Why, that's the Russian New Year! We'll have a big parade, and serve hot hors d'oeuvres...

I'm not sure anyone has come up with the optimal keyboard layout for typing English, which I interpret to be the least amount of effort to type the most common words.

I did a quick comparison of QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak on the finger movements required to type the most common trigraphs in English, which are: THE, AND, THA, ENT, ION, TIO, FOR, NDE, HAS, NCE, TIS, OFT, MEN, ING, EDT, STH. I threw in STR since that one is a very common consonant cluster.

The result: on QWERTY, you have to reach off the home keys 39 times and use the same finger more than once in typing 7 of the trigraphs.

For Dvorak, it was 13 reaches off the home keys, and no repeat finger usage.

For Colemak, it was 12 reaches off the home row, and 2 trigraphs that required using a finger repeatedly.

I see the value in increasing alternating hand usage to increase speed, but there is also something to be gained from having common trigraphs clustered so you can hit them in a rolling motion with your index, middle, and ring fingers.

For example, S-D-F and F-D-S, J-K-L and L-K-J are quick to type on QWERTY but rarely appear in English. Those prime key locations should probably belong to S-T-R and I-O-N.

I always thought it would be funny to do a parody where Khan is thawed out and discovers he's not on Botany Bay at all, but the Golgafrinchan 'B' ark, and his genetically enhanced crew have all been replaced by telephone sanitizers and hairdressers...

I'll see your Wells and raise you a Watts:

"Let me tell you what happens if this thing gets out," she said quietly. "First off, nothing. We outnumber it, you see. At first we swamp it through sheer numbers, the models predict all sorts of skirmishes and false starts. But eventually it gets a foothold. Then it outcompetes conventional decomposers and monopolizes our inorganic nutrient base. That cuts the whole trophic pyramid off at the ankles. You, and me, and the viruses and the giant sequoias all just fade away for want of nitrates or some stupid thing. And welcome to the Age of Behemoth."

We may not have to worry about supernovae, but a gamma ray burst is quite another thing.

As Phil Plait points out, we're practically staring down the barrel of WR-104!

I'm not sure I agree that it's possible to develop defect-free software. All hardware is unreliable. Mean time between failure.

Just to clarify, "defect-free" doesn't mean the software will always run correctly under any conditions regardless of hardware state. It just means that *given* the integrity of the hardware, the software will not have any uncontrolled failure modes.

Yep. Folks who got on the Internet/WWW after about 2001 don't realize that it wasn't always just another medium for slapping ads in front of people.

Exactly. That was my first thought on reading this: "If there's a better way, show us. Come up with a solution. What's stopping you?"

In reality it's not that obvious, or someone would have thought of it already. I would look at engineering practices and see how they handle failure modes. Sometimes it is better to let the thing break as long as you design it to do the least amount of harm when it does.

It's possible to develop defect-free software as long as all factors are under your control. E.g. a program that runs on unreliable hardware can never be made reliable.

> and who is going to build these spaceships? Toyota?

I heard that Nissan put a Pathfinder on Mars.

Don't be disingenious.

don't bother with anything by rudy rucker. except the hacker and the ants, or maybe white light if you're desperate.

Oh, I don't know... I loved Rucker's "Software" trilogy, but it's not about math at all.

If you like pondering infinities, White Light is a lot of fun (but be sure to read The Divine Comedy first).

I haven't read Bruce Sterling's Involution Ocean, but a friend of mine highly recommended it to me.

I live in Minnesota, and I'm going to take courses through Coursera starting today!

Civil disobedience, bitches!

If you are religious, you should be prohibited from serving in public office.

Really? You want to amend the Constitution just to keep out some bad apples? What about the majority of reasonable, competent, intelligent people who are also religious, they get no say in self-government?

Not to mention the First Amendment guarantees free exercise of religion. I am not religious and I certainly wouldn't mind if everyone else gave up religion too, but you have to have the freedom to decide for yourself or you have no freedom at all. What if you change your mind while in office?

As Thomas Paine said, "I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it."