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Well you're now interjecting some opinion in there as well based on an observation. I do agree that GHGs are contributing to it but to what extent is one of those argument points but again it doesn't matter what the root cause is. Why? To be honest I think we're fucking the planet over in such a way that it'll make little difference if it's 2 or 4 degrees C higher on average in 100 years because there won't be really be an easy way to live on the planet. We have too many people trying to live on this blue ball and most of them want what the other industrialized nations have and they're not willing to sit down and enter into a dialog about slowing their own economic growth. Industrialized nations are consuming resources at a rate that will in some respects help curtail GHG emissions by their overconsumption of energy. At some point oil will run out but then you'll see coal being spun back up. We're already consuming more and more natural gas because of new tech. and just getting at that with fracking is screwing the water supplies and releasing more GHGs just in aquisition. Climate Change is only one leg on the barstool in other words but you can say with 100% certainty that human activity is fucking the planet over making it less inhabitable. Rich nations need to do with less, growing nations need to curtail their ambitions and also introduce reasonable contraception policies because more and more people all wanting better standards of living are the root cause.
As George Carlin reminded us the Earth will eventually take care of this minor surface nuisance.

First they tell us that dark chocolate is good for us because of the antioxidants and that it reduces the amount of fat that your body adsorbs from other foods.
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://www.medicalnewstoday.co...

Then they tell us that whole milk, cheese, etc. keeps us leaner
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...

Now bathing in sunlight (don't forget the sunscreen) will help us manage our weight.

So, I guess this means that eating dark chocolate, chasing it down with whole milk, while sitting in the sun and reading (good thing I own a Kindle) will help me get rid of those unwanted pounds... Ahhh... This IS the life.... (grin)

It's possible that Republican anti-science positions are worse in some ways, but Scientific American and MIT acknowledge that the problem is not limited to Republicans.

It's also worth point out that coal power plants generates MORE radioactive waste than nuclear plants by a factor of ~100.

It's just spread over a wide area, causes cancer, and no one collects or taxes it.

Why is this a thing that always has to be explained? It's not just the start screen, it's the pervasive touchscreen controls that do not fit the desktop PC ergonomics. It looks great for a smartphone or tablet but PC? No and their attempts to make some of those controls work with the mouse (ie, charms) is a perpetual annoyance.

Now as for the start screen itself, the act of taking over the whole screen is, at least to me, akin to the Doorway Effect. I don't want a wall of icons; I want text labels in (a few at most) columns ordered alphabetically. You know, like most of my files (sometimes by file type, sometimes by last modified).

Or perhaps you could express the amount of radiation leaked by a nuclear plant by comparing it to the normal operation of a coal power plant.

On average, a nuclear plant leaks about 10 milli-coal-plants worth of radioactive material. Which is why you see the coal industry being hit with billions of dollars in cleanup costs every time they dump radioactive uranium and thorium in the form of coal ash.

Oh, wait. You don't, really. Because coal power plants aren't regulated the same way nuclear plants are they can just blow it into the air and forget about it. And if that coal ash just happens to contain enough radioactive Uranium 238 to power every nuclear power plant in the country with a few hundred tons left over, then so be it. At least they're not nuclear so that's okay, right?

Unlike you I can cite Scientific American to back up what I've written with an actual link:
http://www.scientificamerican....
Note the mention of President Johnson there. If that's not enough try google and you will find many others.

"There are no large "oil companies" any more, they're all "energy companies" now, "

Wrong. They are "natural resource extraction" companies not energy companies. The two are radically different. A unholy part of economics with no environmental costs, and "unlimited supply." Both ridiculous concepts within the farce that is economics. *see http://www.scientificamerican....

You are full of shit.

If governments can tell you what car to drive and how much CO2 it can emit, why not tell people what they can eat, how much animal protein, and put a methane tax on cows and pigs? All this concern over cars and driving and global warming but eating meat seems to be worse than driving a Hummer. http://www.scientificamerican....

