I can't buy a Ferrari for $100, by the same logic, that means there *must* be a Ferrari shortage! Something must be done!!!

Hint: reward good people, and you won't have problems finding good people. The problem is these miserly capitalist/MBA types who feel tech types are getting all "uppity" for wanting a decent salary for their 4 year STEM degree and often 2-6 years of grad school to boot, because doing that takes away from their quarterly bonus.

A program like the grandparent's "Hello World" is meant as a starting point and not a demonstration of how small a nearly-useless program can be. A GUI program necessarily aims to do more than just print a message, and this example gives you a small glimpse at how you the language could look and feel, and how you might go about doing something more practical. A MessageBox popup is not a good starting point since about all you can change is the text itself.

But ... We ASKED him!

Do you have personal experience with this? Are there any data on that? How many lives are saved per year by the threat of gun violence?

In the absence of a study, imagine a world in which every citizen (maybe older than, say, the legal driving age) is carrying a firearm. Imagine the major population centers like NYC where the statistics would matter. Would there be fewer gun-related deaths in that world than in ours? I can't see it that way. I would feel safer in a world where people are more encouraged to deal with conflict in a nonviolent way.

IBM's Watson might be able to beat any human competitor on Jeopardy, but stick it in the middle of the highway and it will get run over by the first semi that comes along because it isn't smart enough to get out of the way.

Killer machines will undoubtedly exist, but they will be human-controlled for a long, long time to come.

Yeah, even the term "disproves" is not exactly correct. Newtonian gravity has a very hard time explaining Mercury's precession and is completely untenable with today's observational evidence. General relativity explains Mercury's orbit without having to invent new invisible planets & stuff. And today General relativity is still doing spectacularly well with many careful neutron star observations as well as experiments closer to home, like Gravity Probe B's measurements of frame dragging and more.

Oh, what I do remember from Bairn Greene's The Elegant Universe was his analogy for Bell's Inequality. Looks like that has been put up on Wikipedia.

Funny, I read that book (which is excellent) but don't remember that analogy. But I think you're talking about special relativity, not general relativity. The best GR explanation I've seen is an article Lost in Hyperbolia. For me that explanation worked perfectly.

Now I remember reading in various places that the solar eclipse data on GR was not actually conclusive. Bad science. The earlier work Einstein did that explained the precession of mercury's orbit was actually the first confirmation of GR. Also, of course, confirmation is not a word that is ever used correctly in science. The precession of mercury's orbit disproved Newtonian gravity but failed to disprove GR. The bending of starlight by the Sun would have been an even more impressive failure-to-disprove GR if the data were actually conclusive.

I guess I need to read through the studies some more, but I believe that most/many indicators of education show that lecturing is poor (relative to other methods) regardless of the particular talents of the students. Yes, I have felt that I've gotten a lot out of certain lectures. Some lecturers are definitely better than others. Certainly both student and professor abilities can make a huge difference, but on top of that a professor can still do better by adopting a hybrid approach.

Lecture for a bit (less than 10 minutes, maybe 15 tops), then switch it up. Have students work a problem (maybe in pairs) and vote on a solution. With smallish classes you can use simple voting methods, and with 100+ groups you can use electronic voting. Have short, focused discussions. Do a demonstration that includes volunteers. Have students research related topics and present their own mini-lecture (small classes only). And so on. Even if the professor is a great lecturer and the students are all highly disciplined and auditory-sequential learners (almost never true for an entire class), they would *still* benefit more from this kind of approach. It certainly takes more work on the part of the professor and involves some retraining, but students are paying a lot of money for their education and they ought to be treated as valued customers a little bit more. I've tried these approaches myself in undergraduate physics classes of various levels from gen-ed courses to the introductory sequence and up to the jr/sr level. I won't claim to have mastered anything but it quickly became obvious to me that lecturing for an hour is never the best way to teach. There are alternatives and a conscientious professor owes it to their students to pay some heed to the learning sciences and experiment with different approaches. It's not a one-technique-fits-all kind of thing, but anyone can improve upon pure lecturing.

