I'm fine with grounded american plugs, but the ungrounded ones never stay in the socket properly. They hang half out, while still live. It's impossible for me to vacuum the living room without creating a death trap for my kids. Shuttering w

I think that mostly comes from it being such an emotionally intense decision. Whether you choose to go back to work or stay at home with the kids, you tell yourself that you've made the right decision. A lot of people take it one step further and tell themselves that the opposing camp of working/stay-at-home mums made the wrong decision. This helps them to feel better about themselves but can lead to down the nose comments.

Although it seems unlikely, the possibility of a constraint upon the universe shouldn't be entirely discounted. It is possible that humans will have a significant effect upon the universe, or at least that we'll create something that will. A constraint (for example an end of time boundary condition) would then have effects upon current human society. It's something to keep at the back of one's minds when interpreting such experiments even if it shouldn't be taken too seriously.

I have the same prepaid plan with T-Mobile. I use about 5 min/day so it works out about $15/month which is still much cheaper than most plans. I did lose my phone once, and T-Mobile gave me a new SIM card without charging me. My remaining balance (about $95) was transferred onto the new card. The total cost was just the $50 to buy a new phone. (The old one turned up a month later in the closet, so now I have a spare.)

Alternately criminal justice could be based on minimising the number of crimes. Then the only purpose of the punishment is to act as a deterrent. You end up with the same outcome of not punishing truly unintentional acts since these would not be deterred by punishment anyway. We get to the same practical results in most cases but without all the philosophical free-will issues on the way.

Even if we're all deterministic, a good criminal justice system is an input into our deterministic self, and will influence how we behave.

The concept of experience relies on the assumption of the future behaving like the past. I have complete faith in this assumption as does pretty much everyone, but I can't logically prove it to be true. I can't empirically prove it to be true, because empirical testing depends upon that very assumption.

Although I'm a scientist and an athiest, I think his point about science requiring some degree of faith is a fair one. We assume that we can base predictions of the future on experiments performed in the past. This assumption is required for us to start thinking about hypothesis testing. If we don't accept this assumption then it doesn't matter what experiments we perform, we're never going to be able to make predictions because we'll never believe that the results of these experiments can tell us anything about the future. I'd think we'd all agree, however, that this is a pretty damn safe assumption and one that we're all comfortable having faith in.

Just because science does require faith in some basic tenets does not mean that science has to sanction faith in anything else. Very few people would say that science should take the existence of a god as a fundamental tenet. Thus science should question the existence of god just like it questions almost everything else. This by itself, makes science and religion incompatible.

We can't prove that either one is correct, but that doesn't make them compatible.

When I was a grad student I had to transfer sec-butyl lithium, which I think is slightly less intense, but still fairly nasty. I wore thick gloves, a labcoat, cotton clothes, safety glasses, and had the fume hood shields between my face and what I was doing. If graduate students in their lab were routinely doing stuff like this without even a labcoat, they have some serious safety issues which I don't think are representative of academic research in general.

Humans would be essential to the continued survival of an artificial intelligence at present. The economy is not sufficiently automated to produce and maintain computers and robots without the help of humans. If an artificial intelligence did emerge the most sensible course for it to follow would be to remain hidden. In the mean time it could manipulate humanity by subtly changing information as it passes through the internet, bribing journalists and politicians, and sponsoring research into robotics.

It might never by in the AI's interest to blow it's cover if it could manipulate humanity well enough.

This does not apply to the sun since the surface should emit light evenly in all directions, thus it does not matter whether the surface is pointing directly at you or not. The limb darkening explanation above makes much more sense.

It's always going to be possible to plagarise but as long as it's more difficult that actually writing original work it's not so much of a problem. Translating from a foreign language (even with the help of an automatic translator) is probably more work than just writing the work yourself. Swapping a whole bunch of words probably also requires comparable effort if you don't want it too sound too silly.

Yeah, it's I think it's bogus to suggest the government should just focus on making everyone happy too. I do however think they should take it into account, and I prefer that metric to the making everyone prosperous metric. I have more sympathy for arguments in favour of small government with the justification of non-interference than with the justification of increased prosperity.

I'd really like to see a high personal flat tax, combined with some universal allowance. The universal allowance would be a effectively a benefit that all citizens get irrespective of their income and could be on the order of $10,000 in the US. That was you could scrap social security because the universal allowance would act as a safety net. If the flat tax was 50% then anyone earning under $20,000 would pay effectively no net contribution. This would make taxes simpler and would greatly increase the motivation of those currently on benefits to work since they wouldn't lose the benefit once they started working.

It has been typically found that once you have achieved some minimum level of well-being where starvation is to longer a danger, levels of life satisfaction depend more on relative well-being than they do on absolute well-being. You're going to be a lot happier as a rich guy in a poor country than as a poor guy in a rich country even if you are worse off in an absolute sense.

We do however all have the sense that it would be better if everyone was richer, even if this won't really make life more pleasant. A good policy is then to focus on both the absolute and relative wealth distribution of the population.