I should hope not, as that's the definition. However, we can see hot spinning gases that emit X-rays, we can measure how far across the hot spinning gas is, we can measure how fast the gas is spinning: therefore, we know the maximum volume, approximate mass, and minimum density of the object which the hot spinning gas is orbiting. That density shows that no such object is made out of ordinary matter like a star, and some are too dense to even be neutron stars. Are they black holes? Maybe. Most scientists think so, because we don't know of any other options, but if they dogmatically said "yes, those are definitely black holes", they wouldn't be scientists.
... you have no evidence for cosmic strings whatever...
... there is nothing but conjecture about wormholes...
Because they probably don't exist, and probably can't exist, but it's fun to think about it. It's like the theological debate over God creating a rock so heavy He can't lift it. Nobody's seriously expecting to find The Rock That God Cannot Lift, and if that's what you hear when scientists speculate about wormholes, then you've completely misjudged the conversation.
... we've been talking about antiparticles for decades (has one of our colliders actually made one yet?)...
Good grief, man, antiparticles are so damn common that that's what a lot of those colliders are colliding. Lots of natural radioactive decays, like Carbon-11 or Potassium-40, produce positrons (antimatter electrons) all the time. It's called beta-plus decay, or positron emission, and it's the basis of the medical PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan. Antimatter protons are just slightly more exotic, but not by much.
... you talk of photons spontaneously appearing out of nothing...
Because the math works out. I don't think anyone's really happy with an infinite number of possible virtual particles bouncing off everything in a just-so manner. But the universe, to the best of our knowledge, acts exactly as if that were true, so we're stuck with it until we have a better idea.
... nobody has ever witnessed any of these things.
Define "witnessed". You're treading into dangerous epistemological territory, there. For instance, prove that Slashdot exists. Not that your monitor showed you a pattern of pixels that formed "words" and "buttons" and "edit boxes" that claimed to be a "website" called "Slashdot", which contained "comments" purporting to be written by other "people". All of these things might or might not be true, and you need to prove all of them. "Slashdot" might actually be an AI personality living on your computer, intercepting your web browser's outgoing HTTP requests in order to communicate with you and feel less lonely. Or "Slashdot" might be an elaborate NSA hoax. Or you could be the AI, and "Slashdot" could be a fond memory injected into your mind by your creators to further some purpose of theirs. Or a consortium of otherworldly beings could've created the entire universe 5 seconds ago, while you were reading my post, complete with memories of having browsed Slashdot previously and of being currently occupied with the task of reading my post.
(Don't laugh. People have memories of things they never did all the time. When I sift through my memories of being 5 years old, I have to ask myself "A
It's an interesting idea, but I think Approval and Range voting both do it better. (Approval: vote for every candidate who's "good enough", then add up the votes the same way as the current system. Range: vote each candidate on a scale, e.g. 0 to 99, add up the scores, divide by the number of voters.)
I think your idea falls down in the two corner cases that any voting system ought to account for: third party candidates whom the voter doesn't know, and write-in candidates.
Let's consider unknown third parties first. Suppose you look at the ballot, and you've got a good idea of how you're voting for the Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, and so on. Then you see a candidate from, say, the Cheese Party. Huh? In your system, you can either vote for him (+1), or vote against him (-1). If you're like most people, you vote against him since you don't know if he'd be any good. You certainly won't vote for him. So even if the candidate was actually pretty sensible, the Cheese Party loses by a landslide, nobody ever looks into the Cheese Party, and the Cheese Party loses by a landslide in the next election, too. (Approval voting suffers from the same problem here.)
Range voting lets voters leave a choice blank. "Blank" means "I don't have enough information to cast a vote, so I'll leave this choice to the more informed voters". (Very useful in states where you vote on judges, but judges' party affiliations are forbidden on the ballot, and there are so many races that it's impossible to research them all.) Now, Range Voting as normally implemented has a quorum requirement, so the Cheese Party still loses since few people had heard of them, but they score really well (among people who did vote for them), they make it into the newspaper, more people hear about the Cheese Party platform and what they stand for, and next time around more people give a score for their candidate. Maybe someday they win.
Now, let's consider write-in candidates. Your system could either (A) forbid write-ins entirely, (B) automatically treat un-written-in ballots as "0", or (C) automatically treat un-written-in ballots as "-1". Assuming write-in candidates are a good thing, A is obviously a bad choice, and C results in the same problem mentioned previously for third parties. B, however, is even more dangerous: in your system, the final tallies for any winning candidate will almost always be small positive integers; even a small write-in campaign can completely topple the preferences of a much larger number of voters. We'll assume that C is the system actually used. (Approval is most similar to C.)
Range voting, OTOH, can handle write-in candidates without blinking, since the system is already set up to gracefully handle "blank" votes on unknown candidates. If the write-in campaign is too small, they make a good showing but are disqualified by the quorum rule. If the write-in campaign is big enough, maybe they win. For a third party that's just starting out, being off the ballot isn't much different from being on the ballot, which means that all the petty politics of ballot qualification become irrelevant.
Java's VM is not very friendly to Perl and similar languages. Java has a strict belief in strong typing that extends to compiled bytecode. Closures are possible to emulate, but hackish. And you can completely forget multiple inheritance, "duck" typing ("IS A" versus "CAN" or "DOES"), mixins, almost all metaprogramming, runtime re-blessing of object classes, runtime modification of inheritance hierarchies (useful on rare occasions), or tons of other bits from Perl, Python, Ruby, and all the other "cool" kids.
It actually surprises me every time I hear about someone hacking a new language to compile down to Java bytecode. After all, Java VM bytecode is so intimately tied to Java that it's rather straightforward to decompile it from bytecode to Java source and get good results.
In short, whoever hacked up the latest Foo-to-bytecode compiler has also written a Foo-to-Java source converter for free. That right there tells you a lot about (a) how similar Foo is to Java, or else (b) how much work the hacker put into transforming Foo into equivalent Java code.
The supposed "community" rewrite started with a bunch of actual community requests, which Larry Wall then waded through increasingly slowly, pretty much taking the little bits he liked, then proceeded to add on a huge set of requirements that he cared about personally (and to be fair, probably the core Perl devs too). Things like extending regex into a full grammar that could parse Perl and be used to extend the language. [...]
Are you kidding? The man almost gave me a full-body orgasm just from the new grammar system alone. That's actually the number one reason why I'm itching to jump to P6 as soon as it's out. A grammar-to-parser generator that doesn't merely claim the low-hanging fruit of "better than bison/yacc"? And it's seamlessly integrated with the language? Hell yeah!