I heard of one professor that met a student wandering the halls at the end of the semester, looking for their professor. He asked him where this certain professor's office was -- they were preparing for the final exam and had some questions. He said "I'm your professor. Have you seen me before?" Obviously this student didn't feel that the lectures were an efficient way for them to learn.

My thoughts exactly. This is apparently a new study, however. It's not clear to me what is new about it other than, perhaps, translating the results into letter-grade equivalents. I like the quote: "it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data."

And yet, as you point out, this kind of data has been around for decades at least. I think they knew in the 80's if not earlier that knowledge retention is terrible for students listening to lectures compared to other methods (reading, group activities, teaching, etc). But how many professors took that data to heart? Is it a matter of couching it in different terms like letter grades? Probably not because those professors who lecture today either don't know or don't care. In either case they are immune to new studies like this.

One problem is that folks have to pay Comcast for decent internet service, and also they have to pay Netflix for a subscription. Fine of course, but if Netflix has to pony up extra fast-lane and direct-lane fees, ultimately their subscription prices increase. So Comcast+Netflix customers essentially get a hidden charge for their video streaming, one directly to Comcast and the other indirectly to Comcast (through Netflix). The real problem is that the indirect fee also applies to DSL and satellite customers, so you can't even avoid this fee by choosing a Comcast competitor.

I can understand wanting a free market system to avoid tragedy-of-the-commons types of issues with Netflix customers causing other non-streaming subscribers to get worse performance, but this present "solution" is clearly broken and gives Comcast and other last-mile providers a significant economic influence over other companies like Netflix that does not derive from consumer choice.

I think there are at least two underlying problems here. You point out one: corruption in the form of campaign finances and lobbyists. The other is the outrageous effectiveness of propaganda. I don't hear much about potential solutions to this second problem, and it's perhaps more difficult to solve. It might help to have some kind of propaganda analysis/deconstruction as part of a standard curriculum in high school, but that wouldn't be enough. We also need some watchdog-type media coverage that picks apart and shames people using such blatant propaganda techniques. Obviously TFA is just such a thing, as are programs like The Daily Show etc. These are good but not yet spread widely enough across the political spectrum.

Ideally a large fraction of voters need to be able to identify propaganda whenever they see it. And they need to react negatively to it, more than logic demands, overcompensating for the rest who get suckered by it all. Unfortunately, nearly all political campaigning is so densely infused with propaganda that we get accustomed to it. If all advertisers and all politicians do this all the time, there's no person more shamed than any other.

It's not a completely stupid idea, just a mostly stupid idea.

But it might make financial sense for powering McMurdo Base, for instance. The cost of hauling diesel down there is almost as ludicrous. Remote outposts and stuff.

Or if your government decided to send a small team of special forces into hostile territory, that would be a convenient way to provide them power. And you could use "cheap solar power for everyone" as good cover for launching something.

We've seen fossils of simple (prokaryotic, bacterial) life that are at least 3.8 billion years old. Basically the instant it became possible for single-cell life to exist, it did. That suggests that simple life is *easy*.

It took evolution roughly a billion years to produce eukaryotic life, suggesting that step is hard. It also took 2 billion more years to produce a eukaryotic lifeform capable of space flight, suggesting that step is also hard.

The sun is predicted to make life on earth impossible in roughly ~1 billion years. An oops anywhere earlier in the process, and evolution wouldn't have had time to recover. We're lucky to exist.

So my suspicion is that the universe is relatively teeming with simple life anywhere it is possible (there are tentative signs that there *might* be life on Mars and possibly Titan too) but complex life is much rarer, rare enough that it's not surprised we haven't found any yet.

Also, wanting to communicate and explore is inherently a human desire, and whatever neo-human-cyber-whatever descendants emerge from the Singularity might not have the same desires. And I can predict their desires much more accurately than I could an aliens.

Roughly 40 years old and still doing science.