If you had something hurtful happen this year then don't click on a big photo thing that says "year in review"?!

I haven't clicked on mine because I usually hate that crap from Facebook so I just ignore it... I wouldn't know if there was something hurtful in it or not....

This isn't true for me. I really don't give a rat's ass about "toxins" (that's WAY overblown) - but I generally buy organic. Why? Quality. I'm not directly talking about "taste" (although grass-fed beef _does_ taste different from corn fed... but both are good!). I'm talking about average _quality_ of the food: i.e. how fresh it is, how well it is packaged, how it has been processed (or not), etc.

Yes, if you have two cows that are both high quality and you raise one organically and one non-organically and process their meat in exactly the same way and get it to the market and then to my table in exactly the same way: they are going to taste similar. _However_ that's not what happens.

Organic farmers are usually closer to where their goods are sold. They also give a shit about their product and aren't just some huge conglomerate - and their food is processed in smaller batches where more care can be taken. This means that (on average) I get higher quality food when I buy organic. Fresher greens, fresher (and better cut) meat, better spices, fresher produce, etc.

This is the same reason why people like to shop at farmer's markets: better quality food straight from farms.

As for the actual topic here: I know a lot of people are doing the Vinyl thing because it's "in" right now... but many people are also discovering that they _like_ the color added by vinyl medium.. and that it suits their ears. I'm not one of those people (digital FTW!) - but I can understand it.

No. Design is just as important as getting the right answer. More projects fail from bad design then from not working properly (entropy overtakes them until they can't add new features users want or the bugs start to creep in as new features are added due to poor compartmentalization).

Math helps. It helps a ton. Being able to use givens and rearrange a known set of variables to get to an answer is definitely critical. BUT - there is more to creating good software.

Starting early on how to think abstractly and to generalize with good interfaces is key so starting with high schoolers is not a bad idea at all.

Uh...Philae was a European probe, not NASA. Your argument is invalid.

Gregory Benford had a great column about this, all the way back in 2000. It also involved a nuclear powered satellite.

It's human nature to react more extremely to new things, especially if they seem "unnatural." This might have been a survival instinct in bygone days, when the hominid who noticed that bush was out of place could take another path and avoid getting eaten by the sabertooth tiger behind it. But like so many such instincts, it translates poorly into the technological era.

Maybe not in the home... but think about public spaces. Put a few of these in a hotel lobby and everyone traveling through there can get a charge.

What about at Airports? Put one in the middle of each waiting area and all the passengers get a charge.

How about meeting rooms at companies?

Not too mention restaurants (Starbucks?)...

There are tons of places where lots of people congregate and they would appreciate getting a "top up" on the their batteries.

This is not a question of "if" only of "when"... and these are the first steps toward that...

Aw damn, you beat me to it.

The interesting thing is that particular anime was basically a satire on the problem Japan faced from its aging population...the same problem that these robotic walkers are designed to help ameliorate.

All right, I give up...who DOES declare the escolating ebola outbreak an international emergency?

If you don't wipe your phone this can happen with anything (including an iPhone)...

However, if you reset an iPhone there is NO way to recover anything. Everything written on an iPhone is encrypted... when you reset an iPhone it securely wipes the key and then nothing is retrievable.

I feel it's really important that this piece get approved. The media is replete with Hachette, its authors and agents, and the various traditional publishing old-guard trying to stack the deck against Amazon. The other night the New York Public Library held a so-called "panel discussion" that was essentially an excuse to get together and bash Amazon. We need more people to hear the other side!

Interesting... I'm not sure what's unproductive about producing a freely available scientific engineering platform that is directly impacting the energy generation issues in this country.

But, ok :-)

You can install PETSc without a Fortran compiler at all. Change that --download-f-blas-lapack to --download-c-blas-lapack and you're good to go...

In fact... MOOSE works on platforms without a Fortran compiler at all... although we generally recommend that you have one (so that you can still link in any legacy routines you've written in Fortran).

I'm not specifically against Fortran... I was just trying to say that most new computational science development at the National Labs is NOT being done in it. We've moved on...