The problem, of course, is that instead of the restaurant taking up space on one floor of the building, it would then occupy a restaurant-sized hole in every floor of the building. (Yes, this could be partially offset by stacking several floors of restaurant in this hypothetical elevator shaft, but you're still wasting many multiples of the restaurant's floor area in the building. And floor area in high-rise towers isn't cheap.) We'll leave aside the challenges of providing working utility connections, and the likely-to-be-appalling costs of construction and maintenance.

Dear fan,

I am sure that you can find many other entertainment content options that also cost significantly more than $5, especially among those available on the first day of theatrical release. Many of them also require you to get off your ass and go somewhere, rather than letting you enjoy your entertainment experience in bed, at home, on your tablet.

So, yeah. $5. It costs that much because we think it's worth that much, and because we think that enough people will agree with that assessment to make this business financially viable. In a very real and tangible way "what people will pay" is very much "what something is worth", at least for dollars-and-cents pricing decisions.

Sincerely,

Joss Whedon

P.S.: I'm funnier than Louis CK, so there's that, too.

You know that by far the largest group of unemployed people living on a government income are retired old folks collecting Social Security, right?

But I'm guessing that "grandma" isn't the demographic group I'm supposed to think of when you blow your ill-informed dog whistle.

The same is true for speeding. But even if you want to narrow the scope to "things I can do in my own home, where I won't get caught except if something goes terribly wrong, or by happenstance" there is still a pretty big field.

Suppose I live in a high-rise apartment tower. It would be trivially easy for me to buy a couple of dozen propane cylinders from local retailers, and slip them into my hypothetical apartment. (Put each one in a suitcase or cardboard box to carry it upstairs, and spread the purchases out over a few different stores, across several weeks of summer barbecue season. Pay cash.) No one knows my apartment is now a giant bomb. Totally illegal under an assortment of fire codes and municipal bylaws. Probably runs into state and/or federal rules about the transportation and storage of dangerous goods. To be honest, I can't be bothered to look up all the different ways in which it is illegal.

Anyone could do it. No one who does it would get caught (unless they talk about it). Should it therefore be legal to store a quarter ton of compressed, flammable gas inside a residential apartment building?

I have to admit that I am always surprised by people who confuse and conflate the notion that something is possible with the notion that laws against that possible-to-do thing are thereby rendered unenforceable.

It is extraordinarily easy to acquire an automobile with a top speed exceeding 75 miles per hour. They can be found readily on our city streets, in the garages of our homes, all across America. Millions of such vehicles exchange hands, legally, every year. Shockingly, that doesn't actually render laws against speeding unenforceable--even though every driver has access to technology with which they can speed, available at the twitch of a foot.

Well, no. That figure only applies if a power outage (affecting both the city power and the building's emergency power, so as to disable the building's tuned mass damper) occurs simultaneously with every occurrence of high winds. Or if the building's owners decide to just turn off the tuned mass damper for giggles, and leave it turned off for a decade and a half.

Far more interesting - and potentially scary - was the fact that even with the mass damper, the building would expect to see winds sufficient to cause toppling approximately once every 55 years. As the building is now approaching its fortieth birthday, there's a better than even chance that it would have fallen by now.

Which, I'm sure, is a great comfort for that now-crippled or -deceased driver. The guy with the license plate frame is probably very sorry after the fact, and would probably do things differently in retrospect. Meanwhile, the guy who lost his legs doesn't want a million dollars; he wants his legs.

In occupational health and safety, it is generally and widely understood that serious or fatal accidents seldom occur out of the blue. A fatality will nearly always be surrounded in time and space by a cloud of (usually unrecorded or unreported) near misses and minor incidents. Relatedly, there is the concept of "normalization of deviance". Essentially, the idea that if you let your standards slip a bit and nothing bad happens, the tendency is to allow that lower level of vigilance to become the new acceptable standard. Lather, rinse, repeat until a major failure occurs. (The Challenger disaster is an oft-cited example.)

Coming back to the licence plate frames, I don't care whether or not someone gets a fine for speeding. I do care that we've created a pool of privileged drivers who are no longer receiving any feedback when they engage in higher-risk driving behaviors. "Go ahead and drive as fast as you want; we'll trust your judgement on that until after your first high-speed collision..." probably isn't a real solid basis for road safety.

Depends on the tickets, perhaps. Shaving a $400 'big' ticket down to a $200 'small' one, or even down to a warning--that can add up. Remember that nominally-small tickets often have a large number of fundraising surcharges and taxes from different levels of government piled on top.

And the tickets themselves aren't always the greatest cost. Insurance companies will bump an owner's rates substantially after a couple of tickets (sometimes after one ticket), and those higher rates will linger for years.

Between two and four moving violations in a 12-month period will get your license suspended in California, with all the personal and financial costs associated with resolving and working around that.

Finally, this 'charitable' donation is tax deductible--so the effective price tag on this bribe is lower.

Which would be at least a vaguely-credible argument, if marriage and its associated legal rights and benefits were also stripped from every childless heterosexual couple where one or both members were infertile, where the woman had reached menopause, where the couple had failed to submit proof that they regularly engaged in unprotected intercourse, and where either partner ever used any form of birth control.

Oh, and where adoption by homosexual couples was illegal, and there was a legitimate and reality-based argument supporting such a policy. (Good luck with that.) And where homosexual couples were unable to employ less-traditional reproductive methods and technologies (sperm or egg donations, in vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, etc.) to have children. (Note: not an option in Athens.)

