Wheels only work if they jive with the surface. The wheel-surface combo is the machine -- your car tires wouldn't be so handy if not for roads -- and this is hardly simple. Or this.

An aside: Why do polls always ask for your favorite option? How about voting for a least-favorite, and then the least least-favorite wins? That's my preferred way to choose a restaurant ("I don't care which we go to, so long as it's not barbecue..."). I'd rather nobody be unhappy than two people be thrilled.

You raise a common question: why not look for life as we do not know it? Why are we looking for something so darn Earth-like?

Yes, life could exist elsewhere. There are soooo many possibilities. I mean, we seem pretty distance-from-the-star-centric, but even on Earth some critters aren't solar-energy dependent! Did you know Jupiter radiates more heat than it gets from the sun?

But basically, here's why we're looking for Earth-like planets:
Big gas giants are 0 for 4 on having life (that we know of)
Objects that do not revolve around a star: 0 for many
Small rocky planets: 1 for 4
Rocky Earth-sized planets that are 0.9-1.1 AU from a medium-sized star: 1 for 1

We have limited resources, so we are forced to narrow our scope. Narrowing our sights based on the few dozen studied objects in our solar system... it's easy to mock, but what else can we do? We can (1) keep searching through our own solar system to ameliorate some of the "sampling bias," and (2) look for rocky Earth-sized planets that are 0.9-1.1 AU from a medium-sized star. And that's pretty much what we're doing.

Climate Change is furious at your disbelief! Climate Change rages, shaking in thunderous fury!

(I think you were looking for anthropogenic...)

Many people here are (correctly) deriding ADHD as being an ill-defined "disorder" vaguely attributed to recalcitrant students. That seems to be exactly the issue the EEG scans are trying to address.

From TFA: "...hopes will help doctors diagnose attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) more objectively..."

To use a polemical and simple example, imagine a time before trisomy 21 (aka Down's Syndrome) was understood. Then instead of understanding a cause (trisomy 21), we had to rely on symptoms (mental retardation). You can't take a symptom and pretend it's a cause. Mental retardation is ill-defined and has many potential causes, and lumping all "mentally retarded" people together is disingenuous. If mental retardation were treated like ADHD is today, then anyone who did poorly in school would be labeled mentally retarded and given a prescription, some pills, a stigma, and a glass ceiling.

We should welcome even small steps towards objectivity and causation for ill-defined diagnoses like ADHD.

Surely lots of people make house rules to certain games, no? And isn't that a game "you weren't intended to play?"

My buddy and I still play the 17-year-old Super Mario Kart regularly, but the game's evolved with a ton of house rules. Some exampes:
1 - If you get a ghost, you have to either steal the opponent's current item or the very next one, but you can't just hold onto it waiting for a red shell.
2 - If you get a banana, you can yell "GAME!" and the other player has to stop. Then you position yourself, and try to hit him by throwing the banana.
3 - If you have one hit left, your opponent has all three, and you get a green shell...

This wasn't the game the designers necessarily had in mind, but it's the game we like. Ghosts are too powerful. Bananas are too boring. So we tweak the rules.

TFA mentions Easter eggs rather than house rules. Easter eggs just can't be what they were before; the internet makes it too easy to learn everything about a game. There's no way the new Zelda will have a secret room that nobody knows about for years, but ~10 years went by before I found out about the secret room in Zelda for SNES. You just can't have secrets like that in popular games anymore.

Actions can only determine social class in meritocratic cultures.

If this was a caste culture, then cosmetics might have made someone more important within their class, but... an Untouchable cannot become a Brahmin. Perhaps Jimenez meant that the cosmetics were not indicative of any particular social class.

From TFA:
"Give participants the tools to mold a game into an ideal form, and they'll quickly use them to generate so-called min-max exploits that produce the fastest possible experience or in-game wealth for the least effort possible."

Once you give participants the tools to mold a game, then "molding the game" becomes a meta-game. And the goal is obviously to exploit loopholes in the original game as much as possible. It's just too bad the meta-game-playing folk conflict with the original-game-playing folk.

If we want people to use less gas, why not just raise the darn price?

There are times and places for government regulation, but requiring a minimum fuel efficiency? If the goal is to reduce greenhouse gases, then fuel efficiency is just a half-assed proxy for fuel consumption.

42 mpg x 20 mile commute each day is a lot more fuel consumptive than 20 mpg x occasional grocery trip.

And what qualifies as a "car" and what as a "light truck" and "SUV," all of which have their separate regulations? What a mess.

People respond to their pocketbooks. In this case, it's easy to align people's incentives with the goals we want to achieve: Make gas expensive.

The disparity between polar north and magnetic north is exactly what led the researchers to conclude that the cattle are EMF sensing. From the 2008 paper:

"To test the hypothesis that cattle orient their body axes along the field lines of the Earth's magnetic field, we analyzed the body orientation of cattle from localities with high magnetic declination. Here, magnetic north was a better predictor than geographic north."

By that definition, why not count your sense of humor?

Only recently have we realized that cows and deer have a sense of magnetic direction. Just this month, the same group found that power lines can muddle the cattle's sense of direction.

It's a stretch, but is it possible we humans have a weak magnetic sense that's simply drowned out by urban noise?

Surely there have been studies on this. Anyone?

Okay, instead of the dog example, try the canonical example of a 'ring species': these California salamanders. In that case, A and C cannot interbreed, and neither can their gametes.

I'm saying that going back in time shows how arbitrary the species concept is. At one point, we and chimps shared a common ancestor. Then we went our separate ways, and are now considered two species. 5 million years ago, we were one species. Now, we're two species. Where do you draw the line?

I'm genuinely curious: what other definitions do you use? (I'm a grad student in evo bio.)

We're pretty much on the same page. I just lean towards the Jung/collective unconscious camp of myths, rather than the retelling of historical events. But hey, I've seen sand dollars in the Sahara, and a catastrophic flood sure fits the bill.

Good link on Aboriginal mythology! Didn't know any of that. Thanks.

Reading over my own post, you're right: I did sound like I think myths have no value. What I mean is:
I think myths tell us more about ourselves than about the physical world around us.