Because I don't have a license, I always drive

You don't have a license because you don't know how to drive, or because you've been ordered to stop driving by the courts? In the first case, you're a dangerous lunatic who should be locked up and hit with heavy drugs until your stupidity is cured (or you're a vegetable, whichever comes sooner, or is cheaper - probably the vegetable option). In the second case, you'd have been arrested as soon as you took control of the vehicle (by sitting in the drivers seat, and often the police could get sufficient evidence to do you for simply opening the car door).

I thought it was spider-goat silk.

Read more carefully. What I said:

"[BMI] works pretty well as a population health metric"

"BMI doesn't work as well when applied to individuals."

You understand that the Snapple lady is an individual, right? And that individuals and a population are quite different things?

I work in tech in a very liberal Canadian city and have a bunch of gay friends, and sometimes get lulled into thinking the world is a big happy accepting place.

Then I step outside the downtown bubble, just by a few miles, and I'm stunned by what I sometimes encounter. I do a little writing for a group that makes short films, and we had a shoot where one of the actors didn't show up. He was part of a couple, and I suggested we recast the part using a woman who didn't have a part yet, so the couple would be gay but everything else would be the same. The film was about relationships and this couple was fighting about stuff. There might be a hug at the end, but nothing more overtly affectionate than that.

The young, professional woman I suggested this too looked at me with her eyes literally wide with horror and said, "I'm sorry, I can't do that. I'm really straight."

In that situation it wasn't my place to berate her for her bigotry, particularly as I didn't think until much later of the correct come-back: "You're really earthbound, too, but I bet you'd play an astronaut if I asked you to."

So yeah, while to so many of us this is a done deal, our gay friends and family still have to walk around every day wondering when they are going to encounter that kind of horrified rejection, and while at least they don't get beat up as often as they used to it still has to be pretty awful for them.

If anyone wants people like Tim Cook to stop making a big deal about being gay (and really, don't we all want that?) they should make sure to be accepting and matter-of-fact about the gay people all around us, whose much-talked-about "agenda" involves living happy, fulfilling lives.

Airlines are perfectly willing to charter planes to people who don't have their own. It's actually cheaper to do it that way if you're flying a decent number of people. Yeah, it might take some coordination among the various agencies. They should be doing that anyway.

Your own links contradict you. The director of the CDC (who is an MD, not a scientist) said a travel ban could make things worse. The WHO supports travel restrictions and controls, such as closing all but major entry points and implementing screening for sick people, and continuing low-risk activities such as fuel and supply deliveries, but cautions that overly broad restrictions could be counterproductive.

There's lots of actual science done in that area. And a lot of crap "science" too, plus a LOT of random incorrect assertions. The "overweight" and "obese" ranges aren't arbitrary, they were chosen to correspond to bands of health risk. BMI is "scientific" and it works pretty well as a population health metric, as do the weight ranges based on it.

BMI doesn't work as well when applied to individuals. There are some other reasonably simple measurements that work better, such as waist to hip ratio. Being overweight is an important risk factor for a lot of serious diseases, both at the individual level and at the population level.

It's called a survey, you systematically search a given area with instruments that can detect what you're looking for, it's not done until the survey is complete.

Someone gives you nine lives and you're bitching about not having 10?

Einstein's 1905 paper was three pages long and did not have any citations. Thing is, E=MC^2 itself doesn't need a citation because it became "text book knowledge" not long after it's publication. Same thing with Feynman diagrams, the best minds mercilessly ridiculed his presentation, but the next day they came back mumbling "maybe the kid is on to something", nobody would cite his paper now because Feynman diagrams are "text book knowledge", taught and tested at undergraduate level.

In Science, Engineering and Medicine, text book knowledge is the highest level of certainty that we have, when you graduate you're not expected to remember it all but you are expected to know how to look it up. A citation is for things that can't be found in text books, nobody seems really sure what "highly cited" indicates.

Having your work become (or overturn) text book knowledge in your own lifetime is by far the most impressive thing anyone in the "STEM" fields can have on their CV, it's basically a prerequisite for a Nobel prize.

Scientific discovery comes from applying existing tools to existing data. Some scientists spend the entire career building data sets about one particular thing and encourage others to explore their data. For instance there was the astronomer Bruno who mapped the sky with extraordinary accuracy, told everyone he could about it, and was executed for his troubles.

Or more recently Phil Jones the target of the "climategate" beat up who spent more than two decades painstakingly gathering paper/microfiche records from around the globe and systematically building an open and accessible global temperature database, sure they made a few discoveries of their own in the data but since it was all government funded they could hog the data themselves even if they wanted to.

Data gathering is where governments can best achieve their stated goal to "boost science", eg: Earth facing satellites, LHC, Hubble Deep Field, etc, that kind and scale of data collection is strong fertiliser for Scientific discovery, but highly toxic to quarterly profit statements.

A generation of rabid opposition to nuclear power is wrong, as is using climate change as a stick to beat global capitalism with rather than saying, "Hey, all we need is a carbon tax and we'll be done" (this is what the evidence in the Canadian province of British Columbia shows, anyway, but who cares about evidence when you're busy fighting global capitalism?)

I only use M$ at work, and for the wife's box. I don't know,or want to know, Win8. All my clients are simply going to skip the 8 generation. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

I don't see that this experiment is any different from a photon reflecting between parallel partially-silvered mirrors. You see a range of arrival times at the detector, despite the wavefunction being "fragmented" by multiple reflections.

So this won't do anything to advance measurement theory. It is an interesting example because of the exotic circumstances. Your description is extremely good and quite plausible, although I haven't read the paper either.

I question how much it's still "oil". Oil, outside of reservoirs, evolves. The volatiles slowly separate out; their ultimate fate is evaporation and photodegradation. The shortest chains are lost rapidly, but the longer they get, the longer they take to disappear. As volatiles are lost, the oil thickens. It eventually becomes tar, and then basically asphalt.

Blasphemer!