Eating meat may the only thing that can save us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Fight desertification, sequester carbon AND grow good food. The guy in the TED talk points out that this works well in terrible conditions.

Not necessarily...see this report http://www.scientificamerican....

In this study, however, docs told patients they were getting placebos. Eighty patients with irritable bowel syndrome were instructed to take two sugar pills daily. The bottle even had "placebo" printed on it. After three weeks, 60 percent of the placebo group reported relief from symptoms, compared to 35 percent who’d received no treatment at all.

When a doctor prescribes a placebo, he generally knows what he's doing and will monitor the condition. The course of action will be based on well proven tests and knowledge. A placebo is more often given just to placate a patent.

When a "healer" gives a placebo, he has no clue what is actually wrong with the patient and is just taking their money without actually fixing their problem.

There's a big difference there, one is a scientific approach mixed with beside manner, the other is pure charlatanism that might work entirely by accident. Placebo's may work on a minor problem like IBS, but when you've got an infection sugar pills and prayer wont help 1 iota. The problem is, a healer will use placebo's for both.

If governments can tell you what car to drive and how much CO2 it can emit, why not tell people what they can eat, how much animal protein, and put a methane tax on cows and pigs? All this concern over cars and driving and global warming but eating meat seems to be worse than driving a Hummer. http://www.scientificamerican....

The placebo effect is very real, it really works, and that's what this is, ie. placebo in the guise of "Energy Medicine" instead of a sugar pill.

Yes, it can cure, it can help people, but not people with real diseases/illnesses.

In no circumstances should it substitute proper science if there's something seriously wrong with you.

It depends on what you mean by real diseases or illnesses. Mental illnesses such as phobias, depression, or anxiety disorders, and partially mental symptoms like pain and nausea, can be treated pretty effectively with placebos and other holistic approaches like exercise and meditation. For example, we know cursing up a storm to be a pain-relieving exercise (as long as you use swear words sparingly the rest of the time). I would almost prefer people turn to some of these things first rather than drugs. But yeah, what makes me wary of the Change.org petition are the references to specific techniques, which probably require expensive certifications for practitioners so that patients have to pay an arm and a leg.

Sure enough, after I typed this, I looked up Wikipedia's page on "Thought Field Therapy" and found this:

[Roger Callahan, the inventor of Thought Field Therapy] also asserts that his most advanced level, Voice Technology (VT) can be performed over the phone using an undisclosed "technology". Training for the advanced VT is provided by Callahan. The fee listed on Callahan's website for this training is $100,000. Trainees must sign a confidentiality agreement not to disclose the trade secret behind VT.

In this study, however, docs told patients they were getting placebos. Eighty patients with irritable bowel syndrome were instructed to take two sugar pills daily. The bottle even had "placebo" printed on it. After three weeks, 60 percent of the placebo group reported relief from symptoms, compared to 35 percent who’d received no treatment at all.

If anything, the IPCC errs on the conservative side.

Like hell they [sic] are.

https://www.skepticalscience.c... ".. the evidence suggests that changes in climate are occurring faster, and with more intensity, than the IPCC have predicted. It is not credible to suggest the reports were biased in favour of the theory of anthropogenic global warming when the evidence demonstrates the IPCC were, in fact, so cautious."

http://www.irinnews.org/report...

"The international scientific community’s new assessment of the estimated sea level rise caused by global warming is a significant development, but experts say the projections for higher sea levels in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate (IPCC) assessment report (AR5) are still on the low side. The projections are of immediate concern to low-lying countries and small island states."

http://www.realclimate.org/ind...

"This is where the “conservative” estimates of IPCC, seen by some as a virtue, have lulled policy makers into a false sense of security, with the price having to be paid later by those living in vulnerable coastal areas."

http://www.scientificamerican....

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blo...

What is done in these highly politicized reports, is take the 5% extreme case, say in California and report that. Then take the 5% most extreme case in NY and report that.. So on and so forth. Now even if these "confidence" things could be interpreted as probability of the event occurring, which they can't. They present all of these 5% things all over the world as if that is what could happen, while even with this poor interpretation of data, its a million to one that even a dozen of these predictions to come true. Its total misrepresentation of the model/data at best and scientifically dishonest.