So...yeah. If Prop 8 had made it illegal to supply birth control to married couples, then the child-free versus child-producing argument might hold a small amount of water. Oddly enough, it wasn't about that.

I can't help but interpret your comment to mean that you don't quite understand what moral rights are, nor how they might apply in this context. Among other things, 'moral rights' include the right of a creator to attribution (that is, to be credited as an author when their work is published), and the right of a creator not to have their published work distorted, mutilated, or otherwise substantially modified without their permission. Waiving all moral rights means that a journal is free to modify the text of a scientist's article as they see fit, and to publish a scientist's work without that scientist's name on it. It's rather the opposite of journalistic integrity.

What Nature asserts is that they require authors to cede all moral rights so that the journal can withdraw or retract papers (involving serious errors, omissions, or misconduct) even without the authors' consent. The problem is not that Nature has a mechanism for involuntary retraction of findings; that's a necessary and useful thing. The problem is that Nature demands the whole grab bag of all moral rights, when all they really need is a specific exception to deal with a relatively narrow set of unfortunate circumstances: [Author] grants [journal] the right to withdraw or retract from publication this article, at the discretion of [editorial board], following [some process].

This is an urban legend often associated with Building 470, a facility at Fort Detrick used to culture large (like, thousands-of-gallons large) quantities of biological weapons, including anthrax. Building 470 was decommissioned in 1971, and demolished in 2003; there were no dead bodies sealed in the walls, and demolition workers were more concerned about exposure to asbestos and lead paint used in the 1953 structure.

I believe that the waiver of open access and the waiver of moral rights are actually separate clauses within the NPG contract, separately obnoxious and objectionable in their own independent ways.

Ah, the hopeless naivete of someone unfamiliar with government contracting for military and aerospace programs.

The first four years of the program actually cost $192 million, though to be fair Boeing "contributed" a nominal $67 million of that, presumably with the expectation of future contracts if the program continued. (Not if it was successful, necessarily, just as long as it continued. And the $67 million probably included significant in-kind contributions of labour and materials, where Boeing would 'bill' itself market rates for parts and labour, rather than their actual internal cost.)

In 2002, Boeing picked up a subsequent $301 million government contract; their investment paid off quite handsomely. In 2004, the X-37 became a classified DARPA project, so we don't really know how much more it cost over the last decade, but I would be shocked if the total program cost didn't run into ten figures. The first X-37 mission didn't occur until 2010.

So no--not a 'bargain'. Two modest-sized, unmanned, robotic space vehicles (space drones) at a quarter billion each, plus whatever secret development costs accrued between 2004 and 2010. It's a neat technical achievement, and putting drones in space is certainly less costly than putting warm bodies up there, but don't delude yourself by thinking that it's cheap.

This is a 'fact' that I hear quoted a lot, but for which I hear the actual relevant research cited very seldom. Not saying it's not true, but I am more than a little concerned that too much may be read into it in the retelling. Among other things, I suspect that the latter claim - specifically, a reduced risk of (musculoskeletal?) injury - is more plausible and more likely supported than the former assertion: a general, overall 'benefit'.

I'll leave aside the incidence of crashes when drunk; we'll take it as read that drunk drivers are so much more likely to be involved in a collision in the first place that it complete swamps any benefit from reduced injury severity. (There's probably also an increased risk of collision when a sober driver is distracted by drunk passengers, but we'll skip that, too.)

A study that looked just at injury severity versus 'degree of inebriation' probably tried to do an apples-to-apples comparison that controlled for things like vehicle size and speed, type of collision, and whether or not a seatbelt was worn. If there was a significant difference in seatbelt compliance between the 'drunk' and 'control' groups - that is, if the drunks were less likely to wear a seatbelt - the benefit of seatbelt-wearing would have been lost from the final analysis. (In other words, the study would have compared belted sober to belted drunk, and unbelted sober to unbelted drunk--but not looked at belted sober versus unbelted drunk.)

And then there is the post-crash treatment of injuries. Immediately after a collision, the drunk is less likely to be able to provide or effectively receive aid from his companions. Once medical personnel arrive on scene, and after transport to a hospital, the drunk is less likely to be conscious, less likely to be able to communicate problems to doctors, and less likely to be able to follow instructions or answer questions. Potential symptoms of serious injury - like altered mental state, vomiting, loss of bladder control, etc. - may be misattributed to intoxication. (These are all pretty moot in the event of relatively minor injuries, but for a severely injured patient can have a drastic effect on outcome.) Medical interventions (everything from drugs to surgery) may be less effective or more dangerous in an intoxicated patient.

All that may lead to statistically better outcomes for the drunk who suffers mild-to-moderate injuries, but worse outcomes for one with severe injuries--which is why I would put a big question mark over the claim of overall 'benefit'.

1. I would like to present the results of [experiment].
2. I would like to lead a group discussion about the implications of [novel hypothesis].
3. I would like to teach you how to perform [new calculation].
4. I would like to tell everyone how to comply with [complex new regulations].

...Are at least four very different communication tasks. Some are better accomplished with PowerPoint (or other similar presentation tools) than others. The way that a presenter uses those tools is likely to have a significantly greater impact on the effectiveness of the presentation than the presence or absence of those tools. Uses of the different presentation aids need not be mutually exclusive--PowerPoint decks, whiteboards, handouts, etc. can be used singly or in combination for best effect.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. I've been at very productive scientific meetings where someone puts up one or two slides of data and we spend the rest of the time in an open discussion around the whiteboard trying to figure out what it means (and which experiments should come next).