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It's amazing how many people still wrongly believe that formal verification guarantees that software is bug-free. The proven properties only hold under certain conditions. In a recent study, researchers from the University of Washington analyzed several verified distributed systems and found a total of 16 bugs in them, some of which could cause the systems to crash or corrupt data. The bottom line is that formally verified software does NOT mean bug-free software and you STILL need to test software. Here's a summary of their findings.

Let me leave this (or here or the original) for your edification.

I'm glad Purdue is getting some dividends out of that nanotechnology center they built 10 years ago. That thing always gave me the creeps. Probably because I watched too much Star Trek as a kid.

That 100% increase in wages translates to....a 4% increase in the cost of the food.

Your example, and the research you cite are microeconomic studies. When we raise the minimum wage, we are not just raising the minimum wage for food service workers, as the study you cited suggests. Minimum wage will go up for all workers. It will have a macroeconomic effect. That will increase the costs throughout the entire supply chain. That is not within the scope of the research you cite.

When you sum all of the costs down the supply chain, labor is the dominant force.

In most of those examples, there is still an underlying labor cost.

And no one is disputing that. What we are disputing is your attempt to make that labor cost a large part of the overall cost. And it simply isn't.

In the end, the vast majority of the cost of any goods are labor.

[Citation Required]

Let's look at some numbers instead. Raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 is a more than 100% increase. So what affect would that ~100% increase have on prices? Well, let's look at the worst-case scenario: Fast food. Because unlike all your examples, a significant percentage of the costs in a fast food restaurant is wages.

That 100% increase in wages translates to....a 4% increase in the cost of the food. Or about 17 cents for a Big Mac.

If a 100% increase in wages only yields a 4% increase in one of the most wage-intensive industries in the country, we probably shouldn't be worried much about the effect on the price of milling wheat into flour.

This article appears to contradict your link. Bacteria can also digest lignin, if I'm interpreting that right. Further, if they didn't come along to digest cellulose, then a similar situation may have happened earlier in prehistory, at least for a while.

She's the head of the School of Engineering Education at a very respectable University (Purdue). That's a far step above "some rando on the internet".

GMOs allow much higher productivity from farmers

That sounds great!

which is not inconsequential given the world population.

True, true...

Granted, the overuse of pesticides, herbicides, and similar is quickly showing it's impact in the form of resistant strains (and killing bees, etc.).

Hmm. See, therein lies the rub, right? Those resistant strains, and the impact to our most valuable commercial pollinators, add up to a significant negative impact on agriculture.

The idea of 'organic food' for everyone is nonsense. First, because much organic food differs very little from 'normal' food since there's no real standards to apply and second, because we'd face food shortages if we tried to go backwards to broad use of inefficient farming methods.

We have to go forwards in order to go backwards... in order to go forward. (And then we're doing the cha-cha.) Intensive, zero-tilth organic gardening produces higher per-acre yields than any other form of farming. But there is no denying that it is labor intensive even given the complete lack of mechanical tilth, which is replaced by planting crops (and other beneficial plants) with deep tap roots which become compost in-place. Appropriately to a nerd website, the solution to the labor problem is robotics.

Planting most crops in monocultures is beneficial only from a labor standpoint. It primarily permits us to use mechanical cultivation with relatively dumb machines. They're now up to the point where they can drive themselves up and down the rows, but what about when they can cut weeds and compost their heads (no need to pull them if you can cut them repeatedly), measure food quality (e.g. with laser spectrometry) and harvest based on ripeness... Plants grow better when you plant them with different plants with different needs. If we use intelligent machines (the term is used loosely, but typically) instead of dumb ones, we can plant crops in a way that actually improves both yields and quality whether we use organic techniques or not.

Here's a 2017 paper from purdue that roughly agrees with your analysis. Their estimate is actually 13 billion total cameras in the world.

