Online donations of a 2-month-old cryptocurrency named for an internet meme featuring a dog that talks in broken English raised $30,000 to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics.

Seriously, I'm not sure it gets any weirder than that.

I'm working my way through System Shock 2 on Impossible as an OSA agent. I've *finally* gotten to the point where my powers are beginning to be effective and I don't have to rely on wrenching every single thing to death now that I've hit the command deck

I also downloaded The Void last night on a whim off of Steam. Really, really bizarre, and the strategy is not obvious at all. I'll see if it's more an art thing or a compelling game

and haven't flown since my first kid was born. As so many others have mentioned, the economics just don't work anymore. I trained on C-152s many years back and they're a nice plane, but even then they were $80/hour to rent one from the local FBO. They sold them right after I got my license and the next cheapest was a 172 at well over $100/hour. To keep yourself from literally being a danger to yourself and everyone around you you need to put in 100 hours/year. $10k/year on a hobby? Yeah, there are a few folks out there who could do it, but not me. Buying a new plane will run you as much as my house, and a used one will cost thousands a year just in inspections and even more in hanger fees.

The only way I think you could do it was the way my old neighbor did- he was a master mechanic who was working on his FAA certificate. He'd signed up with a couple of wealthier folks and he got a fraction of the plane free if he did the work on it.

Students love grade inflation because they love getting A's

Faculty love grade inflation because they spend less time dealing with pissed off students and helicopter parents

Administration likes grade inflation because it means fewer people drop out, which is good for the bottom line. More degrees with honors sounds great too.

All we need to do is fix students, faculty and the administration and we can solve this problem right away.....

The most annoying thing about trying to land on a comet is that you can't timewarp past 1x anywhere close to it, and the gravity is so low it takes forever to actually land, or have your Kerbal come down after jumping.

(Would be cool if they'd add a couple to KSP. I bet there's a mod that does)

FARK has a tool like this that puts up a little banner asking you to either subscribe or turn off Adblock. I decided to actually give it a try one day. Within less than 30 minutes, my background music was stomped on by a very loud, unskippable, unpauseable video ad.

Adblock went right back on.

I don't mind ads. I understand this stuff isn't free and I'm willing to put up with them provided they aren't going to scream in my ear. But the ad makers don't seem to be willing to adjust their side of the equation.

And what happens when the OpenStreetMap deletionists show up?

"Hmm, I could have sworn Clover, VA used to be around here..."

It's played on a normal TTT board. Each player makes two moves a turn, which exist in indeterminate states. Eventually the players will develop a cyclic entanglement of their moves, at which point a measurement is made and the entangled moves collapse into permanent moves on the board. I refereed a paper on it recently for J. Chem Ed where they used it to teach basic QM to physical chemistry students.

You can play a version online here

Being done as we speak, by one of the coolest (both figuratively and literally) experiments ever designed.

(Technically, they weren't falling but rising- Ice Cube uses the Earth as a shield to screen non-neutrino events)

Depends. For us, it was a zero warning phone call telling us to come pick up our son at the hospital. For #2, we were on vacation and got "How fast can you get to Norfolk?"

/Adoption can be amusing...

Feel free to keep doing this HP: we picked up an awesome employee when he bailed from there. We'll be happy to hire more of those expensive experienced people- you don't really need them to sell printer ink...

Biology->Chemistry->Physics->Math->Philosophy->Linguistics->Religion->Anthropology->Psychology->Biology... QED

Interestingly, the Economist's article on the same points this weeks notes that there is a group specifically devoted to doing replication- the Reproducibility Initiative from PLOS One. They've got a $1.3 million grant from the Arnold Foundation to look at 50 high profile papers in cancer research.

Other than the original idea (Heritage Foundation is hardly a shill for Obama) and implementation (The last R candidate for president) of course.

Forums like /., for example. Even today slashdot has a tiny fraction the functionality (and speed) of a high quality USENET newsreader.