From the article, and the pictures that go with it, I think the thing that is being described as elegant is the rollercoaster itself. This guy is a Ph.D in design, and you kind of get the feeling that he had a great idea for a rollercoaster and tacked on the euthanasia part to get some deeper meaning to it - one which is a little ridiculous, as people have pointed out here.

But that coaster itself is quite beautiful, and would make a fantastic desk toy.

And the movies were focused more on the story because of the limitations to the special effects. I think that's where it's all going wrong: many of the changes brought in have been subtle (or even not so subtle) changes to the storyline, as they effect the characterization.

I agree completely with this. I use Lego Mindstorms with classes of 4th - 6th graders, and a lot of what I do is about breaking a problem up into a set of steps, and then writing instructions for each step.

It's amazing how much fun you can have with this, and how you can introduce concepts like ranges, variables and randomness by setting up an obstacle course that they have to run/walk through, and throw a big foam die (random number), or open a folder with a printed number inside (to represent a variable, that they tear out of the folder and carry with them to the function that the variable is used in as an argument - like do x star jumps, where x is the number).

If, else and while can be done in a similar manner: "If you're a boy, throw three red balls into basket A. If you're a girl, throw one ball of each colour into basket C" kind of thing.

You can then let some kids modify your initial obstacles, or come up with a completely new course, and then see how to write a set of instructions that will allow someone to complete the course. They can even save parts of this as reusable code pieces, if you plan your classes in the right way, which is a very powerful idea.

Of course I then move on to the lego robotics environment. But I think the point is to show the kids that computers do many simple processes very quickly, and that every activity can be broken up into a set of simple steps, which need to be followed in order to succeed.

Let me first say that although I'm an atheist myself, I completely respect your right to be religious, especially since you came to it through thought rather than socialization or indoctrination.

I think you're a bit wrong about the article of faith you give as an example, though: scientists may take it on good faith (i.e. trust) that your results need not be checked, the difference is that you gave your methods, and your results can be checked. If there is another explanation for the results than the one you gave, this can also be investigated. The spectacular implosion of that Korean genetics lab is an example of this in action.

In other words, the results you got are very different to a miracle or a prayer being answered, because neither of those are repeatable or verifiable, and other explanations for those phenomena may exist, but you have no way of evaluating what is the cause.

That is the faith of religion, and it is very different to the trust that exists between scientists.

And you're anonymous.

Come to Hong Kong. The days of the skyscraper are far from over here - we don't have earthquakes, and we have no more land available - the population density here is 6480 people per square kilometre over the whole territory, but most of Hong Kong's land is unusable, so the real density in urban spaces is much higher. The official factsheet suggests 53 110 pp/sq.km, but wikipedia goes for 130 000 pp/sq.km in Mongkok, the busiest area.

  Here, there is nowhere else to go but up.But I agree with you, in any reasonable area, and especially in the States, it's better to build lower and sprawl.

There are plenty of card scanning apps for phones these days, and I personally hate standing there, tapping away at my phone while someone hand-holds me through spelling their name, and getting their e-mail address correct (all those underscores and dots and things are hard for people to verbalize).

I think it's far more effective to give the card. You may only hang on to it for as long as it take your phone to get the info from - but as someone else pointed out above, you can tell a whole lot more from a card than just a set of contact details.

I like the awesome certificate of authenticity on that. Looks totally legit.

More like, it's funny how the terms of service agreement works. I'm guessing that M.I.C. Gadget didn't have Mark Zuckerberg sign one, while Zuckerberg did get an agreement with whoever uploaded the photos (which btw you don't own, and so don't necessarily have rights to any revenue they generate).

And that's why we saw so many nations involved in aid and rescue after Katrina. The response there was totally people first, face later.

Very likely. You do realize that more than one thing can happen on the same day, right?

I'm with you there - I love going through the games, and perfecting my setups for each car and track according to my style of driving. Takes a long time, but you get a real feeling of achievement when you hook it up.

But other people may not enjoy the game in the way that I do, and they should be given the choice to unlock everything and go wild. It's their game, after all, they bought it.

Definitely. And there's a cult of personality about it all, too. I don't edit articles for Wikipedia, so I don't have their groupthink, but I can't help but feel that the entire campaign this year has been set up by some of the more fawning members of the Wikipedia community.

Personally, I could give rocks about Jimmy Wales. I might consider giving money to Wikipedia, though, if they just had the barometer of cash donated vs. cash that they ran in the previous years.

I'm not buying into any conspiracy theories, and I'm going to watch this develop with interest - at the moment I think there are many possibilities here, and this is something of uncharted territory in govt affairs.

That said, I think there is a motive for the US to be pulling the strings here. This is from the article::

The investigation stems from separate encounters Assange had with two women during his August visit to Sweden, where he was applying for Swedish residency and attempting to secure the protection of Swedish free-press laws for his secret-spilling website

Maybe it's just a way of preventing Assange from getting Swedish citizenship and the protection that this would afford? The Swedish govt can't give him this while charges hang over his head - whether they're true or not. Doesn't explain how they govt would get these particular girls on board or anything, but it is a somewhat plausible motive.