Maybe AC meant "tons" literally. If there's 2000 climate scientists total, 5% would weigh about 15,000 lbs., which is several tons. There's just a lot more tons of climate scientist on the consensus side.

Agreed. His website says he wants to inspire sustainable living, but I really don't see how living in an expensive plastic-and-aluminum ball with packaged food and water does that.

Never said I didn't buy into it. I use a fluoride mouthwash. Just curious.

Does this mean that fluoridating our water and/or using a fluoride mouthwash are useless?

Seriously. Anyone who's already shown some interest in watching Star Trek can certainly handle that.

Well, HBO hasn't gotten any money from me, but AMC has. I willingly forked over $2/episode for Breaking Bad and Walking Dead, which I can watch again and I don't have to sit through the FBI warning. So call it $40 for the 2nd season of Walking Dead, and they had an average audience of ~5 million. If all those people were like me and didn't have cable, that's potentially ~$200 million in revenue. Let's be conservative and halve it. The total budget for that season was something like $60 million. So that's a $40 million profit, which I wouldn't scoff at. In fact, that's all of AMC's quarterly profit. Seems like a viable model in a world where people aren't shelling out $100/month for a bunch of crap they don't want to watch.

It's a good telescope.

"... the efficiency of the ATA will be increased by doing radio astronomy and SETI searches simultaneously."

In fact only one of the science goals listed is actually related to SETI, and the rest are quite interesting even if you think SETI itself is useless.

If I recall, Judge Rehnquist wrote the majority decision: "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah."

The trouble there is in deciding what to maximize/minimize. I suspect it would be fairly easy to show heterosexual monogamy minimizes inheritance battles (assuming patriarchal inheritance) while maximizing baby production and genetic diversity. And I think a few people still genuinely believe these are the sole/primary goals of marriage, but most don't.

I don't think that's how assumptions work.

Empiricism is great, and there are some values everyone's pretty much agreed on (e.g. stealing is a dick move if you have other means of providing for yourself, and don't kill anyone unless you have a really good reason), and I believe in an objective reality. But values can't be empirically determined; empiricism only shows which behaviors maximize values determined by some other means.

Not sure I buy this. If 20k are responsible for 500 million per week, that means those users average a tweet every ~15 seconds, 16 hours per day, 7 days per week. And since that's an average, some users would be tweeting at an even higher frequency. That just doesn't seem sustainable; wouldn't they starve by the end of the week? Or have carpal tunnel syndrome by the end of the month?

Cheap, effective for finding ferrous meteorites. We use magnets from old hard drives. Good place to look is the average winter windward shore of a large dry lake bed, where small meteorites tend to get concentrated. Look for signs of eolian erosion. Poke around until something sticks. Kinda time-consuming, but we've found a couple chondrites that way. Probably doesn't make good TV, though.

No it's not. I'm no fan of the Mail, but the headline "Did tonight's super moon cause Japan's tsunami?" leads to "And yet there is not a shred of evidence to support this."

FTA: a really boring trailer. Most low-budget sci-fi movies I've seen were considerably more interesting than the trailer to this game. Skynet will be trained by the incredibly bored.

Some institutions and universities cover the OpenChoice cost for the authors.

Full disclosure: I am a geologist, but I don't study intra-plate earthquakes and I'm not familiar with Stein's work. You're correct that the faults themselves are locked, so there's no relative motion immediately to either side of the fault. But the strain accumulation is caused by the relative motions of much larger crustal blocks, and this movement can be seen using GPS. Saying "the faults are moving @ x mm/yr" is incorrect short-hand for saying "the relative motion of the crust on either side of the fault far away is x mm/yr". That said, I'm used to dealing with GPS for faults that have surface expressions. I'm not sure how the thick layers of sediment above the New Madrid fault zone would affect the signal, but my guess would be that the GPS signal would be more diffuse and noisier. Yes, they are ground stations.

The San Andreas is a strike-slip fault, so GPS will show motions of the North American and Pacific plates roughly parallel to the fault line. The Ramapo fault is a normal fault, so far-field motions will be perpendicular to the fault line and directed away. The New Madrid fault zone actually consists of two strike-slip faults and a thrust fault, so the GPS signal will be more complex. I don't know if there are GPS data for the Ramapo area, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be used to detect motion in Canada, other than the fact that it would mean working in Canada.

I don't know. Obviously they're not using GPS data to constrain when faults were active thousands of years ago, but other kinds of geologic evidence could be useful in that regard. It may be the consensus of those who study intra-plate earthquakes, which from my perspective are just something that happen sometimes.