I do conversions all the time: I cook. I look up recipes. And US/Canadian recipes are written with deeply moronic idea that quantities of matter are easily measured by volume.

So I have this table of how much grams is a bloody cup of strawberries (and I don't know the kind of mental confusion which may lead anyone to think this makes the remotest amount of sense). Because if you want to be somewhat precise, there is only one single appropriate tool in a kitchen, and it is the scale.

Likewise, it is easier to mix liquids in ml (grams if it is water) and solids in precise amounts by weighing. And most importantly, this allows you to scale the recipes easily by the amount of the main ingredient.

As for the Fahrenheit thing, all I can say is that it is a truly moronic scale. From the freezing point of saturated brine to the body temperature of a human with a slight fever. Obviously this makes sense -- not. Feet, inches, miles, pounds, you know what? its some arbitrary choice. Fahrenheit is just dumb.

But whatever, these conversations usually boil done to this bizarre fact: Europeans like decimal notation, and Americans like fractions. And for sure, if you like fractions, you probably think conversions are not too useful. I can also tell you are American by the fact that you think "KMPH" is not disturbing as a notation: even in science, I find that Americans can think of acronyms as single entities, e.g they read ABC/DEF as "ABC"/"DEF", whereas Europeans will introduce symbols such as A_{foo}/B_{bar}.

As far as I can tell, this is the deep root of why notations/units are such. But the fact remains that measuring quantities of matter in volume is wrong :)

Actually, progress has been clearly exponential. Progress dropping to linear would be a clear regression.

By using TOR, you are also providing cover to people living under repressive regimes. Which means that depending on your interpretation you are also helping terrorists.

However, this argument is profoundly absurd: walls also help with privacy. Most pedophiles do whatever it is they do behind walls. Are all civil engineering bureaus enablers?

At the end of the day, the FBI compromising TOR does two things, help them capture pretty horrible individuals, and weaken privacy. Now in the West, this is somewhat academic what the consequences are. Elsewhere, people may die.

This is exactly how it works now in Cuba.

Thus my larger point that Marriage in the West is really from the Roman/Greek tradition rather than the Judaic.

you are living in la-la-land if you think that rights not defended and imposed by the Leviathan have any value. Justice is part of the apparatus of state. What of your rights with no police or tribunals to enforce them?

That is an argument from ignorance: in the bible, marriage is between a man and a number of wives and concubines and slaves...

In the West marriage comes from Roman and Greek institutions, altered by Germanic traditions, and a post hoc sanction by the church -- inheritor of the Roman tradition.

There is a huge cognitive dissonance in the US about rights. Because Americans are told they have "inalienable" rights coming "from their creator", they have the feeling that the government can only take them away. However, in reality, "rights" stem from social consensus and need to be actively defended by the manifestation of social consensus: "the government"!

Any right that the government does not actively defend is moot. If you wish for "small government" you also wish for weak protection of your rights.

Another source of confusion is that there is some distinction between "state government" and "federal government" and the average American seem to not understand that this is just an arbitrary separation of duties which is not particularly good or appropriate. At the end of the day, you are "governed" and obey "laws" and have "rights" and it matters little where these come from, states or Washington.

No, it is not a model. Mendeleeiev noticed regularities in the elements. He found that putting them by rows and columns of properties, he got an arrangements where there were gaps. This was a model exactly in the way that giving names to clouds and putting them in a table is a model.

Because nature is fairly regular, he was right: elements did fit in the missing spaces. But also, whole rows were missing. Now we understand, through quantum mechanics, where the patterns come from -- and also where they break down.

We know that the table is now complete (in that all elements in all rows we have previously observed have been produced), and that relativistic effects may (or not!) make the next row completely different. Because this is the XXIst and not the XIXst, we actually have models to build the next table :)

No we don't. That's bullcrap.

Even if you take the evolutionary view of the tug-o-war between sexes, always remember that you cannot have a tug-o-war with an object. At most it can tell you that men and women would optimally, in a maximalist perspective, desire different things about relationships, but both realise that to get said relationship, compromise on both sides is required.

There is a tug-o-war because at the end of the day, relationships are desirable for both. In fact, still taking the evolutionary view, the fact that gays of either sex still desire relationships -- even asexual people do -- indicate that the desire for companionship likely trumps all.

So be nice to your fellow humans, 'cause they are all potential significant others. That is what biology tells you.

Leaving aside the moral aspects of it, I'll tell you what's wrong: taping only 50% of your potential market is just bad business.

It's not that women don't play games -- it's not even that the storylines are male-centred. It's that there seems to be an almost conscious effort to be offensive. You don't need to be politically correct, you just need to imagine that your players may also be women, that they have similar, yet slightly different preferences and that if tweaks allow them to better relate to the characters (be they male or female!) you can open your market.

On a related note, the fact that characters are predominantly male is to me a symptom, and not a problem per se. Male player will often be completely fine with playing a girl, and vice versa. The problem lies in that the writers seem not capable of grasping that concept. And a writer that inflexible is probably not very good...

Interesting, you compound your misunderstanding of the structure of government as understood since the Enlightenment with a misunderstanding of energy infrastructure, as understood from the early 20th and of the formation of public opinion (mid-twentieth).

Governments, not democratic ones, and even not most autocratic ones are not sustained (only) by the threat of violence. The situation in Syria is illustration of that: although it is not actually possible to overthrow Assad, as he is ready to go to any extremity to hold onto power, he still does not rule Syria anymore. Government are truly sustained by the implicit will of the people: they may not like you, but they realise that given a minimum amount of competency in the administration, order is better than chaos.

You may think people hate paying taxes, but in fact people just dislike paying in general, and accept taxes as necessary. You will even find that even direct democracies increase taxes :)

This is a really dumb way of thinking about how the government spends money. A corporation does not need to make a profit: it needs to make a profit now. And not just now, but also high enough.

Governments are special in that they can finance things which bring in enormous profit in the very long run (fundamental research, very large infrastructure projects) or which have very large positive externalities (free roads). Without governments, you could not build dams: large ones become profitable after 50 years. No bank, no insurance company will accept such long-term risks: they may well not exist that long. Only countries can be reasonably certain of existing within such stretches of time.

TL;DR; it is an essential function of governments to fund long-term, high-risk projects.

About the old ideas, you are right. However, I still think that grad students actually make good reviewers in that the (good) ones have a keener sense of what is bullshit (as in "this suspiciously missing control is not suspiciously missing: you were afraid it would disprove your oversold message").

But yes, supervision is useful, because there is value in experience. BTW, when I say "grad students" I mean students vying for PhDs who already have at least a master's degree. It is a bizarre (to me) Americanism to call grad students people with only a bachelor.

If find it a bit sad that you think that students will steal ideas from the papers they are reviewing. On the other hand I find it heartwarming that you have students good enough to scoop papers already in review :)

Right, because the FED trebling the money supply just caused 300% inflation. Oh,wait, it didn't.

Also, no studies ever show that happiness correlates with the log of money. Oh, wait, they all do. Perhaps more tellingly, the probability density of income within countries (and amongst countries) is log-normal. So yes, the proper way to count the utility of wealth is in log.

Remember kids, libertarianism only makes sense if you ignore reality.