Well... the guy does have a lot of other political positions. This was the minor point that made it to Slashdot. Everybody else is talking about his position on the Iraq War: he voted against it while Hillary Clinton voted for it. That boosts his foreign policy credentials, though it's still extremely unlikely that he's going to win. It puts him competing with Martin O'Malley for a shot at the VP chair, unless on the off chance something totally tanks Clinton between now and February. Which isn't impossible. (There's also Sanders, but he doesn't want the VP chair and I don't think he really wants to take over if she does tank. He's just trying to force everybody else to run to the left in a party that has run very hard to the center.)

His announcement is news, but not for nerds. The minor point about the metric system is for nerds, but not news. Slashdot, being Slashdot, tried to make news-for-nerds out of it, but all it generated was a lot of the same old talk about the merits and difficulties of switching to metric, all of which is decidedly Not News.

I think I'm already shopping there!

It's not Hot Topic and GameStop that are merging; it's GameStop and ThinkGeek. There is the opportunity for "synergy" (yeah, I hate the word, too) in that they're both retailers to a similar demographic, but one is online and the other is brick-and-mortar. They can do all kinds of cross-selling and get a combined company that sells more than either of the two separately. As well as eliminating a few minor redundancies in the staffing (such as maintaining two completely independent web sites), though that kind of thing never produces really huge gains.

That's an *opportunity*, of course, not a guarantee. They can still fuck it up royally. In fact, that's where I'd lay my money.

For some reason, al Qaeda seemed to have a thing for planes. They did try after 9/11, like the Underwear Guy and the Shoe Guy, though both were quite incompetent.

I suspect it's related to people's general fear of planes, even though they know on a per-mile basis the planes are really safe. The combination of the rather remarkable fact that they fly at all, that people are trapped in them, and the spectacle of many people dying at once seems to attract a lot more attention than it really merits in terms of the sheer calculus of death. Terrorism became really prominent through hijacking and bombing planes. It still seems to hold a fascination.

It is notable that we haven't seen any attempted bombing or hijacking for quite some time. Perhaps al Qaeda has realized that it's pointless, though they're not really doing all that much against softer targets, either. I think we all know how easy it would be, and how much disproportionate terror it would cause in Americans, and I don't really know why they haven't tried harder. Not that I'm unhappy about it, but it does leave me uneasy. Not uneasy enough to impose TSA-level draconian measures on everything, of course.

Thanks!

Any idea why they're allowed to emit the CFCs, rather than trapping them? I would expect it to be a closed system. Is this just tiny, unavoidable leaks, or is it deliberately releasing them to the atmosphere?

Found this:

http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawki...

It says that a 3K black hole has a mass of 4x10^22 kg, a bit larger than the Everest-sized black hole.

The Everest-hole hole is extremely hot, 10^8 K, but it's still radiating so slowly that it'll take 10^21 years to evaporate, so it would be more than enough to destroy the earth.

I'm not quite sure how to solve for one that would be hot enough to suck in the earth before evaporating, but I see that a black hole that would last 1 second is a mere 70 million kilograms, with a radius of about a picometer.

It's denser than that. The Schwartzschild radius of a black hole with a mass around 10^15 kg (a rough guess) is about 10^-12 meters (about a picometer). Give or take a few orders of magnitude. Wolfram Alpha has a convenient Schwartzschild radius calculator. The evaporation time for a black hole that big is 10^30 seconds.

The smaller a black hole is, the denser. The number you give is for a star-sized black hole. There isn't any known way to form grain-of-sand sized black holes, though they might have formed in the very early universe. In which case one could be wandering through the solar system at this very minute....

Record albums are kind of the pop equivalent of a symphony. They last roughly the same time, the length of a CD. It's a myth that it was chosen to be the length of Beethoven's 9th, but the intuition seems to be about right: that's about how long people are willing to listen to music before they need a break.

Not all albums are constructed well, but a good album has some kind of structure and forms a complete unit of music, rather than just being a bunch of songs. It's about as unified as the movements of a symphony. Songs don't quite correspond to movements (a movement is likely to be 15 minutes, a song 3), though as you say there is yet more structure within a movement.

These attention spans are probably not absolutely fundamental to human nature, but they're at least deeply culturally embedded.

It is too bad that things seem to have settled in a place that have eliminated long-form songs like Bohemian Rhapsody and Stairway to Heaven (about the length of a symphonic movement, and each definitely composed of sections that are very different musically). I would be very happy to see those return, though songs like those are rare epics, requiring tremendous skill and insight to construct. I don't know if Pandora will want to play them to you, since it means they get paid just once for feeding out bits that they could have been paid 3 or 4 times for, but I suspect that if somebody writes a great song like Stairway there will be demand for it. The streaming services will want to serve that demand, and since they have control over how often it comes up, it may cut only a tiny bit into their profits.

But it does require extra fuel. I'd have expected that fuel to be more than the weight of a parachute system, though perhaps not: it would be lowering a mostly-empty tin can.

I imagine that it's a bonus to be able to have that kind of precision on your rocket engines: if you can get them down, then it may provide advantages in going up. Certainly it's nice that you've proven that kind of control.

Good thought. I really like having a wifi remote for my Roku. Line of sight stops being an issue.

The crux, as I see it, is that an add-on box is clunky compared to a TV. It's a thing that has to be installed. That's not vastly hard, but it's a power cord and a data cable, and it just kinda hangs off of your TV. That's not elegant. (Note: I don't have an Apple TV, but I don't get the impression that they have any better solution than my Roku does.)

They can certainly make the software better, but I can see why they would want to sell you an entire television to make the entire user experience just right. It's kinda too bad that it just doesn't add enough value to a TV to make it worth the trouble. Apple has always succeeded best when they could make their solutions elegant, in ways that seem obvious yet nobody had done them until Apple did.

I do like your idea for improving the iPod, though perhaps an audio indicator ("You have ten minutes of play time remaining") would be easier, since it's just a software update. I suspect that they won't be refreshing that line very often. I, for one, have switched to using my phone, finally putting my much-beloved fourth-generation Nano to bed. (It was the last one before it became an iOS device, which meant that it was perfectly optimized for playing music and nothing else. But my phone does a better job, especially since it has wi-fi built in, and I am going to be carrying it around anyway.)

That's a riot. Thanks for that.

It's the corporate cash, rather than the consumers. A lot of it is sitting in the Fed itself. Bank reserves with the Fed have skyrocketed:
https://research.stlouisfed.or...

They've been sitting at about 3 trillion dollars. They could invest that in new products, but they don't seem to think that the consumers have the money to make that investment worthwhile. I think they're wrong. Consumers are starting to borrow again:

https://research.stlouisfed.or...

after a substantial blip during the crisis itself.

So I think (and I believe you agree with me) that this is really caused by the investor class failing to invest. That's an odd economic choice, since that kind of stagnation should mean that inflation gradually eats their nest egg. They've managed to keep inflation low. The Fed is offering free money, and instead they're putting their cash into the bank.

A lot of economists would say that it's time for even more forcible inflationary measures, since the current low rates only barely seem to be staving off deflation. The Fed hasn't been willing to go that far (they'd rather that the legislature do it if the investors won't), but they have repeatedly refused to raise interest rates. That's the action they take when they're afraid of inflation; it's the punch bowl they take away when the party gets going. And this party is stuck; it's not completely moribund but it's getting mediocre small talk (and many are shut out entirely.)

Actually, only around 20,000 genes, spread over 3 billion base pairs. They knew how many base pairs they were looking for; the fact that it was a mere 20k genes came as a substantial surprise.