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That's common knowledge.

Bit Twiddling Hacks

Not, too common, apparently, since this particular hack isn't in that list. It wasn't too hard to work out what it does (find the largest power of 2 that divides x or, equivalently, find the value of the lowest bit that is set) but it didn't make the Hacks list, and I don't think that's because it's too obvious.

That's common knowledge.

Bit Twiddling Hacks

This is what one the old systems looked like

This may be what you want. http://web.stanford.edu/class/...

To give you an overview, it's an intro to programming using Javascript and a little image manipulation library. Each page has a series of problems with boilerplate code that you edit and click a button to run.

Head straight to Week 2's lessons (http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs101/image-3-loops.html) and go through it with him.

Kids find it pretty cool that they can change some numbers and that will have an effect on the picture. I did this with my nieces (8 and 10) just a few weeks ago and they both LOVED it. I was showing it to them to gauge their interest for a totally unrelated reason, and we ended up going over it for about 3 hours in one sitting.

Give your kid little challenges and provide most of the code. They just edit the code. It'll be a while before they add their own lines of code (about 2 hours for my nieces). One of the big points of interest was one of the problems that introduced an "If" statement based on the pixel's X coordinate. We made many changes to that block of code and ended up making stripes of different colors across the image, first vertical, then horizontal, then mixed. They thought it was just the coolest thing.

Then there's code that changes pixel values based on the average color of the pixel. So it's doing stuff like taking a picture with a red stop sign in it, and making the stop sign blue without altering the rest of the image. It's really neat, and it's the kind of stuff they've seen in movie special effects (they'd heard of green screens and I related how similar this is), and it's just a few lines of code.

So they charge $41k per student, they have 15 students in a class, that is $615,000. Each of those students is probably taking about 5 classes each for three quarters, so that comes down to $41,000 per class. According to Standford itself, the most they pay is about $28,000 per year for Teaching Assistants, and some of that is funny money spent allowing them to take courses. Let's not forget that the University is constantly harassing alumni for money.
It certainly looks to me from a cursory look at the numbers that they can't afford to have two TAs in the class. However, in a school which boasts a low student to faculty ratio, they ought to have it easier than most schools for one faculty member to handle grading the work.

Let us not forget about the issues with mailing lists either.

http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~d...

http://www.vox.com/2014/11/21/...

What I'm hearing, for example from Carol Dweck, is that self-esteem is not a noble goal by itself. Certainly, we shouldn't be trashing people's efforts, as Microsoft discovered after they canceled Courier; at least, I'm guessing that's the client who called Dan Ariely (video) for help. (Text summary.) In general, good work is intrinsically rewarding. I'm sick of this culture of fake cheerfulness.

Relevant articles on the subject (which I have not checked for scientific validity, but the sources seem OK):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-ocean-acidification-intimates-long-recovery-from-climate-change/
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/april/prehistoric-mass-extinction-042710.html

"In fact, roughly 121 million years ago—during an age known as the early Aptian—global CO2 levels were likely higher than 800 ppm (and possibly as high as 2,000 ppm) thanks to cataclysmic volcanic eruptions. [...] The records reveal that acidification proved a big problem for nannoplankton."

"It took at least 25,000 years for the new acidity levels reached in the surface waters to transfer to deeper waters, according to the research—and the ocean took 75,000 years to reach its peak acidity for that episode, as well as at least 160,000 years to recover. "

From the other article:
"New evidence gleaned by analyzing calcium embedded in Chinese limestone suggests that volcanoes, which spewed massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for a million years, caused the biggest mass extinction on Earth."

"[...] as carbon dioxide gas dissolved in the oceans, it raised the acidity of seawater. The research team said it was a deadly combination – carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and higher acidity in the oceans – that eventually wiped out 90 percent of marine species and about three-quarters of land species, in a cataclysmic event 250 million years ago known as the 'end-Permian extinction.' "

3. [...]no moving parts. SSD for boot,

As far as I can tell this is speculation on your part. Past a certain weight people are not going to throw the box around. As a heater it's also quite possible that it will be fastened to a wall or something too. Not that it matters anyway.

3. The article says that the supplier supplies power. Whatever cable they use for that can easily have a fibre built in for data.

