Here in the US, violent crime has been falling for quite some time, and total crime as well. While every burglary is upsetting, and unfortunately few are prosecuted, is Britain so worried about it as to consider something that a lot of people would consider rather a damper on their daily lives? (A lot of people would be very self conscious doing ordinary dressing and sex with a camera in the room, even if they've taken measures to keep the data from getting out until a crime occurs.)

I know that Americans are quite paranoid about crime. A great many people would tell you that the crime rates are going up, even though they're going down. Is that what's going on in the UK? Or is there actually some rash of crime that's making them this worried? Or is this simply some top cop blue-skying about what he wishes he had, without regard to how that would affect people?

And yet it does appear that the telcos are throwing money to make it happen. They certainly expect something for their money.

It does appear that it's unlikely that it would be legislation, but I imagine that they're laying the groundwork for something. Perhaps they're trying to shift the Overton window to bring it up again in the 115th Congress, when they may have a Republican President? It's unlikely that it would produce a filibuster-proof Republican Senate, but if the filibuster is the only thing preventing passage, there are often ways to convince individuals to break ranks. One tactic involves making this seem like a reasonable thing to do, and introducing legislation (especially when you give it a misleading name) can help.

Cities seem to me like the worst place for automated driving. They're not great for any driving, since things are constantly coming at you from all directions. And while computers are great at operating with many simultaneous distractions, these are cases where errors get people hurt or dead. Erring on the side of caution will block traffic, and city streets are often already at capacity.

I would think that the best use for automated cars would be interstates, which have limited access and more predictable situations. Problems turn into crises fast, but that's the kind of thing where a computer could react better than a human, since it's likely to involve less fine discrimination between "human" and "non-human".

Ultimately I'd love to see automation replace all human drivers in cities, since it can break the connection between driver, destination, and necessity to park. They could coordinate more effectively at intersections, which are currently very wasteful. So I'd like to see this work, but right now it feels like begging for trouble.

The Democratic nutjobs are minor back-benchers. The Republican nutjobs chair committees. Both the House and Senate environmental committees are chaired by people who have publicly said that climate change is a hoax by scientists (Bridenstine and Inhofe).

LIGO works by measuring the distance between two tracks set at right angles. A passing gravitational wave would momentarily change the length of one leg or the other, or both, in characteristic ways.

It measures the distance with a laser beam. It splits the beam, and sends them down the two tracks. They bounce off mirrors, and when they return, they interfere. Changes in the length will change the interference. That means that they can detect changes at distances on the order of a single wavelength of light.

That's an interferometer, the I in LIGO. At its core, it's the same thing that Michaelson and Morley used to look for aether, and failed to find it. The trick is that this has to be even more sensitive, because the expected changes are even smaller and the contraption itself is much bigger (4 km, versus a few meters). They have to exclude all kinds of potential interference, from passing trucks to earthquakes.

I suppose it may well go "ping" when it spots a gravitational wave, and they'll end up comparing it to other experiments. But they'll get more than a ping; they'll get a signal of the changing lengths that they can use to map the size of the wave, and even a hint of its direction.

For some reason, he didn't head off to Newfoundland; he went at tropical latitudes. If he was trying to follow a line of latitude due west to Asia, he was going the VERY long way. If he hadn't bumped into something along the way, he'd have been deeply screwed.

The direct route from Portugal to Japan would have taken him northeast. He probably had suspicions that the northeast passage wouldn't work, but the further north he went, the better. He'd have been better off going to Newfoundland. He would have failed to find the northwest passage, but he couldn't know that, either.

The explanation that he thought it was smaller would account for that. If he was going based on his suspicion that there might be something that far south, he had little evidence to support it, and was really staking his life it. It certainly paid off in spades, but that could easily have been a lie he paid for with his life.

I feel the same way about some very prominent members of the US science and technology committees.

Ultimately, it comes down to the question "why do you care who Andy Canfield is?" Are they planning to exchange money for goods or services? Write you a mash note? Collect on a debt?

As you say, "Andy Canfield" is kind of a red herring there. It's really the operational/instrumental definition of "is there some connection between this key and some object or information I want?" I'm not sure there really is any meaningful way to do that in the general case. It needs to be reconsidered as an array of different questions about why we care about identity in the first place.

Right now a lot of the notions of identity are really badly defined. "Identity theft" happens because lending institutions are legally allowed to connect your physical body (which can be punished in a variety of ways) to various intangible measures of identity with extremely thin degrees of proof. That may be the worst possible case.

Unfortunately, I've found that increasing numbers of sites require those cross-site scripting just to render themselves. It's not uncommon for a site to require enabling literally dozens of other sites. It can be hard to tell which of those are content, which are navigation, which are ads, and which are tracking. At least some are starting to detect when you're selectively disabling the ad servers and metrics sites, and refusing to render at all.

In general, I'd prefer to avoid those sites entirely. I do understand their need to foist off ads on me, which is why I haven't run with AdBlock. I just want to disable antisocial behavior like animations, which make the content hard to read. But I can think of a few sites which have useful content that require me to let more things through NoScript than I'm really comfortable with.

Ultimately, his idiot opinion on astrology doesn't really matter, since he's not going to make much headway against hundreds of other MPs. In the US, a well-place committee member can make his personal biases and idiosyncracies matters of law. I don't know if this guy has similar power; he is on the Health Committee and Sci-Tech committee but I don't think he has a lot of pull there.

My bigger concern, though, is in the constellations. Not of stars, but of beliefs. Poor reasoning in one area doesn't have to mean he reasons poorly in every area, but I've found that certain kinds of stupidities tend to cluster together. If he's just a guy with a stupid idea about the stars, even a well-placed guy, there's only so much harm he can do, and his constituents can be forgiven for electing him despite a foible. But it would not surprise me to discover that he buys into other conspiracy theories and applies similar poor reasoning to other areas. If that's the case, yeah, I blame his constituents.

In this case, he's not being published in reputable journals. He's had some letters published, which are not subject to peer review. The few times he's gotten his papers into major journals, they've been savaged, and they don't publish him any more. His work is relegated to minor journals and letters.

The peer review process does provide a strong bar against junk science, but not all peer review is the same. Researchers in the field know it, but when the goal is to appeal to the public, it's easy to gloss over the differences. Even other scientists rarely know which are the reputable and high-impact journals outside of their own field.

Does signing up for premium change anything from the artist's point of view? Pandora loses the revenue they get from the advertising, and I suspect it's roughly a wash.

Music is further made odd by the amount of money being spent to create demand. There's an enormous amount of marketing and advertising. Although there is some interest in the "long tail" of music, most of what people are willing to pay for comes from a well-oiled machine that has focus-grouped and promoted the bejeezus out of it.

That costs a lot of money, and it's aimed at getting people to take part of their overall budget and put it into music that could otherwise be spent on many different alternative goods: different entertainment, food, materials, education, retirement, etc. They're also vying for a limited factor of people's time budget: while songs can be done in parallel to other things, there's only so much attention, and they can listen to only so many songs.

A lot of factors enter into the economic model, and it goes far beyond just "supply and demand" even before you get the thumb on the scale of artificially-produced (and highly imperfect) scarcity.