(Little known fact: Perl 5's "regular" expressions haven't been regular for a very long time. Thanks to various hackish uses of punctuation, you can invoke other regexes recursively, using them as a full-blown context free grammar today. But Perl 6 is finally cleaning up -- or, if you're using Pugs, has cleaned up -- the crotchety old Perl 5 regex syntax so that you can use those capabilities in serious, maintainable programs.)
Ranked Pairs is far and away the best option. It satisfies the monotonocity criterion. It is very simple to understand, especially from the perspective of a voter. You simply rank who you want to vote for. (Any voter who doesn't like it can simply rank their candidate #1 and leave the rest blank, just as we do now.)
(As the RV.org site points out, when you sit down and write code to implement a Condorcet method, any of them, you end up with about twice as much code compared to implementing RV. I've implemented Schulze voting before, so I know that of which they speak. Meanwhile, with RV, you just sum the votes as you would with Plurality or Approval, then divide by the number of voters. The fact that each vote is a ranged score rather than a {0|1} doesn't really change how the code works. Maybe you add a simple quorum check on the final score sums, but that's 2 lines of Perl using sort and grep.)
Plus bee swarms use it to vote on new hive locations, so even though I was skeptical at first about the Bayesian regret metric, RV is a tried and tested voting method in the real world, and bees are considerably less intelligent than even the dumbest voter.
There are two main problems with range voting. One, it makes voting overly complicated (not to the Slashdot crowd, but for the average voter.) Two, it is subject to gaming. Voters will be likely to rate secondary candidates lower than how they really feel in order to increase their top candidate's odds.
Re #1: I'd argue that RV is actually simpler than any ranked ballot. Seven words: Hot or Not, Olympic scoring, IMDb, Netflix. Every Joe-on-the-Street already understands RV. It's one of the three simplest systems possible (after Approval and Plurality). Try out this Range Vote on the US Presidential race — unlike Condorcet, you don't have to stand around hemming and hawing about exactly which order you'd put them in, plus you can actually express "I have no opinion" by leaving a line blank. (And since they threw in all the kitchen sink candidates on that poll, you'll use that option a lot.)
(In Condorcet, your only option for unknown candidates is to lump them all together in one big tie in the middle... but you're still saying "These unknown candidates are definitely worse than any of the ones I like" and "These unknown candidates are definitely better than any of the ones I hate". One of them could be {your undiscovered favorite|the reincarnation of Hitler}, but you've just {hurt|helped} their campaign. RV lets you leave them blank, so that better informed voters can put their knowledge to work — but thanks to the quorum, unknown bad candidates can't win by voting once for themselves or anything silly like that.)
(Oh, and speaking of unknowns, RV works well with write-in candidates, thanks to the quorum. Condorcet does not, since write-ins are implicitly in last place on every ballot by default.)
Australia has had compulsory instant runoff voting (aka IRV, though we call it "preferential voting") for decades. It works pretty well. Systems like the Condorcet Method, Meek's Algorithm and Range Voting have some theoretical advantages, but they fail in one crucial respect: they are hard to count. Range Voting creates possibly hundreds of rounds of counting. [...]
Range Voting involves adding up a bunch of scores, then dividing by the number of votes cast to take the average. It's notionally simpler than IRV, only slightly more complicated than Plurality or Approval (there's one extra division at the end of the summation), it can use simpler voting machines than any ranked ballot system, plus the counting can be parallelized to individual districts (unlike IRV, in which all vote data must be physically located in one central location).
Oh, and real-world IRV examples (like Australia) have clearly shown that IRV still creates a two-party system, because it's so heavily impacted by strategic voting that third parties are still shut out. If too many people vote honestly when their #1 preference is a third party, they risk the elimination of their established-party fallback and throw the election to whichever established party they hate the most. That's the exact "split vote" phenomenon that switching away from Plurality is supposed to solve.
Whatever the solution is to two-party dominance, Australia has conclusively shown that IRV is not it.
Also, in this scenario, in fact in ANY approval voting scenario, nobody ever has an incentive to disapprove their second choice while approving their third choice.
As shown on rangevoting.org, this statement is false in some scenarios. The linked page presents an example (see "Theorem 4") where there are four candidates (in rapidly decreasing popularity: A, B, C, D) and a voter has preferences C>>D>B>A, but the optimum strategy is to approve of C and B while dishonestly disapproving of D, because approving of D hurts your chances of breaking a tie in favor of C.
While you're never hurt by voting for your #1 favorite in Approval, there are weaker forms of strategic dishonesty lurking in the corners.
Wrong. All that the free market requires to work is that the State not create artificial barriers to entry, or prevent competition in various ways (e.g., mandate cartelization, regulate, allow patents, etc). All that the free market requires is the lack of initiation of aggression. To the extent that there is aggression, the free market is hindered. This is the correct concept of the free market, as elaborated by the Austrian school of economics.
How convenient that lying is not a form of aggression. I suppose, then, the market will just run itself perfectly smoothly if we just roll back 100 years of consumer protection laws and let companies make whatever baseless claims will sell their products? That the government is harming the free market by restricting the free speech of corporations by initiating force against them if they make fraudulent claims?
There's a reason for the modern conception of a "free market" — a simple-minded adherence to "no initiation of force" doesn't magically result in a Smithian "invisible hand" when information is asymmetric, or the barrier to entry is high, or when a natural monopoly is the default, unregulated state of an industry.
BTW, the whole superluminal expansion thing, mentioned by another poster, is called "Inflationary Big Bang Theory". It was proposed to explain why the cosmic microwave background is so uniform, because a slow (light speed or slower) Classic Big Bang would've produced a very lumpy universe. It stuck around because it explained a lot of other stuff, too.
Since the expansion of the universe is a property of space-time itself, not of the matter within space-time, this doesn't violate Einstein's Special or General Relativity. Essentially, for any two points A and B, new space is constantly popping up in between them, which is what causes the Hubble expansion of the universe. If the new space is being created quickly enough, as happened during Inflation, a light beam sent from A to B will never reach B, because for each second the beam travels, more than a light-second of new space has appeared between the beam and B. At that point A and B are "causally disconnected".
An allele is a specific sequence of DNA letters found at a particular locus. In simple terms, an allele is a "version" of a gene.
A gene is the set of all possible alleles that could be found at a particular locus. A mutation creates a new allele from an existing allele, and adds the new one to the set.
