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It also doesn't make sense to recycle plastic simply because it's cheaper to make new plastic. The best thing you can do with used plastic is mentioned in this article:

http://sciencenordic.com/why-s...

Spoiler: burn it for energy.

You said "the idea that people tend to chose it or even that the majority of prostitutes start out choosing it as a career is specious in the extreme." It seems that a majority of prostitutes do, in fact, choose it as a career. Half of the prostitutes in a new survey say they became prostitutes because of sexual curiosity, and 68 percent consider their line of work as part of their sexuality."

That phrase "as early as"--what does it mean, exactly? If you call this a "prediction"-- what did it predict, and how can you tell whether it is accurate?

Here's a good discussion: https://www.carbonbrief.org/gu...

And here's a nice one with a pretty graphic visualization: http://sciencenordic.com/when-...

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This article says nothing about the Gulf coast being hit by 3, 4, maybe over half a dozen hurricanes per year. Just that as there is a observable and measurable correlation between oceans warming and hurricanes growing more frequent and severe.

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This article mostly talks about the fact that hurricanes may become more intense and that a category 6 will eventually have to be created if that happens because hurricanes with windspeed ranging from 257.5 kph to 407 kph are being lumped together into category 5. It goes on to speculate that dumping the category system might be a better idea than creating a category 6. Towards the end it even says: This oscillation means the Atlantic is expected to cool in the future, obscuring links among hurricane activity and global warming. Perhaps counterintuitively, recent computer modeling studies predict fewer tropical cyclones if the ocean heats up further as a result of global warming. But they also predict intensification of the ones that do form, albeit with limited confidence. Frequency drops by 6 to 34 percent this century, according to 2010 review article in Nature Geoscience, whereas intensity rises 2 to 11 percent. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) , i.e. fewer hurricanes but the ones we'll get will be more severe. Nothing about the Gulf coast being hit by 3, 4, maybe over half a dozen hurricanes per year.

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The independent isn't really a scientific source but all this piece says is that somebody found evidence that warmer oceans seem to be linked to an increase in hurricane frequency and that in a warm year hurricanes are twice as likely as in a cold year. The real news here is that somebody found a way to extract data about hurricanes from old measurements made before the satellite age. They say nothing about the Gulf coast being hit by 3, 4, maybe over half a dozen hurricanes per year.

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Still nothing about the Gulf coast being hit by 3, 4, maybe over half a dozen hurricanes per year. It does talk about more hurricanes but the frequency is nothing like you claim: ”If this trend continues, it is realistic to expect a ten-fold increase in hurricanes like Katrina. That amounts to once every two years,”

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And yet again nothing about the Gulf coast being hit by 3, 4, maybe over half a dozen hurricanes per year. This guy talks about improvements in computer modelling since 2005 and seems to be making the case that global hurricane frequency will not increase but that the severity of the hurricanes we do get will increase. I.e. about the same number of hurricanes but they'll be more destructive.

Yea, you did a search.

Found all these in less than 1 minute, and everyone voted you up because they want you to be right, but obviously you are not. I like the one claiming Category 6 hurricanes will be hitting any day now.

Bonus speech by Al Gore saying the same thing.

Read that long winded piece and it is mostly a regurgitation of d

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Yea, you did a search. Found all these in less than 1 minute, and everyone voted you up because they want you to be right, but obviously you are not. I like the one claiming Category 6 hurricanes will be hitting any day now.

Bonus speech by Al Gore saying the same thing.

It's a big read but Africa has always had lower rates of caries than other developing nations. However, as my link outlines, this varies regionally within Africa.

The currently accepted wisdom is that Africans have a better genetic predisposition to tooth decay. Locals can grow up on a diet of wild meat and grains, never brush in their life, and have rather stunningly perfect teeth. Here is an article on the genetics of teeth.

This link is not about teeth, but there is a lot about diet that we don't understand.

In addition to the possibility of uncanny valley problems when serving content to animals is the problem is that animals need a much faster fps to perceive continuous motion.
Dogs need about 70 fps or faster or it looks like a series of static pictures much like 5 fps might look to us.
Birds need over 100fps.
Older TV's were probably annoying as all get out to them. I know my dogs from long ago disliked being forced to watch "The Smothers Brothers" with me. Now I know it was due to the fps being to low.

Thanks to advances in TV technology, we can now better serve our canine companions' need for media.
http://sciencenordic.com/do-do...

One unanswered question is how much variation is there among the breeds of dogs.
Do smart dogs, such as Australian Shepherds, need a faster or slower frame rate than, say a Borzoi or Basset Hound?
Consider that humans are easily fooled with a rather low fps.

Selling arms to dictatorships is just one of those things we have to put up with in life.

http://sciencenordic.com/unite...
The United States arms most dictatorships
January 1, 2012 - 07:00

You'll have to come up with a better reason than that to shut down anonymous networks.

Like, "Because we want to control which dictatorships get arms."

I cited my statistics and will do so again:
http://sciencenordic.com/break...

http://www.nature.com/ng/journ...

