I had occipital lobe epilepsy (i.e. in the visual cortex), and while seizures began with visual hallucinations, I was never susceptible to flashing lights. There was no response to them even on an EEG.

The strangest case of a trigger I ever heard was the woman who had seizures every time she heard the voice of Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight.

Can you imagine solar irradiance falling by 60% over 30 years?

Radiance is proportional to the fourth power of temperature. That's a huge dependence, so timothy and sycodon have got that going for them. Even so, we know the temperature of the photosphere is 5777 K. Since 5777 * (1 - sqrt(sqrt(1-0.6))) / (2030 - 2015) = 80, that implies an 80 degree drop every year across the entire sun, which would have been noticed a long time ago.

These two are skeptical that Earth's atmosphere might be several degrees warmer decades from now, and they're ready to back that up with a claim that the sun's entire atmosphere is cooling down 80 degrees every year.

And they cite a paper that didn't imply that at all. What are these guys smoking?

Uh, your very argument is a prime example of how modern politics seems to be working.

OK, I looked into it a bit longer than sycodon and timothy apparently did, and I take that back. It doesn't appear that Valentina Zharkova is being funded by the Koch brothers or anything like that. Rather, these two misinterpreted her work to suggest that a 60% fall in magnetic solar activity means the sun's brightness will fall by 60%. Which is somewhat ironic for the following reasons-

1. The sun actually gets slightly brighter when solar magnetic activity falls, because of the lack of sunspots.
2. Carbon dioxide has an atmospheric half-life of about 10,000 years, so a "60% fall in solar output" over a timescale of decades won't mean much for long.
3. The core isn't powering down (which would take approx. one million years to become evident at the surface, because the radiosphere is fully ionized and doesn't undergo convection, which means photons reach the radiopause via a random walk process). Any variation in solar output will be tempered by the stability of the heat entering the convective zone.
4. A fall in solar output by 60% would guarantee a following rise afterwards, because of the conservation of energy, and ignoring a rise in CO2 for this reason would eventually backfire.

So this is probably decent research, but unfortunately every right wing nut job out there is going to desperately sink their fingernails into this and deny that rising CO2 is a problem. From reading the comments of the submitter, it doesn't seem that we're dealing with a scientific genius here.

Of course it was. It was posted by timothy.

Water may blunt the physical shocks, but it isn't stable under water- it has to remain under an ammonia solution. I suspect it forms some sort of NI3-NH3 complex. Pure water will abscond with most of the ammonia. When it dries out on a paper towel, I think it's the ammonia evaporating that causes the sensitivity, not the water. (Like I said, good information on this crap is hard to find... most of the research on it is done by teenagers, not chemists.)

"maybe the US flag is also racist? "

Maybe it is. Do you think so? The "don't tread on me" flag was raised by slave holders to fight other slave holders because they were getting taxed too hard. The confederate battle flag was raised by slave holders to fight non-slaveholders because those non-slaveholders elected a president who wouldn't let slavery spread into the western territories. The racism there is a bit more direct.

Of course the relationship between southerners and the flag is complicated, but whether the flag should be flown, or whether they should be proud of it is not complicated in anyway. The Southern states committed treason, started a war, and murdered hundreds of thousands of american soldiers. They did this because they saw the writing on the wall. They knew that without slavery's spread, the end of slavery was near at hand in the United States.

Yes, there's a strong heritage there. A heritage of a monumental mistake for an evil cause that lead to mass murder on an industrial scale. After 150 years of white washing in the schools, and speechifying, and saying "it's complicated", it's time just say what really happened.

Southerners don't think about it much because it's not talked about, but the North, from The great lakes east all the way up to Maine have their own heritage, too, and they have note forgotten it.

The battle flag of traitors and terrorists who murdered hundreds of thousands of american soldiers!? That battle flag?

I guess it's good to see Republicans trying to disown it.

Americans also don't whine. Make your own damn site. Jesus Christ.

There are all kinds of things going on in a beehive besides bees stinging and making honey. The bees spend a fair amount of time keeping out undesirable organisms.

The real question is, if human beings never existed, would bumble bees have developed intelligence and civilization, as no other species filled that niche.

This really gets to the heart of the debate.

It seems pretty stable if you keep it under ammonia. In fact I had some in a bottle of ammonia for a few weeks. I uncovered it later and was really surprised- the black powder had undergone some sort of metamorphosis into these large bright orange opaque crystals, kind of pretty looking actually. I still don't know what that stuff was; and never found any information ever since. I guess people don't do much research into nitrogen triiodide.

Vitamin C is a reducing agent and makes a pretty good explosive if you have an oxidizer, even a mild one like a nitrate salt. It has an electron pair that it's dying to get rid of.
I used to make nitrogen triiodide out of iodine and ammonia. In an excess of ammonia it seemed pretty stable, but once the stuff dries out, a feather can make it detonate. I'd leave a soaked paper towel in front of some other kid's house, run off, and once it dried... kaboom! So of course, I spilled it on my shirt once, and the crystals were already going snap-crackle-pop before I could take it off. I remember my mother asking why my shirt was making such a racket.

I'm not sure why that matters. If they're building a wind farm that offsets the power going into their DC, then who cares if the electrons are mixed together? Geez.

Most slashdotters are already married to their computers.