There is a general dispute in taxonomy between "lumpers" and splitters" - people who say "this, this and this share these characteristics, and so I lump them together in one taxon" versus those who say "this, this and this differ in these characteristics, and so I split them into these taxa".

You're evidently a splitter. No disrespect about that - it's a defensible position (see above). But being a lumper is also a defensible position (see above).

The important things that you need for designing a taxonomy are to know what questions you want your taxonomy to address - if you're wanting answers to questions of surface gravity, then a taxonomy based on colour is unlikely to be helpful, for example.

Our current taxonomy for planets is based on the observational status of the planets in respect of their neighbours - the "cleared orbital region" criterion. In principle, that is an addressable question - observe the skies, plot the orbiting bodies down to a few percent of the size of the planets of interest, question answered.

Where things are getting confused is that many people project questions of the origin of the planets onto the orbital classification. Which may not be the most logical thing to do, when looked at in the context above. The two questions are not strictly related : Earth, Venus, Uranus and Pluto all appear to have suffered a giant impact in the late stage of their construction, but Pluto does not currently have a cleared orbit to make it a "planet" under the orbital classification. So our believed-to-be-correct models of origin processes do not (necessarily) align with current orbital status. But you can see from the length of my qualifications above that one taxonomy split is based on fairly long chains of cause and implication, and the other on simple Newtonian mechanics. So I can understand why the IAU decided to go with the relatively simple present-day orbital status criterion.

If I were to design a planet taxonomy, I'd use a criterion of sphericity (is the shape within X% of being a simple spheroid) to divide planets from "minor planets" (you can look at it as the interplay of material strength versus object mass, if you like), and at the upper boundary the presence of fusion (separating planets from stars, with a fudge area to deal with brown dwarfs). But that criterion shows my interest in body materials (I'm a geologist by trade), which differs from the interests of astronomers in general.

Just until the Saudis decide they've screwed the Iranians enough and cut their production again.

Iran isn't the target. They're in the same game as the Saudis.

The aim of this slump is to bankrupt the fracking industry. Once that has been done, production will be throttled back to bring the prices back up, but not to levels that would allow fracking to resume.

but today nobody does that any more.

Not true.

Some times it really is quicker to do the job in an analogue way than to figure out a way to do it electronically with what tools are available. Or, which tools are allowable according to a site's IT policies ; if I'm forbidden to use "portable" apps by the IT department on a particular job, then it doesn't matter if I've got an appropriate DTP or CAD or drawing application on a memory stick. Those sites are also likely to be the ones that take 3 weeks to process an application to have an application installed.

Cut, paste, and dot over the edges with correcting fluid still works just as well, and can be effective. A couple of tips : if you have the opportunity, do your compositing at double-size if you can, then in the final copy down to correct scale your errors will halve ; if you have reasonably heavy paper, tearing rather than cutting will produce a more feathered edge that shows up less.

trust me here, methane aint nothin to fuck with. tightening up leaks is inarguably a good thing.

This is true for far more direct reasons than greenhouse gas considerations (valid though those concerns are). Methane is a readily flammable gas. The oil industry has been paying most of my pay check for thirty-ish years for gas detection and analysis both for exploration reasons ("what have we got down there?") and safety reasons, in more or less equal measure.

The fact that you can sell it too is another, non-trivial incentive to keeping your wells, well heads pipeline etc in good condition.

There shouldn't be a need for regulation in this area : industry best practice and existing regulations about worker safety (there are laws against killing your workers) and environmental safety (there are laws against killing your neighbours and passers-by) ought to be sufficient. I smell politicians in "the public are looking, look busy!" mode.

according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the administration had asked the person not to speak about the plan.

The number of people so instructed is unlikely to be in the thousands ; probably only in the dozens. So by releasing this information in this way, they've come very close to pointing the finger of suspicion directly at him (or her).

Way to protect your sources, guys. I hop that you get lots more people bringing you scoops. Not.

More points for the longer they lasted (typewriters were around for over a century).

A quern is a hand-powered grindstone. Practically every house in the world - well, the world grinding grain to make bread or porrage/ pottage/ gruel - used one from the dawn of seed gathering (centuries to millennia before the dawn of agriculture) until about the start of the industrial revolution. Say, between 10 and 20 thousand years.

They only went out of use when it really became cheaper and easier to take your grain to the mill to get it ground by wind/ water/ horse power instead of indulging in (literally) "the daily grind".

If you want a million or two years more of duration, then you could go for the sound of stone on stone, making a new stone tool. More latterly, depending on region, antler on stone, but that's probably only a few tens of thousands of years.