Well,
a good starting site is this: http://math.nist.gov/javanumer...
And interesting papers are e.g. this two: https://engineering.purdue.edu... and an older one that is more focusing on the problems of Javas Array implementations: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~artiga...

If the law had been intentioned as the dairies claim, then the word should have been distributing not distribution.

This is yet another grammar rule called Parallel Structure:

Non-parallel:
-- Mary likes hiking, swimming, and to ride a bicycle.

Parallel:
-- Mary likes hiking, swimming, and bicycling.

The word distribution doesn't seem to be an item on the list as it is not an -ing word like the other items are.
If was meant to be part of the item list, then it should have been written as distributing.

In any case, the writer of this part of the law was clearly violating at least one grammar rule that leads to ambiguity.

Anybody who claims that they are "unbiased" is lying. I'm biased, you're biased, and so is everybody else. What you can do is listen to people's arguments and look at their data and draw your own conclusion.

You might look at Wikipedia:

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

Even there, there doesn't seem to be a lot of arguments for agricultural subsidies and a lot of negative effects.

Having said that, a good place to start is probably Econlib; they have a free market bias, but their papers and their speakers/authors are good (and reputable if you care about that):

http://www.econlib.org/library...

http://www.econlib.org/library...

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

The Heritage foundation, of course, has a "conservative bias", whatever that is, but they also make a good argument:

http://www.heritage.org/resear...

For the harm that farm subsidies cause to third world countries, you can listen to both representatives from those countries and even the Guardian:

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

https://www.theguardian.com/su...

Americans couldn't care less, however:

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

As for what farmers actually can do to mitigate risk, that's part of Farming 101:

https://www.extension.purdue.e...

It's such a big part of education because the dirty truth is that farm subsidies go to politically well connected groups, while most farmers actually must manage their risks themselves.

I'm afraid I can't supply you with links that make arguments for agricultural subsidies that I consider credible.

I just got done typing up a nice, long response with links, quotes, explanations, and details...and then I hit Refresh and lost it.

So, here are some of the links. I've provided a super quick summary of what you can take away from them.

Either is acceptable: http://www.grammarbook.com/pun...
Either is acceptable: https://owl.english.purdue.edu...
The Associated Press and Chicago handle it differently: http://www.apvschicago.com/201...
Strunk says keep the "s" unless dealing with ancient names: http://www.bartleby.com/141/st...
Others care more about sibilance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You'll find plenty of adherents to each of those approaches. Which is to say, it's a matter of style, not correctness, with various groups recommending various styles. Your way is a safe way to go, and there's nothing wrong with it. Others prefer to ditch characters that are viewed as unnecessary or that can create awkward phrasings.

Noise, really? I've never noticed any noise coming from wind power, so I looked it up. At 100m a wind turbine generates about 50db -- about the same noise level as the ambient sounds in a quiet suburb. As for eyesore, it depends. Maybe in a neighborhood of charming historic buildings, but in industrial neighborhoods turbines are often the least ugly built thing around.

As for building out nuclear to replace coal, it's a good idea, but the problem is having a solution in place in advance for decomissioning the plants and dealing with the spent fuel. Granted the politics of addressing that problem is horrible, but it's not a reasonable solution to kick that down the road because it's too hard to decide what to do about that now. While nuclear may be a good idea environmentally in principle, in practice we don't have our act together well enough to realize that vision. Not at present.

DPRK claims a functional H-bomb.

So far, there's roughly zero evidence to back those claims. If radionuclides are detected from the most recent NK test, then maybe they have a partially successful implosion test, perhaps even tritium-boosted. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Right now, the US might as well concern itself about whether there is a basselope gap with NK.

- T

I googled various interaction probabilities, which are expressed in units called barns:
http://www.physics.purdue.edu/...

neutron hitting uranium nucleus: 1 barn
helium nucleus hitting gold nucleus: 100 barns (Rutherford experiment 1911)
anti-neutrino captured by proton making a neutron: 10E-17 barns (first detected 1956)
WIMP hitting a xenon nucleus: 10E-21 barns? (year???) need to 10,000 times better than neutrino detector

Numbers are actually ranges including factors like particle energy and angle.

