If it doesn't work, it only has a B.S. in Physics

I've never understood what was supposed to be more "user friendly" about looking several inches over on the screen to figure out what kind of file you're looking at. It's possible, I suppose, that most people are either still not accustomed to the standard file types--and therefore need the long descriptions over in that column--or just don't mind the clunky design. Then again, I think the default display type for Windows is still "Large Icons," isn't it? With that view, I really don't even know how people keep their unrecognized-type files apart, other than perhaps memorizing their icons and re-learning them whenever they install a new program.

The way a person interacts with a computer (that they'll use for any length of time) is very much an individual preference, possibly as much as the seat and mirror positions in a car. Maybe even more so. One of the first things any of us does when we set up a new system for our own use is to go in and set up the preferences we are used to using, making up the aliases we're accustomed to use, and so on. And then we largely forget about it.

Perhaps scientists are also trying to avoid the negative connotations of the words "animal experimentation" out of fear for having their labs destroyed, houses firebombed, or so on. I don't know if that alone would stop the sort of people who commit those kinds of crimes, but it might just garner public sympathy (or at least stop propagating the negative images of researchers who use animals).

I'd suggest that a more appropriate example would be laetrile, if we're talking about people exporting their health care. People went to Mexico for that one, despite that it is apparently ineffective for treating cancer. Those people paid plenty of money and put their health at (further) risk for something unlikely to provide any benefit. Even undergoing currently accepted chemotherapy regimens is placing one's health at risk--but there is generally expected to be a benefit that outweighs that risk, since we have confidence that our chemotherapy regimens can actually provide that benefit.

Laypeople are not and really can't be expected to be health care experts, in general, and so it's somewhat unreasonable to expect that the average person is sufficiently knowledgeable to solely determine what kind of treatment will be effective for his major illnesses. That is one of the reasons we have medical doctors and researchers, after all. Health and health care have a connection that is so nebulous that it's very difficult to make informed choices without well-organized bodies, ones which do, compile, and disseminate the kind of intensive research necessary to provide the information that enables people to make sound medical choices.

Simply because there is a market for fake cancer cures, for instance, does it then become ethical to let people exploit that market and make money off of the completely natural ignorance of the lay public? However, it'd be hard to stop people from going to Mexico to get these "cures," so I guess perhaps we have to ask ourselves--assuming that we can't dissuade people from wanting these fake cures--if we would rather have them getting them in the States or in Mexico. Honestly, that's a dimension of the problem I hadn't really thought of until I was writing this comment today.

My comment was more along the lines of asking if becoming rich really turns a person into a sophomoric frat boy, or if it's possible that type of person will do well in the Wall Street club anyhow. Regardless, I don't think it's necessarily that we can simply say that "becoming rich makes people into wall-pissing douchebags" or that everyone has some kind of "douchebag price" that tips them over into a socially irresponsible idiot once they've made it. The article seems to imply that these people were "corrupted" by the money, whereas it could've been that they were simply enabled to act in that way because of the general laxity of attitudes brought about by their prosperity. I mean, sure, it's easy to see that if you're finally making enough money to hire a housekeeper, then anyone might care a bit less about splashing up on the rim, but that's not really what went on here.

This is what $2 million of bonus can do to grown men.

I wanted desperately to try to argue that perhaps the kind of person who can position himself to make that kind of money is simply the kind of person who would be amenable to literal pissing contests and so on, rather than money itself changing what were previously normal people.

Well, if you do manage to invent the nuclear damper and accelerate the 1/2 life decay of carbon-14, let me know. I can think of a lot of people who'd be interested in forcing accelerated decay of stuff like plutonium.

Under certain conditions the half-lives of beta-emitters (of which class C-14 is a member) have been reduced in the lab. A quick search of Google produced a Health Physics Society letter that points us towards Bosch et al, "Observation of Bound-State (Beta)- Decay of Fully Ionized 187Re: 187Re-187Os Cosmochronometry", Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 5190 - 5193 (1996).

Of course it requires fully ionizing the radioactive atom, and perhaps the reduction in half-life wouldn't be significant for a light atom like C-14, so you're not going to spoof the age of your beverages with this technique.

(From the same source, electron capture decay can be accelerated by placing atoms inside buckyballs, which basically pushes the shell electrons closer to the nucleus and increases the likelihood of capture. Of course, that requires putting atoms inside buckyballs.)

Well, let's drill down through it.

Optical: uses light
Time domain: travel time
Reflect: uses reflections
Meter: measures something

So we have a thing that sends out a pulse of light and measures how long it takes to return after reflecting off the other end of the fiber.

Working with these things in undergrad was neat. You'd have to have a good bit of a spool of fiber sitting there in order to get useful signal times for the sort of simple (undergrad) stuff we'd do with it. It feels a little silly, since you could have your "break" and your entry point a foot apart, and then you have to make the light bounce down all those meters of fiber.

Oh crap it's spreading!

http://www.spamusement.com/

Not really a webcomic, not really updated any longer, and I'm unsure if it's completely safe for work.

Considering how quickly and effectively we managed to slashdot this helpful site, It's pretty obvious that we are the worms.

So, wait, this isn't a Russia-USA cold war, it's an Earth Governments-Astronaut cold war?

Or is it a cold war three-way: USA-Russia-Astronauts?

And that folks, is the difference between NASA-cam and your average gas-station-cam, which, on average, can't identify Bigfoot if it were robbing the place.

Clearly this just means that people on crime shows will just sent the gas-station footage to NASA, so that they can blow it up and see Bigfoot. Problem solved.

Yeah, I realize that. The problem is that I don't run the servers. I join them, and if I ever join a server that's down by one or two people it seems to always be one or two reserved slots.

I mean, I'm not going to quit playing or anything, but it'd be nice if Valve would realize that people have been using admin plugins to do this kind of stuff since--what? The Quake 2 days? It seems like just the kind of thing they would implement into their otherwise intelligent server browser system. Then again, the reason the plugins exist is because the games don't have features like voting and ranking and stuff that people want. It's really extremely bizarre. For all the other innovations that Valve pushes, they don't have these basic features that most modern FPSes have. And they've shown that they can roll out changes to all their Source-engine games at once.