They opensourced the engine, but not the data. Unless somebody creates alternative data, then this is a non-story. http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/06/Aquaria-goes-open-source#disqus_thread

They probably tested the same criminal case with several choices of accompanying picture. That allowed them to examine if the suggested punishment for a given case was independent of the accompanying picture.

I think that the article describes which language that students learn during their first year of study. They can learn C afterwards.

Is anybody working on a book about scipy? I would buy it.

Most microorganisms from earth cannot survive outdoors on Mars, so hopefully the (hypothetical) Martian native life will not be contaminated. But frankly I don't think that any country on earth will delay colonization of Mars to save its native life.

An average freight ship sails at a speed between 20 and 40 kilometers per hour so the train is ten times faster. On the other hand train transport must be more expensive and more polluting. After all you need a lot of trains to replace a single container vessel.

Lomborg does not deny that the green house effect exists. His point is that it is very costly to avoid raising the temperature, and therefore he suggests that we ignore the green house effect and spend our money elsewhere. I think that is fair enough to make such a cost benifit analysis. After all there is lots of evil in this world and somehow we have to choose. The problem is that Lomborg as a person has a bad reputation for cheating with the numbers. Therefore is probably not be the right person to perform this cost benifit analysis.

I am not sure which version I had. I bought the phone on e-bay, and it didn't live long.

I once had a Motorola razor phone, and the user interface was horrible. The menu tree was too deep, and it was often difficult to guess which submenu contained which menu item.

I am for one not surprised that the company ended up in trouble.

The alternative is to reach out to a lot of schools and make sure that each school has a few working second hand stationary computers. It is better to have a cheap solution for the many than an expensive solution for the few. When I worked in India, I heard a talk by a guy from the Shikshana foundation, and I was really impressed by the way they worked. It sounded like they could achieve a lot with fairly small means http://www.sikshana.org/

In northern Europe we have a long history of using taxes on water and energy to guide the industry. We have a capitalist system, but we use taxes to punish polluting companies.

This works well for a single country, but it is hard to make several countries align their tax systems, because each country has different interests.