The problem with HVAC: If it doesn't suck, it blows.

Linus Pauling was very smart and a good man. He has Nobel prizes in Chemistry and Peace to prove it. As a general rule, if Linus Pauling didn't understand something, you don't, either. Yet, toward the end of his life, he had some odd ideas regarding megadoses of vitamin C that haven't ever been proven in clinical studies. The point is that a great scientist can, at times, be wrong about things--especially when they are outside his field of specialization. The big difference between Linus Pauling and Freeman Dyson is that Linus Pauling's ideas regarding vitamin C were mostly harmless, while Freeman Dyson's claims on climate change can be quite catastrophic if we take them seriously.

Since you asked,

https://xkcd.com/538/

I don't speak Mandarin, but a language where a variation in tones can generate a different meaning must be ripe for puns. Given such a puntastic environment, I don't the government stands a chance.

If it talks to God, it should be ideal for safety critical systems.

Just say no to escargot!

The best and brightest US students go to the top schools--Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, Berkeley, etc. At Podunk U, they need to recruit overseas to get the indentured servants, a.k.a. grad students, to do the research and teach the undergrads.

as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

Of course when Michelson said this, there were just a couple of loose ends to be figured out...the "UV Catastrophe" associated with the discrepancy between the purely electromagnetic theory of blackbody radiation, and the strange threshold behavior associated with the photoelectric effect.

Right now, we keep on building bigger and bigger colliders and can't really find anything beyond the Standard Model. It seems that the biggest advances these days are coming from Astrophysics rather than High Energy Physics. Today, the two pesky loose ends that are likely to change everything are dark matter and dark energy. What we need is a theory that explains these phenomena and an experiment to test the theory.

Windows 8 will be responsible for several mass murders.

In recent news, a state senator from Montana (R) was arrested, and a tea-party-republican-congressman from Florida was also arrested. A Republican from Montana and a Republican from Florida. Who would have guessed that. It has nothing to do with Sacramento or party. Like I said, all politics are local. Especially corrupt politics.

In California, if there's a scandal, it's likely to be a Democrat, just based on the statistics. There are far more Democrats than Republicans in office. Furthermore, if you're in San Francisco, you're going to have a Democrat in office. It's the way the city votes. It's your job to pick a good one.

This is nothing more than a 160+ year continuation of San Francisco Chinatown corruption and bizarre happenings. It has nothing to do with party.

I think they should go back to their consumer PC security & utility roots and hire John McAfee.