How narrow is the ruling, really? SCOTUS declared that any closely held business has the right to refuse to pay for insurance that covers contraception if the owners have a religious objection. This may account for about half of private sector employment in the US [citation; there is a linked pdf from the Stern School in the third paragraph]. My Google-fu is not terribly good, and I am having trouble pinning down exactly what proportion of the total America workforce this represents---recent employment reports from BLS seem to indicate something on the order of 70% of the workforce is in the private sector. Assuming that this number is correct, something like 35% of the workforce is employed by closely held businesses. So while the jurisprudence may appear narrow, the effect is potentially quite large.

I think that we substantially agree. There are people that live in the city and need to get around within the city and there are people commute in. If one is going to completely eliminate downtown parking, then public transit needs to be good enough to provide for the people that live downtown. Personally, I would love it if transit were that good---I hate driving, especially in any traffic. However, I think that it is unrealistic to expect that public transit will ever be that good in all but a very few American cities (at least, not any time soon). In the meantime, if public transit is good enough to keep the tourists and commuters from gobbling up too much parking downtown, the problem is ameliorated to some degree.

In any event, thank you for the clarification and the lack of snark. It is unusual to meet rational people on the internet, and I apologize for whatever snark I may have snuck into my previous post.

What does any of that have to do with what I posted? You stated that the public transit system must be good enough to completely eliminate the need for downtown residents to own a car. My counter is that downtown residents are not the biggest problem, but that tourists and commuters are. Public transportation does not need to be good enough to completely replace the cars of downtown residents (which seems to be your claim, unless I am badly misunderstanding the comment to which I originally replied), but rather it needs to be good enough to encourage non-residents to park away from the core and hop onto a bus or train for the last couple of miles.

Most of the people parking in downtown SF do not live in downtown SF. The transit system does not need to be good enough to allow people to not own a car, it simply needs to be good enough to encourage people to use it instead of driving into the city. Personally, I think that public transit in SF is pretty close to this goal (though maybe not entirely there fore the daily commuter)---when my wife and I visit the Bay, we generally park at one of the BART stations in Berkerly or Oakland (where parking is available and not too expensive), then take the train into the city. From there, SF is mostly walkable or busable.

Including at least half of the sophomore level wannabe CS majors that show up in my calculus classes...

Just to ensure that we are on the same page (since the term "adjunct" means slightly different things in different places): adjuncts are contract workers who are generally paid by the credit hour to teach. They are not researchers, they don't have committee assignments, and they are not on the tenure track. They tend to have very little involvement in the day-to-day running of the department. The fact that adjunct faculty contribute very little to a department is why so many tenured faculty would rather hire professors onto the tenure track.

It varies a lot from field to field. In my field (mathematics), authors generally seem to be listed in alphabetical order. Anecdotally, I have been lead to understand that in anthropology and sociology, authors are generally listed in order of seniority; and that in neurology the first author is assumed to be the head of the primary lab at University A, the second author the graduate student running that lab, the last author is the head of the secondary lab at University B, and the second to last author is the grad student running the secondary lab.

Two comments in reply:

(1) It is common for comments on articles about scientific results to include anecdotes of the form "The result is clearly wrong, because I experienced the exact opposite." This kind of response is so common, in fact, that the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data" has become a shorthand way of noting that the anecdotal evidence of one person does not disprove a statistical aggregate based on a much larger set of data. Indeed, a quick search would make that clear. Even if it were the only thing that I had written, I would hope that the meaning would be clear from the large cultural context. As it is, I provided greater context with the second and third sentences of my post, which I would invite you to re-read before concluding that I don't know what the word "data" means.

(B) That being said, if you are going to be pedantic (as it seems you are insisting upon), the plural of "anecdote" is "anecdotes." The plural of "datum" is "data". From the point of view of a grammatical pedant, I am entirely correct.

The plural of "anecdote" is "anecdotes," not "data." Yes, it is possible to be an adult, become infected with chicken pox, and not become terribly ill or suffer life-altering damage. However, the *probability* of suffering major complications as an adult is much, much greater.

Given that I now hold an MA and am working on a Ph.D., I don't think that it has mattered much.

Not necessarily. While I can't speak to the AC's experience, I hold a BA and an MS in Mathematics. At my undergraduate institution, the difference between the BA and BS was a foreign language. To earn a BA, one needed to take four semesters of a foreign language (or equivalent), while a BS required two semesters of computer science. While I did both, I opted for the A rather than the S (for no particular reason).

Why do you hate America?

Lies! One minute each.

There ain't nothin' in this world that needs to be microwaved for anything other than an integer number of minutes.

for skiing, Seattle