That however is totally unrealistic. First they say they'll pay for power, not that they will lay their own electric cable all the way to the customer to bring power. That would be incredibly stupid, wasteful and so expensive they would never get a positive return on investment. So they will at most install a separate electric meter at the customer's premises, and then hook up their machine to a regular power outlet. So then this fiber you want to put in the power cable will have nowhere to plug into. And again, given that most houses/apartments don't have fiber yet it, requiring a fiber connection would limit them to just a fraction of the potential market, or would force them to lay their own fiber which again is incredibly expensive (but at least it would not be redundant if they manage to resell it to regular ISPs). But it's more likely they will simply reuse their customer's Internet connection (remember data caps are mostly a US thing). So really what this tells us is that they will limit themselves to workloads which don't require too much communication. The ideal case would be CPU/GPU intensive computations like Folding@Home, SETI, GIMPS, etc.

SolarCity claims its GridLogic program can provide electricity to communities and businesses for less than they pay for utility power

For decades we were told over and over, how the utility power is a "natural monopoly" and how, therefor, it can not be subject to competition...

and the facilities can still be connected to their area's utility power grid as an added backup.

This nod does not seem like anything more than a fig-leaf. Because, if I my campus or block or town can connect to a utility's grid, it can also connect to another town's grid — or simply that of a different commercial power-generation provider (solar or otherwise).

Either way, the myth of natural monopoly is crumbling.

The science behind what he's saying isn't really adding up. While there's naturally studies on both sides, this study indicates greater CO2 levels can inhibit growth http://news.stanford.edu/pr/02...

Moreover, methane is significantly more responsible for global climate change because it traps 100 times more heat than CO2. http://www.onegreenplanet.org/...

The article only talks about MIT history and laser inferometers (LIGO). It doesn't credit Louisiana State University's efforts to build resonant mass gravity wave detectors from the 1970s. By 1972, physics Prof William O Hamilton at LSU was working on a multi-ton aluminum bar and a He3 dilution cooler in what would become the Allegro graviy wave detector.

Some interesting history papers:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/pap...
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/g...

Its galactic orbit is pretty similar to the Sun's, so its motion relative to the sun is not that large. Still, even if we assumed that only the sun moved, given the galactic speed of the sun, the change in distance would still only be 6 light years, or 1% of its current distance.

What's really interesting to me is that the messages change in tone and intent depending on where the person lives.

In foreign (non-U.S.) cultures, the voices are often friendly, playful and may be perceived as coming from a relative:

http://news.stanford.edu/news/...

But Barnham does not really scrutinize the issue at all. For all his discussion of "rigor" and error bars in the collection of estimates, it does not consider the various components of the CO2 estimates except for one, which is apparently where most of the high CO2 release estimate comes: the assumption that uranium will be extracted from rock with a uranium content of 0.005% or less. This is the "yellow coal" scenario - at this concentration, using once-through U-235 burning only (boosted by in situ produced actinide burning) as in current reactors, the uranium ore contains no more energy than does coal.

But this is not a likely source of uranium in the future. Seawater is. It contains 1000 times as much uranium as the "yellow coal" ore, and can be extracted at a much lower energy cost, and a lower dollar cost as well.

We can estimate the energy cost of uranium from seawater by considering how it is collected, by immersing special polymer fabrics in seawater, to which the uranium ions attach. Polymers exist that have shown the ability to collect over 10% of their mass in uranium, and may be substantially reusable. The energy cost (and dollar cost) of manufacturing the polymers, deploying them, and stripping the uranium from them is considerably lower than mining and refining "yellow coal" uranium ore. Estimates of current seawater extraction technology are actually lower than the peak spot price of uranium already seen.

Nuclear power opponents dismiss seawater uranium with the argument that it is speculative, since no one produces uranium from this source yet. There is a good reason for that. We haven't exhausted supplies of richer ore yet, and thus don't need it. The fact that no one yet mines uranium ore with a uranium content of 0.005% either somehow does not trouble them in making their projections (the lowest grade ore currently mined is about ten times more concentrated than that).

Further, at-rest encryption means you can't search for shit.

Yep, that's a major issue we have with the encryption technologies we use at the moment. That's where the need for homomorphic encryption and other similar searchable encryption comes from.

