Numbers found by a brief search indicate ~60% (anywhere from 45% to 75% depending on age and obesity) for a human body, and ~80% for a potato. So you could probably get away with a potato sack smaller than a human, but it's a decent approximation either way.

When we think reality is confusing, that's a fact about us rather than about reality - QM (or whatever the actually true laws of physics turn out to be) got here first, has always been in force, and has created that "normal" looking world we're all so used to. A severely curtailed approximate model was good enough to locate ripe fruit and throw rocks at each other, so that's what we find intuitive, but we're the weird ones - imagining the universe operating on the basis of tiny little billiard balls bopping about when that's not even close.

Put briefly: Quantum mechanics isn't weird, you're weird.

Cubits. Probably.

Unless the going theory is that Intel wants to piss off a big chunk of the market for their shiniest "Extreme edition" type CPUs (and expects to make more money by making their offering less consumer-friendly), I have to assume that they're doing this for reasons of techical limitation.

Don't know enough to speculate what the limit would be, but it doesn't seem to make sense otherwise.

I'm idly wondering whether there's the slightest possibility (with sufficient applied phlebotinum) of being able to burn natural gas while leaving the carbon behind - derive energy only from H + O2 => H2O. Probably violates the laws of physics somewhere though; I can't see how you'd be able to allow oxygen to steal away the hydrogen without also reacting with the carbon.

If we're thinking of the same organisation, it's "Hamas". The S is part of the acronym and it doesn't get capitalised anywhere I've seen. Upshot, the rockets belonging to Hamas would be Hamas', or possibly Hamas's rockets, depending on your preference for possessive nouns where the singular already ends with an S.

No criticism intended, just information.

Actually I'm from the UK, but we have the same problems with FPTP - 2 major parties, ostensibly on opposite sides of the left/right divide, but with not all that much daylight between them. Well, three parties that get sensible percentages of the seats, but only two with a shot at an outright majority.

I think it's fairly established that FPTP normally favours a 2 party set-up. Canada may just be an oddity on this one, or it could be in the process of settling out to 2 major parties yet. I know nothing of Canadian politics though; has the makeup of your parliament generally been getting more diverse or more concentrated recently?

From what I understand the normal track is for small parties (or those that have their support spread thinly and evenly across voting regions) to gradually lose favour because they "don't have a chance", until only two remain. You then really can't blame people for voting 2-party, it's the rational choice to maximise your effect on the result.

May not be the best way to maximise your effect on policy though (every third-party vote being a message to their rivals of "Be more like this guy", so there is that. If Canada has a tradition of coalitions, could be that despite FPTP, people know which "half" they're voting for, and can influence policy better by picking a party specifically. Again, speculating for lack of knowledge; would that make sense?

Of course not, but if you predict a whole bunch of things and say you're assigning 50% probability to them, you should expect (approximately) 50% of them to occur. If events don't match your expectations, you should modify your expectations.

i.e. If more than 50% of those events occurs, then either you were less confident in your predictions than you should have been, or it's a fluke and your success rate will tend back towards 50% in the long run. That's what's meant by calibration.

Are you really having trouble understanding that replying to someone and opening with "This", is a simple shorthand for some position located between "I agree", "this is correct" and "that's good advice"? It's just an expression of agreement, in a single word so as not to be excessively verbose to the length of saying "Oh yes, I quite agree with you. That's an excellent idea you have there, now if I might also suggest an extension to that thought"

Pretty sure if you replaced all occurrences of "This." with "I agree." it'd mean more or less the same thing, it's purely a new idiom, language evolving towards brevity, as well as favouring reference over re-stating.

Important distinction - "A party that wanted for him to lose" vs "A party that wanted nothing more than for him to lose".

When "make sure the other guy loses" is the over-riding objective, above any other goal, you stop doing things that would make sense if you wanted to get anything done, because getting things done might make the other guy look good. You stop doing things that would make sense to advance your own (original) agenda, where it overlaps with the other guy, because agreeing with the other guy makes him look good and might allow him to achieve something.

It turns everything into a game of tribal warfare - no compromise, no co-operation, just blind hate and contrarian obstruction. Being anything so long as it puts the other guy down or makes his life difficult. That's pretty much the impression I get of a good chunk of the republican party for the last 4 years, and thankfully it hasn't proved to be a winning strategy. If all you had to do to win an election was to block everything the incumbent tries to do (then lambast him for never doing anything), then the USA would be stuck fruitlessly spinning its gears forever.

Maybe now that's been shown to be a dud they'll start working for the common good of the people being governed, rather than treating ideas (and laws) as soldiers in an imaginary war. Maybe. That is perhaps optimistic though; equally likely they double down on the obstructionist crap, especially given how much the far right has supplanted the centre right.

Hmm, actually first they would need to release second installments in all their other series as The Orange Box 2, then they can put part 3 of every-damn-thing in The Orange Box 3.

And it'll be released on 3/3/33

The weird part is that Valve actually do turn out a lot of games - about 1 a year pretty consistently for the last decade. They don't seem to have a problem with making and shipping things in general, just that one game in particular. Maybe they're caught in the trap of trying to beat expectations against a background of continually rising expectations.

At this point, there's a part of me that's expecting to see the third installment of everything from Valve all come out on the same day. Would explain why HalfLife 2 Ep 3 took so long if they had to wait to also have Team Fortress 3, Portal 3, Left4Dead 3 and DOTA 3 in the pipe and ready to go.

That said, it's not a big piece of me that's actually expecting that though. About 1/3.

Surely in handing over responsibility for managing that complexity, you also hand over control of what could be intensely critical components of your business. They may do a perfectly good job at a lower cost, but in the (hopefully infrequent) event that the shit hits the fan, the job of fixing it is out of your hands and out of your control and that ought to be scary.

I don't know. Maybe it makes enough sense in the bulk of cases to be a good plan, but the risk of having your entire infrastructure yanked out from under you because of a black swan event or just a regular-grade fuck-up at an unrelated company sounds like something best avoided.

You can decide not to allow your friends to post on your wall. It likely wouldn't occur to you that you need to do so in the name of keeping some specific secret, but you can, in theory, control who is allowed to post there. There's not even a theoretical option to prevent people adding you to groups.