We think of fish is heart healthy, but fin fish don't produce omega-3 fatty acids; they bioaccumulate Omega 3s produced by the algae at the bottom of the food chain. Farm-raised fin fish may or may not have a healthy fat profile based on their diet. Grass fed beef has a healthier fat profile than grain fed beef, as well as containing useful phyotchemical (chemicals from plants) like carotenoids. Same goes for pork; lard from pasture raised pigs is relatively high in mono- and poly-unsaturated fats.

The pattern seems to be that the best thing to feed an animal is something that approximates that species' natural food in the wild. So I'm skeptical of a secret, proprietary, industrially produced feed. It's not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if it's just a matter of skipping a few trophic levels (i.e., feeding the animal something prepared from stuff that's lower on its natural prey's food chain). Aquaculture needs something like that. The world's population demands more seafood than can be wild caught. But I'm not enthusiastic about buying meat from animals raised on mystery food.

This is a self-serving move by GM.

Perhaps the engineers named are responsible for the deaths caused by the faulty switch. Perhaps they are not. We don't know. But we can be certain that GM is naming these engineers in the hope that the public will blame and vilify them instead of the company.

This is an attempt to evade corporate responsibility disguised as an act of transparency. Even if the engineers bear some responsibility for the faulty design reaching production vehicles, it should be impossible for two engineers alone to put an obviously unsafe assembly into a production car, even if they conspire to do that *deliberately*. Obvious flaws should have been caught in design reviews, non-obvious flaws in prototyping and testing.

Well, it shouldn't be a question of some random person pulled of the Internet vs. the scientists *working on the project*. It should be a matter of what an educated person would think if all the pros and cons were laid out impartially then intelligently explained to him.

The problem with GP isn't that he thinks that ITER is a "massive and pointless waste of money" that will "never lead to a practical source of energy." The problem is that he hasn't explained the reasoning he used to arrive at that conclusion, and shown that he has thoughtfully weighed the contrary argument. He may well have done so and formed a very sound opinion of the project. We just don't know.

While I am sure there are occasional situations where it might be advantageous to be thought foolish and incompetent, in general this is likely a bad thing.

It's like being thought *weak* in military terms. There in tactical situations you'd like the enemy to underestimate your strength, strategically it's better to be thought stronger than you actually are. If a hostile country is considering violating some treaty they have with us, we'd want them to think our intelligence agencies will catch them red-handed. Once they actually go down that road, we'd want them to think our agencies are completely incompetent.

Right.

You seem to think that Harvard divesting from fossil fuels will cause companies like Exxon-Mobil to collapse overnight.

This is largely a symbolic action. If many other institutional investors follow suit, it's *still* not going to stop companies from pumping natural gas out of their wells, any more than divesting in gold mining would cause gold mines to stop taking gold out of the ground. The last thing a troubled business would do is starve a cash cow.

What divestiture *might* do, in the most wildly optimistic scenario imaginable, is divert a *tiny* fraction of the world's investment in developing new energy stocks toward renewables. Were that to lead eventually to electricity shortages, the price of fossil fuels would automatically rise. That would attract plenty of new investment. A modest rise in prices would swamp any conceivable stock price effect of divestiture, even if all the universities in the world did this.

Finally, as an MIT alum who's taken courses at Harvard, people who manage to land a professorship at the country's oldest and most prestigious university are usually pretty damned smart. That doesn't mean "always right", but it does mean that they probably understand the practical effects of such a move better than you apparently do. This is a university that has managed to build the largest endowment of any educational institution in the world: over 32 *billion*. If that were *market capitalization*, it'd put them on S&P's list of the 100 largest companies in the world. Halliburton's only worth 30 billion.

Distorted picture? Seriously? Republicans fought a major legislative war to ... literally .... take food out of the mouths of hungry children. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, feeding children in poverty through no fault of their own, Republicans wanted to slash it by $40 billion, and did slash it $9 billion. I could go on and on about the appalling impact of other Republican policies, but that right there, literally fighting to take food out of the mouths of hungry children, is so wildly egregious to establish the Republican model of compassion. Taking food out of the mouths of hungry children. Taking fucking food out of the mouths of hungry children. At that point, virtually the only way to "paint a distorted picture" would be drag in Nazis or something.

I've seen the figures, and they don't support your claim.

Republican tax deductible giving is indeed higher, but you and I both know that tax deductible doesn't equal charity. Charity is giving to benefit other people, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless, treating the sick, donating to research to cure diseases for the benefit all mankind, and so on.

A group of people buying themselves a clubhouse is tax deductible if you call the building a "church", hiring people to run that clubhouse and preform services for themselves is tax deductible if you call those services "religious services". But you and I both know that any money that goes towards buildings or goods or services for oneself is not charity. If someone gives $300 to their church, and only 3% of the church budget goes to feeding the homeless, then that's really only $9 given to charity and (tax deductible but non-charitable) $291 dollars buying a building and services for oneself.

The money given to buy themselves a church and buy themselves religious services cuts into disposable income, it cuts into the money Republicans give to charity.

Republicans have higher tax-deductible giving, but lower charitable giving.