A locus is a region of DNA at a particular position on a particular chromosome. There are certain regulators (promoters, inhibitors, and the like) found nearby that control how often (and under what conditions) the gene at that locus is activated.
Technically, I'm being a bit inaccurate, since genes can jump chromosomes, hopefully with their regulators in tow, but in scientific jargon the loci themselves aren't normally said to jump (in keeping with the literal Latin meaning of "locus": location). But other than that, I think it's a good, clear description.
Microevolution it the refinement of existing traits to better suit ones environment and is understood to involve a loss of information [emphasis added].
Not to put too fine a point on it... exactly what are you smoking?
Not one person in the scientific community understands microevolution as a loss of information. From a Shannon viewpoint, each random mutation creates information, because (in Information Theory) the easier something is to predict, the less information it has, and the harder something is to predict, the more information it has. Random mutations are very hard to predict, and therefore they contain the maximum amount of information. Thus random mutation creates information, and it falls to the world to sort the information into "useful" and "useless" categories (by the process of natural selection).
The Bible really does state that homosexuality is wrong, and thus it is a sin.
Why?
No, really. Why?
Murder is a sin, I get that. Theft and robbery are sins, makes sense to me. Breaking the trust of your spouse, bearing false witness, envying other people's possessions: for almost all of the Big 10, it's pretty clear even to me that they're morally wrong.
Despite being an atheist, it seems to me that "love thy neighbor as thyself" [Leviticus 19:18, repeated multiple times in the New Testament], rather than being something revealed only in the Bible, is writ large in the world itself, and pretty much all moral conduct flows from it. Love Thy Neighbor, the Golden Rule, Buddhism's Eightfold Path, Secular Humanism, and the winning strategy for Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in Game Theory all point back to the same underlying basis for moral behavior.
I don't murder another because I wouldn't wish to be murdered if our roles were reversed. I don't steal because I wouldn't want to have my own hard-earned property taken from me. I don't break any promise I make, or lie about others, because I'm hurt when another person breaks a promise made to me, or lies about me, and I wouldn't wish that hurt on anyone else. I don't covet or envy because nothing good can come of it, and if I did it anyway I'd waste my own valuable time thinking about it.
I'm sure you believe God put it there when it was writ large in the world itself, and despite my atheism, far be it from me to dispel that notion in you. But I think it's important to note that, of the sins and commandments listed in the Bible, "love thy neighbor as thyself" is the only one that is writ large in such a way, with the other important ones being the obvious consequences of that singular truth.
Homosexuality? I see no basis by which it could be inherently immoral.
Humans have a deep, instinctual drive to form lasting pair-bonds. There's a cornucopia of research out there showing that people — men especially — are far more mentally and emotionally stable when they have the benefit of a stable romantic relationship. What's more, while there's a web of cause and effect that remains untangled, it's certainly instructive that Catholic priests are (unlike Protestant ministers) required to remain celibate and are (also unlike Protestant ministers) associated with one of the broadest and most disturbing sex scandals ever associated with religion. Married ministers produce the occasional Bakker or Swaggart, but never the sort of sprawling, slow-motion train wreck of a scandal produced by celibate priests.
The interesting part here is that the New Testament is quite clearly in favor of celibacy over marriage, which is why the Roman Catholic Church does it that way in the first place. Paul clearly states that "it is good for a man not to touch a woman" [1 Corinthians 7:1], and that sex of any sort, even in marriage, is a stain in God's eyes. However, because celibacy conflicts with human nature, even Paul acknowledged that marriage was an acceptable compromise to avoid the greater of two evils [1 Corinthians 7:7-9]. I'd say that the priest molestation scandal shows pretty conclusively exactly what he was talking about, and why a policy of celibate priests is a bad idea — probably why it was abandoned by Protestants a long time ago.
The thing of it is, though, that a lot of those guilty priests became priests because they were gay: Catholic teaching holds that gay sex is immoral, so they were compelled to remain celibate regardless. If gay sex (or, horror of horrors, gay marriage) had been available to them as a valid option, they probably wouldn't have b
It's that mind control step that seems the biggest leap. Are you saying that a single random mutation (or sequence of mutations on the same individual wasp) just happened to give the wasp the right venom for mind control and the instinct to sting a second time and attempt to lead the beast home for dinner? How do you subdivide that into valid evolutionary steps?
Almost all venoms are chemicals that interact with either neurotransmitters or the receptors for those transmitters, and neurotransmitters are actually very similar to each other. Octopamine itself is very chemically similar to many other neurotransmitters, such as norepinephrine and dopamine. (They're all just a few -OH alcohol groups away from each other.) That similarity extends to activating each other — octopamine doesn't normally occur in humans, for instance, but it has a strong enough effect on the receptors we do have that it's occasionally abused as a party drug.
Therefore, there are likely to be many venoms that seriously affect octopamine receptors purely by accident, ones that also target other receptors. So, it doesn't have to be a single mutation (or a single generation) at all. Each small mutation in the venom DNA would, if selected for, result in (a) a possibly-small improvement in blocking octopamine, (b) a possibly-small improvement in not blocking other signals, or (c) sometimes both of the previous at once. (The mutations that weren't selected for? Those wasps couldn't feed as many offspring, so those families died out.) Thousands of generations later, the result is a venom that's pretty specific to octopamine, resulting in a non-paralyzed but docile roach.
With regards to the wasp leading the roach back to the nest: that's really no more shocking than any other case of complex instinctive behavior, like a baby fawn standing up and walking within 20 minutes of being born. The wasp's ancestors were dragging paralyzed roaches back to the nest millions of years ago, and tugging on an antenna isn't conceptually that much different. The wasp, to the extent that it thinks at all, probably still thinks of itself as "dragging" the roach; the wasp is merely pleasantly surprised at how little effort it takes.
The second sting to the brain is something that could have evolved before (i.e. using the paralyzing venom, it improved the odds of the roach staying catatonic while being eaten by a wasp larva) or after (i.e. using the zombie venom, it improved the odds that the roach would become and remain obedient). There's really no requirement there on which order the two evolved in, since both are separate improvements, and it's quite easy to imagine possible evolutionary progressions (e.g. single sting => multiple careless stings => two stings for less wasted venom => one quick sting to subdue, one careful sting for good measure).
(Oh, and the roach following the pull of the antenna? That's probably a built-in instinct in the roach. It doesn't want the antenna pulled off, after all. For most insects, the antennae are the most important sensory organs. It'd be like humans flinching when we see something flying at our eyes.)
What is the lifetime of a hotwater tank compared to a monitor? There is a large "instant" powersaving when this kinds of savings are introduced to the common electrical household stuff.
