Thanks for confirming that. I had a feeling this was gibberish and had to scroll down a long, long way to find a post that wasn't either a joke or sci-fi blithering.

Can you actually fly a parabolic flight in a light plane like that? Safely, I mean? I'm sure it's designed to have that within its tolerance, but is it really possible to do that without dramatically increasing risk of getting pushed outside the tolerances by the unexpected?

Good point, though I note that the moratorium expires in July. I am not aware of the status of any attempt to extend it.

Except, of course, for the countries that make huge sums of money producing land mines, and the countries (and non-country actors) with a grudge against somebody and a disposition to not care who else it blows up.

So according to this site, land mine usage is nearly flat despite the treaty.

It would be great to get the US to give up making land mines, but unfortunately China and Russia would almost certainly ramp up production to fill any shortfall. That's not a good enough reason for us to keep doing it, but it also wouldn't save many lives. (Worse, it deprives us of a negotiating point to try to force reductions from other top producers, but since those negotiations are largely nonexistent anyway that too is a bad reason.)

They're also moving a lot slower. On surface streets they're often not moving much more than 10-12 mph even when they're moving, so they're getting a good view of the whole intersection for quite some time before approaching it. It's even longer when you take into account that they're slowing down.

I have no trouble believing that it's perfectly safe to have cyclists do a rolling stop when they can clearly see a lack of traffic. The pause is so awkward (especially for cyclists wearing clipless cleats) that the acceleration time puts them in more danger in the middle of the intersection than just rolling through when they can.

Well, yes and no. Quantum-mechanically it IS deterministic in the sense that any given quantum state will evolve in a perfectly defined way. There isn't any "random number" in the Schroedinger equation (or its relativistic descendants).

It's really the macro-scale stuff that introduces the randomness. At the quantum scale, things exist perfectly happily in a superposition of two states that we never observe at large scales. The more objects you put together, the harder it is to maintain the superposition, and by the time you get to even microscopic objects it will take one state or the other, but not both. Once it tips slightly in one direction, it cascades, and you end up with something that is entirely X or Y, not (X+Y).

The other half of the wave function is largely a matter of philosophy, not physics. In one sense it's "still there", off in some other utterly inaccessible universe. Or you can say that at some point where you weren't looking the other part just vanished. That's two ways of saying the same thing; the math is the same and the results are the same, regardless.

It's not a question of our inability to measure it. It's simply not there. No advances in physics will make it measurable, not without utterly throwing out everything we know and replacing it with something completely different. Which isn't impossible, but it's purely speculative: physics by "I wanna believe".

Why we end up in "this part" rather than "that part" is, similarly, just idle speculation. I've got my suspicions that if you could, in fact, discuss the wave function of the entire universe you'd say that it could only go one way when you put all of it together, but that's just navel-gazing. It doesn't really matter, since you'll never actually know the wave-function of the universe as a whole. You can only observe a few macro parts of it since you (by definition) are a macro organism, and the total underlying wave function will always be forever shaded from your eyes.

With an oversimplifying assumption that bad, I assumed they were physicists of the "why does your field need a journal anyway" school. Nope, turns out this time it's two computer scientists, somebody in "computation and neural systems", and a business school (!).

News Corp will sell anything they think they can sell. They'll sell science on Fox Broadcasting and paranoia on Fox News. The various properties don't have to get along, so long as they're profitable. Witness this jab at Fox News by The Simpsons, which also appears on Fox Broadcasting:

http://www.thewrap.com/sites/d...

You may be unaware, but the density of solar radiation is only about 6 kWh per meter square per day. That means that each parabolic trench of a square meter is capable of producing only about 10 liters per day. You'd need 100 square meters to provide the water needs of a single ordinary house. And that's assuming 100% efficiency; it's more likely to be at least twice that and quite possibly an order of magnitude, by the time you've shipped it. Then you've got to clean up the gunk, and amortize in the costs of the setup.

I'm all for more solar powered stuff, but it's not the automatic, easy win we'd like it to be, even for something as simple as this. Heating water to the boiling point, only to recondense it a moment later, is expensive. I'm sure that clever design could reuse that heat and reduce the costs, but it's still going to be far from free.

Good choice. I was in Europe recently, and there are a fair number of places that can't handle the chipless cards. (Including, irritatingly, French toll booths, which are fairly frequent and of course far away from any place you could get cash.)

The Constitution specifically follows its version of that clause with "without due process" (amendment 5):

For better or worse (and clearly "worse" in this case), due process was followed. The best legal (as opposed to moral) argument against the death penalty is that due process isn't always followed scrupulously: many cases are overturned only by heroic efforts of lawyers, frequently working for little or nothing because the people who had money are unlikely to have received a capital sentence in the first place. Our system of justice seems poor at granting due process under the best of circumstances, and one could argue that there simply isn't due process that can justify the death penalty.

The "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" line is from the Declaration of Independence: a noble and important founding document, but lacking the force of law for a reason. That's not how or why it was written. For better or worse, the Constitution was deliberately crafted with "due process" in mind, and they clearly considered the death penalty to be a valid option.

The show was at its best when it used its absurd, unique situation for black comedy. It got to play around with very dark themes about loneliness and despair. That could be bitterly funny.

Unfortunately, it also kinda ran its course after the first couple of seasons. They had a few other funny ideas, driven in large part by top-notch acting, but it was much more pedestrian in the kinds of jokes they could tell. They kept introducing new characters into a show whose original point had been, "What do you do if you are literally the last man alive in the entire universe?", and that rather undercut what made the show work.

By the end it was decidedly played out; they were just re-treading well-worn sci-fi parody themes (or simply being crude for the laughs). I hear there's even more to come, and I'll probably watch it, but I doubt I'll like it.

How's it working out for you? Less than 10% of Americans still go with OTA broadcasts.

I don't know what the comparable figures are in the UK, but I suspect that they too are moving towards getting their entertainment via media that make the broadcast oligopoly irrelevant. You probably don't care about broadcast providers there and wouldn't care about it if you moved there.

It also doesn't mean it can't be better. We're seeing metabolic diseases at younger ages; we're able to keep people alive longer but they're not healthy. Life expectancy is even starting to drop; not dramatically, but there's reason to think we can do better.

Too little food is definitely bad, and leads to malnutrition. But we're getting people who are malnourished because they have too much food, and of the wrong kind. It's not that hard to do better, but people need to pay attention.

I run with NoScript on Firefox, and unfortunately I'm finding more and more web sites are unusable without Javascript enabled not just for them (and the cloud provider, who could be serving up god-knows-what) but for zillions of "partners". I don't know what those partners are providing, either: probably mostly ancillary crap but the page won't render until it's downloaded.

I keep a NoScripted Firefox for any time I'm visiting web sites that I don't know beforehand; if they don't render then I don't need it that badly. But on my work computers, where I'm browsing only sites that I have reason to believe have things I need and aren't too terribly likely to be hijacked, I've found I just had to turn NoScript off.

That sucks, because the fact is that the vast majority of sites do shit with Javascript that the site would be just plain better off without. I don't object to their need to earn a living by feeding me ads, which is why I don't run with an ad blocker, but Javascript is very easy to abuse, and too many of them create abusive design.