Don't forget that honeybees are an introduced species in North America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

My life belongs to me, and if it sucks, I want to end it without any interference from religious morons and brainless public administrators like Ms. Barber. Removing the means of suicide does not solve or prevent the real problem: people have less and less reasons to live.

Why should I live and get education when engineering is off-shored to brainless indians and chinese?
Why should I live and contribute to knowledge if science and research is constantly mocked, ridiculed and deprived of funding?
Why should I live when I've been treated as a insignificant cog in a corporation (which is now true for everything - even universities are run like a business)?
Why should I live when some female bitch, whose mental capacity was enough only to graduate from an obscure secondary school in a german village, is sitting in EuroParliament and blathering about shutting down nuclear fission and fusion research?
Why should I live when postdocs are lasting months? What useful science could possibly be done in couple of months?!
Why should I live when even art and music became a commodity, and are forced to cater to lowest form of human waste?
Why should I live when imbecile politicians want to turn the whole country into a large maximum security prison?!

I want to kill myself not because I cannot cope with pressures and competition, but because stupid MBA morons hijacked the system and gained power over creative and talented people. Remember those socialized schmucks who bullied and ridiculed you in high school and universities? Now they are MPAs, MBAs and your bosses - they hate you and want to crush you, because deep inside they realize that they are worthless earthworms compared to creative people. I worked hard to solve difficult problems and hence earn my Ph.D. in electrical engineering, but thanks to banksters and businessdicks, the long-term postdoc positions have vanished and even short-term postodcs are nearly impossible to find anywhere in the world.

My life belongs to me - not to a district attorney or moronic MPA. And when I want to end my life, I want my decision to be respected. It is not difficult to implement: farmers already use Controlled atmosphere killing for animals slaughter - inhaling inert gas guarantees a painless and quick death within minutes. You don't even have to build any new buildings or suicide booths - morgues are perfectly fine and can easily cope with those who want to voluntary end their lives.

Instead of stupid regulations, how about giving more reasons to live and removing the reasons for suicide? Or at least simplifying the whole process of ending one's own life? It is harder than writing useless regulations, for sure, and requires substantially more brainpower than a typical MPA possesses, but we still have some smart, educated, thinking people on this planet, aren't we?!

Unplug the network

Not enough. Quoting Spaf:

The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts.

http://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/...

"is it finally time for AP Statistics to switch its computational vehicle to R?"

No. Absolutely not. R is not a reasonable language for computing: http://r.cs.purdue.edu/pub/eco...

The subsidies, tax breaks, etc that you're talking about? That's in the US. This is for the entire EU. But if you want to put it in US terms, maybe you should also recognize tax subisides given for oil exploration, oil logistics (keystone pipeline XL anyone?), public health concerns from smog and carbon monoxide, military protection of oil and liquified natural gas trade routes, military campaign to protect oil pipelines (Georgia most recently), cleanup efforts when some idiot decides it's a good idea to drill somewhere that no submersibles can reach, etc. In fact, the actual price of a gallon of oil in the US is somewhere in the range of $16 when all ancillary costs are factored in.

Exactly. Don't forget the war on toiletries in baggage. Or how something is OK when the US Federal Govt does it, for example, the way waterboarding is called torture only when done by other governments.

So, not long ago, America's major newspapers basically decided that waterboarding was somehow okay. American waterboarding, that is! In the same time frame, the same newspapers made it clear that if any other country practiced waterboarding, it was torture.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

This sort of "Laugh at China" story is designed to make the US look smart, and the rest of the world stupid and to help people miss how stupid our own government is being. But if you look around, you'll find some great ways to spend those student loans:

"Purdue University Graduate Certificate Program in Veterinary Homeland Security"
http://vet.purdue.edu/biosecur...