Yes, yes. And at the bottom of your garden there are fairies as well! It must be true, because you said it was. No need to provide evidence or anything boring like that.

I've been reading the news, too, and I seem to recall many stories of climatologists underestimating the effects of global warming. take, for example, this article which lists many examples.

Interview with Kayser ("we've only found the first five genes"): http://www.scientificamerican....
In short: Hair and eye colour prediction: 0.9, height: 0.75, everything else "much lower" than 0.75 with 0.5 being totally random.

And from the article itself: "The next step is to run larger studies in different populations to confirm that the variants found so far are statistically reliable." which explains why there aren't any more test examples.

A bit about how it works ("Fine Tuning of Craniofacial Morphology by Distant-Acting Enhancers"): http://www.evolutionnews.org/2...

Also remember that every vote for coal is a vote for nuclear waste-product pollution.

You are surprisingly ignorant...

Since, YES, Horizontal transfer does indeed happen, and is widely documented. In fact, it happens A WHOLE LOT.
Yes, porcine and human genes do mix, using viral vectors and other methods.
Yes, Viruses DO INDEED permanently integrate into human and animal genomes. (You DO know that the genes responsible for placental implantation in many placental mammals comes from precisely this source, right? You DO know about the porcine endemic retrovirus, and other such things?)

The argument shouldnt be that "Those things dont happen in nature", because that is straight up wrong. The argument should be that "Natural occurence of this is very narrow in scope, and only persists when there is a profound advantage boost, and then only takes root after a considerable incubation period, and that this behavior has no direct analog with the unnatural section processes used by humans in agricultural settings.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-case-against-copernicus/ has an interesting article on how the scientific evidence available at the time actually disproved Copernicus. It wasn't until much later that the heliocentric solar system was proven true.

I wonder if we start trying to police science too closely if the great theories of tomorrow that we don't yet have enough evidence to support might get tossed.

Same goes for skin, as well. Wash your hands, but you don't have to "nuke bacteria from orbit." A lot of it is good for you and is there for a reason.

Scientists Discover That Antimicrobial Wipes and Soaps May Be Making You (and Society) Sick

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

What is worse, perhaps the most comprehensive study of the effectiveness of antibiotic and non-antibiotic soaps in the U.S., led by Elaine Larson at Columbia University (with Aiello as a coauthor), found that while for healthy hand washers there was no difference between the effects of the two, for chronically sick patients (those with asthma and diabetes, for example) antibiotic soaps were actually associated with increases in the frequencies of fevers, runny noses and coughs [4]. In other words, antibiotic soaps appeared to have made those patients sicker. Let me say that again: Most people who use antibiotic soap are no healthier than those who use normal soap. AND those individuals who are chronically sick and use antibiotic soap appear to get SICKER.

Here, then, is the evidence we need, evidence very clearly at odds with our intuition to scrub and scrub. Yet hardly anyone has followed up on Larson’s study and no one has reexamined what happens with chronically sick patients and antibiotic soaps. The truth is that few biologists are studying what antibiotic soaps do to us. Still, the evidence indicates that when confronted with a dirty grocery store cart handle, we should just wash with soap and water like our great grandmothers would have done (if they had had grocery carts). At the very least, antibiotic wipes do not appear to help us and, it may be that they are actually hurting us.

They may look like sugar ants, but they are from a different, crueler planet. Fire ants are amazing little things, but choicer words spring to mind when they're actually doing their evil. They are the devil's own. That are like the IRS in more concentrated and honest form.

Crazy ants are taking over from fire ants: when both want the same thing, the crazy ants win 94% of the time http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-rise-of-the-crazy-ants/

If fire ants are the IRS in concentrated form, then get ready for an invasion of concentrated TSA.

In the interests of balance, if you work in an open plan office that's her fault.