Get yourself a amp/powermeter and find out what applicances are using all your idle energy. At typical turned off PC with an ATX powersupply still uses an amazing 15W and something like 5W fo the CRT, just about stupid electrical appliance wasted there kinds of energy when turned "off" these days.
I don't know what planet you're from where everything else in your house is so efficient that 15W is an "amazing" amount of power. According to this site run by Ames, IA (the first link Google found), an electric water heater draws 3800 W of power and runs 118±20 hours per month in a typical household of 4. Thus, it consumes 450±75 kWh of energy over the course of a month. Your wasteful computer uses about 10 kWh over a 720-hour (30-day) month. That's a lot more than it should, certainly, but a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all the kilowatt-hours that leak right through your water heater's thin insulation, ones that you could've conserved by simply heating water on demand.
(Aside: And then there's the poor saps like me who are stuck in all-electric apartments, with an electric furnace and an electric water heater, with landlords who don't understand the concept of why this is a bad idea. Two thirds of the energy has already been lost by the time it enters your home, either in the power plant's turbines or in the grid. Heating anything with electricity is terribly wasteful — even the least efficient gas furnace manages to keep about 60% of the combustion heat inside the house, and modern ones do much better than that. Combustion => Heat is always (barring stupidity) more efficient than Combustion => Heat => Motion => Electricity => Heat. OTOH, my rent is cheap enough here that I still come out about $50-$100 ahead per month versus a more thoughtfully designed apartment, and I'm not in a position to buy a house right now.)
No it isn't. In your example FedEx handled the item and received some money (they still would not be liable, of course). Creative Commons got no money and had absolutely nothing to do with the affair. All they did was publish a model license.
Well, obviously, but that would've made the analogy unwieldy. Suing CC is more like suing ISO or ANSI because they published some standard that FedEx, UPS, etc. follow with regards to shipping packages. But that stretches the analogy too much, because it's almost as complicated as the original situation when the point of an analogy is to simplify the situation for better understanding.
It's like suing FedEx because some thief stole your credit card and used it to buy something online, and FedEx delivered the package.
Creative Commons didn't do jack squat to her. What's worse, neither Virgin, nor the photographer, nor Flickr have any sort of contract with Creative Commons. Creative Commons just wrote some nice copyright licenses; if they hadn't written them, the photographer could just as well have posted them under another liberal license, or made them public domain. Hell, even Flickr has more guilt here than Creative Commons, since the photographer probably never would've heard of the CC licenses if Flickr didn't have handy radio buttons to choose among them.
If the photographer didn't have permission from her to redistribute the photo under those terms, then that's the fault of the photographer and the girl for not discussing it — i.e. the photographer should've asked "Hey, can I post this to Flickr?" and, if she didn't know, mention that he uses a CC license.
Worse, Virgin is innocent in all this as well. They used the photo in a good faith assumption that the permissions granted to them by the photographer were his to give. They should immediately pull any advertising with her photo, sure, but they shouldn't be liable for damages if the photo is pulled immediately.
Short, short version: Sean Connery runs around in an orange diaper, while everyone else is either an immortal having telepathic acid trips, or else is a brutal who shoots you while chanting "The penis is evil! The penis shoots seeds!"
It really, really should've been on MST3K, though the giggle factor is high enough that you don't need Mike/Joel and the Bots to keep your sanity.
The physics of transmitting information aren't changed in the least by 802.11N. Balanced electrical signals over twisted pairs of wires (Ethernet, USB, Firewire,...) will always offer superior speeds and better power efficiency versus transmitting and receiving radio waves. There are two simple reasons: (1) wires are directional, so no signal power is wasted by heating steel beams, electrical wiring, doorknobs, etc.; and (2) a balanced electrical signal is nearly immune to outside interference, because unless the interference is physically nearby it will affect both wires the same way.
The new MIMO stuff in 802.11N is an attempt to make wi-fi more directional, and thus improve the S/N ratio and the power-bandwidth tradeoff, but it's nowhere near what an actual directional antenna or phased array can do, much less a simple twisted pair.
Let's not even get into the security issues of wireless versus wired.
I don't really see how storing energy in a high density is inheritantly dangerous. It all depends on how you store it and then there isn't really any practical limit. Any battery will explode if a serious enough malfunction occurs, the question is what you consider "serious".
It's really pretty simple. As a general rule of thumb, the smaller things are, the faster things happen. Bacteria duplicate themselves in 20 minutes, but elephant pregnancies last for 2 years. No amount of evolution will ever produce something elephant-sized that duplicates itself in 20 minutes, due to hard physical limitations. If you want to go faster, you must miniaturize, and conversely, if you do miniaturize, you will go faster.
(That's why AMD and Intel are constantly falling over themselves to miniaturize their fabrication processes. Processors keep getting faster because their components keep getting smaller. There's a direct cause-and-effect relationship.)
And now human beings want larger and larger amounts of energy confined into smaller and smaller batteries. Smaller, lighter batteries means, on average, faster rates of charging and discharging. And since 100% efficiency is physically impossible, faster rates of charging and discharging means faster rates of heat production. And since we're keeping the battery small and light, there's no room for massive heat sinks. All that extra heat stays concentrated in the battery, which makes the temperature much hotter.
Now enter short circuits. These can be simple things like carrying a battery around in a pocket full of loose change, or more "exciting" ways such as crushing or puncturing the battery or breaking loose something internal. In any case, a battery experiencing a short circuit will (by definition) discharge at the maximum possible rate — and thus produce the highest possible temperature. Even if the battery itself doesn't catch on fire or explode, even older NiCd and NiMH batteries get hot enough to cause serious burns if they're near flesh when they go off, and it's quite easy to set nearby combustible materials like paper on fire.
You can reduce the impact of short circuits by increasing the battery's internal resistance, which will slow down the maximum discharge rate. However, this also slows down the maximum charge rate, and human beings want their batteries to be fully charged right now. Humans don't want a battery that will run their laptop for 2 days but takes 2 days to charge, which is what you get if you slow down the battery all the way to the minimum useful discharge rate. (It also reduces battery life, since it converts more energy to heat during normal operation, and also takes up space that could've gone to more battery capacity.)
There's simply an unavoidable conflict sitting plain as day in the laws of physics, and no new battery design will ever solve it. Human beings want safe, fast-charging, high-density batteries. Pick two.