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How perceptive of you, picking up on the subtle persecution.
Yep, because 6 and a half days a week the Slashdot community is wall-to-wall Odin worshipers.

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This is something software engineers should have learned in school. Sometimes a software failure can kill. Did they make *you* study the Therac-25 incident? I bet they didn't, much less to do when confronted with a project which puts lives in danger.

It must have seemed like a no-brainer to go from making thermostats to fire alarms, but I would be very, very reluctant to work on such a project. There's something ethically questionable about replacing a simple, highly effective device that saves lives with a more complex replacement. Even -- or perhaps especially -- if the replacement offers conveniences that simple device doesn't.

How many species would we need? I don't think that question has an answer, because of the somewhat vague definition of what a species is. Culex pipiens, restuans, and quinquifasciatus are very similar mosquito species that readily hybridize to form completely viable offspring; would you need *all three of them*? You might; these are important disease vectors, both human (Saint Louis and Japanese Encephalitis) and animal (dog heartworm), and its quite possible that some genetic populations don't spread certain diseases nearly as well.

And why would you need that? It turns out that pathogens and disease vectors might play an important part in maintaining ecosystem diversity. Hantavirus is common in rodents for example. Differences in hantavirus strains might prevent one population of rodents from taking over the range of another. In effect by co-evolving with a pathogen, a population can use it as a natural defense. This diversity in turn contributes to the resilience of the overall population to environmental changes.

Suppose meadow vole populations A and B live next to each other, but invade the other's territory. There is an environmental change that wipes out one of them, say B. Then A is free to spread into B's territory, and overall the population of voles looks pretty much the same. But if B had previously overrun A's territory, then the voles would have been wiped out.

The operation of the biosphere is immensely complex. The more you know about it, the less plausible things like terraforming seem. I think it may be possible to create a self-sustaining generation ship, particularly if the enclosure is very large and energy is essentially limitless. But I think such an environment would be a dead end. I don't think it would be possible to bootstrap anything like the Earth's biosphere on another planet, at least not for millions of years.

The sky on Mars is blue during the daytime. Why wouldn't it be? Same Sun, same Rayleigh scattering, so you get a similar sky during the day, albeit somewhat darker than Earth's because of a thinner, dryer atmosphere. Mid-day martian landscapes look remarkably like barren Earth deserts.

The soil on Mars is reddish, but it's not because the Sun is reddish; it's because of minerals in the soil. If you brought a bunch of paint sample cards from the hardware store to Mars, they'd look exactly the same. On top of that, the Mars day is only slightly longer than a terrestrial day (by 37 minutes). That's actually *good* because most people tend to have circadian rhythms slightly longer than 24 hours.

A similar question about color arose in my sci-fi writing group. What would a landscape on a red star's planet look like? The answer is "different, but not red." You'd still have a blue sky, and you'd still have the same range of colors, but with the color *balance* is shifted. It's like going from a cold white LED bulb to a warm white incandescent bulb. Blue things will still be blue and red things red, but the blue thing will look more muted under the "reddish" light (which will still appear white because it has a broad spectrum of colors in it).

What's with the obnoxious, non-mutable autoplay ad for this movie? Half the sites I visit are playing this, some times more than once on a page so it comes out garbled because the copies don't sync. This has to be one of the biggest Internet ad campaigns ever.

And since when does Slashdot carry ads that autoplay audio? That's low-rent stuff. The worst thing with this ad is that the player presents a mute button that doesn't mute, it starts the replay over again. The only thing you can do is mute your entire computer, or close the tab with the ad.

Well, I'm not muting my entire computer. I'm closing the tab. So see you later, Slashdot, until the stupid ad campaign is over. And I'm not going to see the stupid movie.

See you later, Slashdot; I'm out of here until the ad campaign is off. And I'm not going to see the stupid movie.

Magma.
Molten ice.

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I was making just this point about the Supreme Court striking down limits on campaign contributions. The Romans never quite admitted to themselves that their republic was defunct. They remained deeply attached to republican forms and institutions, even when those things had withered to ceremonial appendages of a corrupt imperial state. It was necessary for people to go through the motions of democracy; the ambitious plutocrats needed to maintain the fiction they were serving Rome, when in fact Rome was serving them.

FYI, non-profit organizations are usually supposed to turn a profit. Generating more revenue than you need to cover your expenses is a normal and necessary part of a sustainable organization. In practical terms that means you have to aim for a profit. So in practice a non-profit operates almost exactly like a for-profit, except there are no proprietors to distribute the profits to. In a non-profit you simply put the profit back into the mission, or into growing the organization.

A better name than "non-profit" would be "not-for-profit". In a for-profit, profit is the reason for the company's existence. In a not-for-profit, it is merely a financial constraint which determines whether the organization can survive and grow. It's like living to eat vs. eating to live. Eating might not be the purpose of your existence, but if you don't eat your existence will terminate.

In practice this means you do a lot more things in a non-profit that are un-profitable than you would in a for-profit. But this makes the remaining profit-generating activities all the more critical. I know, I've been there, working in non-profits. We took our public mission seriously, but we also generated all the profit we could manage so we could keep the doors open while doing good.