And in 2 years they'll go to 22.

The Pedestrian Council sounds like one of the most dull and unimaginative councils in all of Australia.

Nooooooooooooooooooooo!

Uh. Right.

Dan Reihl's response is that he wasn't paid enough for it to be them paying him for his views. Accepting money from a source about which you give favorable reviews is unethical however you slice it. Just because you work within FEC rules doesn't mean that what you're doing is okay.

Then, the "Ace of Spades" blogger confirms that he was offered to publish a story for pay on multiple occasions.

All this makes Republican payola seem more and more like "standard operating procedure"

I bet that course is a total piece of cake

Though an extinction level event is nearly guaranteed to happen on Earth at some point over a long enough time span, I don't understand why Dr. Hawking feels as though it's more likely to happen or more likely to happen sooner on Earth than it is on any sort of spacecraft.

It is true that the sun's gravity well will cause the likelyhood of a large object collision to be greater, but such a risk must be considered against the probability of an extinction level event on a spacecraft of some sort.

Personally, I think that colonization of the lagrange points by small outposts of humans and other terrestrial beings is a great first step. Make it so that life on earth can be reseeded if it fails. In the short term, back up seed copies of terrestrial life are a better goal than abandonment of the planet, IMO. Eventual abandonment will have to happen due to the death of the sun, but I think that can wait just a little bit.

What's that in hogsheads?

I tried this device one time. The only message it could read from the surface of my brain was "Squiggle"

Kim Jong-Il is ronery because nobody likes a Juche-bag

Welcome the downfall of our graceful robotic overlords.

Yep, I have been having troubles with L3's DNS for about a week and a half now.

As a result, I'm back on insightbb's crappy, crappy DNS.

Well, the stability of anything like this is determined by two things, the change in energy between the two states (ultra dense, and regular density) and the amount of energy needed to activate the change in state (activation energy).

Imagine that the two states are on either side of a hill. The higher energy state will be higher up its side of the hill than the lower energy state. The height of the hill will represent the activation energy.

If the activation energy is sufficiently high, you can isolate the higher energy product just about regardless of the difference in energy between the two states because the higher energy product won't easily gain enough energy to get to the crest of the hill and fall back down to the lower energy state.

IAAC,BIDHAMITTROYOTA
(I am a crystallographer, but I don't have any more information than the rest of you on this article)

You know, I was trying to come up with something about which I could be completely ambivalent and not care about one way or the other in the slightest.

Then I found this on slashdot.

Slashdot: News for New Hampshire. Stuff that doesn't matter at all.