Side note: Neonatal mortality isn't really a fair basis for comparison, since there's no international standard on how premature births are treated. In many countries, if a baby is born prematurely and dies shortly thereafter despite medical intervention, it's counted as a stillbirth, miscarriage, or the like. In the US, the same baby gets tallied as a neonatal death.
From what I understand, the evidence is also pretty strongly in favor of a pandemic fungal infection that weakens the hive's ability to overwinter. That's another strike against the GM crop silliness.
Folks, if you're going to oppose GM crops, do it for the right reasons: Monsanto is a company of fucking douchebags, genes shouldn't be patentable, and GM crops are almost always monocultures derived from a single modified plant.
The reality is that most of the genes people want to add to GM crops are a selective disadvantage in the wild. Plants don't spray Roundup on each other in the wild, so all the effort spent making a plant glyphosate-resistant is wasted energy that could have gone into something productive. Likewise for golden rice (the rice doesn't need the Vitamin A, after all) and just about anything else humans would care to add to a crop.
Slashdot Mirror
I should hope not, as that's the definition. However, we can see hot spinning gases that emit X-rays, we can measure how far across the hot spinning gas is, we can measure how fast the gas is spinning: therefore, we know the maximum volume, approximate mass, and minimum density of the object which the hot spinning gas is orbiting. That density shows that no such object is made out of ordinary matter like a star, and some are too dense to even be neutron stars. Are they black holes? Maybe. Most scientists think so, because we don't know of any other options, but if they dogmatically said "yes, those are definitely black holes", they wouldn't be scientists.
Good. Cosmic strings are 1-dimensional rips in space-time, and have nothing to do with String Theory.
Because they probably don't exist, and probably can't exist, but it's fun to think about it. It's like the theological debate over God creating a rock so heavy He can't lift it. Nobody's seriously expecting to find The Rock That God Cannot Lift, and if that's what you hear when scientists speculate about wormholes, then you've completely misjudged the conversation.
Good grief, man, antiparticles are so damn common that that's what a lot of those colliders are colliding. Lots of natural radioactive decays, like Carbon-11 or Potassium-40, produce positrons (antimatter electrons) all the time. It's called beta-plus decay, or positron emission, and it's the basis of the medical PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan. Antimatter protons are just slightly more exotic, but not by much.
Because the math works out. I don't think anyone's really happy with an infinite number of possible virtual particles bouncing off everything in a just-so manner. But the universe, to the best of our knowledge, acts exactly as if that were true, so we're stuck with it until we have a better idea.
Define "witnessed". You're treading into dangerous epistemological territory, there. For instance, prove that Slashdot exists. Not that your monitor showed you a pattern of pixels that formed "words" and "buttons" and "edit boxes" that claimed to be a "website" called "Slashdot", which contained "comments" purporting to be written by other "people". All of these things might or might not be true, and you need to prove all of them. "Slashdot" might actually be an AI personality living on your computer, intercepting your web browser's outgoing HTTP requests in order to communicate with you and feel less lonely. Or "Slashdot" might be an elaborate NSA hoax. Or you could be the AI, and "Slashdot" could be a fond memory injected into your mind by your creators to further some purpose of theirs. Or a consortium of otherworldly beings could've created the entire universe 5 seconds ago, while you were reading my post, complete with memories of having browsed Slashdot previously and of being currently occupied with the task of reading my post.
(Don't laugh. People have memories of things they never did all the time. When I sift through my memories of being 5 years old, I have to ask myself "A
It's an interesting idea, but I think Approval and Range voting both do it better. (Approval: vote for every candidate who's "good enough", then add up the votes the same way as the current system. Range: vote each candidate on a scale, e.g. 0 to 99, add up the scores, divide by the number of voters.)
I think your idea falls down in the two corner cases that any voting system ought to account for: third party candidates whom the voter doesn't know, and write-in candidates.
Let's consider unknown third parties first. Suppose you look at the ballot, and you've got a good idea of how you're voting for the Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, and so on. Then you see a candidate from, say, the Cheese Party. Huh? In your system, you can either vote for him (+1), or vote against him (-1). If you're like most people, you vote against him since you don't know if he'd be any good. You certainly won't vote for him. So even if the candidate was actually pretty sensible, the Cheese Party loses by a landslide, nobody ever looks into the Cheese Party, and the Cheese Party loses by a landslide in the next election, too. (Approval voting suffers from the same problem here.)
Range voting lets voters leave a choice blank. "Blank" means "I don't have enough information to cast a vote, so I'll leave this choice to the more informed voters". (Very useful in states where you vote on judges, but judges' party affiliations are forbidden on the ballot, and there are so many races that it's impossible to research them all.) Now, Range Voting as normally implemented has a quorum requirement, so the Cheese Party still loses since few people had heard of them, but they score really well (among people who did vote for them), they make it into the newspaper, more people hear about the Cheese Party platform and what they stand for, and next time around more people give a score for their candidate. Maybe someday they win.
Now, let's consider write-in candidates. Your system could either (A) forbid write-ins entirely, (B) automatically treat un-written-in ballots as "0", or (C) automatically treat un-written-in ballots as "-1". Assuming write-in candidates are a good thing, A is obviously a bad choice, and C results in the same problem mentioned previously for third parties. B, however, is even more dangerous: in your system, the final tallies for any winning candidate will almost always be small positive integers; even a small write-in campaign can completely topple the preferences of a much larger number of voters. We'll assume that C is the system actually used. (Approval is most similar to C.)
Range voting, OTOH, can handle write-in candidates without blinking, since the system is already set up to gracefully handle "blank" votes on unknown candidates. If the write-in campaign is too small, they make a good showing but are disqualified by the quorum rule. If the write-in campaign is big enough, maybe they win. For a third party that's just starting out, being off the ballot isn't much different from being on the ballot, which means that all the petty politics of ballot qualification become irrelevant.
Java's VM is not very friendly to Perl and similar languages. Java has a strict belief in strong typing that extends to compiled bytecode. Closures are possible to emulate, but hackish. And you can completely forget multiple inheritance, "duck" typing ("IS A" versus "CAN" or "DOES"), mixins, almost all metaprogramming, runtime re-blessing of object classes, runtime modification of inheritance hierarchies (useful on rare occasions), or tons of other bits from Perl, Python, Ruby, and all the other "cool" kids.
It actually surprises me every time I hear about someone hacking a new language to compile down to Java bytecode. After all, Java VM bytecode is so intimately tied to Java that it's rather straightforward to decompile it from bytecode to Java source and get good results.
