The Cuban missile crisis is an example of why you don't want too many nuclear missiles around. In that case we were lucky that Russia backed down but if both countries had been equally stubborn then we would have had nuclear war. I agree that getting rid of all nuclear weapons is unrealistic but it would be nice to get the number down low enough that a nuclear war would just destroy civilisation rather than sterilizing the planet.

After 4 nights of almost no sleep with a newborn I became convinced at 3am one morning that it was vital to get the surface integral of the baby. After some failed attempts to work out how to do this I realised I wasn't in a fit state to be looking after babies and woke my (slightly less sleep deprived) wife up to take over.

link should be QuantLib

QuantLib is a nice open source quantitative finance framework. I think it's mainly written by academics rather than the banks but it's presumably similar to what they use.

I think it pretty clear from the context that it's Australia.

Since the limiting resource for advanced civilisations is likely to be matter/energy you'd expect competing factions to either consume it extremely quickly or to hoard and hide it. Even if some civilisations chose not to take the expansive route it seems unlikely that civilisations are common but that they all remain inexpansive. It doesn't appear that the galaxy is either being consumed or hidden which suggests either that we are alone, almost alone, or that matter/energy is not a limiting resource for advanced civilisations.

I read an article in New Scientist about this and was confused about the mechanism described. The networkworld article linked to in the summary is slightly better because in talks about an electric pulse, implying that it's not steady state.

It sounds like the there is an electrode on the back on the boat, and when a potential is applied to that electrode it changes the surface from hydrophobic to hydrophilic. This change causes the boat to tilt in the water and it is propelled slightly forward. The potential is then turned off, the boat relaxes to a flat position, the potential is turned back on again, and so on. The net result is a forward motion.

The main advantage won't be efficiency but rather it is a mechanism well suited to very small boats where surface tension is relatively much more important.

I don't think late opening hours even create jobs, since if you can't get a haircut at 10pm on a Sunday night you'd just go during the daytime. Increased business during the day would mean more hairdressers employed during daytime hours. It mostly a question of how you weigh employees schedules against consumer convenience and whether you dislike government regulation of things like opening hours on principle.

All the domains are .com, which, I thought, was intended for american companies. It's not like it's .nl or .uk domains that they're messing with.