Dan Boneh, Giovanni Di Crescenzo, Rafail Ostrovsky, Giuseppe Persiano: Public Key Encryption with Keyword Search. EUROCRYPT 2004: 506-522

Dawn Xiaodong Song, David Wagner, Adrian Perrig: Practical Techniques for Searches on Encrypted Data. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2000: 44-55

Eyal Kushilevitz, Rafail Ostrovsky: Replication is NOT Needed: SINGLE Database, Computationally-Private Information Retrieval. FOCS 1997: 364-373

The problem is that no insurer will insure a nuclear plant, so governments have to take the liability on themselves. Essentially nuclear operators get subsidised free insurance, so where are normally a commercial insurer would require high standards the government has to and the government is vulnerable to lobbying (bribes) and other shenanigans.

First two results on "nuclear insurance"

https://www.nmlneil.com/
http://www.nuclearinsurance.co...

And here's somebody directly addressing this one:

http://atomicinsights.com/real...
http://www-siepr.stanford.edu/...

I would think that the 20 or so kilograms of uranium from a rocket may be overshadowed by the 4.5 billion tons of uranium already in the ocean.

Not that it shouldn't be protected, but if we want long term propulsion in space, we'll need energy densities that can't be generated from chemical propulsion.

Look what popped up today:

http://med.stanford.edu/news/a...

As crazy as it might sound, the GP-B mission has validated means of following a zero acceleration orbit with sub-micron precision. The precision achieved was that the residual acceleration was on the order of 1E-11 g. So yeah, we can definitely follow a zero-acceleration orbit with crazy precision!

As illustrated by Stanfordâ(TM)s password policy shuns one-size-fits-all security http://arstechnica.com/securit... via https://itservices.stanford.ed...

Oh - I see now that I already answered on this earlier - not getting enough sleep here :) - Busy keeping everything as smooth as possible! Hope to have you guys be a part of the community and try out for yourselves :) About trust - there has actually been some interesting experimental economic research on this - whether people trust too much or too little: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/s... Not that it's exactly the same, but it might be similar: after a economic game where subjects were to hand money over to an anonymous individual who could either return more money back or keep all the money, they conclude: "Participants trusted too little, in that they grossly underestimated the proportion of their peers who would return money, prompting them to forgo profitable decisions to trust. However, participants also trusted too much. Given their high levels of cynicism and tolerance for risk, few should have handed money over, yet many still chose to trust.” Great read! Sorry for being such a geek ;)

This is when moms started joining the workforce. Educated in the 60s and beyond.

But there were already many women participating in the workforce, particularly as teachers, nurses, and clerical workers. Women formed the backbone of the war machine for World War II--and were basically kicked out of those jobs when the fighting ended, whether or not they wanted to be. The concept of women working wasn't foreign back then; it was the concept of women doing jobs they weren't supposed to do that was the big sticking point.

A woman invented half of the computer junk we use today at Xerox parc. Some of the greatest programmers of the past 40 years have been women.

Yes, absolutely yes! Until the 60's, this was completely true, because programming was viewed as women's work! Then something happened, and women dropped like flies from the ranks of computer programming. Did they suddenly stop being good programmers, or was something else going on?

I work for a giant company. Huge. You may have heard of us. Its women all up and down. Management and Tech.

I'm going to guess that you're with a Fortune 500 company, then. Consider this Senate testimony that goes into considerable detail as to the persistent gender challenges faced by women in large corporations in America, particularly in professional and higher-level positions. It includes data pulled from the Fortune 500, and goes into painstaking detail as to the disparities--both in numbers of women and their compensation--that continue to exist in large corporations.

Yes it's EDUCATION for women. Everything else follows. You want women in tech, incentivize them to LEARN TECH so they may achieve MERIT.

That's absolutely part of the solution, but it's only part of the solution. Those of us already in the tech sector need to be asking ourselves exactly why, for an industry that repeatedly insists that it is rooted on merit, we look so very different from the society in which we exist.

Further, there exists a clear and significant disparity between women and men pursuing CS degrees--a gap that didn't exist until the 90's. Something happened, and "well, that's just how things played out" doesn't cut it for me.

To focus on one industry is just bizarre handwaving.

Oh, this is a problem across many industries, but that doesn't mean we're somehow absolved of trying to get our own house in order. Further, we have some unique challenges of our own in this regard--the large drop in CS college enrollment, for example.

And the understanding that if gender doesn't want to get involved in a subject it doesn't mean we should establish a quota.

Oh, I recommended a quota? I must be getting old. I have no memory of doing any such thing.

Let's work on getting women in the middle east educated first.

Yes, we wouldn't want to overtax ourselves with doing more than one thing at the same time.

OK? Can we just cut the nonsense?

That would be wonderful.