Maybe graduates can work for the tax black hole that is Homeland Security: http://www.dhs.gov/food-agricu...
http://www.dhs.gov/reference-n...

News for ya, in America, everyone's opinion is worth something and is ultimately expressed through the ballot box. Science doesn't get to say "Do this, for I have obtained a 95% confidence level!"

Contrary to what you may think, you don't get to decide on what's facts.
The laws of nature are not decided by vote or fiat, but we learn about them from experimentation.
Even when a state introduces a bill that pi is exactly 3.2, nature stubbornly refuses to cooperate.

somehow i think he is just trying to hide behind a VPN to do some "torrenting"

So... what's he really doing behind the VPN if he's not torrenting?

*cough*

You can shoot your own impacts here

http://www.purdue.edu/impactea...

or here

http://simulator.down2earth.eu...

I believe the exception is if the first letter is something that is a *silent* consonant, leave it with "a." For example, honorable or university*. A lot of people (native speakers) seem to not get this as you'll see "an historic" a lot of the time but the 'h' isn't silent so it should still be 'a.'

I'll admit that the "if it's separated by another word, use that word instead" seems maddeningly inconsistent. I consider it a bonus that we don't conjugate every god damn part of speech, though. After taking a few years of German, it seems like in German you have to conjugate 6 or 7 out of 10 parts of speech, while in English it's only really 3 (pronouns, verbs, and articles). And of course the genders for 90% of nouns are completely random. My favorite is "das Mädchen." Argh!

* Do I remember correctly that Universität is begun with an "oo" pronunciation? In English it's a "yoo" pronunciation.

The first 2 results for "a vs an" on Google agree with me, anyway. I wouldn't be surprised at a dissenting opinion.
https://owl.english.purdue.edu...
http://www.quickanddirtytips.c...

At Purdue for most math and science AP credits they still require you to take their own placement test during an orientation weekend.

Actually, if you read the MIT link, you'll note that MIT does precisely that for Chemistry and Biology credit, for example. If true, this souinds EXACTLY like one of the very schools I mentioned.

They flat out tell you during the physics one that maybe one kid a year will actually score high enough to opt out of the first physics class......so good luck.

Well, this link and this one both clearly state that getting a 5 on the physics C tests (as well as various scores on other science and math tests) will get you credit for various classes, including in the School of Engineering.

Now -- it's possible either (1) things have changed there since you were in school, or (2) you had to take some special version of physics or whatever in the engineering curriculum that was more advanced than they'd give you AP credit for -- but according to Purdue's own website, they DO give credit for AP classes in science and engineering with high enough scores.

I got no credit for my AP CS class because they just didnt consider it equivalent to anything in their first year engineering curriculum, maybe if I would have been going as a CS major and not CmpE it may have bought me something

Which is part of the point I made -- I agreed with the GP that sometimes you have to make a substitution in your major area. However, if you have AP credits in various things (say, AP European History or something), you should often be able to apply them toward requirements outside your major or elective credits, which could potentially save you time and/or money toward your overall degree.

Being able to get AP credit that counts towards requirements and graduation SOMETIMES != Being able to get AP credit ALWAYS. The GP was arguing for NEVER. I was saying SOMETIMES. You say "not ALWAYS." We don't disagree.

At Purdue for most math and science AP credits they still require you to take their own placement test during an orientation weekend.

Actually, if you read the MIT link, you'll note that MIT does precisely that for Chemistry and Biology credit, for example. If true, this souinds EXACTLY like one of the very schools I mentioned.

They flat out tell you during the physics one that maybe one kid a year will actually score high enough to opt out of the first physics class......so good luck.

Well, this link and this one both clearly state that getting a 5 on the physics C tests (as well as various scores on other science and math tests) will get you credit for various classes, including in the School of Engineering.

