Nope. The first anonymous coward is correct. Orbits do not suddenly change on their own. That would violate various conservation laws. The fact that an asteroid-mass object appears to have hit a pulsar means that something perturbed that astroid's orbit. This was probably an encounter with another asteroid.

When Uranus was discovered the common pronunciation for the old Greek sky god's name was something akin to urine-us, which at the time was considered far more vulgar than the ur-anus pronunciation. Today it is the other way around. Who knows which pronunciation will be considered ruder (or more childish) a few centuries from now.

A significant problem is that many of the people who quote p values do it without understanding what a p value actually means. Getting p = 0.05 does not mean that there is only a 5% chance that the model is wrong. That is one of the fundamental misunderstandings in statistics, and I suspect that it is behind a lot of the cases of scientific irreproducibility.

I hope that it did not suffer too much.

>These studies do aggree, however, that retailers prefer DST because it brings in more customers, traffic safety is improved because of more light for evening commutes

The improvement in evening traffic safety is offset by a corresponding decrease in morning traffic safety. Most of the safety studies that I have seen suggest that morning commutes are inherently more dangerous than evening commutes, probably because people are not fully awake. If this is the case, and safety is the primary reason for DST, then it would be better to have the daylight before work than after.

For this proposal to work the two time zones will probably need to be EST and MST, and put the boundary approximately between Iowa and Illinois. This will minimize the discrepancies between clock time and Solar time.

Daylight Saving Time results in fewer hours of light in the morning, not more. DST puts less of the morning trip to school in light, not more.

Real life does not work that way. In the real world social cues and conventions are important. A face-to-face conversation follows a very different arc than a similar online chat does. Both have their uses, but one cannot replace the other.

Probably, but when people are going to attack someone else over trivial language issues they really should proofread their posts first.

Don't you love it when grammar nazis make spelling errors?

You are thinking of the sample standard deviation of one point, which is undefined, or infinite depending on one's taste. The sample standard deviation of two points (x1, x2) is sqrt(0.5 * (x1 + x2)^2 - x1^2 * x2^2).

If one assumes that Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are correct, and there is no observational evidence that they are not, then Yang-Mills theory, or something very much like it, is inevitable. It arises from the need for conservation of the various charges each force.

Wow! I expected to modded into oblivion over my post. Good to see that people have a sense of humour.

The letters refer to the demographic they are being sold to.
S - suckers
C - chumps

If someone has to sit behind the wheel pretending to drive then self-driving cars will never catch on. However, the goal is to have vehicles that do not need someone waiting to take over at a moment's notice. Once true self-driving cars are available I suspect that they will catch on very fast. Most driving is tedious. Vehicle that allows people to do something constructive while their vehicle takes them wherever they need to go will probably be quite popular. And then there is the aging population that wants to stay mobile even after they are unable to operate a vehicle safely. If these vehicles can be made truly self-driving the transition to self-driving cars may happen quite fast.