Oh, you wnat something technological?

How about the "pop" of a gas light lighting within it's mantle? These days you probably won't even hear it on a camp site - just the click of an LED switching on/off - but for a century or so it represented the chemical industry, the first large-scale "to the door" distribution network (home many optical fibres still run in trenches originally cut for gas pipes?) ; the billing that went with it, needing computers (human ones, then adding machines, then typewriters).

Reading someone's motivations from their actions has always been a pretty fraught guessing game. It's not as if people are reknowned for their consistency or lack of hypocrisy in general.

Oh, the thing I mentioned last about the Monsetego (or whatever it was - is Taurus a Ford model?) was back in the days of human design. My source was a Ford engineer who was bitching to me while I was hitch-hiking and he'd just been ordered to design this optical jig monstrosity, by hand, explicitly to bugger up reparability for the buyers. About 1982 or 1983. His story didn't mean damn-all to me at the time because it was about 6 years before I started trying to learn to drive. But I filed the story as something to keep the next driver entertained with. IIRC the engineer was driving from Ford's Dagenham plant back to Halewood after being dealt this shitty hand, and he was well fuming about it.

I'd be overjoyed if windows 8 on the wife's machine would print to our 13 year old laser printer two days in a row without needing the printer drivers re-installed.

(I'd also be overjoyed if the wife would have let me install a proper network in the house when we moved in, because I can't get the printer to work at all over the wifi, but that's probably a separate issue.

Though I still lose it when somebody writes "ex-patriot".

Errr, why? It would seem a perfectly sensible construct for someone who used to be a patriot but for whatever reason (money, loathing for their home-country's debased political establishment) has ceased to be a patriot.

There's the other homophone "expatriate", for someone who lives in another country to that of their allegiance, but that's a completely different concept. For example, I mostly earn my income as an expatriate, but it would be impossible for me to earn anything as an ex-patriot (since I have never been a patriot).

This particular disease (HOA-itis) being an American one, I only slightly wonder what the supply of house buyers is like. If buyers are also in limited supply, then what is to prevent the seller form selling to the buyer without passing on the HOA obligations. Are they enforceable in court, or would the HOA have to come to court to prevent the sale going through without the HOa contract - thereby putting the costs upfront for the HOA too.

We used to have such tihngs in our country. They were called "feu duties", being short for "feudal duties". Yes, that does mean "feudal" in the same sense as "you owe three days a week labour in the Feudal Lord's fields, and he gets to virginity test all brides before their new husband gets to try them". We got rid of them in the mid-1990s. Glad to see America has yet to catch up.

We will. I've noticed a lot of people are already back to entering years in two digits.

In the run up to Y2K I switched to using ISO8601 date format and haven't budged. YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.ssss+TZ.... If the client then insists on using something parochial, I'll explain my reasons (date, alphabetical and numeric forms sorting into the same order) and then after they've expained why they want something parochial, I'll implement the changes they want. But they have to justify moving away from a reasonable proposition.

We were lucky that we managed to hide our Y2K bug from our customers (they came in from some 3rd-party software) by retiring the DOS version of our main product and completing the release of the windows V1 line, despite all it's bugs. But I also had a literally sleepless night babysitting a billion or so dollars worth of equipment (plus about 200 staff) as we checked out all the machines to see that there was nothing untoward happening. Cost around £2mllion.

You should have just pointed out what plants do with water, they split it into hydrogen and oxygen and so that is the only time water is really truly actually consumed.

Strictly not true. Neutral water has a concentration of approximately one part in 10^7 of hydrogen ions (and the same of hydroxyl ions), and they're constantly dissociating and re-associating. Off the top of my head, I forget what the mean lifetime of any one molecule of water is, but it's more likely to be fractions of a second than multiples of a year.

The original story is a non-story. I remember in the playground at school nearly 40 years ago joking that the idiots moving into town from London had never tasted water that hadn't been through three people's kidneys since it was last rainfall. Our geography teacher made us work out the numbers - it was a little short fo two pairs of kidneys.

I will take my beatings

Just jazzing up a dead horse to give you a flogging that you will definitely not forget for as long as you live.

Current mission durations would make that about 2 rounds.

But bear in mind that you don't get onto this particular gravy train until you're in your early 30s (school, bachelors degree, masters, doctorate, post-doc experience). I went into industry instead of academia and so I'm about 7 years ahead of my classmates who went into academia and about 50% higher in salary.

You're projecting your money-grubbing motives onto other people. That probably says more about you than it does about them.