Am I the only one around here who really prefers to forgo the Koek & Zopie, and prefers a rainy but warm winter? I'm really in no mood to return to the 2012-2013 winter, which felt like lasting into June.

I guess the guy talked about Europe. Europe had a very mild "winter" last year, the exact opposite from the experience in the States (and the years before that it was reversed; Europe with long and cold winters, the US with record-breaking warmth.... it's basically all a function of where the jet stream will stabilize out).

And the 2012 Ignobel literature prize went to: LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.

Pipe it through a VPN

Yet. Infrastructure for life below the ground is present in large quantities all over the world, there basically already are colonies in Antarctica (even tho we might call them "research stations"), and the oceans... Well... That's just a matter of time.

I can confirm this. I live in western Europe, where rain ought to be in the form of drab, drizzly days. Summer always had more concentrated showers, but during the last ten years the incidence of tropical-style thunderstorms in summer has ever increased. This summer, again, broke the record of rainiest summer in recorded history by inches of rain, even tho it's been pretty warm and sunny.

Warmer air can hold more moisture. That's why.
Puerto Rico and Suriname are both firmly located in the tropics. Both had an unprecedented drought this year (still ongoing in Suriname).

You're condemning my entire country to oblivion! Are you seriously suggesting the billions of people on this planet who live on the coast move somewhere else? Good luck with that. That's a bare minimum of three wars or so.

I have to agree with him, and I use Python on a daily basis. When using Python for anything larger than a few thousand lines of code, it really becomes necessary to switch to something more, well, stable. There's several options, and Java is one of them. When you start typing assert statements everywhere, that kinda defeats the purpose of using a dynamically typed language, and tells you it's time to switch to something more robust to begin with.

That doesn't mean Python is a bad language. I, in fact, love it. But it's not suitable for every use case. Just like Java ain't. Using the correct tools for the job is a better paradigm than sticking to your favorite language just because.

Depends. If in the same orbital plane, but just too low, it might be doable. If put into a lower orbit _and_ different orbital plane, it's another venture alltogether. Plus, you'd probably loose the ability to deorbit. If they can still be useful in their current orbits, I'd leave them there.

1) Occam's razor already tells you it's the drugs. Unless aliens show up only when taking drugs, or we suddenly get super-alien-viewing-powers when using drugs, aliens could be there. That's (apart from being ridiculous) such a complicated model compared to the simple "your drugs give you hallucinations" model (which we even know is true) model that occam's razor can rule out the other ones.

2) Erm.. you know that this is EXACTLY how drugs are tested every day? Not unethical. Extremely common.

3) You could run a simulation.

Let alone the cultural environment. Behavioral psychology often attempts to extrapolate its findings on the whole Earth population, without taking into account that the cultural background of its subjects is (virtually) identical for each subject. The cultural background _most definitely_ influences behavior. Do the same study on Western Europeans, Arabs and Japanese, and you'll likely get huge differences per group.

You can compare shit to other shit, but in the end two wrongs doesn't make a right. Civilians are killed in Gaza, and that is always bad. Although, in the end, it's Hamas who is the ultimate culprit. They are launching and storing their rockets from urban areas, in or next to homes, hospitals, schools and mosques. They are using their own people as a human shield. It's their choice to do so. They could have also chosen to launch from a field, where civilian casualties would have been extremely unlikely.

As for Iron Dome, I'm glad it exists. It has knocked out all rockets launched at my family's town so far. Who knows how many Israeli casualties there would have been if it didn't exist; probably many.

I work in bioinformatics, and use both R and python. The data models in R are stronger than in python, and packages like ggplot are easier to use than matplotlib. That makes it a relatively easy entry. It's also much more similar to SAS than python is. However, R has some big limitations. It is _very_ slow and is a memory clogging beast. It also has some very annoying quirks, like the horrible object model. I find python to be much more flexible, and absolutely required for larger data sets. With the right modules (Numpy, Scipy, matplotlib, pandas, scikit-learn etc) it is equally powerful.

So in the end, I use R primarily for quick and dirty analyses on small data sets, but for anything more elaborate I use python.

You are forgetting a whole range of options. First on modus A: a lot of toxins are not reactive outside a cellular environment. Proteins in cells are highly efficient catalysts, and normally unreactive compounds can become highly reactive inside that environment. A good example of this is botulinum toxin. In itself it is not really very reactive, but it is extremely toxic (several ng are enough to kill a human).

Modus B can - and most likely will - be dangerous as well. There are many toxins that are in low doses subclinical, but do not exit the body. After repeated exposure, the dose inside the body will slowly rise to clinical levels. An example of this is mercury. Plastics, by virtue of being highly hydrophobic, will most likely consist of many of these toxins.