do you think that once, just once, an article could mention error bars? Please? This comic pretty much summarizes how much I trust articles like this: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Millimeter waves bounce off of water. Your skin is the first water the waves encounter as they are bounced off of you. It's just a way to get a picture of you naked.

My dog does this... he tears apart yarn, eats it, and eventually it comes out the other end.

The cool thing is that in astronomy, we're still miles from having full sky coverage 24/7. This means that even if you have a (relatively) small telescope, you can still see things the big ones can't just by looking somewhere no one else is at a particular time.

I wish they described how the discovered got funneled up to the supernova scientists on the paper published on it. She must have been with someone who really knew that the "new star" she saw there wasn't supposed to be there, and that person deserves some credit, too!

I'm a scientist who does the bulk of his programming in Python. Numpy (the numerical package for Python) runs at only a 30% overhead over C. When that's not fast enough, I drop into C/C++ for bottlenecks and wrap that back into Python (using the Python C API more often than swig/boost). When there's a great Fortran library that's fast and battle tested, I wrap that into Python using F2Py--and I don't even know that much Fortran.

Just like it's good to know more than one spoken language, it's good to know more than one programming language. It's a mistake to think one programming language fits all needs. That said, it can also be helpful to know one really well, and others enough to convert them into your primary language. For me, Python fills that role very adequately, and I would highly recommend it be a part (read: part) of the undergraduate programming curriculum.

A driving force in evolution (linguistic and otherwise) is isolation. Population isolation allows for a subgroup to drift from the global average by preventing the dilution of mutated genes (or memes) into the larger population. Historically, much linguistic evolution can be attributed to the isolation of communities from one another, and this evolution has contributed to the regularization of verbs, as well as the introduction of new irregularities borrowed from neighboring languages, etc. But now, with global communication, language standardization, and a much heavier reliance on the written word, might not the ways in which language evolves change? Global communication adds a lot of inertia to a language (although it does increase cross-breeding between languages). I think it is bold (and inaccurate) to extrapolate from past linguistic mutations to the future in the light of the fundamental changes that have occurred in communication.