I don't think gambling should be a crime (although regulated, for sure).

But you'd have to have stuck your head pretty deep into the sand if you think it's a "victimless" practice. Gambling addiction has destroyed millions of lives and families.
That's just indisputable. And online poker is no exception.
Yes, gamblers are ultimately responsible for their own behavior. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be shown sympathy.
This addiction is a well-documented and established psychological fact, so putting the entire burden of guilt on them is simply cynical and inhumane. So is exonerating the people who willingly aid and profit from that irresponsibility,
nor does it help the children and others who depend on the addict and are completely innocent.

It's one thing to feel that gambling should be legal (which I do). But another entirely to pretend like there's no reason behind its criminalization.
If you can't see that gambling addicts are, to at least _some_ extent, victims... Well I can only say that a society dictated along those principles isn't one I'd want to live in.

7.4 is a major earthquake. That's about the size of the 1996 Kobe Earthquake, larger than the 1986 Loma Prieta quake. Even by Japanese standards it's large.

It's likely to have mild effects only because it occurred far offshore, not because 7.4 is small.

If you look at the market.. HREF=http://www.spectronicsinoz.com/product/dynavox-eyemax-accessory-for-dynavox-vmaxHere's a competing product going for $11,749 AUD which is over $12,000 in US dollars.

Being that these guys apparently have a number of products in this market already, I suspect they already know what the price levels are. (I bet a lot of their stuff is paid by insurance in whole or part too)

I'm not saying it's not expensive as heck, but that's how things are in those low-volume/high-margin markets. You know, an PCR machine for a biotech lab isn't a heck of a lot more advanced than a digital toaster, but the price difference is an order of magnitude.

I believe the market here is primarily handicapped people who can't necessarily move their heads.

The Three Mile Island incident involved a partial meltdown of a single reactor. Fukushima involves - according to the power company running the plant - the partial meltdown of several reactors, plus overheating at spent fuel pools containing 1,700 tons of highly radioactive waste (and - in the Number 4 reactor's pool - that reactor's live nuclear fuel).

Yes, but the partial meltdowns at Fukushima were not likely as bad or as risky as at TMI. The cooling systems in Fukushima were running for the critical first hours after the SCRAM.
At TMI, the meltdown occurred within the first hour. The extent of the uncovering and eventual overheating of the fuel rods, as well as the reactors, isn't known yet. It was years before they know how bad TMI was damaged as well.

It's already released far more radiation into the environment than Three Mile Island ever did.

There are very few estimates out there, and any at this stage aren't terribly reliable. Nevertheless, even if we take that to be true, the amount of radiation released does not correspond directly to the absorbed dosage or resultant health risks. It depends on the isotope composition, wind patterns, etc. Windscale released 10,000 times more radiation than Three Mile Island did, but only about 40 times the absorbed dose. (Chernobyl was about 10,000 times the absorbed dose of TMI)

There's no basis in fact for criticizing Kaku regarding this statement concerning Fukushima.

Why not? You said it yourself: A disaster could be several orders of magnitude smaller than Chernobyl and still be the second-worst ever.
So how is comparing to Chernobyl helpful? It's not Chernobyl, it's been clear almost from the start that it wasn't likely to become a Chernobyl.

Michio Kaku is not necessarily the best in his field, mediocre at best, but he has the biggest voice.

I agree. But this isn't really news; This is how it's _always_ worked. The public is not going to figure out the merits of your scientific achievements on their own, and then give you attention that's proportionate to that. It's the same as in any other area: You have to market yourself.

Linus Pauling was arguably the most famous chemist of the last century. But he wasn't actually that important. The quantum-chemical contributions he made were in reality on-par with those of Mulliken, Hund and Slater. Many would say Slater should've shared in his first Nobel prize. But it was Pauling who wrote "The nature of the chemical bond", it was Pauling who popularized the subject, it was Pauling who was the bigger educator and public figure (which was not limited to chemistry). Richard Feynman was one of the most famous physicists. And while his contributions are also beyond question, they were arguably not a lot larger than those of, say, Murray Gell-Mann, who is nowhere near as famous. Because Gell-Mann was not a big educator. His popular-scientific books didn't sell anywhere near as well. Dirac was as important as Bohr when it came to quantum theory, but he wasn't anywhere near the popular and public figure Bohr was. And so he's also less known.

What bothers me about Kaku isn't the fact that his fame is disproportionate to his scientific contributions, or even the fact that it leads people to think he's a greater scientist than he is. What annoys me about Kaku is his propensity to comment on stuff that he doesn't know much or anything about. For instance, his statements on evolution, which were harshly (but justly) criticized recently by PZ Meyers. Or his commenting on the Deepwater Horizon spill, the Fukushima diaster (which he, IMO recklessly, called the worst diaster second only to Chernobyl, even though it's far from clear that it'd be worse than Three Mile Island or Windscale at this point, and certainly several orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl). And now we have him commenting about Moore's Law, even though he's not a solid-state physicist.

I suspect he's letting his ego cloud his better judgment. It's not uncommon - the aforementioned Pauling, for all his scientific merits, had a whole bunch of bad, crankish ideas in areas outside his field (nuclear physics, vitamin megadoses, anesthesiology). I don't believe at all Feynman was the humble guy he tried so hard to make himself out to be, but to his credit, he was quite respectful of other fields and did not have that propensity to make himself out to be an expert on things he didn't know much about. Of course, there's also the possibility that it's not about Kaku's ego and that he just genuinely doesn't actually give a damn about educating the public, and is more interested in just getting attention for himself. But I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on that.

"As the arrangement of the nuclei changes, the BO approximation postulates that the electrons will remain in a particular quantum state. " is an entirely correct description.