On the contrary, the open floor plan has its roots in the 20th century philosophy of Modernism combined with a focus on industrial efficiency by early 20th century industrialists. Maria Montessori, in contrast, adapted traditional values to the modern era. The multiple ages grouped together doing work simulates the traditional large family (plus cousins). One of the problems she was addressing was the dual-working-parents leaving their children to play in the stairwells of apartment buildings. And, really, what is the alternative for a preschool? Walls, offices, and cubicles? The need for adult supervision in a preschool dictates the open floor plan there, Montessori or not.

Blame Henry Ford instead.

Cheerleader effect. If well you don't see your friends in a photo with you, the basic principle is similar, we find attractive any mean to take part of a community.

You might be surprised as to how much "road attention" you lose performing such a simple maneuver.

Yes I would be surprised. And I wouldn't take your word for it. Especially as you example is of taking your eyes off the road, not a long press of a button that is already at your fingertip.

Yea, too bad there's not a plethora of existing studies that show how non-visual distractions are just as bad (if not worse, in some cases) as vision-based ones, huh?

http://www.scientificamerican....

http://www.businessinsider.com...

http://mentalhealth.about.com/...

http://www.motherjones.com/kev...

Did you just say that ~43% of Americans are mildly sociopathic? Because that's the number that has tried pot, which is still illegal everywhere in the US (federally). If you think everyone around you is a sociopath, you might want to shift your attention inward.

I'd expect the chassis to rust out before it needed more than a new set of bearings.

Given that said chassis is mostly aluminum that'll be a while...

But then again, I've heard of motors made during Edison's time still being in service, and AC induction motors, properly treated, are about the longest living electric motor as well...

I wonder if we might see a return of reupholstery/interior refurbishment places - rather than replace your Tesla, swap the battery for a new one while you have it repainted, seats replaced, and dash fixed up a bit?

If they have links to the petroleum industry perhaps you'd like to share exactly how much they have made and exactly where this money is supposed to have come from.

Admittedly, it has gotten harder. The money used to follow a much more transparent path. See http://www.scientificamerican....

As I said before: Removing barriers for women does not impose barriers for men. Scholarships exclusively for women do not disadvantage men, they only help to give women equal opportunity.

You MRA's are a pitiful lot. Are you afraid that if you male privilege doesn't advantage you enough you won't be able to compete?

Look, I'm a tall, good-looking, white male from a middle class background. That's life on "easy mode". I could pretend that all of my success is due to exclusively to my intelligence and hard-work, but I'm not delusional. I had, and continue to enjoy, countless advantages. Advantages that other people can only dream about. So many, in fact, that it's hard for me to identify most of them! I won't even try to list the educational opportunities and advantages that were available to me and not others. Let's stick to the less obvious ones.

People automatically assume that I'm competent, capable, intelligent, and well-educated. I don't have to constantly prove myself to others. (I don't know that I've every had to do that!) People listen when I talk and give serious consideration to what I have to say. For many women and minorities, that's a rare occurrence. (If they're lucky enough to ever have experienced that at all.)

I get preferential treatment virtually everywhere I go. Not just at work, but at stores, bars, restaurants, etc. I'm willing to bet that you do as well -- you just don't recognize that or assume it's because of something you've done when, in reality, it's merely due to your gender and where and to whom you were born.

You reminded of This and, to a lesser extent, This.

Give it some thought.

No need to be overly dramatic but you do have something of a point: the IPCC does have a track record of being overly conservative in its estimates.

Hey Californians. I live on the other coast and I have a hole in my back yard where I can pump all the water out I could ever want - for free.

That only works until you deplete the groundwater supplies, and once depleted, they take a long time to refill. Also, drawing excess water from the California aquifer has caused salt water to seep in, which obviously will make things worse.

The plains states are getting into some very real trouble soon as agriculture has been draining the enormous High Plains Aquifer System.

I think the ultimate energy source is seen in the Casimir Effect, but our
science budget would have to be scaled up to 10% of what we spend
on military, lol.

