I don't think I will end up agreeing with parent post (that the removal of humans from an urban region would foster genetic diversity among the remaining species), but this idea is something to think about. If I had mod points at the moment I would give parent post a "+1 interesting". It does not deserve the "-1 troll" it currently carries. An odd concept but not a trollish one.

If the UX is really good, you can let the user documentation slide somewhat. You can also think about presenting the basic user docs as a wiki and encouraging your user base to expand and expound on that. Editing user contributions will be a heck of a lot easier than writing from scratch (you can start things off by just publishing an outline of what needs to be covered).

Well, the concept of "two", or "twoness" is imaginary. It has no physical, chemical, astronomical, or any other scientific qualities. So it is outside the set of things that are "real". "Twoness" only exists in your head; it is at best an artifact of your perception of reality. But such artifacts are not real in themselves.

There is no reason to believe that doubling something that is not real will make it real. That would not be logical. (Invoking the Spock argument.)

Thus "2+2" does not "REALLY" equal "4" in any place other than in your head.

That you can use the totally imaginative structures of "language" to construct a pattern of sounds or pixels that evokes in someone else an imaginary statement of "2+2=4" is something to wonder about, but again no part of that process has any real component. It is all imagination. Highly discipiined imagination in some cases, such as QED, but still just imagination. Not real in any meaningful sense of reality.

More and more I'm getting a feeling that science has been down this road before. That our understanding of subatomic particles and the distant edges of the Universe is similar to the pre-Copernican use of epicycles to understand astronomy. That the search for dark matter (and probably string theory too) is a search for that final missing epicycle that will make the model work just right.

I think we need to look for a Galileo or Copernicus who has some whacky, undeveloped alternate concept that if only we could change our point of view, we would see that it makes everything so much more clear.

And the Earth - Moon should be classified as a binary planet. They are in such an intimate dancing orbit with each other that neither one can be adequately described without refering to the other.

This is more than a semantic squabble. Any exoplanet that is likely to support life as we know it must not only be in the Goldilocks zone, it must also have a companion close enough to create tides (and tide pools, and generally act as a celestial stirring rod).

Of course there are other leakers.

What is remarkable about Snowden is not that he was able to obtain all this "secret" information, but that he went public with it. Rather than selling it to someone like maybe one of those rich guys who are paying ISIS's way. It is some of the other "leakers" who are unquestionably doing that.

The NSA, etc, needs to be shut down. If only because it is demonstrably true that persons who make a career in climbing bureaucracies lack the kind of intelligence necessary to managing the needed level of security.

There may or may not be other good reasons for getting the government out of this kind of spying and database management. But just as it would be stupid to hire Cordon Bleu chefs to run an explosives manufacturing plant, it is stupid to put even the very best bureaucrats in charge of this kind of data collection and database management. They might be very good at what they have experience in doing, but this kind of stuff is going to blow up in everyone's face. Explosive technologies cannot be handled with cookbook methods.

The only sane course is to get USA government out of this activity. It is not something a democratically oriented bureaucracy can do. We need to look to other methods.

From what I have read about ebola (EVD-- whatever), it has an incubation period of 21 days and its early symptoms are easily confused with the flu. Just about everywhere other than Antarctic research stations is within 21 days travel time of west Africa.

Mecca is going to be an epidemiologist's nightmare this year. Lots of Muslims in west Africa, and some infected Boko Haram nuts might think that they were doing Allah's will in bringing the disease to impure muslims and infidels. Sort of like the way the USA gave smallpox to the American Indians through infected trade blankets.

Right. Just like bubonic plague isn't airborne--- until it mutates into pneumonic plague.

Ebola is a rapidly changing virus. Rather like the flu in that respects. That its initial symptoms are indistinguishable from the flu yet the victim is already contagious is a nasty touch.

Why are you treating your customers as if they were your collaborators? They should never see your word processing documents, and they should never, ever, have access to your spreadsheets. Even in those situations where you have absolute confidence in the integrity and technical capability of your customer, you should not invite man-in-the-middle attacks with the inappropriate use of unsecurable formats.

Learn how to use PDF. Most current word processors and spreadsheets offer this as an export (I don't know about Microsoft).

Perhaps in your little corner of the world MS documents still reign supreme. But can your MS Word open a .doc written by your Mom in 1995, allow you to add commentary, and then save it back into the archive in its original format?

Short answer: Microsoft's breakage of its own standards to leverage its marketing position has you screwed. You might not know that yet, but you are definitely screwed.

Hop off that dinosaur, its in its death throes (beware that thrashing tail). Get on some critter that has some life left in it. Just about any of the newer office suites (other than Microsoft) will support ODF and assure that you will always have access to your archives.

Mod parent up.

Too many people fall into the trap of mistaking scientific authority for scientific method. A scientist may be an excellent authority in his specialty, but he is still just an authority and is prone to all the kinds of errors of that any man can make. The scientific method with its hypotheses and experiments is the gold standard, and even its results should be rigorously questioned.

A scientist who is not a profound skeptic about just about everything is not really a scientist, but merely an imposter.

TFA describes the situation on a dry asteroid.

An asteroid or comet that contains water as well as stone is likely to behave differently. If its ice is melted by impact or increased exposure to sunlight, then frost heaves might cause a faster migration of big stones to the surface than would happen by granular convection. But if the ice is acting as a concrete binding agent, then there will be no frost heaves and no granular convection. Probably on a lot of asteroids both processes will be active.

I'm thinking that determining whether frost heaves or granular convection has been at work is going to be important in figuring out how to deflect any asteroid or comet. I'n guessing this will need to be done on a case by case basis.

There is possibly some confusion in parent post between granular convection and frost heaves.

In New England and other climes that have a winter freeze and spring thaw, the winter freeze pushes rocks upward as the water in the soil expands into ice. In the spring thaw, the ice under the rocks melts from the periphery inward, and slurries of ice water mud fill the voids. As a result, the rocks stay in their higher place as the soil settles back to its spring level.

One of my chores when I was growing up was to help with digging the big and deep holes in the garden next to the emerging boulders that were too large to remove. We'd roll the boulder into the deeper hole and bury it, and be able to use the rototiller and tractor over it for a few years before it would rise again.

Brazil nut effect is an excellent way to distinguish this process from the superficially similar strawberry effect (which happens in grocery stores where the biggest and reddest strawberries are always visible at the top of the container).

This is true. But it is not a weakness of the language. And do not confuse "insane syntax" with what Perl is doing.

Perl holds the author responsible for using the correct syntax in the context of the author's intent. It does not hold the author's hand, as if they were some kindergartner just starting out. One of Perl's axioms is that the author must be allowed to do whatever he wants without regard to some imposed notion of what is reasonable, for who but the author can know what his intention is?

That means a lot of shitty scripts are written in Perl. But a lot of shitty verbiage is written in English. Neither language should be judged by the great volume of shitty work that has been done in it. Each language should be judged by the quality of the most elegant work that it can support. There has been some really elegant work done in Perl.

For critical work, Perl should not be used by programmers who do not yet know what they are doing. While it is a great language for studying things like Knuth's work on algorithms (TAOCP), it should not be used in mission critical applications until the student has mastered those studies.

And determining which programmers are sufficiently capable to be allowed to use Perl is a problem for the IT managers and software team leaders. It is not a problem with the language.

Don't try to use Perl in anything that is mission critical until you no longer need the training wheels.