Every single field has its own vernacular, its own special usage of words. It's unavoidable. If I refer to an 'atomic bus queue operation' in a computer context that's perfectly clear and unambiguous... but it's not what a 'layperson' would probably picture. If you can fix this, you will revolutionize human communication.

I wish you luck.

I said the predictions have been shown to be accurate, not the hypothesis. Perhaps the sentence could have been simplified, but the grammar's correct.

This doesn't necessarily mean that he disagrees with evolution and mutation as a mechanism for change or that there is common DNA across a large number of species.

BTW, I couldn't let this one go. It's not just 'a large number'. It's the same DNA code across all organisms we know of. There are a couple of exceptions - but they edit the code back to the 'standard' one before the proteins are transcribed.

And the pattern of 'common DNA' confirms common descent to a ridonkulous degree.

Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It's possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a 'family tree'. "These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere..." This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.

Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces 'family trees', nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones, see below) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution. (Little-known fact: Linnaeus, who invented the "kingdom, phyla, genus, species, etc." classification scheme for living things, tried to do the same thing for minerals. But minerals don't form from copy-with-modification, and a 'nested hierarchy' just didn't work and never caught on.)

Today, more than a century later, we find another tree, one Darwin never suspected - that of DNA. This really is a 'text' being copied with rare typos. And, as expected, it also forms a family tree, a nested hierarchy. And, with very very few surprises, it's the same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits.

It didn't have to be that way. Even very critical genes for life - like that of cytochrome C - have a few neutral variations, minor mutations that don't affect its function. (Genetic sequences for cytochrome C differ by up to 60% across species.) Wheat engineered to use the mouse form of cytochrome C grows just fine. But we find a tree of mutations that fits evolution precisely, instead of some other tree. (Imagine if a tree derived from bookbinding technology - "this guy used this kind of glue, but this other bookbinder used a different glue..." - conflicted with a tree that was derived from typos in the text of the books. We'd know at least one tree and maybe both were wrong.)

The details of these trees are very specific and very, very numerous. There are billions of quadrillions of possible trees... and yet the two that we see (DNA and morphology) happen to very precisely match. This is either a staggering coincidence, or a Creator deliberately arranged it in a misleading manner, or... universal common ancestry is actually true.

(Single-celled organisms are much more 'promiscuous' in their reproduction and spread genes willy-nilly without respect for straightforward inheritance. With single-celled creatures, it looks more like a 'web' of life than a 'tree'. But even if the tree of life has tangled roots, it's still very definitely a tree when it comes to multicellular life. Which is the area that people opposed to evolution most worry about anyway.)

You're absolutely right. You don't need to have much theoretical knowledge to practice a particular skilled trade. It's only when trying to develop beyond the current state of the art that a good grasp of theory helps. If you're not interested in that, go ahead and don't worry about the whys and wherefores.

A scientific theory ties together a broad range of observations into a coherent model and makes testable predictions, that have since been tested and found to be accurate. It's still called the germ theory of disease, after all. Or the theory of Relativity, which you use every time you use a GPS. Without Relativistic corrections, the whole system would drift to the point of uselessness within six hours.

A cross between Descent and Tron, with procedurally-generated levels. Haven't had time to try it yet, but it looks worth checking out.

I used to do software for industrial robots. Safety for the people around the robot was the number one concern, but it is amazing how easy it is for humans to give orders to a robot that will lead to it being damaged or destroyed. In practice, the robots would 'prioritize' protecting themselves rather than obeying suicidal orders.

I use the Self-Destructing Cookies add-on. It allows the cookies... but as soon as you move off the page, or close the tab, it dumps the cookies. Sure, I have to re-sign in to some places more, but so what? Add in "clear history when the browser closes" and it's pretty comprehensive.

About the only thing I've run into that it breaks is Disqus logins. But I use a separate browser - which also deletes everything on close - for that.

Ha! Dude, it's not like a walkthrough for a linear first-person shooter. As TFA says, it's algorithms for rearranging the blocks.

My 14-year-old son found an old Rubik's cube and tought himself to solve it using youtube videos in about a week. He enjoyed it enough to ask for a 'speed cube' for his birthday. I don't think he'll be in world competition, but it frequently only takes him tens of seconds.

Me, I manged to teach myself to get one side solved and oriented, but I never figured out more than that on my own. (Nor felt the need to go look up solutions.)

Seems entirely too coincidental.

Set up a website to support my Android app, and after a couple months I started getting a flood of referrer spam filling up my logs. All of it from a couple dozen different netblocks in the Ukraine. I tried a couple different techniques to filter out the bad guys, but at this point I just toss all the netblocks into the reject pile in my htaccess file.

Does anyone actually get legitimate traffic from the Ukraine anyway?

Sure, the real-world violence and power struggles are sad. But from an internet perspective, I have a hard time seeing much to care about.

Yes, but more women take the SAT than men, and yet the ratio of perfect math scores is 2:1 in favor of the men or 2.5:1 after adjusting for the fact that more women taken the test.

Performance in the SAT is not uncorrelated with effort put forth in the math classes prior to the test. That's a variable that's strongly influenced by socialization.

Given the example of things like chess, it would seem that socialization should probably be the default explanation until and unless evidence of other explanations comes to light.

Compare with women and chess.

The model revealed that the greater proportion of male chess players accounts for a whopping 96% of the difference in ability between the two genders at the highest level of play. If more women took up chess, you’d see that difference close substantially. ... So why are there so few female chess grandmasters? Because fewer women play chess. It’s that simple. This overlooked fact accounts for so much of the observable differences that other possible explanations, be they biological, cultural or environmental, are just fighting for scraps at the table.

Ah, okay. Gotta call Poe's Law on this one. It doesn't really matter if you're serious or not - either way, you're just cherry-picking passages to respond to and not addressing the salient points (e.g., the economic question). So, um... have a nice life, I guess.