Why we put up with NK at all at this point is simply a matter of lack of leadership.

And the minor issue that doing anything practical puts at risk the life of every single citizen living in Seoul, population 10 million. Never mind the geopolitical risk of any conflict sucking in China, which would be a bit of a nuisance.

That's what we have moderation for. Also, fuck Bennett.

The inter-arrival times of a Poisson process are exponential.

It's far too early to do the maths on the three dimensional case, but uniformly distributed points on the real line have nearest neighbour distances that are exponentially distributed. It should be pretty obvious that with a big enough number of points some will be close.

There are colleges where men are just assumed guilty of any charge of sexual assault, and cannot even question their accusers in the adjudication process

I might have more of a problem with that if it didn't lead, on average, to more cases getting decided correctly.

Equality of outcome, equality of opportunity. Neither is perfect. Enjoy your male tears.

They are not illegal per se. However, there are plenty regulations around how these things are used. Try depositing £20k cash in a UK account and see how anonymous the source of that cash becomes.

Yeah, we mostly call that prostate cancer. Most (old) men die with a prostate cancer in situ.

I challenge any one of those moaning fuckers to so much as hit a comet with a rock, never mind come close to doing science out there :p

AAAARGH vi

I think this should be a meme.

...I would strongly recommend just getting the best people you can. In my experience good, experienced people in a small team do not mind picking up the grunt work if the team is pulling together and being productive.

You're wrong. This seems to be a common pop-sci fact, but it's nonsense. If you drank only distilled water, you would die slightly quicker than someone who drank only water, but that's it. Drink distilled water and eat normally, you would observe no effects.

Yes, but also rather more worryingly there is the minor issue that after using it for a few weeks it will become contaminated with Legionnaire's.

Requirements vary quite a lot between country. The UK is one of the strictest - corrected vision must be a certain standard in both eyes. In the US, some states allow people the UK would class as legally blind to drive. Some of these folk use miniature telescopes strapped to their eyes to see with - needless to see, field of view with these things is pretty small.

Half right. You must be upfront about what you do and intend to do at the time of underwriting, but if you then take up chain-smoking while surfing on a shark, that's your business. The insurer absorbs that as normal mortality. To put it in perspective, the biggest life policies are on the order of GBP50-100m (Warren Buffet types), and the industry absorbs one or two claims of this size every year. The real risk here is aggregation risk, the fact that you'll have a dozen millionaires on these flights. That's not an issue for the insurers, really, but it is for the reinsurers and their retro pools. But even losing the top ten insured lives is smaller than a billion dollar cat which again, is barely a rounding error in reinsurance.

Actually, closing the lid traps an aerosol of toilet water which blows up in the face of the next user. It persists a surprisingly long time. Citation: some Reader's Digest magazine I read in a dentist's waiting room twenty years ago.