The other thing to note is that humans can directly understand distinct moments in time that are well under one second apart. Not all THAT much under -it varies a little from person to person, but it's usually between 1/50 and 1/60 of a second- but the fact remains that even if we try to measure the human "clock rate" as the smallest distinct points in time that we can distinguish, we're faster than 1Hz.

A more appropriate time scale would be to say that 50 clock cycles of CPU time equals one second of human time. The numbers don't look quite as impressive when you do this -a cold boot takes just under 650 years, as opposed to some 32,000 years- but it still drives the point home that humans are slow. Some of the smaller time scales also become useful as metaphors: for example, the main memory access takes 7 "seconds": much like something you have to struggle a bit to remember, but it still seems to come quickly.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say "a looong" time ago: it's only been a year since Blink was even announced. But you're fundamentally correct.

Webkit and Blink (the engine behind Chrome and, now, Opera) share a common ancestry, but they are no longer the same engine, and have not been for some months. For that matter, even when Chrome was WebKit based, it never used the same JavaScript engine as other WebKit browsers, and this was one of its strongest initial selling points.

No one is threatening to fire him, but very few people have the power to actually do that. By calling him unfit to lead, they're essentially doing the equivalent.

What do you mean by "that"? Whose comments are you talking about?

I don't actually know if I'd go that far. Your heuristic will pick out a single bully in a class of victims, but it will also pick out a single victim in a class of bullies, and I'd argue that the latter is by far the more common case.

They are not "nothing", but the psychological mechanism is what does the work. The trigger is in fact "nothing", in that it plays no part in the medical effect.

The tree-bark studies you use are more along the lines of herbalism than holistic medicine or homeopathy. The yew extracts commonly used in chemotherapy should also be considered here.

This is not just a matter of the fact that they use herbs. They fail homeopathy by not relying on the "memory of water" effect that homeopathy claims to rely on: indeed, homeopaths would be horrified at the doses used. Likewise, holistic medicine is generally quite keen on not introducing foreign substances into the body, which these clearly do.

These aren't the only herbs to be shown effective, either. And when they are shown effective, medicine incorporates them. But a great many herbs have been shown to have no effect at all, or even to cause harm, and science has rejected these, as it should. The resulting dosage tables from these tests bear little resemblance to herbalism as the herbalists tend to think of it.

Essentially, herbalists stumbled onto a couple of patterns, and thought this meant they knew everything. When we put it to the test, we found a few accidental discoveries: it's not unlike the way that alchemists accidentally discovered gunpowder. But the methods the herbalists used were bunk, and a lot of the resulting knowledge was bunk, and even when it wasn't, they turned out to know far less than they thought they did.

But if the medicine relies on the placebo effect to work, then it's a sham. You could do just as well (and a lot more cheaply) with a sugar pill.

This depends on a number of factors. Did Microsoft use the designs he came up with when he did this work? Was Linux not allowed to use these designs? Did he (or someone else) find a way to improve upon that work, and were these improvements incorporated into Windows (or Linux)?

Even a rockstar can be hobbled by bad management, and we all know that the quality of Microsoft's management has, at times, been questionable. It's entirely possible that this could have happened here. Or maybe it didn't. We can't be sure from the Microsoft side.

Leslie Nielsen would like to have a word with you.

That's not science: it's uncontrolled historical data. Not xkcd's thing.

Nothing, so long as it's driven by well-thought-out goals and done at a reasonable pace. This, by contrast is an aesthetics-driven attempt at sudden and radical change: not remotely the same thing.

There is a difference between sensible environmental policy and a War on Coal. I don't think Obama is attempting to wage a War on Coal.

But it's tough to deny that some people are, in fact, trying to do this. It's that precise mentality that drives the people who want to buy it all up and shut it all down.

Yes, but that's not War On Coal thinking. The WOC folks are attempting to use force to ensure that we funnel all our money into their pet technologies Right Quick (tm), and that this will quickly get us back up and running. And if it doesn't, then we'll just have to Conserve (tm).

PNG is great for everything but actual photos, and should be used for just that: everything but photos. But photos really do need the extra boost from lossy compression.