Now -- it's possible either (1) things have changed there since you were in school, or (2) you had to take some special version of physics or whatever in the engineering curriculum that was more advanced than they'd give you AP credit for -- but according to Purdue's own website, they DO give credit for AP classes in science and engineering with high enough scores.

I got no credit for my AP CS class because they just didnt consider it equivalent to anything in their first year engineering curriculum, maybe if I would have been going as a CS major and not CmpE it may have bought me something

Which is part of the point I made -- I agreed with the GP that sometimes you have to make a substitution in your major area. However, if you have AP credits in various things (say, AP European History or something), you should often be able to apply them toward requirements outside your major or elective credits, which could potentially save you time and/or money toward your overall degree.

Being able to get AP credit that counts towards requirements and graduation SOMETIMES != Being able to get AP credit ALWAYS. The GP was arguing for NEVER. I was saying SOMETIMES. You say "not ALWAYS." We don't disagree.

[...] using the best tool for the job is what it's about.

Ah, but from the point of view of a computer scientist, the "best tool for the job" isn't necessarily the best tool that currently exists. R is a fabulous set of well-documented algorithms and linked together with one of the bizarre, poorly-specified and inadequately-documented language with a flaky, abstraction-leaking, poorly-performing implementation.

I think it's great that R is written by statisticians for statisticians, and that statisticians find it useful. But you shouldn't then be surprised if it doesn't do parallelism, even though many statistical problems on large data sets should intuitively be easy to do in a parallel kind of way.

Of course Python doesn't beat R; it doesn't even compete in the same space. (Oh, and its formal semantics are almost as bad as that of R.)

Of course Julia doesn't beat R. It was designed to be a modern SISAL (which in turn was designed to be a modern Fortran). Again, it doesn't pretend do the same thing as R.

The thing is, the computer science community knows it can do better than R. The problem is convincing the statisticians that a better R is in their best interests.

No one uses R for it's amazing language*. The language sucks.

From Morandat, Hill, Osvald, Vitek, "Evaluating the Design of the R Language", http://r.cs.purdue.edu/pub/eco...

"R is a dynamic language for statistical computing that combines lazy functional features and object-oriented programming. This rather unlikely linguistic cocktail would probably never have been prepared by computer scientists, yet the language has become surprisingly popular. With millions of lines of R code available in repositories, we have an opportunity to evaluate the fundamental choices underlying the R language design. Using a combination of static and dynamic program analysis we assess the success of different language features."

Given that the volume can kill a person ...

Can it really? They say it is as loud as several jets taking off. I have been on aircraft carriers where the flight crews were in close proximity to jets taking off, and none of them died as a result of that. According to this chart noise around 150dB can rupture an eardrum in someone wearing no hearing protection. Ruptured eardrums are rarely fatal.

APA citation: Contributors' names (Last edited date). Title of resource. Retrieved from http://web/ address for OWL resource

Of course it does not need an anchor tag, but if the address is there, most can cut and paste.

As a newish developer who knows only the minimum I need to about TCP/IP protocol, I was surprised that this, and a number of common things (apparently games, streaming video) use UDP at all. I thought it was basically just used for ping.

Out of curiosity can anyone point out good books for learning more about how to implement applications that use TCP/IP including udp in ways other than the common ssh/http/ftp connections.

ICMP is used for ping, friend. I recommend the Comer books. Also, I'd also recommend that you read the IP, UDP and TCP specs.

I found a copy of the HDMI spec someone posted at Purdue: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ece477/Webs/S12-Grp10/Datasheets/CEC_HDMI_Specification.pdf

Section 5.1.1 Link Architecture
"As shown in Figure 5-1, an HDMI link includes three TMDS Data channels and a single TMDS Clock channel. The TMDS Clock channel constantly runs at a rate proportional to the pixel rate of the transmitted video. During every cycle of the TMDS Clock channel, each of the three TMDS data channels transmits a 10-bit character. This 10-bit word is encoded using one of several different coding techniques.

