Iraq under Saddam Hussain was not a religious state and did not harbor religious terrorists. Your rant makes no sense at all in the context of a war against Saddam's Iraq.

I agree. I work as an Actuary, and most of my actuarial coworkers don't typically pull those kind of hours. Maybe they meant "from time to time" rather than on average?

You realize this is a factual claim, not an opinion, right? Shouldn't you make a basic effort to know whether it's true or not before posting it?

Since you're talking about your own children, I'll assume you grew up in the 80s to early 90s. And since your comment focused on US culture, I'll use US crime rates since then to illustrate my point, which is that children today will grow up in a world about half as violent what you grew up with:
Violent crime, 1993-2012
Violent crime, 1973-2003
Homicide
Property crime (theft)
Even non-crime dangers are way down:
Fire deaths since 1918
Traffic deaths since 1900

Bear in mind that I'm not commenting on the rest of your post, just that one claim I quoted above. But if you care about truth more than truthiness, you should really change your tune about the violence and danger in today's (US) society.

This is why I feel just fine about Abrams directing the next Star Wars: he's already directed two Star Wars movies, and they were good!

I have a co-worker who just switched to our profession (quantitative finance) last year after being a materials engineer his entire life. His retraining was significant, including earning a masters degree. I don't know how old he is but his hair is white and his kids are in college, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's older than you.

He's incredibly happy.

Go for it.

Flipping a coin would have an expected correlation of 0%, although with only 56 samples it could easily be 20-30% in any particular trial. 71% is pretty significant.

Of course, it seems like the researchers did test a lot of different possible relationships and cognitive skills, so they were biased towards finding at least one strong one. (obligatory XKCD.) Still, 71% is a lot better than you are giving them credit for.

See how the data points are all paired? -- each IQ has exactly two dots above it, one red and one blue, presumably representing the same individual. From what I can tell, the important part of that graph is not the absolute position of the red or blue dots, which I agree do not have a remarkable slope, but rather the difference between red and blue for a given individual.

Their other plot from the news article seems to be just that difference, or some derived representation of it. It's a much more convincing relationship.

I followed the links through to a Guardian review of the book about Shin, only to find "This content has been removed as our copyright has expired." WTF?

Fortunately, the Wayback Machine is a bit more sane and has the full story: http://web.archive.org/web/20120320021739/http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-korea-prison-camp

I'm from Minneapolis, and although I don't fly all that much, I believe our airport (MSP) is 100% millimeter-wave. I have never seen a backscatter x-ray machine there.

This article confirms it as of August 2012, although it could have changed since then:

I can't help but picture this CEO as a 6-year-old who's been prevented from stealing his younger sister's toy and is now throwing a tantrum.

I am a libertarian. It should be a no-brainer for Republicans to attract my support (over the Democrats at least). Instead they're giving me and everyone else the finger with their absurd rhetoric and childish political games. This goes for their politicians, their pundits, and quite a few of their supporters. Everything Obama supports is automatically bad, even if it's the same thing the Republicans earlier supported.

This insane prioritization of winning vs. losing and minor social issues instead of real governance is why I agree with the sentiment of this post. The Republicans are a menace and must be stopped.

That doesn't seem too plausible.

The moon is only about 1% of the mass of the earth, so let's start with a baseline estimate that it could change surface gravity by 1%. However, it's pretty far from earth's surface (around 100 times earth's radius), and gravity scales with the square of the distance, so now we're talking a 0.0001% change.

It gets worse, though: because we are in mutual orbit with the moon, we are actually in microgravity (freefall) relative to it. In other words, the moon pulls on you with roughly the same strength as it pulls on the earth, so the total 0.0001% change in gravity mostly cancels out! The only part of it that's left is from you being slightly closer to the moon than the earth is (when the moon is above you) or slightly farther (when it's on the other side of the earth). This difference is what causes the tides, but it's incredibly small relative to the gravitational pull of the earth.

Not to mention that the moon was probably not around when the earth was fully molten, or that the earth *does* have heavier elements (iron) predominantly in the center, or any number of other reasons why this idea doesn't seem likely...