We think of fish is heart healthy, but fin fish don't produce omega-3 fatty acids; they bioaccumulate Omega 3s produced by the algae at the bottom of the food chain. Farm-raised fin fish may or may not have a healthy fat profile based on their diet. Grass fed beef has a healthier fat profile than grain fed beef, as well as containing useful phyotchemical (chemicals from plants) like carotenoids. Same goes for pork; lard from pasture raised pigs is relatively high in mono- and poly-unsaturated fats.

The pattern seems to be that the best thing to feed an animal is something that approximates that species' natural food in the wild. So I'm skeptical of a secret, proprietary, industrially produced feed. It's not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if it's just a matter of skipping a few trophic levels (i.e., feeding the animal something prepared from stuff that's lower on its natural prey's food chain). Aquaculture needs something like that. The world's population demands more seafood than can be wild caught. But I'm not enthusiastic about buying meat from animals raised on mystery food.

It makes perfect sense. What if your concept of absolute determinism as implied here is actually not absolute and has limitations? That's what he was saying, at least as I understood it. That would mean that some subset of everything would be steady, regular, unpredictable, and unsurprising. The rest wouldn't.

An analogy could be a program that takes certain actions based on the output of a high-quality random number generator of some kind. The compiled program code itself is completely deterministic, behaving as designed each time it is run. The randomness adds an unpredictable element; it determines which of the predetermined (that is, available or achievable) outcomes actually ends up happening. You can't break fundamental rules of physics but plenty of other things could play out in myriad ways.

This is a self-serving move by GM.

Perhaps the engineers named are responsible for the deaths caused by the faulty switch. Perhaps they are not. We don't know. But we can be certain that GM is naming these engineers in the hope that the public will blame and vilify them instead of the company.

This is an attempt to evade corporate responsibility disguised as an act of transparency. Even if the engineers bear some responsibility for the faulty design reaching production vehicles, it should be impossible for two engineers alone to put an obviously unsafe assembly into a production car, even if they conspire to do that *deliberately*. Obvious flaws should have been caught in design reviews, non-obvious flaws in prototyping and testing.

Well, it shouldn't be a question of some random person pulled of the Internet vs. the scientists *working on the project*. It should be a matter of what an educated person would think if all the pros and cons were laid out impartially then intelligently explained to him.

The problem with GP isn't that he thinks that ITER is a "massive and pointless waste of money" that will "never lead to a practical source of energy." The problem is that he hasn't explained the reasoning he used to arrive at that conclusion, and shown that he has thoughtfully weighed the contrary argument. He may well have done so and formed a very sound opinion of the project. We just don't know.

While I am sure there are occasional situations where it might be advantageous to be thought foolish and incompetent, in general this is likely a bad thing.

It's like being thought *weak* in military terms. There in tactical situations you'd like the enemy to underestimate your strength, strategically it's better to be thought stronger than you actually are. If a hostile country is considering violating some treaty they have with us, we'd want them to think our intelligence agencies will catch them red-handed. Once they actually go down that road, we'd want them to think our agencies are completely incompetent.

Right.

You seem to think that Harvard divesting from fossil fuels will cause companies like Exxon-Mobil to collapse overnight.

This is largely a symbolic action. If many other institutional investors follow suit, it's *still* not going to stop companies from pumping natural gas out of their wells, any more than divesting in gold mining would cause gold mines to stop taking gold out of the ground. The last thing a troubled business would do is starve a cash cow.

What divestiture *might* do, in the most wildly optimistic scenario imaginable, is divert a *tiny* fraction of the world's investment in developing new energy stocks toward renewables. Were that to lead eventually to electricity shortages, the price of fossil fuels would automatically rise. That would attract plenty of new investment. A modest rise in prices would swamp any conceivable stock price effect of divestiture, even if all the universities in the world did this.

Finally, as an MIT alum who's taken courses at Harvard, people who manage to land a professorship at the country's oldest and most prestigious university are usually pretty damned smart. That doesn't mean "always right", but it does mean that they probably understand the practical effects of such a move better than you apparently do. This is a university that has managed to build the largest endowment of any educational institution in the world: over 32 *billion*. If that were *market capitalization*, it'd put them on S&P's list of the 100 largest companies in the world. Halliburton's only worth 30 billion.

... caused by a false belief in an inherent benevolence of government, compounded by this denial-apathy thing concerning the casual lies coming from every major institution and corporation on a regular basis.

If you imagine for a moment that there were aliens observing the earth, you could not blame them for refusing to initiate first contact.

Lisi's "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" predicts particles. Is this one of those particles that it predicts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

... and as long as that never changes in the future, and nothing you do today that is considered harmless enough is later perceived to be suspicious.

Er I meant "without being *smart* enought", not "*fast* enough". In this case I guess I was too fast to hit submit. Or maybe just not smart enough to re-read properly before submitting?

By the way Slashdot's post rate limiting is completely dumb. It's now been 2+ minutes since I submitted my comment and I can't post this correction yet. Hey Slashdot, how about implementing an 'edit post' button! Welcome to the 2000's!

Exactly. I fail to understand how someone can be smart enough to think of the shortcomings of super fast charging without being fast enough to think of the obvious solution of batteries in between the power station and the car charger. Suggests either extreme laziness or some kind of agenda.

When I was at CMU from 1990 - 1994 the CS department had a couple of rooms full of old discarded and no longer used mainframe and mainframe support equipment. We wandered through there once or twice just to see what old computers looked like. I probably saw your IBM 360 surrounded by dozens of big refrigerator sized reel to reel tape machines (there were alot of those) and didn't even know what I was looking at.

I've been to alot of the world. I'm guessing you haven't, because if you had, you'd find that this is generally a universal invariant among humans.

Maybe not everyone is as thick (literally) as the average American, but they're gaining ground rapidly, because it's generally only through economic inability to be "thick" that they are. Make everyone as rich as Americans, and everyone becomes fat. Seriously.

And in terms of mental "thickness", well I can assure you, that's the same absolutely everywhere, already.

On the other hand, keep in mind that any and all of these "surveys" showing people being dumb will keep going until they've managed to cherrypick enough dumb answers to make the casual observer believe that this represents the norm. Maybe they asked 500 astronomy grads and 5 of them were dumb, and those are the only 5 they showed. Since those kinds of articles/videos/exposees tend to be looking to titillate, not inform, it is entirely believable that it's all just cherrypicking for the purposes of supporting a false pretense.