The air Marshall. Let the Federalis deal with them.

You're an idiot. We have flight attendants so there's a constant supply of slutty girls on layover at BWI to fuck.

Stop citing Myth Buttheads. It is unscientific entertainment that often comes to the wrong conclusions.

Did you see the gunpowder engine one? They put a hopper on a shaft that goes to a piston tied to a bow, with a candle at the bottom. It worked for one cycle, but the hopper didn't feed gunpowder correctly. They also tried pouring gunpowder into a 2-stroke weed whacker engine, which didn't work. Myth: BUSTED.

Problem: the moment I saw it, I redesigned their hopper in my head to disrupt, collect, and feed gunpowder effectively. That was the only part of the first design which failed: the hopper didn't disturb the gunpowder enough for it to resettle, so a second operation of the hopper didn't feed more powder. They thus decided a gunpowder engine is impossible.

People argue that two-spaces is an anachronism and we shouldn't do it anymore. They tell us that the computer algorithms adjust everything to have that extra space from one space after a period or colon. Yeah? And when you post on the Internet, it condenses two spaces to one, and it's in variable-width type, and the period is like two pixels wide, and the space doesn't automatically become wider.

People are so fucking stupid they type arguments on a computer screen about how things they're looking right at are displayed, without noticing that what they're describing is exactly not what they're looking at.

I remember in 2012 when there was a Congressional hearing to decide if Muslims should be illegal. A coworker was watching it crying. I took a look... jesus christ what the fuck? They were actually discussing if the Islamic faith was so toxic that we should barre anyone Arab or Islamic from entering the country, eject the ones we have, strip all kinds of rights, and imprison or monitor any practicing Muslim or person of descent from an Islamic family.

FDR all over again. Concentration camps, anyone?

And NOBODY seemed to have a problem with this!!!

Generating them is harder than remembering them.

I use exclusively lower-case letters. No numbers, capitals, or symbols.

Good luck.

I see you haven't switched to dvorak.

Memorable does not imply low-entropy.

There are 26 letters that you know of, each in two variations, with 10 numbers, a space bar, and 32 symbols. Each individual item is one of 95 characters, if you're not using accented characters. If you are using accented characters, you have graves and back-graves and umlauts and circles above the vowels letters, and a tilde above the vowels and n, and the German long S, totaling 27 additional characters, making 122.

There are thousands of English words. A fluent person should at least know 850 basic English words, plus all their variations (plurals like "cows", verb conjugations, and parts of speech modifiers like "happily"), plus hundreds of domain-specific vocabulary words from their own specialist knowledge.

Memorizing a random string of numbers is hard; memorizing a story is easy. To put this into perspective: Black Boys Raped Our Young Girls, But Violet Goes Willingly. Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Grey, White. Resistor color codes, 0-9. Even the unordered colors are hard to remember.

A small, random set of independent characters from 94 possible values is itself hard to remember. Each character is one object, unless entropy is removed. The natural conclusion is to chunk characters into something memorable: words. Rather than remembering individual instances of 94 things, you produce largely random instances out of a pool of 3000-5000 things. You can assemble these into a superstructure (Horse rocket pen ninja) and turn that into a verbal description (a HORSE riding a ROCKET PEN under attack by NINJA), and turn that into an image. You can make alterations (ninja vs ninjas). You can recall this image, recall the story, and recognize which subject matter--in the verbal recall and the visual recall--relate to your passphrase.

With four words out of a vocabulary of 5000, 8 completely random characters produce 10 times the number of possible combinations. Four random words produce about 2 million times as many possible combinations as would deformations from a dictionary word averaging 3 possible transformations per letter on an average of 8 letters, 5000 * 4^8 (5000 words times 4 possibilities in each of 8 positions).

So 'b0x(u%7eR', being considered equally as likely as 'cat', is has 1/2,000,000th of the entropy of "horse rocket pen ninja", and is harder to remember. 'a84Xg&S%' has 10 times the entropy of "horse rocket pen ninja" and 20,000,000 times the entropy of 'b0x(u%7eR', and is much harder to remember. There is an entire class of less-memorable passwords with a fraction of the entropy of highly-memorable passwords, and an entire class of non-memorable passwords with a slight fraction more entropy.

Keyword-driven searching is associative, but only in a minimal form. Humans remember things by remembering other things; they expect to find things in a computer by remembering something about the thing they want to find, and then entering it into the computer.