Well, you're right from a formal logic perspective. In spoken languages, though, there's often an implicit 'either' attached to the 'or', causing 'or' to essentially mean 'xor'.

Yes, everyone should be expected to go read Principia Mathematica before posting to Slashdot, far better than any captcha in use today.

I think this is an incredibly short-sighted look at this. What we are talking about is changing genes, changing neural links, or fundamental brain chemistry (which we kinda do already... see medications). The human brain is incredibly complex and the only way we know to "fix" it is surgery to remove something like cancer, or via medications. To fundamentally change neural pathways or genes would be to fundamentally change the person, with unknown side effects. To suggest we can simply "fix" them ignores some well observed side effects of "traumatic brain injury". Likewise, the brain will adapt in a concept called neuroplasticity, it will rewire a damaged portion to a new section of the brain.

There are people out there who have no choice in the matter. For example intersex individuals, such as those born with 2 X's and a Y, are uncommon, but are out there. We are not necessarily talking gender dysphoria. Rather, we are talking someone who does not strongly express either gender. My understanding is that parents typically want males, so given the choice early on that's what they opt to have the doctor go for (and resulting surgery). Later on in life that may impose gender dysphoria, not because "he feels like a woman", but because his body is actively producing hormone levels of both, perhaps with a leaning toward one or another. This is not some psychological conditioning, this is a fundamental issue with the chemistry of their body. How do you suppose we fix that? A series of invasive surgeries? Years of therapy to "deal with it"?

In that sense, it was a form of anthropomorphism

I wouldn't call it that, since there isn't any necessary imputation of human characteristics to the objects. Instead, it's to do with intentionality. Whether I have a variable called "train_speed" or a "train" object with a "speed" member, the key thing is that these data are "about" achieving a particular purpose. I think TFA (and Dijkstra's piece) could have been much more insightful if the authors were familiar with a few ideas from philosophy of mind.

As you point out, things are more clear for physical modelling than other domains because no one is going to argue that trains don't have speeds.

It is accurate to say that a program tries to do something

The key is intentionality. Programs are intentional systems, and their "aboutness" is reflected in variable names ("speed", "name"), language constructs (try-catch) and, most importantly, however the algorithm achieves a specific end.

IMHO, we can go a long way in using the "intentional stance" without venturing into potentially misleading anthropomorphizations.

Something like this: http://srp.stanford.edu/links....
I wonder why this has never been implemented in openssh. (There are patches and it is supported by lsh).

unless you work at a company like Google that refuses to hire anyone from Iran

Not sure why you're bringing up this particular bias, but it's worth mentioning that one of my favorite professors is Iranian and was a senior research scientist at Google. link

12,125 PSI pressure at that depth. Surface pressure is 14.7 PSI.

1) Source for ocean depth pressure at 8145m.
2) Source for atmospheric pressure at earth's surface

It's totally dark down there. No light except the occasional bioluminescence. It's like an off-world environment. Makes me wonder where else life can exist.

I have yet to see studies seriously listing benefits of a warmer climate and actually comparing that to any negatives.

http://web.stanford.edu/~moore...

I found that in 30 seconds. Why couldn't you?

I have little doubt that if I spent more time, I could find many more.

The actual fact is that for all of history, more deaths attributable to climate have been due to cold rather than warm. This is a statistic that is also just about as easy to find.

It is one of the oldest known paradoxes. Your proposed resolution is #2.1 in the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... and it has a number of counter-arguments which you can read up on there or here http://plato.stanford.edu/entr...

What do you think, "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State" means?

To me it means, people should be armed so they can be ready to defend their free country.

In reading any document you have to look at the intent behind the wording, and their intent is pretty clear as the documents show.

Yeah, if we applied your principle to the First Amendment, the only "free speech" rights you'd have, would be to petition the government. And only for redress of grievances. (As well as only after registering, passing background checks, and only using means available in the 18th century — such as print or personal speech — but certainly not online or TV.)

no one really argues against the entire constitution

I certainly wish so, but that's just not true:

• Georgetown professor of Constitutional Law argues for abolishing the document
• And, of course, the Communists agree.

The primary argument — cited by all such "critics" — is that some of the founding fathers owned slaves. Presumably, they'd reject the Pythagorean theorem too, because the ancient mathematician was a slave-owner. And, for one more example, the Aristotle's Logic — on the same grounds...

