Even if that's true, keep in mind the lifetime risk for a male developing cancer is on the order of 40% already. 1/1000 is barely background noise.

I was quite the Diet Coke addict for a couple years before cutting way back earlier this year. Still, I wish there were some flavorful beverage that I could enjoy without worrying about whether it'll cause me diabetes or cancer or weight gain, as pretty much all soda/diet soda has been shown to do in high enough doses. I also can't stand coffee (too bitter) or tea (mashed leaves floating in lukewarm water.... mmmm), so it's mainly ice water for me these days.

Is there any chemical California has not added to their list of carcinogenic compounds?

I agree. I'll be keeping my iPad 1 until it dies.

The most exciting thing to me was the other thing that got announced: the 1080p capable Apple TV. I know, for the majority of folks watching movies on a 30-40" LCD TV, 720p vs. 1080p is a wash. But I just put a home theater projector in the basement, and watching 720p on a 90" screen is just as bad as watching standard-def on a 50" LCD.

And with places like Blockbuster going under, it's getting harder to find sources for Blu-ray disc rentals. RedBox is great when they have something, but that's about it. As far as I'm aware this is the first time anybody's offered downloadable (well, legally downloadable) 1080p content. But it's not clear when that will be available, if it's Apple TV exclusive (not available in iTunes on OS X / Windows), etc.

haha, oops... So... about that "anonymous" part... guess it's time to change my /. username again...

I grew up and now work in Ann Arbor. Posting as anonymous, for obvious reasons. First, some background. Ann Arbor Public Schools has become a reference model for how not to run a school district. The district routinely has nationwide searches at great expense to find a new superintendent, simply because (1) the average tenure of a superintendent in Michigan is less than two years and (2) none of them are stupid enough to come to a district as dysfunctional as Ann Arbor.

The current superintendent came from a rural district in Pennsylvania, and was old enough to actually retire from her old district to take the job here. But hell, at least she was available.

The tech crisis is at least real. Those really are eMacs being used in the classrooms... yes, the eMac that Apple stopped making in 2005. The district has a budget deficit of $14 million, due to a perfect storm of decreasing state funding (Michigan is not exactly a bastion of tax revenue), decreasing local property values, and fewer students (the #1 local tax payer and #2 employer, Pfizer, pulled out in 2007).

The odd thing is, the district is, by many measures, not bad. But that's due primarily to high student achievement due to the relatively educated population (over 70% of Ann Arbor residents have a 4-year degree or more). Meanwhile, we have high schools that are too big, middle schools that are a disaster, and elementary schools that are actually OK (but not great). On a side note, did I mention that my father teaches for AAPS, and I went to private school? Yeah...

It seems that predicting doom and gloom about the next round number in gas prices has become an American tradition (see $3 gas in 2005, $4 gas in 2008, etc). On the contrary, overall it's been a good thing - it's lead to conservation and fuel-efficient vehicles, just as economics would predict. 10 years ago the notion of getting Americans to use less gasoline year-over-year was crazy talk... now it's reality.

In early 2008 I traded in my old '90s Toyota truck for a Ford Escape hybrid. Many of my friends thought I was crazy. "Gasoline prices will never make it worthwhile, you're wasting your money on hybrid tech, Ford will never be profitable again", etc... Now Ford is more profitable than ever and builds vehicles on par with Toyota/Honda quality (that Escape is at 60,000 miles and hasn't had any service except oil and air filter changes). And gas prices averaging more than $4 over the lifetime of the vehicle did make the purchase worthwhile, especially with the hybrid tax credit.

The other really interesting thing going on right now is that the US "is the closest it has been in almost 20 years to achieving energy self-sufficiency", according to a recent Bloomberg report. Apparently domestic oil output is the highest it's been since 2003, and (even better) the amount of oil we import from the Middle East has fallen to 15% from 23% in 2009. The sooner we're not relying on places like Iran and Saudi Arabia for our day-to-day energy needs, the better.

I think people today are generally spoiled by good customer service at large retailers like Amazon or Best Buy, where the business writes off 1-2% of asshole customers who consume most of the customer support resources as the cost of doing business.

The problem is, that doesn't extend to small businesses, where one bad customer can quite literally eat up a majority of the proprietor's time and energy, and the business doesn't have the depth to just send the customer free stuff to make them happy. Had that happen with a scout troop I volunteer for a couple times, where one obnoxious parent consumed hundred of hours of volunteer time before they were told to leave.

If I were a physician, I'd certainly trade one marginal (in the economic sense) customer for the freedom from losing sleep at night about whether their child is dying from one of any number of untreatable disastrous diseases. If my patients are going to argue with me about whether vaccines are, in fact, the greatest medical development for humanity in the past two centuries, how on earth am I supposed to be able to get them to consent to any other medical science?

This.

