...moving us closer and closer to psychohistory.

Congratulations to the real winners of last nights race: Nate Silver, Sam Wang, Intrade and all the other "Quants" (statisticians) who never characterized this election as "close" or a "tossup," but stuck to their Bayesian models predicting Obama as a heavy favorite. If their predictions were wrong, they would be looking for new jobs today, but the hiney hobbit pundits who characterized these brilliant nerds as "effeminate UnAmerican eggheads" will pathetically deflect responsibility for their own failed predictions this morning--but the nerds know the score. Science works bitches.

Just to add to this, the shipping and handling is actually the source of profit for many companies on Amazon. I personally knew the owner of a company that sells $0.99 computer games on Amazon, but charges $5.99 shipping on them, which turns into a $5-plus profit on each game sold. I recently fell for this tactic when I bought a copy of the Hulk Video Game for $3.96 and got charged $4.59 in shipping. This is also the case with many used-book sellers on Amazon, who sell the book for a dollar, charge you five in shipping, and then send it using the library book rate, which only costs them pennies.

Someone else in this thread mentioned that NC does not have a tax on services, which might be why the company I knew was located there.

No. I haven't read that one and neither of you since Peter and the Wolf is a 1936 classical composition by Sergei Prokofiev, where the boy beats the wolf at the end and rescues his animal friends.

I believe what you meant to refer to is the Aesop fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf .

Thanks for playing though.

Following up on your "serious note" part, I did a review of the peer-reviewed literature concerning the beneficial and inconsequential effects of meditation from the perspective of a rational secular skeptic. Some studies have found no benefits, but the majority of them do find mindfulness meditation, as opposed to other forms of meditation, does improve brain plasticity, increase novel thinking, and greatly improves the sense of well-being. This really seems to be something we should work into our lives like physical fitness and eating healthy.

One of my martial arts teachers always instructed me to focus my gaze on my opponent's solar plexus so that I could see what their legs and arms were doing in the peripheral vision and to never move the gaze from that point so as not to telegraph my intention with my eyes. Kick boxing ended up being probably the most important class I ever took in my life. It taught me to never get in a fight.

Mental retardation is an actual medical term which is subject to the Euphemism Treadmill effect, where over time a term becomes an insult in common usage and the professionals have to find a new word that doesn't have the baggage associated with it to maintain professional integrity (Similar to the reason we call them "Bathrooms" today instead of "Water Closets" or "Toilets" as the two latter terms became too crude through common usage). Don't blame "political correctness" on this, blame crass people like Anne Coulter who use the medical term in a derogatory sense towards those who don't have the disability without any sensitivity to those who must actually live with the condition.

Replace the word "Retard' with "AIDS carrier," "Cancer Survivor," or "Quadriplegic" and try making the argument that the offense people take to your use of these terms to disparage others is just "political correctness." The reason you don't use these terms as insults is because these are human beings who can fight back. "Retard" is okay because the mentally retarded can't defend themselves. Coulter is a bully and a coward for using the term and defending its use.

People like Coulter who call the backlash against their use of these words "political correctness" do so because the word "ignorant" applies to them. They are ignorant of the suffering of others, ignorant of medical science, and ignorant of basic good taste. I used the world "retard" as an insult when I was a child, but I'm an adult now and I am educated enough to know how abusing that word abuses those who are living with this debilitating condition.

My wife and I attended the Reason Rally on the National Mall this year, which was billed as a positive expression of non-theistic secular thought. We met many wonderful people there and were truly inspired by Adam Savage's incredibly positive and inspiring speech on the wonders of science, Nate Phelps remarkably eloquent denunciation of his father's Westboro Baptist Church, and your own speech highlighting the absurdity of having to hold such a rally at all; however, I we were also incredibly put off by vitriol on display by so many other speakers who were entirely focused on the evils of religion rather than the good science and rationality brings to civilized life. We ended up leaving the rally in the middle of PZ Meyer's speech because we found it so distressing in its Rush Limbaugh-esque tone.

It bothers me that so many of us define ourselves by what we don't believe rather than what we do. As Carolyn Porco elucidated so concisely at a talk you were involved in, I am not an atheist, I am a scientist. Like Carl Sagan, I get a profound sense of spirituality from science that I want to desperately for everyone in the world to open their own eyes and discover.