The BO approximation does not assume that the nuclei are completely stationary. What you're talking about with that is what's called a clamped-nuclei Hamiltonian.

You stated the rationale behind the BO-approximation without understanding it. Because of the difference in mass, the nuclei are practically stationary relative the electron's frame of motion. That does not mean they are stationary.
What it means is that the potential the electrons 'see' from the nuclei varies very slowly. If a potential on a particle changes sufficiently slowly, then the particle remains in the same state - that's the adiabatic theorem.
"Adiabatic" because no energy is thus being transferred to the particle. In the BO approximation, no kinetic energy is being transferred between the nuclei and electrons. That is what the BO-approximation is.

By assuming that, the nuclear-electronic kinetic-energy coupling terms disappear from the Molecular Hamiltonian, which allows you to separate it into an electronic and nuclear Hamiltonian.
Then, you might additionally assume clamped-nuclei. But not necessarily. Quantum molecular-dynamics simulations are usually done with the BO-approximation in place.

You'd think that SCIENCE, of all journals, would get the Born-Oppenheimer approximation right !

You'd think someone would have the common-sense to check up their own knowledge before assuming that a distinguished professor
who's been doing quantum chemistry since the early 60's doesn't know the stuff you teach on an introductory course of the subject.

There was a time when project names were chosen to be cute acronyms. I work with digital signal processing where there are algorithms named MUSIC, for "MUltiple SIgnal Classification", and ESPRIT, for "Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques".

That hasn't really changed, how about: Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array - AMANDA?

That's what IceCube was formely known as, or rather, the IceCube array is an extension of the original AMANDA detector array.

"Hurry up Fnuggi! I can feel you're about to thaw!"

At the bottom: "Icicle time..!"

The AP is also reporting that China is creating a Confucius Peace Prize to be given out the day before the Nobel Prize.

Well, they're in good company:
"The German National Prize for Art and Science (German: Deutscher Nationalpreis für Kunst und Wissenschaft) was an award created by Adolf Hitler in 1937 as a replacement for the Nobel Prize (he had forbidden Germans to accept the latter award in 1936 after an anti-Nazi German writer, Carl von Ossietzky, was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize)."

And of course the Soviets also banned (a bit on-and-off though) their citizens from recieving the Nobel, and Stalin created the Stalin Prize in his own honor.

Actually there appears to be no less than three follow-up commentaries to that article in the same issue.

Apart from the one you mentioned there's R Bender, "Determination of the area under a curve." and T M Wolever, "Comments on Tai's mathematic model.".
In my experience, an article has to be pretty damn bad to get any kind of commentary against it, but three? That basically means it's just as crazy as we think it is.

And sure, numerical integration is a rich field, but real advances in numerical integration aren't published in "Diabetes Care".
Doesn't have to be a math journal, physics or comp sci could be just as plausible, but a medical journal? Not really.

"no support for bitmap fonts" should of course have read "no support for vector fonts".

Wayland has no drawing api, and it's scope is extremely limited compared to x, x will still be needed on top of it for the forseeable future.

X has no drawing API!
Do you even know what Xlib provides in the way of drawing? 1980's-style graphics primitives, pixel-based, non-anti-aliased polylines, circles and arcs.
Nobody is seriously using X for drawing anything anymore. You say in another post that "the fundamentals of drawing haven't changed" - Yes, they have.
X was designed entirely around raster graphics. It had no support for bitmap fonts, and no support for device-independent graphics. That hasn't been the right way to do things since at least the early 90's, and with PostScript debuting in 1983, it was arguably an obsolete device model even when X was created. Nobody uses X for "drawing", all they use it for is pushing pixels out to the screen.

Today, either you're doing explicitly raster graphics (read: 3D stuff, which is device-dependent), or you should be doing device-independent rendering. Bitmap fonts are the exception, not the rule. It's insane to expect people to write separate drawing routines for printing, or generating a PDF or whatever. (And X of course never had any kind of real printing support to begin with)
If you think we need X for drawing, then you simply have no clue.

The problem is that they're "among, not "are". More people in the US/UK get what those countries reserve for the few and well connected. In the US, we don't need Potemkin Villages, but those countries sure do.

WTF? Are you seriously lumping together North and South Korea in terms of living standards?
Did I miss something? When did South Korea cease to be a first-world democracy?
You don't need to be 'well-connected' to buy something in South Korea. You go to the store, and you buy it. It's a friggin market-economy.

Making 1/3 of a US wage does not mean you're a developing nation. People in Portugal make 1/3 of the average US salary,
if you make a raw dollar comparsion, and they aren't starving. They have homes, cars, computers, phones, etc. Same in South Korea.
Maybe not two cars, and maybe not the latest computer, and maybe a smaller home, etc. But they're by no means poor.

By all means, speak up on behalf of the North Koreans, who have no say in their government or situation, but talking that way about South Korea is just condescending.
They're one of the richest nations in the world, and the second-richest nation in Asia.

Is it "swastica-waving", though, or are they "just" racist?

Nobody who isn't retarded would wave a swastika and still believe they had a shot at getting elected. But you be the judge:
But they were born out of the first wave of neo-Nazism in Sweden in the 1980's. Their original program consisted of (among other things):
A ban on all immigration except for people from 'ethnically related nations'
Government-sponsored repatriation of people of non-Nordic ethnicity.
Banning all international adoptions, and abortion, as well as increased government support, tax breaks and such for families of the 'right' ethnicity.

Obviously they would never get elected on that program, so in the past 20 years they've successively toned it down to try to gain an air of respectability. But it's the same party and the same people, many of whom once were unabashed swastika-wearers. (And like all good fascists, they're really into 'law and order', which means cracking down on 'immigrant crime', yet have a very disproportionate number of criminally-convicted members.