Of course not, no papers published at all. It's all part of the conspiracy, MAN! Because as we all know, scientists despise clean energy and grant money is given out in accordance with how much you don't do anything revolutionary. Fight the evil scientist cabal!

So why is a seven randomly-chosen word password, which would average in the ballpark of 50 characters, somehow less typo-prone than an abbreviation password a tiny fraction of its length for the same level of entropy?

The former being 13 characters long and the latter being about 50 characters long.
Make a sentence that abbreviates to 20 characters and it's more secure than your "7 random words and two punctuation marks" example. And probably a heck of a lot easier to memorize than seven random words and two random punctuation marks at random locations.

"Love is beautiful, like birds that sing." is more secure than "Lib,lbts". Why are you making your password less secure?

"Lib,lbts" is not brute-forceable in most contexts, and the concept of having to type in 40 characters every time you want log in is absurd. And if you don't think Lib,lbts is secure enough, then what about Lib,lbts.Linu,lriapov? It's a lot more secure than "Love is beautiful, like birds that sing" and takes half the time to type in, with half the risk of typos and all that comes with length.

There are better routes than "Correct Horse Battery Staple".

Think about how memory champions memorize arbitrary data: yes, it's visual, but it's not random words stuck together like "Correct horse battery staple", it's a meaningful scene, something you could describe with a sentence. Now, of course, that's too bulky to make a password. But you can deal with that easily - the easiest way is just take the first letter of each word, an abbreviation / acronym password. For the first sentence in my post, depending on how you apply the rules you may get something like tabrtchbs or Tabrt"CHBS" or the like.

Now, obviously on an attacker can reduce the search space with statistical analysis of sentences, but overall sentences yield an extremely random password - moreso than "Correct Horse Battery Staple", it's much shorter, and it's easier to memorize. And if the security of such a standard approach isn't good enough, you can apply your own extra rules, such letter substitutions, arbitrarily inserted characters, change the order of the word or what letter you pick from each word, etc.

Nah; it's not coming at all. It's here. And we're not gonna do a thing about it, so we'll just have to adapt. And migrate inland as our coastal areas slowly flood out.

Here in New England, one of the running jokes for the past decade or so has been for one person to ask what time the robins arrived this year, and another person says "They didn't return; they never left."

Actually, it is a bit more complicated than that. They're one of the many semi-migratory birds now. Part of the population heads south when it gets too cold. But we've seen robins in our yard (in a western suburb of Boston) every month of the year for about 10 years now, while before that, they were almost never seen in December, January or February. This was never exact, though, since their normal winter range did extend to around New York (and southern Nova Scotia ;-), and they were reported around Boston occasionally during warm winters. If you look in older bird books, you can see the robins' winter range ending somewhere south of us, depending on the book, while the current books show it extending to around the New Hampshire border.

But still, they're a locally obvious sign that the climate has shifted north by a hundred miles or so. And a casual search of the topic will make it clear that the US government and most of the population have no intention of doing anything serious to change the trend. The scientists have clearly pinned the blame on human activity, and the engineers point out that this means we now know how to control the climate if we want to. But we (collectively) don't want to.

(Then there's the local joke about all the folks in New Hampshire and Maine who think global warming sounds like a fine idea. Myself, I intend to plant a palm tree in our yard as soon as they become available in the nurseries, which may happen soon. ;-)

Heh. The example I like to use is to point out that killing one cow (or steer) means around 100 meals for a human, while eating a single slice of bread means you're responsible for the death of around 100 baby wheat plants (and probably a thousand living, breathing yeasts). Or: When you eat a hamburger, the meat part is entails less than .01 deaths, while the bread part caused the death of 100 to 1000 living creatures. So it's the vegetarians that are doing the real mass killing of prey.

Of course, this is a bit disingenuous, since the animal was probably fed on grains. But you can confuse this issue a bit by pointing out that cattle actually evolved as grazers mostly on the vegetative parts of their grassy "prey", not the seeds, and the plants can quickly regrow their leaves. Our feedlots are responsible for lots of deaths of little baby grains, true, but naturally-raised beef wouldn't do this. They do ingest at least a few of the seeds, so the issue isn't quite so clear, but it's basically accurate.

For some reason, people with ethical concerns about eating animals never seem to consider that plants are also living creatures. They seem to think that killing a single animal is something horrible, while there's nothing wrong with mass murder of baby grain plants. But you can confuse them a bit by talking about the plants as living creatures. Produce the image of an animal thousands of times our size, collecting our babies and tossing them alive into large hoppers, to be ground to a paste for the next meal. That's what we do to wheat plants. Hiding it in a grain mill doesn't change the fact.