Maybe we could close 10% of the 700+ baes in 100+ countries ??? ROFL

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

http://www.scientificamerican....

http://physicsworld.com/cws/ar...

So we win some, we lose some

Because in the case of lakemaid Brewery, they were technically not breaking the law, they we looking to advance the technology of beer delivery to a "new level".

Seriously, skimming around led me to this article which indicates that FAA does not have regulations in place, only guidelines. Forgetting the technological issues LMB would have to over come, they were operating in a line of sight manner, with the idea of GPS positioning being overridden by a human pilot *(yes, there is tech for that).

Since there would not be multiple companies operating in that environment, the FAA could have used LMB asa tast bed to see how such a business would work. The clientele was perfect, the location fantastic...stupid on the FAA to try and shut them down and shame on LMB for giving in so quick.

oh and... BETA!!!!

In the scientific literature, there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused primarily by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases.[2][3][4] No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view,[5]

And on the other side we have a massive political campaign to deny climate change:

https://www.google.com/search?...

http://www.scientificamerican....

"Men and women have differently wired brains, more news at 11."
That. Is. False. Stop propagating that myth. Young girls get told that lie, then believe it and don't go into STEM becasue "they aren't wired for it"

"Anyways why is it such a "social problem" that they aren't interested? "
That's not the problem, the problem is there are directed away from it, usually by idiots saying things like "Men and women have differently wired brains"

You don't know it to be false anymore than the commentors know it to be true. Especially considering studies that assert there are differences in, if not behavior, possible wiring of brains between the sexes. That isn't to say they are conclusively "wired differently", but it's bullshit for you to dismiss it as "propagating a myth".

http://www.scientificamerican....

How about the myth you seem to be propagating? That somehow men and women only populate the fields of interests and careers they do, because of big meanies imposing sexist and genderist constructs upon them during their formative years? That the only reason little johnny wants to be a kung-foo-astronaut-scientist-president at the age of ten is because the sexist society which surrounds him does not allow him to want to be a movie-star-princess-ballerina-nurse-stay-at-home-dad. That left to their own devices and interests, the distribution of genders would be perfectly even across the spectrum. This might be a fair assertion, were it not for real world experience. I mean, in a vacuum, where we look upon humanity as if we were some alien life-form visiting this unfamiliar species.

Also, could you introduce me to these parents and siblings and family and friends and teachers and rest of society who are going around telling young women that they can't be interested in science or engineering or programming? Especially in this day and age? I have yet to really meet any of these people, but they must be absolutely everywhere -- like closet racists or something -- since they apparently have such a monumental impact on the world.

Unfortunately this Scientific American article is behind a paywall, it's where I originally saw mention of this. This article includes at least one of the articles that SciAm was referencing.

Here's a link

Read this blog post which references actual studies and then tell me gender bias is not real. Can't read? I'll summarize it: send out a resume to a bunch of people. Sometimes use a male name, other times use a female name. Have the recipient rate the candidate and guess what? The resume with the male name scores higher in their estimation. When asked how much they would pay the candidate, the male is always valued higher. Even if the person evaluating the resume is a women.

Many orchestras now perform blind auditions, because they discovered that gender and physical appearance of the candidate skewed their perception of the candidate's performance. There are studies that test people's cognitive abilities after the most subtle forms of "priming." Stereotype susceptibility is a real thing, proven in study after study. Remind a group of asian girls they are asian before they take a math test, their scores increase. Remind them they are girls, their scores go down.

We are social animals, even those of us that lack social skills, and constant social pressure has real world ramifications. It amazes me that a site of self-professed nerds is populated with so many people that don't question their own biases.

The internment of Japanese-Americans was immoral and unnecessary, the use of census information in wartime to track enemy aliens was less problematic than the internment of Japanese-Americans who were American citizens. The law allowing the use of the census data was passed in 1942 and repealed in 1947.

http://www.scientificamerican....