What you are saying is incorrect. 1 or 2 in 1000 is not .0001% of the population, it's 99.998% of the population (for febrile seizures in relation to MMR vaccine http://sciencenordic.com/break...)

Add in other serious side effects and we're getting closer to to .01%.

And what are the benefits of the vaccine? They reduce your chance of contracting a disease by a small percentage if exposed to it.

In my opinion, it makes sense for most people to get this vaccine. In my opinion it also makes sense for most people to avoid alcohol and other drugs. In my opinion people should practice restraint in a lot of ways that they do not. However we live in a society based on freedom, and if you can't handle the risks (and benefits) of your neighbors having liberty, then frankly it doesn't make sense to live in this country.

It is good public policy to encourage people to get vaccinated, and it is also good public policy to encourage people to go to college. However these things should not be mandatory.

On my android phone, I can type words by swiping between letters, rather than simply poking at them with my fingers. I'm amazed how well this tech works and how fast I can write with it.

I know that eye trackers exist (and that one can select letters by hovering over them) but does eye tracking + swipe exist? If it doesn't, it would be straightforward to prototype it easily (originally you had to buy it, but now it seems to be part of the main OS. http://www.swype.com/

...actually, after a bit of googling it looks like others have thought of this: http://sciencenordic.com/texti...

Other human computer interaction options would be the various brain wave headsets which are now appearing (e.g. from google I see http://neurosky.com/ http://interaxon.ca/ etc). They tend to be less accurate, but are probably useful for things like controlling the environment (lights on and off) etc. It wouldn't be difficult to interface them with some basic home automation hardware.

I would think that finding a mix off input devices would be ideal in terms of preventing fatigue.

Once a bit of time has passed, you might consider spending some time looking through the faculty pages at your local University's CS Department. Get in contact with them. There is a lot of work (and funds) going on into HCI right now. This seems like the type of project that would get a lot of support from graduate students and faculty.

Please come back to us with a follow-up post. Don't forget to include a fundraising link for equipment costs. I would certainly contribute.

I can't tell if you think that is a possibility, or it you're just trolling. Look at this picture of how far away the Earth is from the moon: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... The moon is both incredibly large and incredibly far away. The idea that we could affect it to the extent that you could see it from Earth is completely ridiculous. Look at the "dark side" of the Earth as seen from the moon: http://sciencenordic.com/what-.... If all the lights on Earth don't make an impression to the moon, then nothing we'd even think about putting on the moon will have any noticeable difference to us.

All great points. You may also have distant relatives or old friends who may still be interested in your life either now or later. At the very least, historians may be interested in your life, including in your local historical society. See for example:
"Why do historians value letters and diaries"
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/whydo.html
"Thus, the historical value of reading diaries and letters involves understanding the significance of how individual writers employed, experimented with, or altered the conventional forms alive in their time. Perhaps more than any other kind of historical text, the personal writing we are considering reveals how people both embraced and resisted the time and place in which they lived. Their personal motives for employing either form -- the emotional and intellectual energy infusing the form with life each time it is written with a new subjectivity -- suggest much about how people in the past made their cultures, but made them from the materials at hand."

In any case, whether pictures or writings remain, you've made ripples in the world in all the lives you've interacted with. What is the universe quantum physicists describe but the sum total of all those sorts of waves?

Probably too late, but might give you a bit more time to make a few more ripples:
http://sciencenordic.com/cancer-patients-high-vitamin-d-levels-live-longer
"For example lung cancer patients, the median survival rate after the cancer diagnosis was 5.3 months for patients with low vitamin D levels, whereas it was 22.6 months for patients with high levels."

More about other cancer options in this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3610805&cid=43358733

You might find parts of this book by Thomas Moore "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ideals" of interest, or at least, just the summary:
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
"Our lives are filled with emotional tunnels: the loss of a loved one or end of a relationship, aging and illness, career disappointments or just an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Society tends to view these "dark nights" in clinical terms as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. But Moore shows how honoring these periods of fragility as periods of incubation and positive opportunities to delve the soul's deepest needs can provide healing and a new understanding of life's meaning. Dark Nights of the Soul presents these metaphoric dark nights not as the enemy, but as times of transition, occasions to restore yourself, and transforming rites of passage, revealing an uplifting and inspiring new outlook on such topics as:
* The healing power of melancholy
* The sexual dark night and the mysteries of matrimony
* Finding solace during illness and in aging
* Anxiety, anger, and temporary Insanities
* Linking creativity, spirituality, and emotional struggles
* Finding meaning and beauty in the darkness"

Although it sounds like you have already found a way to honor and respect the dark night you are facing. So, I link to that more by way of honoring what you say.

A key point he makes is that in mainstream Western culture, we usually see "growth" as about like a caterpillar getting bigger, but ignore growth as "transformation", like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. "Groundhog Day" is a favorite funny movie that connects with that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)

I wrote about my mother's last days here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
" I'm glad I had the "free" time