Umich researcher here (full-time staff, part time comp sci student)... yes, I wish my tuition was a bit lower, especially since I'm a self-funded student. But we have one of the top CS programs in the country (and arguably the best outside of Silicon Valley). The only way you can build and maintain a program like that is to have resources like this available to the students to experiment with and learn from. It's an investment, not an expense.

By the way, don't worry too much about your tax bill. Our state legislature is doing their best to defund us all the way to zero (last time I checked, state money was less than 10% of the U-M budget).

A border patrol vigilante is busy trying to figure out how to load a magazine clip into his assault rifle flatscreen.

Amusing timing on this question, as I just got back from running two weeks of summer camp for a Boy Scout troop(*) I volunteer for. 60+ people, 15 days. I slept for about 20 hours when I got home Sunday night.

Backstory: A couple years ago, we took a hard look at the fact that we were taking 30 kids to camp each summer at the cost of $350+ a head, when we were spending less than that to run basic program the rest of the year. Scout camps are cheap compared to most other summer camps, but still, $350/person can buy a lot of camping if you spend it yourself instead of on some pre-packaged experience where you're mainly paying the stipends of camp counselors. So we decided we'd go somewhere fun (picked a river valley in the northeastern US with boating/rock climbing/biking/hiking options), and run about half the daily activities in in-house with adult volunteers (whom we can also pay for), and contract out the other half to a local guide service. Much better experience for the kids. We actually had kids break down in tears this year because they were anti-homesick (they didn't want to go home!)

Lots of people ask why I spend so much personal time and money on what (on the surface) amounts to a horrible vacation (chaotic, lack of sleep, busy all day). And it's true, if your ideal vacation is lying on a beach somewhere for a week, it's not for you. But frankly, "going to the beach" was every family trip since I can remember until I went away to college, and I just can't stand it anymore. When I go away on vacation, I want to do something other than bake in the sun every day and different from what I do in an office the rest of the year.

*(In case anyone asks: I find the most of the behavior of the BSA organization as a whole to be embarrassing/despicable, but most of the time we simply ignore them and they ignore us.)

A comic book is just a medium for telling a particular story. The notion of a "comic strip" was originally telling a story with a sequence of pictures. Television and film is arguably just an evolution along that path. In other words, focusing on stories regardless of the medium they're told in is going back to the original business of comics.

Personally, I have a hard time seeing Comic-Con as anything but a win for everyone involved. Fans love it for the interactivity, writers, artists and actors love it for the chance to get fans excited about their work, and I'm sure it makes plenty of money for the ownership. I suspect very few people in those groups want the event to go back to focusing solely on comic books.

I'm in southeast Michigan. Temp here is 98 today, and has been similar for the past week. At home, I normally run the air conditioning a couple weeks of the summer. This year, it's been running constantly since April. At work, our buildings are serviced by an internal power plant and it seems to hit capacity when the temp gets over 95 or so, so we've been under instructions for the past week to turn off lights and computers to reduce the electrical and heat load. I'm sure HVAC systems in places like Houston and D.C. are designed to deal with this kind of heat, but Michigan ain't Texas (or at least we keep telling ourselves...)

On the topic of dealing with the heat, one thing that helped me a few years ago was losing weight. I lost about 50 pounds (went from ~230 to 175), and one of the unexpected positive consequences is that I am much more tolerant of warm temperatures than before. Previously, just sitting around in anything over 80 degrees was uncomfortable, now that threshold is more like 90. (On the other hand, I'm now more sensitive to cold, but hey, that's what winter coats are for.)

Not that I'm a defender of Verizon, but why the hell would anyone sign up for a shared plan with only one device? Obviously you're going to lose out... the prices are designed to make it marginally cheaper to add additional devices in return for a higher "first device" fee.

The new "share everything" plans are designed to make it easier (and a bit cheaper) for families with a bunch of smartphones, a tablet or two, and text-messaging addicted teenagers. Not for single-device customers looking for a bargain.

The only reason I've ever heard that actually makes sense is that it cuts down on in-store returns.

People often feel that if they return a product to the store that they're obligated to include all the original packaging: little plastic baggies and paper flyers, as well as the foam padding and the box itself.

