I think a large part of the problem is the primary voting system. A would-be presidential candidate first has to appeal to the extremists in their own party before they have a chance to try to appeal to the general public.

I have a proposal to fix this.
Step 1: To be on the presidential ballot, you must have reached some threshold number of votes in the primaries. This threshold should be set so that there will be about 4 to 6 presidential candidates. (Primaries are not party-based. All presidential hopefuls appear on the one ballot.)

Step 2: Voters rank the presidential candidates in their order of preference. These preferences are processed by a Condorcet method. This ensures that if one candidate would win a two candidate election against any other candidate, they are elected.

With 4 to 6 candidates, there is room for at least two from each main party, plus the occasional independent/minor party candidate. The Condorcet voting encourages moderates rather than extremists. (In turn, this will encourage the selection of moderates in the primaries.) It also gives independents a decent chance.

(Note: I am not a US citizen, nor am I living there.)

Do you mean flight engineer a.k.a. second officer? Are there even any airliners still flying that have a flight engineer? I think they stopped building them in the 80s.

As I understand it, normal practice is that the pilot stays with the same plane throughout their shift, unless technical issues require the airline to substitute another plane. Most pilots are only allowed to fly one type of plane. (They can retrain for a different model, but this takes a month or two. It isn't something you study up on a lay-over.) So they aren't going to fly a 737 in the morning and a 767 in the afternoon. (There are exceptions. The 757/767 pair and the A330/A340 pair were designed to have nearly identical cockpits so that pilots could swap between those types at will. Also, a few pilots are current on more than one type.)

It makes sense - the pilots need as about as much downtime between flights as the planes do. If your schedule involved swapping pilots between planes, you'd get even more disruption by delayed flights than currently.

"Co-pilot" is a misleading term. They are both pilots, one is captain and the other is first officer. Both are trained to do anything that needs to be done. 50% of take-offs and landings are performed by first officers rather than captains. (The non-flying pilot will be talking to ATC, troubleshooting technical issues and assisting the flying pilot in other ways.)

My understanding* is that many airlines are doing this, and the flight critical standard and emergency check-lists are still kept in hard copy. The material no longer on paper will be things like approach maps for a few hundred airports, and manuals for seldom-adjusted aircraft systems. Should such documents be required but unavailable due to misfunctioning tablets, air traffic controllers and the airline's dispatch centre would be able to assist by radio.

If there is a real pilot in the house, perhaps they could comment further.

* I am a non-pilot with an interest in aviation, so I try to follow such developments via internet news sites.

I never claimed there was a problem with causality. Yes, I have taken a physics course. At university. As the lecturer.

If (and only if) the trade occurred before the light-travel time from Washington, then (by special relativity) there exists a reference frame in which the trade occurred before the information was released in Washington.

It would be so fun to see this argument play out in court.

I'd prefer a heartbeat system. All the trades submitted between 12:00:00 and 12:00:05 are collected and processed and the results released at 12:00:06. Repeat every 5 seconds.

(I use 5 seconds for illustration purposes, I have little idea what the appropriate cycle period would be.)

I've found a new contender: Kiribati.
It beats Singapore on the tabulated measures: max temp varies by 0.5 C per year, min by 1.2 C. Similar to Singapore rainfall varies by a little less than a factor of two. However, according to the accompanying text, it is very windy for five months of the year.

The range in record temperatures is much greater: 12 C to 45 C:
http://www.myforecast.com/bin/climate.m?city=69577&metric=true
By comparison, the same source gives 19 C to 38 C for Singapore:
http://www.myforecast.com/bin/climate.m?city=75281&metric=true

If you think snow and ice are novel to you as an Australian, try seeing how New Zealanders react to squirrels.

Likewise. Most of my life I've lived in temperate oceanic climates (Palmerston North, Auckland, currently Hobart) where summer is best. Occasionally I've lived in temperate continental climate (Princeton NJ, Sydney) where spring/autumn are best.

If I lived in Singapore, it would be 'Seasons? What are they?' Going on climate records climate records only (no personal experience), Singapore has the least variable weather of anywhere I know. (Average daily high is 1.7C higher in the hottest month than the coldest. The range of record highest temperature to record lowest temperature is 16.6C. Rainfall is more seasonal, but still less than a factor of two between wettest and driest month.) Can anyone find a less seasonal place than Singapore?

The abundances of hydrogen, helium and lithium. The cosmic microwave background. The maximum age of stars. The observably different conditions at high red-shift. The agreement between observed large scale structure and that expected in a Big Bang + dark matter + dark energy universe.

(Disclaimer - I haven't read the article. Maybe they discuss this.)

What if I'm hugely stressed out because a tsunami or forest fire is coming or my critically injured child needs rushing to hospital or some such? If that changes my brain waves enough to prevent me driving, it would be unfortunate.

(To be fair, TFA says they're looking initially to use it on buses and armoured cars. I wonder if "masked man is pointing gun at my head and ordering me to drive" sufficiently alters the brain waves.)

I've been thinking about getting one of those, but a mere 8GB cache seems inadequate. Does anyone with experience of these care to comment?

Link: carbon dating can't be trusted beyond 150 million years.

Conclusion: The date of 100,000 years given here is wrong.

If you'd taken time to scan the paper, you'd easily find the section on dating (2.2): "A chronological model was
developed using a combination of radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), and relative
palaeomagnetic intensity dating. [...] OSL measurements suggested that material incorporated into the basal sediments might date to
93,000 ± 9000 years ago."

I.e. the 100,000 years is independent of carbon dating. (Actually, I'm surprised they even attempted carbon dating in this environment.)

How does the distribution of surpluses work?

Say the threshold is 100. (It is a small election.) Candidate A got 200 primary votes, of those 150 had B as second choice, 50 had C. Do they say 'half of A's votes are 'used up', so the surplus is distributed as 150 votes for B each with a weight of 1/2, and 50 votes for C, each with weight of 1/2'? (That would be sensible but horribly complex to calculate.)

Alternatively, they just take 100 of the voting papers which had A as primary, and say "these are the votes we're redistributing". This is simpler, keeps the number of votes integral, but means the outcome of the election is non-deterministic (and potentially biased, depending on how the votes to be redistributed are selected). Given the lack of fractional votes in the document you link to, I take it to be this second option.

As it was my first time in Australia for an election, I watched on TV. The coverage was completely about the lower house. By the time I quit watching (Rudd's concession speech) I don't think there had been so much as a mention of the fact that senators were being elected also. It was weird and puzzling.