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Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 54

Nope. The first anonymous coward is correct. Orbits do not suddenly change on their own. That would violate various conservation laws. The fact that an asteroid-mass object appears to have hit a pulsar means that something perturbed that astroid's orbit. This was probably an encounter with another asteroid.

Comment Re:Can someone who knows about astronomy fill me i (Score 1) 129

When Uranus was discovered the common pronunciation for the old Greek sky god's name was something akin to urine-us, which at the time was considered far more vulgar than the ur-anus pronunciation. Today it is the other way around. Who knows which pronunciation will be considered ruder (or more childish) a few centuries from now.

Comment What is a p Value? (Score 1) 182

A significant problem is that many of the people who quote p values do it without understanding what a p value actually means. Getting p = 0.05 does not mean that there is only a 5% chance that the model is wrong. That is one of the fundamental misunderstandings in statistics, and I suspect that it is behind a lot of the cases of scientific irreproducibility.

Comment Re:I'm not going through this again... (Score 1) 545

>These studies do aggree, however, that retailers prefer DST because it brings in more customers, traffic safety is improved because of more light for evening commutes

The improvement in evening traffic safety is offset by a corresponding decrease in morning traffic safety. Most of the safety studies that I have seen suggest that morning commutes are inherently more dangerous than evening commutes, probably because people are not fully awake. If this is the case, and safety is the primary reason for DST, then it would be better to have the daylight before work than after.

Comment Re:Relevance of theory to the real world is unknow (Score 2) 600

If one assumes that Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are correct, and there is no observational evidence that they are not, then Yang-Mills theory, or something very much like it, is inevitable. It arises from the need for conservation of the various charges each force.

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