However, Sherman had every legal right to get census data on farmland (not persons) in any even he used information from state of georgia quoting sherman
"I had obtained not only the United States census-tables of 1860," Sherman wrote in his Memoirs, "but a compilation made by the Controller of the State of Georgia for the purpose of taxation, containing in considerable detail the 'population and statistics' of every county in Georgia" (Sherman)."

http://proceedings.esri.com/li...

To be accurate, the search in Gran Sasso is a search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which are one microphysical explanation for dark matter. I personally do not like the common conflation of dark matter (for which there is abundant evidence) with WIMPs (for which there is no evidence at all).

A lot of the interest in WIMPs comes from particle physics, due to the "WIMP miracle" (that hypothetical particles at the electro-weak scale, i.e., ~ 100 GeV, apparently have the right mass to explain dark matter) and the hypothesized connection between WIMPs and supersymmetry (i.e., that the WIMP could be a supersymmetric neutralino). After much experimental work, the WIMP miracle is almost dead experimentally, and the supposed connection to supersymmetry is not doing so well either.

However (not that you would know from reading most articles on the subject), there are a number of other viable theories for dark matter. These include axions, primordial black holes (maybe), and macroscopic quark nuggets, which would have important practical implications should they be detected.

Until you get energy densities similar to Gasoline, you're NOT going to obsolete it.

Yeah but you don't have to obsolete gasoline for solar to be useful. I could use an electric car for my commute, and if costs come down I might. If fracking hadn't held down the cost of gasoline I would have an electric car by now.

But I would still have a gasoline car. A few times per year I make long road trips. So, gasoline car for long road trips, electric car for short commute to work.

Delivery trucks, moving vans, and farm tractors will probably not be electric any time soon. So what? Use electric where it makes sense...

(Making the cell makes more pollution than it "removes" from the environment producing power).

Nope, not buying it. I need a reference if you want to convince me here. Besides, the pollution from a solar cell factory is all in one place and can be managed, rather than dumping it into the air behind a car that is driving.

According to this reference, most of the pollution from manufacturing solar panels is from the electricity to make them. The article says that if solar panel factories were solar-powered, solar panels would be remarkably low-pollution. The article also says the energy payback time is 1 to 3 years.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-cells-prove-cleaner-way-to-produce-power/

It's more expensive than anything else.

Nah. A solar cell installation pays for itself within a decade... you have a big up-front cost, but then you get free power (no need to buy fuel or dispose of waste).

For large installations, solar thermal makes a lot more sense tho.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#High-temperature_collectors

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/22/3099141/climate-denying-groups-funding/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-climate-change-denial-effort/

http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/climate-change-denial-a-billion-dollar-industry-of-fabrication-says-study/

(sampled from the first few hits for: https://www.google.es/search?q=climate+change+denial+lobby+billions }

Since I think we know that few scientists are billionaires, and yet scientific fraud is documented to exist, you just might be distorting the picture. (I like the bit about, "might as well add creationism while we are into denialism." It really added to your argument. You should have suggested a more sophisticated cocktail for sipping on a "billion dollar yacht" though.) Thank goodness that everyone associated with climate science is clean, eh?

False positives: fraud and misconduct are threatening scientific research

The psychologist, who admitted "massaging" the data in some of his papers, resigned from his position in June after being investigated by his university, which had been tipped off by Uri Simonsohn from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Simonsohn carried out an independent analysis of the data and was suspicious of how perfect many of Smeesters' results seemed when, statistically speaking, there should have been more variation in his measurements.

The case, which led to two scientific papers being retracted, came on the heels of an even bigger fraud, uncovered last year, perpetrated by the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel. He was found to have fabricated data for years and published it in at least 30 peer-reviewed papers, including a report in the journal Science about how untidy environments may encourage discrimination.

The cases have sent shockwaves through a discipline that was already facing serious questions about plagiarism.

Spring (and Scientific Fraud) Is Busting Out All Over

Verbeke and Tijdink cast a wide net, with support they received from the Pascal Decroos Fund for Investigative Journalism. They contacted researchers from the medical science faculties of every university in Flanders, sending out more than 2,500 questionnaires and receiving 315 fully completed anonymous responses in return.