Unfortunately, we're animals, and we can't get our food from the sun, air and dirt. To live, we must kill other living things and eat them. There are marginal cases, such as fruits that were evolved as animal food (to trick animals into transporting the seeds). But we humans can't live on fruit alone; we do have to kill other species for most of our food. This slightly complicates the moral and ethical issues.

Oh, hey, just looked it up. Seems that there's wide belief among the skeptics that it works based on a really simple trick: a rigged plug. Inside the plug he's got the ground wire swapped with a live wire. So inside the box he can at will make the power draw seem to disappear, because they're not measuring the ground wire. He's actually refused a million dollar prize from a skeptic who wanted to test his device in a way that would include measuring current from the ground wire. Funny, that. ;)

Also looks like in all of his previous incarnations there were no unusual isotopic concentrations measured in the ash. So funny that all of the sudden after facing that criticism his reactor changes how it works and starts outputting extremely enriched stuff in the "ash". Funny how that works. ;)

Publish what for review? This "paper" is not peer-reviewed, and would never pass peer review. And it doesn't take doing stuff behind their backs, their setup is so bad. And FYI, have you ever looked up Rossi's background? This is his third scam. His first landed him in jail, it was an "organic waste to oil" company that took the waste, illegally dumped it, and never made a drop of oil. His second was "20% efficient thermoelectric generators", which were anything but.

Just a random thought, the device could be profitting from distorting the phases on the AC supply. Multimeters designed to read AC power can give false readings when presented with a non-sinosoidal supply.

The papers' commentary about the nuclear "changes" seems really over the top, leaping on to the cosmological significance of lithium 7 depletion and the like. They don't describe how this ash materializes but it's quite possible that it's just a non-nuclear isotopic enrichment process. Another possibility is less pretty - that some parts were designed to specifically burn to ash, and these were made of enriched isotopes.

If it's so legitimate then why isn't this paper peer-reviewed and published in a legitimate scientific journal?

If it doesn't meet the standards of peer review, then it's hokum.
If it does, then either:
* They don't plan to publish (really? scientists who think they're on to something world changing but don't want it to be evaluated and accepted by the broader scientific community?)
* They plan to publish later but are going to the press first (an extremely bad practice that gets scorn heaped upon scientists)

The fact that you're seeing this without it having gone through peer review is not a confidence-building sign.

And they all stood on Newton's shoulders.

No, wait; Newton came after Euclides. So Newton must have stood on his shoulders.

The human pyramid is getting rather tall, and a bit top-heavy.

Is it really? I've always read of it being a conclusion, not a postulate. Maybe I should finally go dig up the original papers and see who's been getting it wrong all along.

(Not that doing so would likely effect much in the ongoing flame wars, uh, I mean serious scientific discussions about such things. ;-)

Sorry, 70s level tech is a still massive, massive, massive interconnected tech tree reaching across the globe with billions of people involved and billions of tonnes of industrial equipment involving over a hundred elements comprising hundreds of thousands of compounds used to produce tens of millions of types of industrial components.

Just think of the concept of a petrochemicals industry on Mars where you lack oil as an input - petrochemicals having a tremendous range of differing properties being one of the most fundamental aspects for modern space technology. Your first step has to be to make oil in the first place, which means freezing out CO2 from Mars's incredibly sparse atmosphere. You also have to spend a tremendous amount of energy electrolysing mined water ice (mining being a very resource-and-wear intensive process) to make hydrogen (which tends to embrittle the materials that work with it, and electrolysis itself is hardly a wear-free process - and we won't even get into the power aspect). Then you need to make town gas from a high temperature catalyst bed reaction (which you poison with time and have to regenerate, and repair the reactor itself). Then you have to turn the town gas into oil via fischer-tropsch, again, another high temperature catalyst bed reaction. But the chains from fischer-tropsch aren't going to be suitable for all products, so there's a number of other processes with various consumables. Then you've got your right mix of hydrocarbons, but that's hardly all you need, most petrochemical products aren't just carbon and hydrogen, there's chlorine, fluorine, and all sorts of other things to react with it in many different processes, nasty chemicals with long tails... it's just a tremendously, tremendously difficult task.

This stuff is very hard to do as-is on Earth with massive resources and international trade and billions of people. On Mars? No time soon, that's for sure...