is there, it’s already collected, why not use it to prosecute the crime? Why are you protecting the guilty? If you’re innocent you will want us to use this information to exonerate you.”
8. I read your email. Get over it.
9. http://www.policymic.com/articles/29585/3-new-ways-google-glass-invades-your-privacy
10. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57591975-93/google-glass-privacy-concerns-persist-in-congress/
11.

>> RTFA

Dude, on Slashdot? Really?

>>>> copyrights and patents that can be deferred just about forever.
>> No idea where you're taking that from

Couple of places. There's a reason companies employ lawyers, after all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
http://io9.com/5865283/three-sleazy-moves-pharmaceutical-companies-use-to-extend-drug-patents

...and they have to pay a toll on the intergalactic superhighway, hurr durr?

Whatever. But when the contractor did work on my house, he hauled all the stuff in a pickup truck, and no moving van was involved.

Sometimes you need to move a big load in one vehicle. Most of the time you are better off with something that is cheaper to operate.

My money is on the space elevator.

If you can build one, please do.

I am dubious about the near-term feasibility of a space elevator. I don't think our materials engineering is there to build it, and there are other problems.

http://io9.com/5984371/why-well-probably-never-build-a-space-elevator

Sure and I'd love to be wrong, but in the near term, it's going to be rockets of some sort. Let's at least make them reusable.

I see your intelligently designed cockroaches, and raise you intelligently designed science.

Checked the link and it's OK, SFW and isn't an example of Rule 34 either.

That Intelligent Designer is a crafty one! You'll never best his cockroaches!

I see your intelligently designed cockroaches, and raise you intelligently designed science.

I found the first one unwatchable due to all the fake lens flares that were artificially inserted.

Not so fast, bunkie... http://io9.com/5230278/jj-abrams-admits-star-trek-lens-flares-are-ridiculous

They were all done live, they weren't added later. There are something about those flares, especially in a movie that can potentially be very sterile and CG and overly controlled. There is something incredibly unpredictable and gorgeous about them. It is a really fun thing. Our DP would be off camera with this incredibly powerful flashlight aiming it at the lens. It became an art because different lenses required angles, and different proximity to the lens. Sometimes, when we were outside we'd use mirrors. Certain sizes were too big... literally, it was ridiculous. It was like another actor in the scene....

Death from neutrino's? Woops containment shielding failed, nothing to see here... was it a tokamak?

I'm not sure you can die from neutrino exposure, but it doesn't matter with these people - you won't be able to tokamak of anything (apologies to Mel Brooks ).

it is not one of...it is THE meth capital of the country. Bar none.

http://io9.com/5989152/a-map-of-state+by+state-meth-incidents-in-2012--what-can-we-take-away

The reason for this is that your state, more than any other, has HUGE amounts of meth addiction.

Seriously, Missouri is so fucked.

The only states even close are Ten. and Indiana. You guys actually need to be doing waaaaay more than making people show ID for over the counter meds.

http://io9.com/5989152/a-map-of-state+by+state-meth-incidents-in-2012--what-can-we-take-away

Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.

Most industrialized countries are seeing their birth rates plummet (like Italy). People are also feeling a law of diminishing returns of more stuff. So, it is not clear our population or per-capita energy demands are likely to continue to grow that much. Not saying they won't (evolution argues fast growing subpopulations might expand and dominate) , but there are certainly counter trends to exponential growth. Nature has a way of turning exponentials into S-curves...

One the plus side, expanding into the galaxy could give humanity another 1000 years or so of exponential expansion. :-)

But here is an important point. As Julian Simon points out in "The Ultimate Resource", the human imagination is the ultimate resource, since it creates all other rsources (often by figuring out how unused stuff can be made into resources or existing stuff can be reorganized into better resources).
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

The USA once faced a "Peak Whale Oil" crisis in 1846. Yet we moved past that because someone figured out you could get a form of oil from the ground instead of just from whales. See:
http://io9.com/5930414/1846-the-year-we-hit-peak-sperm-whale-oil

If our population continued to grow exponentially, there would be quadrillions of people around to imagine new ways to deal with this issue of energy. I don't know what they might be in those four areas I mentioned (wants, efficiency, distribution, and availability). Or maybe it will be an innovation in some new area somehow. For example, maybe someone will figure out how to tap the zero point energy of the vacuum as both a source and sink of energy and matter? Or maybe someone else will figure out multiple universe theory, or some notion of our universe as a simulation.

I don't know for sure what it would be, or that someone would find it. But, are you willing to bet on your current conception of physics as being undeniable 100% accurate fact that sets hard limits for all time against the imaginations, research, and hard-work of many quadrillions of people (and sentient AIs) working together for hundreds of years? Are you willing to wager on that certainty to the point where, as with TFA where the author says essentially it would be better that all those quadrillions of people should never exist? Wouldn't that claim of omniscient certainty be an ultimate definition of self-centered hubris? Or at least, wouldn't it be "non-scientific", given scientists should always be open to falsifying their theories?

See also, as just one example from:
"They really ought to have known better."
http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/stoopid.lis
""Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth decimal place."
      -- A. A. Michelson, 1894
[On the occasion of the dedication of a physics laboratory in Chicago, noting that all the more important physical laws had been discovered]"

See also Isaas Asimov's short-story "The Last Question", with the recurring line:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
  "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER".

Online here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEq-tTjcc0

You may well be right in the end. But there are a lot of uncertainties before then... And clearly there are a lot more obvious possibilities than TFA considers.

For example, Europe just issued a patent for for Francesco Piantelli's LENR process (aka "cold fusion"):
http://pesn.com/2013/01/24/9602268_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_January24/