The input stream to the Source’s encoding logic will contain video pixel, packet and control data. The packet data consists of audio and auxiliary data and associated error correction codes.
These data items are processed in a variety of ways and are presented to the TMDS encoder as either 2 bits of control data, 4 bits of packet data or 8 bits of video data per TMDS channel. The Source encodes one of these data types or encodes a Guard Band character on any given clockcycle."
The word packet is only used when describing packet and control data. Video data is transmitted as pixel data, with each color component going through a separate data link, remarkably like DVI...

Section 6.5 specifies how it draws pixels in RGB mode, which is the only mode HDMI and DVI share, and strangely enough they put the RGB pixels on the same data links as DVI does, in the same TMDS format.

Section 8.3.3 is titled "DVI/HDMI Device Discrimination" and specifies that any device that does not identify itself as an HDMI device in its EDID will be treated as a DVI device. Meaning it can't use all the extra features of HDMI.

Appendix C "Compatibility With DVI" :
C.1 Requirement for DVI Compatibility All HDMI Sources shall be compatible with DVI 1.0 compliant sink devices (i.e. “monitors” or “displays”) through the use of a passive cable converter. Likewise, all HDMI Sinks shall be compatible with DVI 1.0 compliant sources (i.e. “systems” or “hosts”) through the use of a similar cable converter.

When communicating with a DVI device, an HDMI device shall operate according to the DVI 1.0 specification, "[...continues]

C.2 HDMI Source Requirements
When communicating with a DVI sink device, an HDMI Source shall operate in a mode compatible with that device. This requires that the Source operate under the following limitations:
Video pixel encoding shall be RGB.
No Video Guard Bands shall be used.
No Data Islands shall be transmitted.

An HDMI Source may transmit Video Data Periods without Guard Bands only when communicating to a DVI sink device or during the process of determining if the sink device is HDMI capable. An HDMI Source, upon power-up, reset or detection of a new sink device, shall assume that the sink device operates under DVI 1.0 limitations. An HDMI Source shall determine if the sink device is an HDMI Sink by following the rule(s) described in Section 8.3.3. Upon detection of an HDMI Sink, the HDMI Source shall follow all of the HDMI Source-related requirements specified in this document.

All electrical and physical specifications in Section 4 shall be followed by the HDMI Source even when communicating with a DVI sink device.

C.3 HDMI Sink Requirements
When connected to a DVI source device, an HDMI Sink shall operate as a DVI 1.0 compliant sink with the exceptions outlined in Section C.1 above. A DVI source device will always be restricted in the following ways: Only RGB pixel encoding is used. There is no Guard Band on the Video Data Period. There are no Data Islands transmitted. An HDMI Sink, upon power-up, reset or detection of a new source device, shall assume that the source device is limited to the above behavior. Upon the detection of an indicati

Can you show some examples of Microsoft research?

Pick any top-tier CS conference. They'll probably have something there.

For example, OSDI '12 (MSR personnel on 5 papers, 2 of which all coauthors worked at MSR), PLDI 2012 (MSR personnel on 6 papers), SIGGRAPH 2013 (harder to sort through, but I count 16 papers with at least one MSR co-author), VLDB 2011 (8 research papers as well as several other things like demos, a keynote, an industrial paper, and a 10-year-retrospective best paper award), STOC 2013 (16 papers if I counted right!), etc.

Seriously, I was not being choosy with those conferences -- the only choosy things I did was pick years for which there was an obvious page that listed the institutions with the authors instead of just the authors (e.g. VLDB 2013) because I'm lazy. If you pick a conference that covers a topic of interest, MSR has had something there. :-)

and throwing the Economist's bone's, killing a chicken, and skaking the Magic Eight Ball:

Question: what will the European economy do?

"My sources say no"

Which is much more informative than Alan Greenspan EVER was.

