That's not really just an idea from xkcd. Modern taxonomists group birds within the clade Dinosauria. Also, birds have tails, even if they're short. The tomia of a number of birds are also very toothlike. A number of dinosaurs, such as T. Rex had all kinds of adaptations to make their skulls lighter relative to their bodies.

So chess is not a sport, but speed chess is?

Deemed by me?

I went back and read the (score:-1 Troll) post again. It still says:

Sorry still sounds like it's deriding the "fodder" (I'm going to assume that he doesn't actually mean for them to be eaten) and glorifying the cowards hiding behind them.

You really seem to attributing to me a lot of things I didn't actually say. I makes it hard to even understand what you're talking about.

You seem to be all for the utter and total betrayal of the "beta" soldiers, for the betterment of the "alpha" soldiers. There doesn't seem to be much else to say.

I'm trying to understand this... Are you glorifying cowards who use other people as human shields? Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

If you're going to complain about immigrants working on advanced aerospace technology and the Apollo project in essentially the same breath, it might be worth noting all of the German immigrants who worked on the Apollo project.

Good point. That would almost be reasonable, if the proceeds weren't going to the police doing the seizing. If the system were set up so that the proceeds went, for example, into paying back social security, or to pay for services or toys or whatever for orphans... For that matter, if there were just some laws preventing police officers from profiting directly from seized property (no more bonuses to officers, no more first pick of auctioned property, etc.), the situation might be improved. The fact is, found, unclaimed and unowned property shouldn't belong to the police, collectively or individually. If anyone, it should belong to the public. The entire history of laws allowing bounty and spoils for public officials is nothing but a history of corruption. From firefighters burning down houses to judges sentencing innocent people to death for witchcraft. This sort of thing shows that, whatever illusions we may have of living in a more civilized age, we really don't.

So... a few tens of thousands of dollars worth? Hardly seems worth worrying about one way or another if that's actually the case. :)

Am I the only one who gets disturbed every time it's blithely mentioned that this or that police agency gets to take spoils for themselves? It seems a little... inherently corrupt.

Can you explain to me why anyone ever "buys" a house somewhere with a homeowners association? Seriously, what were you thinking?

Might be that we haven't defined if phone calls are private in the digital age because they were legally affirmed as private way back in the analog age. Re-reading your post, I'm not sure you understand what the stingray is for.

This is completely wrong.

First, as GuB-42 pointed out, luminous efficiency is an anthrocentric measurement. The numbers on the wikipedia page you referenced where white LEDs go to 22% efficiency at 150 lm/W, and are listed as the most efficient. Obviously, since a white LED is just a blue LED with a phosphor coating to re-emit in different colors, a white LED can't actually have higher radiant flux (watt for watt efficiency) than the blue LED it's made from, or we've just discovered perpetual motion. Also, I should point out that there are LEDs with luminous efficiency (a confusing term) up to 173 lm/W, which is higher than anything on that chart. I should also point out that I didn't specifically say LEDS, so singling out LEDS when low pressure sodium lamps list on that chart with a luminous efficiency of 29% isn't entirely reasonable.

In any case, the numbers I listed were clearly a lot better than those of the original poster, which were off by more than an order of magnitude or three orders of magnitude, depending on which version you look at. This is back of an envelope stuff, not a detailed engineering study. For example, I didn't see you blasting the efficiency number of 15% given for solar cells when the solar cells typically used in space hardware these days are usually in the mid-twenties or above, in terms of efficiency.

Yeah, I clearly "no" so much less about it than you and bow down in your presence. Really, the fact is that even engineers who deal with this stuff all day long have a hard time keeping up with all the funny little ways to think about light. There's a lot of comparing apples to oranges. I wrote my post because the poster I was replying to was off in their calculations by a monumental degree.

Didn't that end up turning nearly everyone in the world into murderous, light-shunning monsters in the movie?

Pretty much all of the experiments done on the ISS show the opposite. The plants tested so far don't care about "up". Or, rather, to them "up" is towards the light source and "down" is towards moisture.

What are you smoking there exactly? .01% efficiency for electric lighting? You did put in in your calculation as 1%, but even that's ridiculously low. Even the earliest electric arc lights weren't that inefficient. For modern electric lighting, you're looking at more like at least 30% efficiency, if not more. I have no idea why you included the "light to carbohydrate" efficiency in your calculations. I'm assuming it was to compare against "artificial chemical mini-reactors", but you didn't really give any numbers or description of those processes, so it's not exactly a reasonable comparison, especially since you can get a lot more from plants than just simple sugars. Efficiency of generated light is also a bit harder to figure out because grow lights tend to be tuned for maximally efficient photosynthesis and don't "waste" as much energy as natural sunlight. Your .01% (although you put it in your final calculation as 1%) efficiency for photosynthesis is typically more like 3 to 6% for plants with real sunlight and would probably be at least upwards of 5% for "tuned" artificial light. It's theoretically possible with efficient enough solar cells and artificial lights to take sunlight in through solar cells and produce artificial light from the electricity which actually is more effective at growing plants than the original sunlight. It would require higher efficiencies than are likely to ever become available, however. Still solar powered grow lights don't actually fare as terribly against direct sunlight as you make it out. Also when comparing with Earth, don't forget that space stations beyond LEO (or even in LEO with certain orbits) will tend to have greater insolation than Earth.

In any case, the actual efficiency is going to end up being something more like .15x.3= .045 or 4.5% conservatively, but probably higher. At the same stage of the game, the power available to a chemical mini-reactor is going to be .15, or 15%, since it's getting its power from the same solar cells as the greenhouse. So, then it's a question of how efficient the artificial reactor is versus the plant at converting its input power source to final product. This is of course ignoring the fact that an assortment of plants (and fungi, algae, etc.) is an incredibly complex chemical factory that can produce everything a human needs to survive, whereas a chemical reactor that produces simple carbohydrates... produces simple carbohydrates.