Not the only way, or even the best way. IRV still has spoilers, and so still tends toward two-party domination (just ask Australia.) If you want a system where more than two parties can actually compete, better to go with approval voting or score voting.

http://www.electology.org/approval-voting

Every environment is noisy now.

Why read the wikipedia page, when you can read the whole book?

If you like it, be sure to check out the "sequel", I Am a Strange Loop; it summarizes his earlier work in GEB in about two chapters, and the exploration from there is illuminating.

First, let me second some earlier suggestions: Flatland, and Godel, Escher, Bach (or the much more concise semi-sequel, I Am a Strange Loop.)

But one I'd suggest, which I pretty much never see anyone else mention, is The Day the Universe Changed (companion to the BBC miniseries, now available on YouTube.) It's sort of about the history of science, but more so it's about how our discoveries about the world changed (and continue to change) our perception of it.

No, that's my entire point: after 521 years, half the DNA in sample A is gone, and half the DNA in sample B is gone, but some of those halves will be different; 25% of each link of DNA will be intact in both samples, 25% will be intact only in sample A, 25% will be intact only in sample B, and 25% will not be intact in either sample.

"after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken"

Okay, but there were how many billion copies of the sample when the creature died? If there were two, after 521 years I still have (on average) at least one copy of 3/4 of the data, extending the half-life to (check my math here) 737 years. With 15 billion copies or so, the half-life gets up to, hey!, about 65 million years, and there are trillions of cells (and so trillions of copies of DNA) in a human-sized body.

In the vein of xkcd-what-if #11, I wonder about the physical meaning of kilometers per second per megaparsec. Kilometer and megaparsec are both lengths, so you can divide them out by the conversion factor (1 megaparsec = 3.08567758 × 10^19 kilometers) and then you are left with "per second", i.e., a frequency. A frequency of about 240 billion gigahertz. What, if anything, does that mean?

Jesus also said the meek will inherit the earth.... because the AWESOME are going to fly away in ROCKET SHIPS! (Although Jesus may not have explicitly said that second bit.)

"We didn't give it to them" is not the same as "They couldn't have gotten it." 3rd parties were able to collect UDIDs for a long time, and it's quite easy to believe the FBI could get them from there.

To the geniuses helpfully reminding this guy of the speed of light:

When he says "virtual explorers", he doesn't mean you'll be sitting in New York while playing on Alpha Centauri I via VR. He means uploading your mind to the probe before launching it.

tl;dr: rtfa.

No, the density of uranium declines as you dig in to the mantle. Uranium tends to collect in the crust. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibility_(geochemistry)

His former chess level is less-relevant than the fact that he's a leader in the political movement opposing Putin.

It's illegal for the cops to use an IR camera to observe your house, without a search warrant. "But your body is an infrared transmitter, dammit! When you walk around spraying ir in all directions the people it is bouncing off of have a right to absorb some of it and do with it as they wish! That includes the cops." No, no they do not.

Two phones. Don't call mom with the burner. (Come on people, at least watch Breaking Bad!)