In short, whoever hacked up the latest Foo-to-bytecode compiler has also written a Foo-to-Java source converter for free. That right there tells you a lot about (a) how similar Foo is to Java, or else (b) how much work the hacker put into transforming Foo into equivalent Java code.
Are you kidding? The man almost gave me a full-body orgasm just from the new grammar system alone. That's actually the number one reason why I'm itching to jump to P6 as soon as it's out. A grammar-to-parser generator that doesn't merely claim the low-hanging fruit of "better than bison/yacc"? And it's seamlessly integrated with the language? Hell yeah!
(Little known fact: Perl 5's "regular" expressions haven't been regular for a very long time. Thanks to various hackish uses of punctuation, you can invoke other regexes recursively, using them as a full-blown context free grammar today. But Perl 6 is finally cleaning up -- or, if you're using Pugs, has cleaned up -- the crotchety old Perl 5 regex syntax so that you can use those capabilities in serious, maintainable programs.)
I was a huge fan of Schulze method (another Condorcet variant, and one used in the real world in Debian elections), until RangeVoting.org convinced me today that Favorite Betrayal is an actual problem in any Condorcet method. Not only does Range Voting not have this problem, it also bypasses a lot of the Arrow's Impossibility Theorem baggage (since Arrow only applies to ranked systems, not scored systems) and, even better, is nearly as simple as Plurality or Approval.
(As the RV.org site points out, when you sit down and write code to implement a Condorcet method, any of them, you end up with about twice as much code compared to implementing RV. I've implemented Schulze voting before, so I know that of which they speak. Meanwhile, with RV, you just sum the votes as you would with Plurality or Approval, then divide by the number of voters. The fact that each vote is a ranged score rather than a {0|1} doesn't really change how the code works. Maybe you add a simple quorum check on the final score sums, but that's 2 lines of Perl using sort and grep.)
Plus bee swarms use it to vote on new hive locations, so even though I was skeptical at first about the Bayesian regret metric, RV is a tried and tested voting method in the real world, and bees are considerably less intelligent than even the dumbest voter.
Re #1: I'd argue that RV is actually simpler than any ranked ballot. Seven words: Hot or Not, Olympic scoring, IMDb, Netflix. Every Joe-on-the-Street already understands RV. It's one of the three simplest systems possible (after Approval and Plurality). Try out this Range Vote on the US Presidential race — unlike Condorcet, you don't have to stand around hemming and hawing about exactly which order you'd put them in, plus you can actually express "I have no opinion" by leaving a line blank. (And since they threw in all the kitchen sink candidates on that poll, you'll use that option a lot.)
(In Condorcet, your only option for unknown candidates is to lump them all together in one big tie in the middle... but you're still saying "These unknown candidates are definitely worse than any of the ones I like" and "These unknown candidates are definitely better than any of the ones I hate". One of them could be {your undiscovered favorite|the reincarnation of Hitler}, but you've just {hurt|helped} their campaign. RV lets you leave them blank, so that better informed voters can put their knowledge to work — but thanks to the quorum, unknown bad candidates can't win by voting once for themselves or anything silly like that.)
(Oh, and speaking of unknowns, RV works well with write-in candidates, thanks to the quorum. Condorcet does not, since write-ins are implicitly in last place on every ballot by default.)
Re #2: Yes, there's some ga
Range Voting involves adding up a bunch of scores, then dividing by the number of votes cast to take the average. It's notionally simpler than IRV, only slightly more complicated than Plurality or Approval (there's one extra division at the end of the summation), it can use simpler voting machines than any ranked ballot system, plus the counting can be parallelized to individual districts (unlike IRV, in which all vote data must be physically located in one central location).
Oh, and real-world IRV examples (like Australia) have clearly shown that IRV still creates a two-party system, because it's so heavily impacted by strategic voting that third parties are still shut out. If too many people vote honestly when their #1 preference is a third party, they risk the elimination of their established-party fallback and throw the election to whichever established party they hate the most. That's the exact "split vote" phenomenon that switching away from Plurality is supposed to solve.
Whatever the solution is to two-party dominance, Australia has conclusively shown that IRV is not it.
(RangeVoting.org makes a credible argument that honeybees have already solved the problem, and the answer is Range Voting. For good or bad, I say this as someone who was for years 100% a Condorcet fan until today. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions, but I do suggest you at least read the opposing arguments like I did.)
As shown on rangevoting.org, this statement is false in some scenarios. The linked page presents an example (see "Theorem 4") where there are four candidates (in rapidly decreasing popularity: A, B, C, D) and a voter has preferences C>>D>B>A, but the optimum strategy is to approve of C and B while dishonestly disapproving of D, because approving of D hurts your chances of breaking a tie in favor of C.
While you're never hurt by voting for your #1 favorite in Approval, there are weaker forms of strategic dishonesty lurking in the corners.
How convenient that lying is not a form of aggression. I suppose, then, the market will just run itself perfectly smoothly if we just roll back 100 years of consumer protection laws and let companies make whatever baseless claims will sell their products? That the government is harming the free market by restricting the free speech of corporations by initiating force against them if they make fraudulent claims?
There's a reason for the modern conception of a "free market" — a simple-minded adherence to "no initiation of force" doesn't magically result in a Smithian "invisible hand" when information is asymmetric, or the barrier to entry is high, or when a natural monopoly is the default, unregulated state of an industry.
BTW, the whole superluminal expansion thing, mentioned by another poster, is called "Inflationary Big Bang Theory". It was proposed to explain why the cosmic microwave background is so uniform, because a slow (light speed or slower) Classic Big Bang would've produced a very lumpy universe. It stuck around because it explained a lot of other stuff, too.
Since the expansion of the universe is a property of space-time itself, not of the matter within space-time, this doesn't violate Einstein's Special or General Relativity. Essentially, for any two points A and B, new space is constantly popping up in between them, which is what causes the Hubble expansion of the universe. If the new space is being created quickly enough, as happened during Inflation, a light beam sent from A to B will never reach B, because for each second the beam travels, more than a light-second of new space has appeared between the beam and B. At that point A and B are "causally disconnected".
Fast charging means fast discharging (internal resistance limits both). Fast discharging means more "vent with flame" events (or worse).
And people thought Li-ion was temperamental...
"Allele" is not vague at all, to a geneticist.
An allele is a specific sequence of DNA letters found at a particular locus. In simple terms, an allele is a "version" of a gene.
A gene is the set of all possible alleles that could be found at a particular locus. A mutation creates a new allele from an existing allele, and adds the new one to the set.