In reality, most stores are far more lenient, but when you have quite literally destroyed the package in the process of testing it out, it makes you far less likely to take that $10 light bulb back to the store.

Damn, pasted wrong URL. Hate it when I do that.

http://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=8070026&icde=12211723

You do know that R01 grants aren't exactly done on a secret handshake agreement, right? There are so many hoops academic researchers have to jump through to get federal funding. And I say that as someone who almost lost his job the day after landing a big grant, because I accidentally kept someone out of the loop. Your grant proposal gets reviewed by your department people, by the IRB committee, by the university's office of research, and by internal counsel (if needed) BEFORE it ever leaves campus. And then it gets reviewed by program officers, and many impartial and often vicious grant reviewers. And let's not forget that NIH grant success rates in many institutes are approaching 10%, so likely it won't matter at all because you won't get funded.

And, shockingly, the grant description has been available at NIH.gov since at least 2009: "An important innovation of this phase of the longitudinal study will be careful assessment of social aggression in online communication by providing adolescents with handheld devices and recording and coding the content of their text messaging, Instant Messaging, and email communication."

You personally may disagree with the decision that the project is ethical, but you can't argue that they weren't honest with everyone about what they set out to do.

I know that dread of doing taxes is an American tradition, but at least for me (a single person who rents, has income from only one source, and doesn't own any complicated investments), doing my 1040 takes me two or three hours at most, and a few weeks later I get a deposit in my bank account. Easy money.

Given that this has happened three years in a row, I should probably get my employer to adjust my withholding, but frankly getting $2000 hard cash is a nice "bonus" every spring, and really, what else would I do with the money if I had it earlier? I'm already fully funding my retirement account. I suppose I could put it in a CD for .05% interest or whatever those are paying these days, but the lump sum is more appealing.

So, the data started to decouple from predictions, circa year 2000. It seems rather convenient to say that 1970-2000 matches the model, and then simply ignore 2000-onward.

And could we maybe narrow down that prediction a bit, too? Anything between economic collapse (zero) and "unlimited economic growth" is pretty open-ended. (And what the fuck does the term "unlimited economic growth" actually mean, anyway? Money growing on trees?)

Reading predictions of economic doom always brings to mind a quote from "The West Wing" about how economists and futurologists almost always fail to account for technological progress:

When the iPhone "Find My Friends" app came out last year, I was rather surprised by how many people were opposed to it and refused to share information. "I don't want other people to know where I am all the time" was the most common complaint.

My response at the time was, "do you really think the police/federal government/big telecoms can't already track you?"

If you're going somewhere you don't want other people to know about, leave your phone at home.

I'm a hard science/computer science guy who's livelihood is working on various NIH/NSF projects. A common thread talking to other scientists the past few years has been the theme that the tools for data analysis have not kept pace with the tools for data acquisition. Companies like National Instruments sell sub-$1000 USB DAQ boards with resolution and bandwidth that would make a scientist from the early 1990's weep for joy. But most data analysis is done the same way it's been done since that same era: with a desktop application working with discrete files, and maybe some ad-hoc scripts. (Only now the scripts are Python instead of C...)

The funny thing is, most researchers haven't yet wrapped their brains around the notion of offloading data onto cloud computing solutions like Amazon AWS. I was at an AWS presentation a couple months ago, and the university's office of research gave an intro talking about their new supercomputer that has 2000 cores, only to get upstaged 10 minutes later when the Amazon guys introduced their 17000 core virtual supercomputer (#42 on the top 500 list, IIRC). There's a lot of untapped potential right now for using that infrastructure to crunch big data.

I'm not sure about diabetes, but when my time comes up I'd much prefer a massive heart attack (hopefully with the majority of suffering for me and my family over in less than a day), than a slow, drawn-out battle with cancer. I've seen that a couple times, and used to work next to a cancer center. Cancer is an ugly way to go.

Unfortunately, my family history has many more cases of cancer and Alzheimer's than heart disease, though I've still got a few decades to decide on a strategy. Eating lots more burgers and fries, perhaps? Assuming California doesn't outlaw those...