In human memory, this brings up every association, categorized, detailed, and sorted by relative strength of association and frequency of use. On computers, we can track frequency of use automatically; strength of association is not automatic because computers don't learn and analyze context.

In this way, a computer search mimics human memory: it allows a memory of one thing to associate to another. It's not a complete implementation, and can't be fully completed automatically. Further, even a complete system cannot be operated without human memory; a human, having improved his memory with a superior filing system, will be able to use the best technical search engine better than a dumb human.

Searching and indexing information isn't a computer problem. We can already find information in massive databases--MongoDB and PostgreSQL handle that well.

It's tagging information that's difficult. Contextual full-text searches often fail to find relevant context. Google does an okay job until you're looking for something specific. General information like melting arctic ice sheets or the spread of Ebola find something relevant; but try finding the particular documents covering the timeline Wikipedia gave for Thomas Duncan's infection, and each of the things the nurse said. You'll find all kinds of shit repeated in the media, but not how they originated. Some of the things in there are notoriously hard to find at all.

I've thought about how to structure a Project Management Information System for searching and retrieving important data. Work performance information, lessons learned, projects related to a topic themselves. This steps beyond multi-criteria search to multi-dimensional search: I want to find all Lessons Learned about building bridges; I want to find all Programming projects which implemented MongoDB and pull all Work Performance Information and Lessons Learned about Schema Development; etc. I need to know about specific things, but only in specific contexts.

For this to work well, people need to tag and describe the project properly. The Project Overview must carry ample wording for full-text search; but should also be tagged for explicit keywords, such that I can eschew full-text search and say "find these keywords". It would help if project managers marked projects as similar to other projects, and tagged those similarities (why is it similar?). A human can highlight what particular attributes are strongly relevant, rather than allowing the computer to notice what's related.

With so much information, searching requires this human action to improve the results. It may also be enhanced by individualized human action: what humans produce what tags and relationship? What humans do you feel provide useful tagging and relationships? What particular relationships do *you* find important? What relationships do you want to add yourself? This will allow an individual human to tailor the search to his own experiences and needs.

On top of that, such things require memory: a human must remember certain things to know what to search for. I remember working on a project where... ...and so this becomes relevant to this search, and let me find similar things.

Computer searching is a crude form of human memory: human memory is associative, and computer searching is keyword-driven. Humans need to use their own memories, to tell the computer how they see things, and then to tell the computer how they think about what they want to know--what it's related to, what it's similar to, who they think knows best about it--and have the computer use all that information to retrieve a data set. To do that, humans must manually remember in the computer and in their brains.

The holy grail of searching is a strong AI that takes an abstract question, considers what you mean by its experience with you and its database of every other experience, pulls up everything relevant, decides what you would want to see, and discards the rest. Such a machine is largely doing your job: it's thinking for you, deciding what you'll remember, and making your decisions by occluding information which would affect your decisions. Anything less is a tool, and faulty, and requires your expertise to leverage properly.

Actually, a jeep would produce soil (sand) compaction and more destruction of habitat. Its high-torque tires would roll in a straight line, rather than stepping, increasing the likelihood of injury and death of small desert animals. Largely, rolling vehicles over non-developed land kills a whole bunch of animals in the process.

Edward Elrich would agree with you there.

It would not be awesome; it would be sacrilege!

This thing converts nickel into copper. Copper! Nickel is itself rare, and incredibly useful. Steel, the all-powerful metal used for everything which requires strength, the metal used for swords and shields and war machines, the metal used to stand up buildings and build great engines. Nickel, mixed with iron, strengthens steel: most strong steels and superalloys involve a not-insignificant quantity of nickel, between 0.2% and 8%.

If anything, we need more nickel, vanadium, and molybdenum! We already produce molybdenum by fusion reaction, though.

It doesn't make scientific sense because fusing nickel into copper would be easy for me to comment on if I had bothered to put the periodic table in my mind palace.

Nickel is heavier than Iron; fusing it requires input energy. Nuclear binding energy is highest at iron: fusing heavier elements takes energy, and fusing lighter elements releases energy. There is more energy in Copper's nuclear bindings than Nickel's; there's more energy in Carbon's nuclear bindings than Nitrogen's. Fusing Carbon to create Nitrogen would release energy; fusing Nickel to create Copper would consume energy.