A locus is a region of DNA at a particular position on a particular chromosome. There are certain regulators (promoters, inhibitors, and the like) found nearby that control how often (and under what conditions) the gene at that locus is activated.
Technically, I'm being a bit inaccurate, since genes can jump chromosomes, hopefully with their regulators in tow, but in scientific jargon the loci themselves aren't normally said to jump (in keeping with the literal Latin meaning of "locus": location). But other than that, I think it's a good, clear description.
Not to put too fine a point on it... exactly what are you smoking?
Not one person in the scientific community understands microevolution as a loss of information. From a Shannon viewpoint, each random mutation creates information, because (in Information Theory) the easier something is to predict, the less information it has, and the harder something is to predict, the more information it has. Random mutations are very hard to predict, and therefore they contain the maximum amount of information. Thus random mutation creates information, and it falls to the world to sort the information into "useful" and "useless" categories (by the process of natural selection).
Why?
No, really. Why?
Murder is a sin, I get that. Theft and robbery are sins, makes sense to me. Breaking the trust of your spouse, bearing false witness, envying other people's possessions: for almost all of the Big 10, it's pretty clear even to me that they're morally wrong.
Despite being an atheist, it seems to me that "love thy neighbor as thyself" [Leviticus 19:18, repeated multiple times in the New Testament], rather than being something revealed only in the Bible, is writ large in the world itself, and pretty much all moral conduct flows from it. Love Thy Neighbor, the Golden Rule, Buddhism's Eightfold Path, Secular Humanism, and the winning strategy for Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in Game Theory all point back to the same underlying basis for moral behavior.
I don't murder another because I wouldn't wish to be murdered if our roles were reversed. I don't steal because I wouldn't want to have my own hard-earned property taken from me. I don't break any promise I make, or lie about others, because I'm hurt when another person breaks a promise made to me, or lies about me, and I wouldn't wish that hurt on anyone else. I don't covet or envy because nothing good can come of it, and if I did it anyway I'd waste my own valuable time thinking about it.
I'm sure you believe God put it there when it was writ large in the world itself, and despite my atheism, far be it from me to dispel that notion in you. But I think it's important to note that, of the sins and commandments listed in the Bible, "love thy neighbor as thyself" is the only one that is writ large in such a way, with the other important ones being the obvious consequences of that singular truth.
Homosexuality? I see no basis by which it could be inherently immoral.
Humans have a deep, instinctual drive to form lasting pair-bonds. There's a cornucopia of research out there showing that people — men especially — are far more mentally and emotionally stable when they have the benefit of a stable romantic relationship. What's more, while there's a web of cause and effect that remains untangled, it's certainly instructive that Catholic priests are (unlike Protestant ministers) required to remain celibate and are (also unlike Protestant ministers) associated with one of the broadest and most disturbing sex scandals ever associated with religion. Married ministers produce the occasional Bakker or Swaggart, but never the sort of sprawling, slow-motion train wreck of a scandal produced by celibate priests.
The interesting part here is that the New Testament is quite clearly in favor of celibacy over marriage, which is why the Roman Catholic Church does it that way in the first place. Paul clearly states that "it is good for a man not to touch a woman" [1 Corinthians 7:1], and that sex of any sort, even in marriage, is a stain in God's eyes. However, because celibacy conflicts with human nature, even Paul acknowledged that marriage was an acceptable compromise to avoid the greater of two evils [1 Corinthians 7:7-9]. I'd say that the priest molestation scandal shows pretty conclusively exactly what he was talking about, and why a policy of celibate priests is a bad idea — probably why it was abandoned by Protestants a long time ago.
The thing of it is, though, that a lot of those guilty priests became priests because they were gay: Catholic teaching holds that gay sex is immoral, so they were compelled to remain celibate regardless. If gay sex (or, horror of horrors, gay marriage) had been available to them as a valid option, they probably wouldn't have b
Oh, I've seen a gay dog myself...
And there's the 7% or so of rams that mount other rams...
And there's the many firsthand accounts of men getting molested by overly frisky polymorphously perverse adolescent male dolphins...
I've never seen Hawaii in person. That doesn't mean Hawaii is a liberal myth.
Almost all venoms are chemicals that interact with either neurotransmitters or the receptors for those transmitters, and neurotransmitters are actually very similar to each other. Octopamine itself is very chemically similar to many other neurotransmitters, such as norepinephrine and dopamine. (They're all just a few -OH alcohol groups away from each other.) That similarity extends to activating each other — octopamine doesn't normally occur in humans, for instance, but it has a strong enough effect on the receptors we do have that it's occasionally abused as a party drug.
Therefore, there are likely to be many venoms that seriously affect octopamine receptors purely by accident, ones that also target other receptors. So, it doesn't have to be a single mutation (or a single generation) at all. Each small mutation in the venom DNA would, if selected for, result in (a) a possibly-small improvement in blocking octopamine, (b) a possibly-small improvement in not blocking other signals, or (c) sometimes both of the previous at once. (The mutations that weren't selected for? Those wasps couldn't feed as many offspring, so those families died out.) Thousands of generations later, the result is a venom that's pretty specific to octopamine, resulting in a non-paralyzed but docile roach.
With regards to the wasp leading the roach back to the nest: that's really no more shocking than any other case of complex instinctive behavior, like a baby fawn standing up and walking within 20 minutes of being born. The wasp's ancestors were dragging paralyzed roaches back to the nest millions of years ago, and tugging on an antenna isn't conceptually that much different. The wasp, to the extent that it thinks at all, probably still thinks of itself as "dragging" the roach; the wasp is merely pleasantly surprised at how little effort it takes.
The second sting to the brain is something that could have evolved before (i.e. using the paralyzing venom, it improved the odds of the roach staying catatonic while being eaten by a wasp larva) or after (i.e. using the zombie venom, it improved the odds that the roach would become and remain obedient). There's really no requirement there on which order the two evolved in, since both are separate improvements, and it's quite easy to imagine possible evolutionary progressions (e.g. single sting => multiple careless stings => two stings for less wasted venom => one quick sting to subdue, one careful sting for good measure).
(Oh, and the roach following the pull of the antenna? That's probably a built-in instinct in the roach. It doesn't want the antenna pulled off, after all. For most insects, the antennae are the most important sensory organs. It'd be like humans flinching when we see something flying at our eyes.)
I don't know what planet you're from where everything else in your house is so efficient that 15W is an "amazing" amount of power. According to this site run by Ames, IA (the first link Google found), an electric water heater draws 3800 W of power and runs 118±20 hours per month in a typical household of 4. Thus, it consumes 450±75 kWh of energy over the course of a month. Your wasteful computer uses about 10 kWh over a 720-hour (30-day) month. That's a lot more than it should, certainly, but a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all the kilowatt-hours that leak right through your water heater's thin insulation, ones that you could've conserved by simply heating water on demand.
