This sounds like a reasonable goal. If my upstairs neighbors' kid is any indication, all this toddler-bot needs to be able to do is stomp around, slam into walls, and scream at random intervals.

This isn't really news. I'm pretty sure marine animals have learned to come up on land in search of food at least once or twice before in the past.

I wouldn't be surprised if the mayor and council or DPW chief of some small town arranged to have their water tower wired by some lowest-bid contractor just to show off to other local small towns. "Your town installed halogen street lamps in the commercial district? Well mine just put our water supply on the 'information superhighway'! Check it out, the password is '1-2-3-4' . . ."

Should we use these to decant Alphas or Epsilon semi-morons?

Did NASA's space network immediately encounter an existing alien network and go mad?

Math students don't memorize their sine and cosine tables anymore, law students can barely speak Latin, and these young hot-shot doctors barely know a leech from a hole in the ground! But the real trouble started when they put one of those fancy schmancy crank-operated pencil sharpeners in every classroom. When I was in school we sharpened our pencils with a small knife and it worked just fine. Guess these kids are too lazy to do a little whittling.

My younger brother has been looking for work for nearly 5 years. These "personality tests" and automated application systems are incredibly frustrating. Business managers won't talk to you, they just send you to their the web site to apply for a posted job. After half an hour of vague, logically inconsistent questions you've "applied" for the job. Nobody calls, nobody emails, and if you follow-up with the store they just shrug. And that's if you're lucky enough to be allowed to apply. Some web sites pre-screen you based on a few questions and actually prevent you from applying for the job at all.

Its frustrating for my brother and frustrating to watch. He's caught in the no experience/no job feedback loop and now its being run by machines. Does it really cost a business $5000 in losses for a supervisor to spend a day showing a new hire how to work a register, push a broom, and sign in and out for the day?

Interesting article, cool that Valve went right to the mainstream traditional media with their announcement. But, it was kinda cute reading the author's descriptions of Portal and TF2. I guess the Times simply doesn't have anyone under 40 working for them. Apparently Team Fortress is a game about an evil company that sells its customers faulty products.

Imagine an article covering a sporting event written by someone similarly oblivious to what's going on:
"Members of the Yankees team run to and capture 'bases' as part of an elaborate reenactment focused on battlefield strategies deployed during the Civil War . . ."

NJ to Brooklyn by car: 45 minutes
NJ to Brooklyn by mass-trans: 2-2.5 hours

MTA and NJT actively hates its customers.

We all know that the mice will just get a bunch of cats to chase them and then lure them into the mine fields.

Remember when you were in school and bored? You'd look around the room or out the window for anything remotely distracting because you didn't understand or didn't care about what was going on in the classroom.

Welcome to the current state of science journalism.

The crater is in Hamilton County which is along the southern border of the eastern part of the state. Looking at a geologic map of the region, the county is sitting on rocks from somewhere between Cambrian and Ordovician in age (about 540-440Ma). However, the region's geography is dominated by a thrust-and-fold mountain belt that formed during the Alleghenian orogeny about 325-260Ma. The crater is undeformed so it has to post-date the collisional event. Its definitely less than 260Ma. Considering how symmetrical the crater is, its probably a lot younger but I can't find any sedimentary maps for the area.

Or, you could ask a local Tennessee student and s/he will tell you the crater was formed when God smote Satan 10,000 years ago.

Ugh.

All the more reason to promote science, empiricism, and rationalism. This is what happens when science is portrayed in schools as a list of facts, vocabulary words, and diagrams to memorize. It becomes perceived as more dogma, another belief system. This allows people to portray the issue as a choice between one belief system and another. And which version of reality are people going to choose? The one that requires thinking and math or the one that tells you you're the center of the universe? The answer is: you don't get to choose the version of reality you like best.

There is more to Nye's comments than "let your kids learn about evolution" and there is more to science than "will it run Perl scripts and what is its shear stress threshold?".

Evolutionary theory relies on a number of other systems and theories from a variety of fields outside the biosciences. Evolution relies on deep time, which is also fundamental to cosmology. The measurement of deep time is accomplished, among other methods, through radiometric dating. That only works if you understand nuclear physics and particle theory. And then there is mathematics that underly and support biology, physics, chemistry, etc. These are fundamental, unifying theories in their respective fields. The support columns of a single building. Knock out one and the rest are put under strain, susceptible to failure.

I wouldn't say "most Americans". There's just a very vocal minority out there that presents itself as representing the majority.