I live in a large mid-western college town. Recently a PhD I work with told me that he's decided to send his kids to one particular elementary school, a public school near the University campus. The school is actually somewhat inconvenient for his family - it's not anywhere near where they live. So why send the kids there? Because this particular school has the quantitatively the highest student achievement of the 20+ elementary schools in the area.

Except, what he didn't realize is the selection bias of those students. The kids at that school are mostly the kids of financially-stable, education-valuing college professor parents who all happen to live in that prosperous campus area. There's absolutely nothing special about the teachers, or administration, or facilities, or curriculum. It's just that the kids in each grade are starting out a couple steps above average.

Don't get me wrong, peer education is still valuable, even though the traditional classroom model does its best to discourage that. But when it comes to education it's easy to make the wrong decisions for all the right reasons.

It's been probably 15 years since I read Accidental Empires, but I remember there being some passage in the book where he talked about how somebody (Stewart Brand, maybe?) was trying to persuade him to publish the book as hypertext, with internal references and links. The idea was the book was not so much a linear story as it was a documentary of a lot of moving parts in an industry that's been moving incredibly fast for 30 years, and hypertext would be the ideal way to present that. Of course, now, this just means another Wiki site, but at the time it seemed like a pretty radical idea.

I know Cringely catches a lot of flack here and elsewhere for being a bit too hyperbolic, but I've always respected him for being one of the few high-profile tech writers who will genuinely go out on a limb (often correctly) to call the shots of where he thinks a particular tech or company is going. You won't catch Pogue or Mossberg doing that, and most other tech writers just parrot from PR statements. IIRC, he just wrote a blog post recently that he plans to retire later this year, but I hope he keeps writing one way or another.

Behavioral experiments like this are relatively straightforward to plan and run. The hard part is to explain the result, and the reasons are not always what you'd expect on first glance, often due to confounding variables that you've inadvertently changed.

It's also worth noting that the news release throws in a quote about altruism, but the original paper's authors were careful not to go there.

For example, reading this carefully, it's clear that the rat frees its cagemate and then goes for the chocolate. It's not a binary choice between the two. Why does it do that? Perhaps it's hidden empathy/altruism circuitry. Or maybe the rat's just afraid of what its cagemate will do if it eats all the food and then the trapped rat gets out. Contrary to what most people think, domesticated rats are very much like domesticated dogs in terms of temperament... very social animals, usually with a playful temperament, but can also be very territorial and assertive. And territorial fighting usually occurs over shared, limited resources, like food. (I will say, chocolate is a good choice. Rats love chocolate. Some of our rats will eat 30 - 40 M&Ms in a half-hour experiment. Not bad for an animal weighing 300 grams.)

Maybe it is altruism or empathy. But true altruism is doing something good and expecting nothing in return, not a pain avoidance strategy.

Ultimately, everyone agrees that open sharing of research data funded by the taxpayers would be A Good Thing(TM). The problem is: how do you persuade people to actually do it. Much how things like advanced safety features on cars, free college tuition, and taxes on big banks sound like great ideas, until you look at what it will actually cost to implement. Not just "cost" in terms of money for infrastructure development, data storage, and support, but in terms of persuading an entire culture to change their workflow.

In our lab, we already spend an extraordinary amount of time on administrative tasks only indirectly related to our research. Adding in a mandatory data sharing task and fielding questions from random people who wanted to use it would be a serious additional chore. Then there's the embarrassment aspect... we actually had a project a couple months ago where there was another group doing an experiment that we wanted to do, and they had software already written. So we thought, "great, we'll just ask them for the code". So we fired off an email... and after a couple weeks we finally got a reply to the effect of "this is actually my first program, and I don't feel comfortable sharing it." So we had to spend 2-3 months writing our own version to do exactly the same thing.

Not only that, but with reduced CO2 emissions as a direct result of fewer spinning hard drives drawing power from the electrical grid and the increased albedo from all that data being stored in clouds, we've also solved global warming! Go team!

And what, pray tell, do you imagine the cloud stores data on? Turtles?

(emphasis mine)

Yes, I'm glad we have rediscovered what it means to find an "average". [facepalm]

As long as you don't need a camera that fits in your pocket, a low-end DSLR is probably exactly what you're looking for. Even a lowly $400 Nikon D3100 has a sensor size and resolution that camera fanatics could only dream about 15 years ago. And if that's out of your price range, you can do much better shopping refurb or used equipment (I paid ~ $250 for a D40x two years ago when I was in a similar situation as you).

Why DSLR? Because it (1) has a big sensor and (2) compatibility with hundreds of lenses. Bigger sensor = more light captured = easier to take good photos with less skill. And even the low end Nikon lenses give pretty good results with the new VR (vibration reduction) feature. Seriously, my photo quality went way up when I ditched the cheap pocket cam. I'll never go back.

Get an 18-55mm lens (probably will come with the camera) and a 55-200mm lens (around $120 online), and you'll be set for just about anything except low-light and indoor sports photography.

In terms of brands, I went with Nikon just because I was familiar with them, but the Canon stuff is functionally equivalent.