My first programming class: Punch cards. Punch your deck, take it to the input window, wait around an hour or two for it to run, pick up the printout at the output window, debug. Rinse, repeat until successful. The IDE was long nights at the computing center with a thermos of coffee. Finally getting a terminal and 300 baud modem at home was a really big deal.

Exactly. The idea of gmail users ridiculing AOL email addresses is giving me a good laugh. "Sure! Please spy on all of my messages and advertise to me in exchange for free email. Sign me up!". Chumps.

So you're saying that interest rates are somehow being manipulated downward to hide the magnitude of the deficit? Since the deficit is a known quantity, why would anyone take that deal? In the sane world, creditors demand a premium for assuming greater risk. If there's a stronger economy out there offering a higher rate, they'll go there in a heartbeat.

There's a lot of that going around, for sure, but the real issue is that science always has the potential of being disruptive to established economic interests. Whether it's Big Tobacco or fossil carbon, those interests are paying the GOP serious money for protection against these kinds of disruptions.

And yet investors all over the world are falling over themselves to loan money to Uncle Sam at virtually zero percent interest. If the size of the deficit were considered a big problem by serious money, interest rates would be very much higher than they are.

That said, it's been a long time (Eisenhower, maybe?) since having Republicans in the White House has been good for deficit reduction!

I would agree with you, but what we have here is an opportunity to demonstrate our upstanding character to our peers by venting self-righteousness against someone of lesser moral virtue. Before you know it, we'll be arguing over which method of execution is most appropriate, and whether the boy's family ought to be punished as well. No punishment will be quite harsh enough to quench our indignation over what this evil, horrible boy has done. We're an angry mob, and we want everyone to see it because we imagine that it makes us look virtuous. It's the American Way.

> It's called "thirst"

Is that a new app? Where can I get that?

The math works fine; the problem is choosing the appropriate method. My hunch is that the biggest mistake in the use of stats in the social sciences is failing to correct p-values for multiple comparisons. That is, if you're hypothesis is limited to predicting an association between two variables, then p-values are just fine. But if you sent out a questionnaire with 20 questions on it and compute all 190 pairwise correlations between them, you'll get around 9 or 10 "significant" (p 0.05) but meaningless associations just by chance. You can't (or shouldn't) cherry-pick these and write them up like they mean anything. Yet many people do just this, often not realizing how the hypotheses were selected (it can sometimes be subtle, or buried in the history of the project).

A useful exercise (if you can use basic statistics software) that illustrates this is to generate a bunch (say, 10 or 20) of series of random numbers and then compute the matrix of correlations (or t-values, if you prefer) between all of them. You'll find that roughly 5% of the correlations are "significant" at the p.05 level, even though the series are really random and independent. It's a trivial result and just what you'd expect by chance, but it does drive the point home that you can't rely on p-values alone if you're testing multiple hypotheses. In the latter case there are corrected measures available that take this into account.

...how long it will be before the climate on HD189733b becomes a political issue.

It appears you're comparing total water consumption (including industrial and residential use) in other countries with residential use in California. I don't know how Cali stacks up against other states statistically, but the average you quote (178 g/day) is about 2.5X my own experience (2 person household) in Michigan.

It helps to let executive management outside of IT know that you're doing something. Maybe periodic reports detailing intrusion attempts, right down to failed SSH logins (there are always lots of those). The value of defense goes up if it's clear to everyone that you're actually under siege.

But that's exactly what they are, if they do business with the public. When you incorporate a business, the government grants you special rights, like being able to protect your personal assets from the liabilities of your business, and having access to a stable legal system to enforce the contracts that you make. In return, you have certain responsibilities about how you conduct your business; e.g., things covered by consumer protection laws, the way you keep your accounts, and not discriminating against classes of customers and employees out of your own bigotry. You want the advantages and protections of an incorporated business without having to follow the rules of a civilized society? Tough shit.

If a bunch of Republican senators could get together and write a letter outlining the details of these abuses, I'm sure there wouldn't be any consequences (to themselves) whether the spying is classified or not. Plus, it would be a great way to limit the powers of the federal government and stick it to Obama at the same time!

Another advantage being that your wallet won't sit there alerting everyone to the fact that its owner isn't anywhere nearby...