Repel the deer? No. However, the splattered innards and guts of the deer you just hit will smoothly slide right off your windshield.

I got into this discussion too late to be noticed, but I feel the need to help people understand that this theory is *NOT* stating the universe is a simulation. Projections are not simulations.

What the theory suggests is that of all the dimensions we know about (the article mentions 6, which is how many dimensions you get with one flavor of string theory), some of them are illusion. Like a hologram -- a 2D plastic or glass toy that displays a 3D image. The universe does not contain 6 dimensions; it contains a smaller number, and the rest of the dimensions only appear to be there.

It's likely that the universe contains at least three dimensions, because we would have noticed non-isomorphic behavior in space. But the jury is still out on whether the fourth dimension -- Time -- is an illusion. The same goes for the fifth and sixth dimensions.

None of this says anything about the universe being simulated. That's a philosophical question that physics will probably never be able to answer.

Nerf hammers *are* technically hammers.

I only asserted that he was better at all of those qualities than the Kim Jung family.

My pet golden retriever also beats the Kim Jungs at most of those metrics, so I stand by my earlier statement.

You didn't read my comment, did you? Hitler was white, not ugly, and somewhat intelligent. In the neoreactionary view, those attributes make him more desirable as a monarch than any of the Kim Jungs. His family background and political connections mean *nothing* -- in fact, basing leadership on social networking is exactly what the neoreactionaries are trying to get away from.

If you read TFA, the neoreactionaries are proposing that the monarch at the top of the hierarchy be selected by genetic fitness. The smartest, fittest, and most handsome men (one assumes only men) would rule. So there's no danger of anyone from the Kim Jung family being in charge. We're much more likely to end up with Hitler.

Everything you say is true. However in this case, Snowden *asked* for the password and the employees *gave* it to him. That's just stupidity on the users' part.

In other news, there are a lot of stupid employees at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii.

If the NSA had trained its employees competently, they wouldn't be so naive as to give their login passwords to anyone, even an admin.

'Traitor' and 'whistleblower' are not contradictory concepts. Snowden committed treason to reveal illegal behavior in the NSA. I am in favor of using his information to force the NSA to follow the law, *and* in favor of putting him in jail for treason.

It's also wrong to suggest that whistleblowers should receive automatic pardons. There were ways to reveal this information without committing treason; Snowden chose not to take that route. He's a traitor *and* a hero, and ideally his actions would cause positive change in the world while he's rotting in jail.

I prefer the Copenhagen interpretation, but this experiment is also interesting if we use the Many-Worlds interpretation. Then the God-like outside observer sees every possible quantum state and all of its outcomes simultaneously, as if they all have already happened. That sounds to me like a recipe for strict determinism.

Note that alongside the hundreds of thousands of federal workers were even more contractors who were also furloughed and will *not* be paid for their time off. If you focus only on the federal workers you'll miss the bigger picture. The contractors and subcontractors are the ones who took the real economic hit.

(Full disclosure, I'm a contractor and I'm not getting paid for the past three weeks. My client, who is a federal worker, will be given back pay.)

Where I'm coming from: I'm a satellite physicist working as a contractor for the USGS on the Landsat program. I work very closely with NASA.

Almost all the scientific programming we do -- and by 'we' I mean USGS and NASA -- is either in IDL/ENVI or Matlab. They're the defacto standards for scientific processing. We do need to know SQLPlus to get our data out of the databases, and we need rudimentary C++ skills in order to make prototype code for the IT coders to turn into an operational release. Sometimes it's easier to code something in C++ then IDL or Matlab, so it's nice to be able to jump straight to that when warranted. Add Perl for text manipulation (which always turns out to be useful in some way) and that's all the programming I've done for the past ten years. Many scientists in the building swap out ARCGIS or ERDAS for IDL/ENVI. (Matlab doesn't seem to be swappable; you either need to use it or you never touch the stuff.)

I've dabbled in Php when they asked me to prototype a web site but that never went far. I've done a little Flash programming that they eventually decided to hire out for. (I did a fine job, but they wanted the application to go bigger.) In the early days of my career FORTRAN was everywhere, you couldn't get away from it. There are still some FORTRAN programs in-house that I could fiddle with if they asked me to, although I'd blanch at the prospect.

All that said, what you need depends on what your role is. If you're a scientist like me then these self-taught languages might be enough. If you're a science-oriented IT person, you'll need more -- most importantly strong C++ skills, at least around here. And different disciplines will have different needs; I worked briefly for NIH (National Institutes of Health) and they still had COBOL programs.

I know of one person in two organizations (USGS and NASA) who knows Python, and he's an IT guy not a scientist. He's also the only person I know who has ever used Hadoop. I have never met anyone who knew R. Visual Basic is used occasionally here and there for prototyping, and almost immediately switched out with C++ as soon as management decides to support the project.

It should be noted that the House of Representatives already has passed 41 bills that repeal Obamacare. The Senate rejected them all. That's how our government works -- nothing happens unless both halves of Congress agree.

The republicans are now trying to make policy by going outside of the government's normal mode of operation. We'll see how that works for them.

Have you tried Kinja? It is *not* a positive in any sense of the word. It is terrible, bloated software packed with bugs. It often doesn't work at all, or on some major browsers, and when it does work it often screws up any formatting the author attempts.

Worst of all, it's run by free moderation -- as in, there is no oversight or appeal process for bad moderation calls. You can get into an argument with a moderator and find yourself blocked from the entire site, with no recourse. Kinja enables overzealous moderation and petty forum dictatorships, the situations that many good discussion forums take pains to avoid.

If Kinja is the future of internet commenting, then internet comments are truly dead. The net will become balkanized groups of friends chatting in their own echo chambers, a worse situation than in the BBS days.

I'd reassure you about American courage if I wasn't afraid of speaking publically on this topic.