In a world where the Internet gives every crackpot a soapbox from which to preach to his fellow crackpots, it's not longer possible to distinguish ironic self-deprecation from a serious but deranged complaint about other people.

Would Canada under Harper and the Conservatives be that much better? His government brought forth the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act which did not mention children or predators anywhere but in the title, and would have expanded government surveillance powers had the bill not been stopped by public outcry.

Scotland would have been a good choice had the independence referendum passed. So I guess now you're going to have to learn Swedish.

Creationism is a pseudoscience invented by modern Christians, true. But that doesn't mean Genesis isn't a Jewish myth. Myths aren't intended to be science, or even history. They're intended to resonate emotionally.

This is what I think the Garden of Eden story is about: I think it's saying that the kind of "paradise" where you sit around all day without working or suffering is incompatible with human freedom. The experience (aka "knowledge") of both good and evil is a consequence of human choice. We might be better off in some ways living in a kind of Cosmic kennel, but we wouldn't have any of the richness and meaning of human life without the experience of good and evil.

Now it so happens that in the Middle Ages certain Christians re-created this naive picture of paradise. They pictured heaven as a choir in which the faithful gathered around God in concentric circles and sang His praises forever and ever. But what if one day you felt like doing something different? If being fed and amused perpetually is your idea of paradise, then you naturally won't be open to some implications of the Eden story.

The Garden of Eden story turns out to be very interesting as a myth. It's just not very interesting as science.

Well, this is one of those things where copyright law doesn't necessarily behave the way people think it should.

Take the famous case of science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley. For years she encouraged fan fiction in her Darkover universe -- until she wanted to use some plot ideas from a fan story she had read in one of her own novels. The author of the fan story successfully blocked the publication of MZB's novel.

So it's clear that original authors don't automatically get ownership of derivative works. What they get is more like a veto power over various uses the derivative author can put his work to. Actually slinging around the word "ownership" in this kind of context tends to be misleading. Copyright is considerably different from the usual concept of "ownership", e.g., the way that you own your car or your pants. It's actually a kind of legal monopoly on certain activities as they apply to a work. That explains why an interlocking web of monopoly rights can lead to a work being simply unusable; that's a result which violates people's intuition that someone must "own" the work and therefore must be able to do whatever he pleases with it.

In this case the best position for the developer to take is that his posting is covered in some way by fair use.

Or ... the chaotic bits may lay outside your nice linear model. Either way prediction of future events is off the table.

Here's the thing though. Consider my Bandar connection; he was ambassador to the US, and has LOTS of connected and influential people -- especially in the petroleum industry. But my indirect connection could just as easily be to some radical imam who is not hobnobbing with the Bushes. That could raise a red flag, even though such an indirect connection clearly is usually meaningless.

I've been involved in contracts that had public health modeling components. Being "way off" is not necessarily a proof the model is no good when you're modeling a chaotic process which depends on future parameters that aren't predictable. In our case it was the exact timing of future rainfall. In their case it probably had to do with human behavior. A small thing, like an unseasonable rainstorm, or an infected person showing up in an unexpected place, can have immense consequences.

You look at all the data you have, and you think, "Hey, this is a lot of data, I should be able to predict stuff from it," but the truth is while it looks like a lot of data it's a tiny fraction of all the data that's out there in the world -- and not even a representative sample. So you have to guess "plausible" values, and if they're wrong you might not see the kind of result that eventually happens, even after many model runs.

So in most cases you can't expect a computer model to have the power to predict specific future events. It can do other things, like generate research questions. One of our models suggested that having a lot of infected mosquitoes early in the season reduced human transmission of a certain mosquito borne disease later in the season, which was a surprising result. When we looked at it, it turned out that the reason was that the epidemic peaked in the animal population early in the season before people were out doing summer stuff and getting bit. Does that actually happen? We had no idea, but it sounded plausible. The model didn't give us any answers, it generated an interesting question.

I mean, if the workers *are* terrorists then they should be arrested, right? Short of that there are countless ways a non-terrorist can be "linked" with terrorists, and due to the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon it's quite common to have surprising looking connections.

For example Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and I happen to have a common common friend. I met the friend through work and Bandar knew him because his family was a neighbor in Aspen where Bandar has a house. And since Bandar is in the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden belonged to a prominent Saudi family, it's almost certain that Bandar knew him from before his Mujahideen days in Afghanistan. So I'm only two two acquaintances removed from Osama bin Laden. That sounds alarming! But in fact I've never *met* Bandar, in fact I've never met any Saudis at all.

I've been racking my brains for people I've met from the actual Middle East, and it turns out that at one point in my career met the Egyptian-American space researcher Farouk el-Baz (who has a TNG shuttlecraft named after him!). El-Baz comes from a connected family; his brother for example was high up in Hosni Mubarak's government, and Farouk himself was at one time a science adviser to Anwar Sadat. It's a fair bet that he knows somebody from Egypt who later went on to be involved with the Muslim Brotherhood -- it wouldn't reflect on him at all. But if that were true I'd be just one acquaintance away from a direct "connection" with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now it also happens that my wife went to graduate school with someone who was the first woman valedictorian of the US Naval academy. Since I know her directly, I have all kinds of one-degree of separation relationships to people in all kinds of sensitive military and national security positions. I also two different one-degree of separation connections to the Clintons and current Secretary of State John Kerry. If you count my "connections" to my college professors at MIT I'm one-degree of separation away from several Manhattan Project scientists.

If you plotted out my social network to two or three links away it'd look remarkable, in some cases even disturbing. But it's not. "Connection" means almost nothing. There have been cases of people "connected" to terrorists because the frequently called the same number -- a Manhattan pizza restaurant.

Which according to Woody Allen's book "Without Feathers" is "a mythological beast with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion."

No. I've had Harvard graduates as coworkers though. None of them happened to be prima donnas, although I'm sure it happens.

Well, I went to MIT but have taken classes at Harvard, but not being a mind reader I guess I'm at a disadvantage here. All I have to go on is the people I've met there.

There's no question that for certain fields like finance Harvard's a great headstart on networking. But for English, foreign major, science and social science majors the reason to go to Harvard is that it's a great school, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that some Harvard classes are every bit as tough as any of the classes I took at MIT.

And if you take that bait, you're a sap.

The problem is that the banking system has been rigged in order to socialize risk. This guy exploited that fact, realized he made more money than an individual human being could possibly amuse himself with and decided to dispose of a big chunk of that were it might do a little good.

People are shouting "Harvard! Harvard! Harvard!" because they don't want you to think about the rigged banking system. They'd rather focus any anti-elitist backlash on intellectuals.

Apparently you are under the impression that symbols can only be physical objects.

Complaining about how what the kids are into makes no sense? Congratulations, you are now middle-aged. You have become the thing you hated.

... and wild animals don't waste valuable calories or protein. It's not that the nutrients in the placenta are *especially* good for you, it's just that nutrients period are good for you and hard to come by.

I once went on a winter hike with a park ranger, and he identified some tracks in the snow as coyote tracks. So I naturally asked how he could tell it was a coyote and not a dog being taken for a walk. The answer was that domestic dogs are so well-fed they waste energy running all over the place; coyotes are always on the edge of starvation so they nearly always travel in a perfectly straight line.