(Aside: And then there's the poor saps like me who are stuck in all-electric apartments, with an electric furnace and an electric water heater, with landlords who don't understand the concept of why this is a bad idea. Two thirds of the energy has already been lost by the time it enters your home, either in the power plant's turbines or in the grid. Heating anything with electricity is terribly wasteful — even the least efficient gas furnace manages to keep about 60% of the combustion heat inside the house, and modern ones do much better than that. Combustion => Heat is always (barring stupidity) more efficient than Combustion => Heat => Motion => Electricity => Heat. OTOH, my rent is cheap enough here that I still come out about $50-$100 ahead per month versus a more thoughtfully designed apartment, and I'm not in a position to buy a house right now.)
Well, obviously, but that would've made the analogy unwieldy. Suing CC is more like suing ISO or ANSI because they published some standard that FedEx, UPS, etc. follow with regards to shipping packages. But that stretches the analogy too much, because it's almost as complicated as the original situation when the point of an analogy is to simplify the situation for better understanding.
It's like suing FedEx because some thief stole your credit card and used it to buy something online, and FedEx delivered the package.
Creative Commons didn't do jack squat to her. What's worse, neither Virgin, nor the photographer, nor Flickr have any sort of contract with Creative Commons. Creative Commons just wrote some nice copyright licenses; if they hadn't written them, the photographer could just as well have posted them under another liberal license, or made them public domain. Hell, even Flickr has more guilt here than Creative Commons, since the photographer probably never would've heard of the CC licenses if Flickr didn't have handy radio buttons to choose among them.
If the photographer didn't have permission from her to redistribute the photo under those terms, then that's the fault of the photographer and the girl for not discussing it — i.e. the photographer should've asked "Hey, can I post this to Flickr?" and, if she didn't know, mention that he uses a CC license.
Worse, Virgin is innocent in all this as well. They used the photo in a good faith assumption that the permissions granted to them by the photographer were his to give. They should immediately pull any advertising with her photo, sure, but they shouldn't be liable for damages if the photo is pulled immediately.
Short, short version: Sean Connery runs around in an orange diaper, while everyone else is either an immortal having telepathic acid trips, or else is a brutal who shoots you while chanting "The penis is evil! The penis shoots seeds!"
It really, really should've been on MST3K, though the giggle factor is high enough that you don't need Mike/Joel and the Bots to keep your sanity.
The physics of transmitting information aren't changed in the least by 802.11N. Balanced electrical signals over twisted pairs of wires (Ethernet, USB, Firewire, ...) will always offer superior speeds and better power efficiency versus transmitting and receiving radio waves. There are two simple reasons: (1) wires are directional, so no signal power is wasted by heating steel beams, electrical wiring, doorknobs, etc.; and (2) a balanced electrical signal is nearly immune to outside interference, because unless the interference is physically nearby it will affect both wires the same way.
The new MIMO stuff in 802.11N is an attempt to make wi-fi more directional, and thus improve the S/N ratio and the power-bandwidth tradeoff, but it's nowhere near what an actual directional antenna or phased array can do, much less a simple twisted pair.
Let's not even get into the security issues of wireless versus wired.
It's really pretty simple. As a general rule of thumb, the smaller things are, the faster things happen. Bacteria duplicate themselves in 20 minutes, but elephant pregnancies last for 2 years. No amount of evolution will ever produce something elephant-sized that duplicates itself in 20 minutes, due to hard physical limitations. If you want to go faster, you must miniaturize, and conversely, if you do miniaturize, you will go faster.
(That's why AMD and Intel are constantly falling over themselves to miniaturize their fabrication processes. Processors keep getting faster because their components keep getting smaller. There's a direct cause-and-effect relationship.)
And now human beings want larger and larger amounts of energy confined into smaller and smaller batteries. Smaller, lighter batteries means, on average, faster rates of charging and discharging. And since 100% efficiency is physically impossible, faster rates of charging and discharging means faster rates of heat production. And since we're keeping the battery small and light, there's no room for massive heat sinks. All that extra heat stays concentrated in the battery, which makes the temperature much hotter.
Now enter short circuits. These can be simple things like carrying a battery around in a pocket full of loose change, or more "exciting" ways such as crushing or puncturing the battery or breaking loose something internal. In any case, a battery experiencing a short circuit will (by definition) discharge at the maximum possible rate — and thus produce the highest possible temperature. Even if the battery itself doesn't catch on fire or explode, even older NiCd and NiMH batteries get hot enough to cause serious burns if they're near flesh when they go off, and it's quite easy to set nearby combustible materials like paper on fire.
You can reduce the impact of short circuits by increasing the battery's internal resistance, which will slow down the maximum discharge rate. However, this also slows down the maximum charge rate, and human beings want their batteries to be fully charged right now. Humans don't want a battery that will run their laptop for 2 days but takes 2 days to charge, which is what you get if you slow down the battery all the way to the minimum useful discharge rate. (It also reduces battery life, since it converts more energy to heat during normal operation, and also takes up space that could've gone to more battery capacity.)
There's simply an unavoidable conflict sitting plain as day in the laws of physics, and no new battery design will ever solve it. Human beings want safe, fast-charging, high-density batteries. Pick two.
Side note: Neonatal mortality isn't really a fair basis for comparison, since there's no international standard on how premature births are treated. In many countries, if a baby is born prematurely and dies shortly thereafter despite medical intervention, it's counted as a stillbirth, miscarriage, or the like. In the US, the same baby gets tallied as a neonatal death.
One word: goatse.cx
From what I understand, the evidence is also pretty strongly in favor of a pandemic fungal infection that weakens the hive's ability to overwinter. That's another strike against the GM crop silliness.
Folks, if you're going to oppose GM crops, do it for the right reasons: Monsanto is a company of fucking douchebags, genes shouldn't be patentable, and GM crops are almost always monocultures derived from a single modified plant.
The reality is that most of the genes people want to add to GM crops are a selective disadvantage in the wild. Plants don't spray Roundup on each other in the wild, so all the effort spent making a plant glyphosate-resistant is wasted energy that could have gone into something productive. Likewise for golden rice (the rice doesn't need the Vitamin A, after all) and just about anything else humans would care to add to a crop.
And that's why it was a joke rather than a serious suggestion. Duh.