You're funny, but I want to do the numbers ... some cultivars claimed to get 100 tons/acre of Valencia oranges at the trees' peak*. At 60% juice content (optimistic), that's 60,000 liters/acre-year. How much for a 1-acre (63 m square) sealed greenhouse with filtered air? You can take it from here, but I guess our screwdrivers are getting expensive that way. (:

* http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/orange.html#Yield

I had a Facebook add pop up that said "Want an NSA Clearance?" (not a typo, the company messed up their grammar).

According to Purdue, words that start with consonants may be preceded with "an" if they have a "vowel sounds". They give the example of "an MSDS" and "an SPCC". Similarly, words that start with vowels but have consonant sounds use "a".

I'm no expert in grammar, but it seems possible that "an NSA clearance" may be correct.

Any experts want to chime in?

I had a Facebook add pop up that said "Want an NSA Clearance?" (not a typo, the company messed up their grammar).

According to Purdue, words that start with consonants may be preceded with "an" if they have a "vowel sounds". They give the example of "an MSDS" and "an SPCC". Similarly, words that start with vowels but have consonant sounds use "a".

I'm no expert in grammar, but it seems possible that "an NSA clearance" may be correct.

Any experts want to chime in?

The PDP-11 has always been one of those canonical architectures that everybody studies (or should, if they don't), even if they never actually see or use one. Very clean, very orthogonal.

I did an undergrad course in operating systems using XINU on an LSI-11. Great fun. I worked for DEC for a while in the early '90s, but only played with VAXen. It was the beginning of DEC's death spiral, so it wasn't a fun place to be.

I've sometimes thought it would be fun to own a real PDP-11, cool front panel and all. No idea what I'd do with it, but that's another matter. :-)

...laura

Making a car safer to drive because accidents becmoe more survivable is not the same thing as making accidents less likely, which is what we've been discussing. Those two cars will of course behave differently. Do you think that the presence of an airbag or a seat belt materially affects the car's handling? Of course not. The differences are due to a litany of other changes to cars over time.

As for that limb you're on. Don't look down:
https://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2006/060927ManneringOffset.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8198694?dopt=Abstract
http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/failure%20of%20seatbelt%20legislation.pdf
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Buckle-Up-And-Behave.html

And it's not limited to cars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IB2xRfRHOA
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/07/peltzman-effect.html
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-balance-of-risk/
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607603134/abstract
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702825.html
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61755-3/fulltext?_eventId=login
http://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/Wilson_Circumcision.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

I'd be interested to know if anyone can spot something that would make this simulation invalid in the case of 2012 DA14. I just searched through and copy-pasted excerpts containing the word assumption for effect, but have no idea how important any of these are:

"To implement such a program, it is necessary to make some simplifying assumptions that limit the accuracy of any predictions."
https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/Content/pdf/Documentation.pdf

assuming that the meteoroid is approximately spherical

For the purposes of the Earth Impact Effects Program, we
assume that the trajectory of the impactor is a straight line
from the top of the atmosphere to the surface, sloping at a
constant angle to the horizon given by the user. Acceleration
of the impactor by the Earthâ(TM)s gravity is ignored, as is
deviation of the trajectory toward the vertical in the case that
terminal velocity is reached, as it may be for small impactors.
The curvature of the Earth is also ignored. The atmosphere is
assumed to be purely exponential:

We define the airburst altitude zb to be the height above the surface at which the impactor diameter L(z)
= 7L0. All the impact energy is assumed to be deposited at this altitude;

if the unbulked breccia lens volume Vbr (i.e., the observed
volume of the breccia lens multiplied by a 90â"95% bulking
correction factor; Grieve and Garvin 1984) is assumed to be
related to the final crater diameter by: Vbr â 0.032Dfr^3