My attempts to get people to read your book The God Delusion were met with strong resistance, people were very turned off to its tone, but those same individuals loved your book The Magic of Reality . As someone who has pursued both the strategy of being highly critical of religion in one work, while apparently softening that criticism in your latter work in exchange for focusing on the wonders of the natural world, could you speak to pros and cons of these different strategies of persuasion, not just in your own work but in the efforts of others like Adam Savage and PZ Meyers?

Thank you so much for your taking the time to interact with us on /.! This really is an exciting development and an honor.

This is a very important finding, and something people need to be aware of, but I also want to add another variable to the equation: part of the reason women don't command higher salaries is because they don't demand higher salaries. I don't want to take the sexist position that women need to act more like men to achieve salary equality, but I do get extremely frustrated by the fact that my female peers seem to lack the will to fight for equal pay. My father had to coach my mother into demanding a higher salary when she got a job as a professor. I've had to coach my sister to ask for higher pay, and I've done the same for female coworkers, where I have even taken them aside and told them my salary to see their eyes bug-out and then get angry at the injustice of our different pay-scales.

Yes, women and men discriminate against women concerning salaries and capabilities. It's scientifically proven, and it's something we all need to be cognizant of so we can work for a just society; however, women also need to stop allowing themselves to be discriminated against. I have seen many women go from unequal pay to getting what they deserve simply by having some self-confidence in their value to the company and demanding their worth when the opportunity arises to ask for it. If the boss still refuses, sue the discriminatory #$%@.

That being said. I think the book that best matches what you are looking for is Prothero's " Evolution, What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters ," which goes species by species where we have very good fossile records and explains why we know what we know. Coyne's " Why Evolution is True " is very popular, but might not be as in-depth as what you seem to be looking for.

Of course, there's always Richard Dawkins and Carl Zimmer's many books, of which my favorite is his Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins , which focuses just on recent human evolution.

I think what you should do is what I find myself in need of at times like this: go to a big book store or library and spend an hour flipping through the various books on evolution until you find one or more that really speak to you.

Good luck with your quest!

There really isn't one tomb that will give you all of that. You have to follow the research where you find it. Here's a blogpost to get you started. It serves as a jumping-point to learning about the multitude of aspects of evolution, allowing you to go deeper into what specifically interests you, whether it's chains of fossils, DNA, or strata.

I agree. This is @#$%ing offensive. My wife and I are software developers and she is a million times the better coder than I, she is very attractive, and she was the lead developer at her last company, where she eventually decided to quit because of self-absorbed idiots like the author of this article who were constantly getting heart-bubbles for her and later putting her down when they learned she was out of their league. Today, years later, that same company pays her an exorbitant hourly rate to maintain their code because those same idiot developers can't program worth a damn, but they still try to make themselves feel better by sending her snotty emails criticizing the code she writes (that they could not write themselves).

The intended audience for this piece are the same guys who read and believe Penthouse Forum. It's exactly this kind of delusional mindset that make the IT department in so many companies intolerable to deal with. I'm embarrassed see this make Slashdot, but maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

The fact that all the direct download links appear to be overrun, but the Torrent works fine is a strong argument for why Torrenting isn't in and of itself piracy.

This article should be required reading for kids today. This is an issue I find myself wrestling with from time to time. I spent two years wasting time in Star Trek Online with the purpose of wasting that time. It was a pretty game and I decided this was where I was going to grind away in thoughtless leveling-up--and it was brainless, repetative nonsense. I basically voluntarily put myself in a Skinner Box, holding down the "fire" button while runing around for hundreds of hours in order to get that little hit of dopamine each virtual reward of experience points brought me. Finally, I decided it was time to just uninstall the damn thing and walk away from it incomplete (not that it could ever be completed).

That one was voluntary, when Skyrim came along, I got sucked in again, playing heavily for several months before my family and job responsibilities forced me to shelve it for six months. I recently started it up again long enough to complete the main quest, and that felt like a chore. The months of not playing broke the spell, so that I didn't feel connected and invested in the rewards anymore. Why the @#$% would I spend hours saving to buy a virtual house or read a hundred vitual books about a virtual world when I've got the real thing to work on here? Skyrim was epically beautiful, but so is a weekend hike in the mountains.

Gaming is an important, healthy activity. It increases mental alertness and improves reaction times. I think all kids should play video games--or rather, play the right kinds of video games. My new rule for games is no more "forever" games like MMORPGs and Skyrim. I'm currently looking for a new game, and the most important characteristic is that it that it take <=20 hours to complete. I'll pay $20 to see a two hour movie with my wife, so $50 enjoying 20 hours of Portal II is a bargain.