There are no imperial units for time. However the second is part of the metric system and we do use it even if we also use hours and minutes which are not part of the metric system. So our time system is more metric than imperial and so the question really is: why do you use partly metric time but insist on imperial for everything else? (well except for the gallon, pint, fluid ounce etc. for which you came up with a different definition from the imperial one but still called it by the same name).

The 95% of the world's population that use metric for everyday purposes would disagree.

Not quite, prison is used to remove people who damage our society and to prevent them causing further damage. Someone who embezzles money or commits fraud can hardly be classed as "dangerous" but at the same time society should not have to put up with them.

Piracy, both online and offline, should have the same, long sentences for those who run commercial operations which make significant money from selling copies of films, music etc. Sharing a legal copy with friends and family should not be illegal because the vast majority of the people see nothing ethically wrong with it: the artist was paid for the copy and that copy is now being shared. So the dividing line should not be online vs offline but commercial vs. private and for private I would argue that it should not be a crime.

In addition task one is also a trivial one to solve: use a laundry hamper into which you put your dirty clothes when you want them washed. If you don't do that then the problem is not so much finding the clothes as it is reading the human owner's mind to know which clothes they want washed. Even humans doing the laundry have to have some indication which clothes should be washed.

...and a ruler would still not help most US readers since if the coin was unfamiliar to them then the ruler would be in centimetres.

I was actually in a very similar situation to the OP - I'm British and my wife is American. One of our kids was born in the US and so unfortunately automatically a citizen while our son was born in Canada and I signed to forms to allow him to get a US passport. In hindsight I wish I had never done this. The tax situation for them is unbelievably appalling - so bad that my wife is thinking of giving up her US citizenship (not that she wants to) once we get Canadian citizenship. Unfortunately that option is not available to our kids: it is impossible to revoke US citizenship before they are 18.

The reason the tax situation is bad is not just because you have to file US taxes if you earn anything - my wife stays home and looks after the kids at the moment so she has not actually had to file US tax returns. The killer is all the other paperwork that is not associated with taxes but with having accounts outside the US. If you have more than $10k outside the US you have to report every account that you own or are joint on to the US government separately of the tax form.

My wife was unaware of this requirement and only heard about it when there were reports on the radio of the US government fining US citizens in Canada 50% of their savings for not having reported their accounts. It gets even worse if you have any sort of investment: there are copious forms to report these to the US. But the worst thing is that this is poorly documented and when they change the rules they never bother informing their citizens abroad...they just wait for an opportune moment to start fining them.

So, provided your kids have citizenship in a European country so that travel will be easy for them there is absolutely no benefit from them having US citizenship and considerable problems. Looking back I really wish that I had been aware of the appalling behaviour of the US government to its own citizens because letting them get US citizenship has undoubtedly made their lives worse. I would strongly suggest that you do not register them as US citizens and if you are still not convinced check into whether this is a time-limited offer or not. For example as adults with a US mother I would expect that they could register as US citizens themselves once they turn 18 if they decided that they wanted to live in the US and perhaps by that time the US people will have managed to get their own government to treat them properly.

Just what we need a bunch of robot cars going around telling us that "You will be incorporated". Will they come with a red laser pointer strapped to the roof too?

This is a terrible analogy. First autopilot for a plane cannot taxi the aircraft so it is not feature complete. Secondly the consequences of mechanical failure in a car are far less severe and you can probably solve most of the ones which do not themselves involve the engine dying by having a kill switch and a steering wheel: all you have to do is yank the switch and steer the now rapidly braking car out of trouble. A kill switch on an aircraft is a somewhat less viable option which is why you need a pilot. This is also why commercial pilots have far more training than bus drivers.

A group of physicist-journalists have done an interesting experiment to show how light trapped in a tiny wave guide interacts with electrons. They then massively overhyped the results by making claims that are highly dubious at best in order to gain attention.

Actually that is not true if you go to high enough energy: have a look at this. Those four tracks coming out of the centre of the ATLAS detector at the LHC are muons, a heavy cousin of the electron. The muons are neither stopped nor destroyed by the detector but they do lose a little of their energy as they pass through it but for high energy particles this really is a very small, non-instrusive fraction of their energy. We can even use the curvature of the track in ATLAS' magnetic fields to measure the momentum of the particle.

Even if you stay at low energies there are biophysicists who can use lasers to pull apart single DNA and other organic molecules in non-destructive ways to study how they fold which involves quantum transitions between different folding states. So there are plenty of non-destructive QM based measurements which we can do both on fundamental, and non-fundamental particles.

If your objection is that we have 'changed' the system by making the measurement then perhaps it is worth reflecting that, at a fundamental level, everything is quantum mechanical. Hence there is no measurement that you can make which will not involve changing the system you are measuring. So if your criterion is that your measurement must not change the system you have just ruled out any measurement which any scientist has ever made.

If you want to see two photons interfering in a double slit experiment you don't have to do anything more complex that direct a laser pointer at a narrow slit. This is generally what happens in almost all double slit experiments ever performed by school kids and undergrads to demonstrate diffraction. You are talking about a special version of it to show that photons self-interfere but this does not exclude them interfering with other photons if there are some present.

I still bet they don't know about the GR corrections due to gravitational time dilation.

I completely agree - these sort of articles are presenting science which we have known for a long time already, so it is hardly "news", and they don't present it well. I usually put it down to the submitter not knowing the science and so it is new to them and the editors not knowing any better either. However I could not resist pointing out the irony of your post...sorry! ;-)

My reaction was why Civ 5? Given the quality of the AIs in it I'm not sure 'intelligence' is really an apt description.

I don't think it does but for the definition to work it will have to have some sort of sensible criteria to separate them from asteroids. However clearly the notion that Pluto is not a planet really upsets a lot of people which is something I find hard to understand. Does it really matter that much how we classify it? Indeed it seems such a silly, unimportant thing to be arguing over again when there is real science to be done that it makes me wonder if the astronomers involved have lost their grant funding and so have nothing better to do with their research time.

Actually if we program that information into their memory before turning them on then they will actually know who created them. That's one difference with computers - they can be easily programmed.