2. I assume we've measured whether Rosetta is rotating, even slightly. Is there a chance that this will help (or hurt) Philae's chances at coming back on line?

The comet is actually rotating a lot, once every twelve hours. Since the comet acts as a gyroscope its axis of rotation keeps pointing towards the same distant star while the comet goes around the sun, and because the axis is tilted, different parts of the comet will receive light. The comet has seasons.

It'll drop to 1.25 actually. That's 5.6 times current flux.

A simple calculatoin:
Current amount of energy from panels is a quarter of what's needed
current distance from the sun is 3 earth units, it will go down to 1.3.
That means energy flux no the panels will increase (3/1.3)^^2 or more than 5 times.
If all the rest remains the same(er, what?), that should be enough.
And if the system can handle currents five times as high.

Yes.

Or what was it again. Is google going to guess the length of the nose of the emperor of China next, based on search items? And has it got the flu? Look , that there's a good correlation is clear, but the reliability of the results is very low. Next the NSA will be using those tools in order to find out how much they can get away with. Or wait, they already made their minds up about that.

Ok, maybe I'm hineininterpretierung this a bit

I had to think about that. I don't have much time for creationism but I think their arguments have been underestimated.
The main problem with creationism is not that their arguments are so weak. I believe some of their arguments are valid and too easily dismissed by let's say 'most people who believe in evolution theory'. For instance it's a very legitimate concern that the power of the combination of selection and random variation may be too weak to explain what we see around us.

The thing is that the approach is one of case-making rather than scientific investigation. That's why you can't discuss with them. The arguments they'll come up with will be borrowed (in let's say, the best cases) from investigation that is arguably scientific. So it's not really proper to dismiss the arguments as a rehash of things that have long been settled. but because the appoach is one of case making, the arguments are only pursued as long as they can support a case. The story ends once the case is won.
Another approach is to accept the validity of some of the creationist's objections and to just keep on digging and finding out how it works.
And gradually you figure out more. And that is what has happened and will happen. A lot of work has been done on the speed of evolution since the first iteration of Fred Hoyle's Junkyard Tornado argument in 1982.

Ow brilliant.fixing blockquotes the smart way.

Had to maintain a Windows 2012 Server system last weekend.... dealing with the Windows 8 configuration interface on a server makes me very angry.

Imagine Bruce Banner had been a sysadmin. The world would have been a different place.

The NYTimes article covers the issue well. The remnants of chemical weapons were not handled well which resulted in american casualties and which resulted in potential(I would say actual) use as IEDs. So Pentagon has reasons for not wanting to talk about this. I know mustard gas preserves fairly well. VX and sarin does not.

So there is no thinking in the line of ' Saddam had chemical weapons after all'. At least not anymore. Before the war there was deliberate obfuscation on the subject of how much chemical weapons capability one needs in order to provide a reason for war, so any find of a weapons cache was considered proof.
The idea is still around but officials have dropped it long ago.

  That was so important about the work by Scott Ritter in the runup to the war. He quantified the possible capability and made clear that whatever capability there was it could be military significant. So instead of asking 'are there chemical weapons' he asked 'are there enough chemical weapons', which is what every military analyst should do. An important part of propaganda is making you ask the wrong questions.

I know what the article says. did you look at the stats? Did you read my post? It says So maybe the actual marketing campaign for the FR-S was aimed at younger people than who actually bought it. Also in my first post I was not really thinking about marketing but about the product design part of the marketing. So what I wanted to say is that even if Scion wants to be young, it's not aiming as young as it used to, its product is not as young as one would think, and they mainly reaching people who are not that young either.

(logged in now). And I'm talking about the F-RS not the Scion of 2004. This article has a few statistics showing that the people buying the FR-S are not that young Edmunds . So maybe the actual marketing campaign for the FR-S was aimed at younger people than who actually bought it. I don't know. But I know the car and the design is towards handling - difficult to sell to youngsters - and tuning - easier to sell but maybe not such a large market.

I haven't spent any thought yet on the distinction between BRZ and FR-S.

If you'd seen the guy who's still driving that last Topazs you'd understand.

Oh you made me remember reading about it. Microgravimetric analysis of Cheops in 1980. Of course the Cavendish experiment required only 300 kg of material two centuries ago, so I suppose the whole thing about precision is how far away you are when doing the measuring. So my initial point remains: the title isn't saying much. Not like "Gravitational change now big enough to cause some people to have to update their tables".

Of course, the instruments measuring it can never ever be faulted ?

On the contrary, an alternate title for the article could have been "Measurement of gravity is now so incredibly precise that it can detect the effect of Antarctica melting away." . But that was too long.