Assuming that the top
surface of the breccia lens is parabolic and that the
brecciation process increases the bulk volume of this
material by 10%

we assume, based on numerical modeling work
(Pierazzo and Melosh 2000; Ivanov and Artemieva 2002), that
the volume of impact melt is roughly proportional to the
volume of the transient crater

Here we assume that the
crater floor diameter is similar to the transient crater diameter

Numerical simulations of vapor
plume expansion (Melosh et al. 1993; Nemtchinov et al. 1998)
predict that the fireball radius at the time of maximum radiation
is 10â"15 times the impactor diameter. We use a value of 13 and
assume âoeyield scalingâ applies to derive a relationship between
impact energy E in joules and the fireball radius in meters

The time at which thermal radiation is at a maximum Tt is
estimated by assuming that the initial expansion of the fireball
occurs at approximately the same velocity as the impact:

for a first-order estimate we
assume Î = 3 Ã-- 10â'3 and ignore the poorly-constrained
velocity dependence.

âoeas a rough approximation, the amount of thermal energy
received at a given distance from a nuclear explosion may be
assumed to be independent of the visibility.â

To calculate the seismic magnitude of an impact event,
we assume that the âoeseismic efficiencyâ (the fraction of the
kinetic energy of the impact that ends up as seismic wave
energy) is one part in ten thousand

we assume that the main seismic wave energy is that
associated with the surface waves.

For simplicity, we ignore the uplifted fraction of the
crater rim material. We estimate the thickness of ejecta at a
given distance from an impact by assuming that the material
lying above the pre-impact ground surface is entirely ejecta,
that it has a maximum thickness te = htr at the transient crater
rim, and that it falls off as one over the distance from the
crater rim cubed

we
assume that the transient crater is a paraboloid with a depth to
diameter ratio of 1:2

assumes that all ejecta is thrown out of the crater from
the same point and at the same angle (45Â) to the horizontal.

we assume that the impact-generated shock wave in
the air is directly analogous to that generated by an explo

Definitely too small to be noticed or tracked, but it was bigger than a loaf of bread. The 2003 Chicago meteorite was about that size, and while it lit up the night sky like nobody's business, there was no significant shock wave. I'm going to guess this one was about 1-10 meters across based on its effects.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/metbull.php?sea=Park+Forest&sfor=names&ants=&falls=&stype=contains&lrec=50&map=ge&browse=&country=All&srt=name&categ=All&mblist=All&phot=&snew=0&pnt=no&code=18106

http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/

We see posts about twice a year talking about the next "near miss" we're going to have. So what happened with this one? Didn't they catch it? Or did they catch it, realize it was going to hit, and decide not to tell anybody? It

We don't spot 'em all. We've got several active asteroid search programs going, which have discovered thousands of near-earth asteroids, but there are many thousands more. One of the triumphs of 21st-century science is that we now know where almost all of the "end of the world" and "destroy a large country" km-sized near-earth asteroids are. But we think we've only found about half of the "annihilate a city" 300-m sized ones, and most of the mere "hydrogen-bomb" 100-m sized ones remain unknown. This meteor was *much* smaller than that -- I'd guess only a couple meters across. There are probably *millions* of those out there, and they're too small to see at all unless they make a close pass of the EArth.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/neowise/pia14734.html
http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/

For those musing, here's a Asteroid Impact Effect Calculator. Should be quite a bang :-)

Well, not quite knowing what density to use, I plugged in the 7m from TFA and chose porous object as a WAG at carbonaceous and left everything else at default and got this:

The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 1.9 years

I need to get out more if we have "quite a bang" every 1.9 years.

For those musing, here's a Asteroid Impact Effect Calculator. Should be quite a bang :-)

There are orders of magnitude of difference between the size of asteroid needed to contain industrially useful amounts of metal and the size needed to present a serious threat to Earth's biosphere. You can play around with the parameters to see what I mean.

That's effectively what MLA lets you do. What's the problem?
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/09/

Probably per this:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/09/

(See Figure 3 here for historical trends.)