The answers startled. Four of the researchers who responded, or 1.3 percent, acknowledged that they had fabricated data at least once during the past three years, misdeeds that may still be unpunished. What’s more, 23, or 7.3 percent, of those who sent back questionnaires had engaged in the quaint term “massaging”—in which data or results were removed to make their work true up with original hypotheses. The roughly 8 percent of fraudulent practices found at the universities in Flanders compared with an average of 2 percent of smelly stuff going on that turned up in a 2009 meta-analysis in PLoS ONE of studies from around the world. .....

Respondents said the publish or die imperative was one of the main reasons for the infractions. The survey found that two thirds of the professors polled ran into excessive pressure to get their work into journals and nearly 70 percent of all of those surveyed had added the name of one author who had not participated in a study.

Study: Scientific research fraud on the rise

Btw it's not really a major backtrack, that comment was made ages ago and was corrected after the fact. See page two. Bottom line Nuclear > Coal.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste&page=2

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-compact-fluorescent-lightbulbs-dangerous
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-public/some-comfort-about-broken-cfls
http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/cleaning-broken-cfl

Didn't say you made it up. I'm well aware of the theory - it shows up on Slashdot and elsewhere every now and then. But I don't think it's a better theory than some other random one.

Just because a few tribes do persistent hunting doesn't make it so plausible that persistence hunting is why we evolved to run. A few tribes do some other random stuff too. There could be other reasons. My theory makes about as much sense if not more so.

Warfare seems a lot more prevalent in hominids, especially humans than persistence hunting. And I'd claim the selection/evolutionary pressures are a lot higher.

Chimpanzees conduct warfare and genocide quite regularly: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/science/22chimp.html?_r=0
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2011/05/17/ugandan-chimpanzees-may-be-hunting-red-colobus-monkeys-into-extinction/
Babboons go to war: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8400000/8400019.stm
Even monkeys: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/wild/videos/monkey-gang-turf-war/

Maybe running started with a few persistence hunters, but once a bunch of hominids started going to war running around with spears the survivors were mostly those who could run whether with spears or not. That's a far stronger evolutionary pressure than failing to chase down some meat - could survive for a fair bit by eating some grass bulbs, insects or worms which don't run that fast.

One comment over there has interesting take on this:
1. terrybollinger 12:58 am 09/22/2011

I open up Windows Store Apps only on the the Modern UI display and Win32/64 apps on the desktop displays.

Okay, I'll bite: What benefit could you experience on the Metro side (worth dedicating a monitor) that you can't with the desktop?

Well, you don't get the benefit of a clean slate from swapping to a full screen UI and walking through the mental-door-way that helps you forget what you were about to do.

You also benefit from the lack of discoverability that these gesture based interfaces present -- So you can sharpen your mind guessing at and maybe even learning new ways to do the things you already knew how to do.

You also benefit from Microsoft's App store which charges developers a cut of profits; You see, I'm not going to eat that distribution cost, I'll pass it onto you so the the same app in their "modern" W8 store will costs you more than the desktop version -- Well, actually, I'll calculate adoption rate then distribute that MS tax across both the W8 UI and the desktop program to increase overall cost to you whether you use W8 or not. This is "beneficial" because it gives Microsoft a cut of software sales they never needed before, so they don't have to focus on their core competency (Selling you an OS with features you want), and instead can... well... Give gamers more glorious ads on their dash over the XBL service they pay for which operates via the same MS sales tax model; Fund more patent suits against FLOSS OSs they had no part in developing so they can roll out the MS tax to smartphones and tablets instead of having to compete; Run servers for software as a service so they can rent you MS Office, and help the NSA maintain "national" corporate interest "security", etc.

You've got to look at things from MS's perspective: It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's only micro when it's soft, baby.

Quantum Cheshire Cat

While it doesn't directly correspond to your story, it seems that people near an earthquake have sometimes reported unusual lights: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mysterious-light-associated-earthquakes

I thought you might be interested in the article.