Such is their hatred of the 2nd Amendment and limits on the government's power (when it is in Democratic control, of course), they don't realize, the 1st will be thrown out together with the 2nd.

But, perhaps more worryingly than these fringe loudmouths, is the calm dismissal of even the 1st Amendment by the boring bureaucrats of today: “This isn’t really the ’60s anymore [...] people can’t really protest like that anymore".

We present a novel photographic technique called dual photography, which exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to interchange the lights and cameras in a scene. With a video projector providing structured illumination, reciprocity permits us to generate pictures from the viewpoint of the projector, even though no camera was present at that location. The technique is completely image-based, requiring no knowledge of scene geometry or surface properties, and by its nature automatically includes all transport paths, including shadows, interreflections and caustics. In its simplest form, the technique can be used to take photographs without a camera; we demonstrate this by capturing a photograph using a projector and a photo-resistor. If the photo-resistor is replaced by a camera, we can produce a 4D dataset that allows for relighting with 2D incident illumination.

It exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to swap the camera view with the light view. If light is modeled as rays/photons, the path between the light source and a camera pixel is the same going from the light to the pixel, or the pixel to the light. Hence reciprocity.

And of course your little - how would you call it - PROPAGANDA blog makes big claims I'll counter with mine:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/cern-cloud-proves-cosmic-rays-causing-global-warming.htm

CERN scientist Jasper Kirkby, about his recent cosmic ray experiment:

"At the moment, it actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it's a very important first step"

But what about now? Well, instead of a "warming hiatus", according to the Gospel of Svensmark we should actually see massive cooling: Cosmic Rays Hit Space Age High

"In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19% beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years," says Richard Mewaldt of Caltech.

Was 2009 anywhere near the coldest year since the 1959? No? Then we can just forget about including Cosmic Voodoo Rays in any climate models if we want them to be acceptable to you.

Looks like they missed a Stanford result. http://news.stanford.edu/news/...

BrainBackups Openworm Deep Mind Lovotics Neurogrid

Of course I didn't use the word "F******" in my submission, but I suppose Slashdot must be couth.

Anyway, here's a link to the actual paper (warning: PDF) - http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~d...

my internet bill has not increased since 1999 and my service is 7 times faster than it was in 1999

So? As you can see from graph 4 on this page wholesale bandwidth prices fell 700% in 5 years, you're 3 fold below that drop in price which is only possible because the last mile is a minimally competitive market (oligopoly).

I first learned about C. elegans while researching simple neural systems. There's a nice map of the neural connections available. Today, I stumbled across the name again, when Wikipedia informed me that Caenorhabditis elegans is the most primitive animal that sleeps. Now I find that there's a robot worm that I'd consider to be alive.

This guy's pretty awesome.

Its a good question .
I don't understand astrophysical shocks, but see: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/e...
As far as I can tell the rely on magnetic fields bending the particles back into the shock.

When relativistic particle trajectories are bent by magnetic fields, they emit synchrotron radiation which increases rapidly with increasing particle energy.

Longitudinal fields don't do the same thing. There is a tiny amount of radiation, but it is not strongly dependent on particle energy. I believe this is because Lorentz contraction increases transverse, but not longitudinal electromagnetic fields: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Ideally the fields in the plasma accelerator are longitudinal on axis. If the particle enters slightly off axis it will get a transverse kick and will radiate synchrotron radiation, and we do see that. For very high energies that radiation might be large, but the effect would be to damp the transverse motion of the particle, but not affect the longitudinal acceleration.

  I know that the plasma wakefield people are seriously thinking about TeV scale machines: https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/...

It is possible that the concept fails at some much higher energy.

Yeah, putting this all one one guy is pretty stupid.
If it's happening, it's more a function of "Republicans are going to be in power for the next two years, might as well hitch my cart to that horse."
If it's happening.
Yahoo (I know, I know) had a story up just a few weeks ago about just how liberal Silicon Valley is: Here. Check out the slideshow. It would be a MASSIVE turnaround to look even moderate compared to 2010-2013, let alone Republican leaning. Source data here.

That said, I'm fully willing to believe that wind power is cheaper than nuclear on a per-megawatt basis. What I don't believe is that wind power can reliably provide baseload power. All the studies in the world don't change one simple and indisputable fact: present-day production of wind power is miniscule compared to present-day electricity usage. Wind power has not yet proved that it can supply large quantities of power. Nobody except the most blind zealot would deny this plain fact.

Nuclear power supplies one sixth of present-day electricity usage worldwide. This is a very large amount of power compared to any other carbon-free technology. Nuclear power is not directly subject to vagaries of the weather. Even including Fukishima and Chernobyl, nuclear power is by far the safest energy source (wind power comes in a very respectable second). Available supplies of nuclear fuel will outlast the lifetime of the sun. Nuclear power is proven and it works. Wind may work, and I'm happy to give it the benefit of the doubt, but it is without question an unproven technology at large scale.

When you add in the fact that a warship is supposed to be able to go for at least weeks at a time without any replenishment

Weeks? Try 6+ months for everything but aviation fuel, and even that is around 10-20 days on active war footing (Nimtz class carries enough fuel for ~20 sorties from the full complement of jets)

Did you discuss it with these chaps?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

http://www.renewableenergyworl...

http://news.stanford.edu/pr/20...

It does take up more land to do this - about 2.5 times as much if you use the Japanese system and crop spacing.
But you're not killing farmland, you're having a fairly minor impact on crop yield if the land is healthy and current FiTs provide a much better income for most farmers than they'll get from crops alone.

That men will also be seeing a 20k bump in available work/life benefits. You know, because there is still no indication that the 'Wage Gap' exists in skilled IT positions.

A plurality of women entering the technology or engineering sectors reported that they will make between $50,000 and $69,999, while a plurality of their male counterparts said they will make between $90,000 and $109,999. And this at the beginning of their careers, when their experience level (more or less nonexistent), background (Harvard), and family status (largely unmarried, with no children) should be the same.

A 2007 study by two Cornell University professors found that when all factors (education, experience, chosen industry) are accounted for, women make about 91 percent of what men make (PDF).

" In some very rare circumstances (the compass may be such a circumstance, actually), you could notice that materials you found randomly assembled or randomly assembled yourself do something interesting, but that's definitely the exception."

Is it? Or are you cherry-picking, showing confirmation bias, stating a conclusion without proof or experiment? Is this an article of faith in your scientist religion?

I was reminded of Chris Manning's comment, in Natural Language Processing Lecture 3:

To make just one little side remark at this point, in a lot of areas of probability, everyone, especially in computer science, everyone is very into Bayesian stuff and doing Bayesian probability models. A kind of funny thing about the state of the art of using probabilistic smoothing in NLP is that all the really good ideas like this have actually come from people scratching their heads and looking at the data and what happens in the estimation and why does it go wrong, and by the seat of their pants, coming up with some formula that seems to capture the right properties.

And then what happens after that is then three years later, someone writes a conference paper saying how this formula can be interpreted as a Bayesian prior and does a big derivation of that, and that's been done for both Good-Turing smoothing and also just recently for kinesthenized smoothing. And so there's a link on the syllabus for a paper by [inaudible] of how to interpret kinesthenized smoothing as a Bayesian prior.

But the funny thing is that none of the actual good ideas of how to come up with a better smoothing method actually seem to come from the theory. They actually seem to come from people staring at bits of data.

Yellow. The color of the sun. Obviously.

No, the light from the sun is white. The reason why it appears yellow in the sky is that a good portion of the blue-ish spectrum is spread in the atmosphere, making the sky blue, but hindering most of the blue light coming directly from the sun. The aggregated daylight during mid-day is indeed white, being the sum of direct sunlight plus the other parts of the spectrum reflected in the atmosphere from other directions. Sunlight's not a certain colour in the spectrum, more or less by necessity it's a mix of *all* visible colours.

The human eye is most sensitive to green light a lower intensities, and yellowish-green at higher intensities. This is due to the nature of the colour receptors in our eyes. Observe the visibility of equally powerful red, blue and green laser beams to verify this.

In any unmoderated discussion the loudest and most insistent voices win. This has been true since democracy started - "politic" meaning roughly in the original Greek "To shout down"

Would be awesome if it were true: The modern word 'political' derives from the Greek politikos, 'of, or pertaining to, the polis'. (The Greek term polis will be translated here as 'city-state'. It is also translated as 'city' or 'polis', or simply anglicized as 'polis'. City-states like Athens and Sparta were relatively small and cohesive units, in which political, religious, and cultural concerns were intertwined. The extent of their similarity to modern nation-states is controversial.)

You heard wrong. There's enough nuclear material on Earth to outlast the 5-billion-year lifetime of the sun. Seriously. http://www-formal.stanford.edu...