Yup. Declare normal human variation pathological, make money by "treating" it, laugh all the way to the bank.

I would also add that many of the "autistic" children I see aren't autistic at all, not by any standard I understand. They are children desperate for attention, and have found a way to get that attention.

Some may even be jumping on the autism bandwagon to be trendy. I've seen this with allergies, where kids want inhalers and shit so they fit in with their over-medicated peers.

...laura

For the most part, TNG was competent. At its best it was brilliant. I'm with people on episodes like The Inner Light and The Measure of a Man. Add in, for me, Cause and Effect, The Emissary, a few others. The human condition, in space. Good stuff.

Unlike many, I actually liked The Dauphin.

I thought Darmok was an interesting idea. How do you make aliens who are, well, alien, but not so alien that you can't interact with them? This was an issue with the Borg, badass aliens who could kick the shit out of Klingons and not work up a sweat, but who were so alien that no meaningful interaction was possible.

Bad episodes? Yeah, there were a few. I prefer to remember the good ones.

...laura

Fukushima won't show up more than any other nuclear reactor, if anything since there's no longer an active reactor, it will produce fewer neutrinos. A nuclear meltdown does not in general involve the production of more radiation than a running reactor, the primary problem is that all the radioactive waste can get exposed.

The most interesting bit is not in the summary. Given individual websites they could identify which specific webpage one was visiting thus leaking with high probability all sorts of medical, financial and legal information. Examples used include from medicine the websites of the Mayo Clinic and Planned Parenthood, from finance Wells Fargo and Bank of America, and from entertainment Youtube and Netflix. This sort of thing could be used for all sorts of surveillance or blackmail. Even just knowing what Youtube videos one is watching could be used for such ends.

Do you need to know how fast you're going? Yes.

Do you need to know how your car is performing? Yes.

Do you need to know where you are and where you're going? Yes.

We already have head-up displays that show car parameters, as well as navigation systems that help you get where you're going. This could be incorporated in to an HUD ("turn here ->").

Anything more would be information overload. I do not need ads to tell me how cool the store I'm driving by is (i.e. how much they paid for the ad), nor do I need neat pictures other people have taken in the vicinity.

Look at how they do it in airplanes: the pilots have the essential information in front of them, but can access other information as needed.

...laura

In many fields conference proceedings have little to no oversight. These papers don't get noticed at all or cited and for most purposes don't exist. The only real issue I can see here is that a large fraction of these are apparently coming from China and this is consistent with prior reports of serious problems with academic quality coming from China. It is possible that people are using these essentially fake papers to boost their publication counts which may give them some advantages as long as no one looks closely, but any institution that is a serious institution will look at everything one has published. I actually found this point more interesting:

Considering how many complaints there are about low-quality open-access journals, this suggests that that isn't nearly as much of an issue as some people are claiming.

I've always thought ARM was a cool design. Simple, minimalist, sort of a latter-day PDP-11, one of those canonical architectures that just works. Simple chip, not many transistors, low power, good chip for mobile devices. It seems so obvious in retrospect. Especially since that's not what the designers had in mind. They were designing a simple chip because they only had a couple of people and that was all they could afford.

In one of the later scenes in Micro Men there is a whiteboard in the background with the original ARM requirements, right down to the barrel shifter.

...laura

That's a good point, so from a strict get-there-once attitude this won't be so bad. However, I don't think that slamming into the moon is going to be a good strategy here unless they used some sort of extremely robust system which would create its own problems.

Ok. I just looked at their plan in more detail (that is read all of TFA). They are planning on getting the solar panels and most other infrastructure from Earth. That means massive costs in terms of riding up the gravity well. This makes their plan look extremely implausible.

A major issue is that the moon is fairly far up Earth's gravity well. It is easy to get things to low-Earth orbit and already tough to get things to even geo-stationary. The main saving of putting anything on the moon will come if you can do a large part of your construction on-site since otherwise moving that much material up is going to be tough. If you are doing automated construction on site you also are going to need to be able to make mainly a lot of solar cells. Solar cells are primarily silicon and there's already been prior research on refining the moon's regolith for silicon to manufacture electronic components and that looks possibly doable but one does need to get over some technical chemistry issues. See e.g. http://www.asi.org/adb/02/13/02/silicon-production.html.

The other issue is distance for power transmission: most designs for microwave power involve power transmission from at most a little over geo-stat at about 35,000 km. The distance to the moon is about 10 times that, so if you don't have a really tight beam, there are going to be issues. Also, since the moon change's position you are going to need a large number of sites on Earth that can receive the beam, and if you can't switch off smoothly between them always (which would itself require massive planet-wide infrastructure), you would still need power sources on Earth (possibly just massive storage facilities?) to deal with those times.

Overall, a really cool idea with a lot of technical hurdles. I hope they can make it work but I'm not optimistic.

Nope, not really. The issue isn't his religion, it is that his religion by his own description motivates his conclusions and results. Not too long ago I was talking to an undergrad who said that he wanted to become a climate scientist because he wanted to get people to stop using fossil fuels. I told him that he should instead become an engineer.

The problem in a nutshell is that humans are deeply imperfect. So when we have external motivations, and those motivations are strong enough, they distort what we do. That can occur in a variety of ways such as the file drawer effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_drawer_problem#File_drawer_effect but also more subtle issues. In this particular context, there are literally hundreds of predictions from the 1980s about what the climate would be like today. That means that there are very difficult decisions to make about which predictions one should compare to the current data, and how to measure how accurate they are. Spencer's own motivations make the decisions he makes there to be extremely problematic. And yes, science is universally reproducible, but we're not talking about whether to accept a specific paper in a journal (if we were climatologists who were doing so, I agree that Spencer's motivations should then not enter into that), we're talking about non-climatologists who have neither the full time nor full expertise to make a judgment about all the details of his claims. In that context, the fact that he has strong external motivation is highly relevant when scientists lacking that external bias by and large disagree with his conclusions.

I have no idea where you even began to get "straight" or "white" on that list. And in this particular context, I'd be perfectly ok with agnostics or atheists or Christians or members of other religions. However, when his beliefs about climate change are specifically motivated by his religion there's a problem. Heuristically speaking, his beliefs are more suspect. There are a lot of Christians who don't think that God is controlling the climate and they do perfectly good climate research.

Not really. There's no intrinsic reason an atheist should think that climate change is happening. For that matter, there are Christians who are scientists who don't think that their religion forces an answer to these questions one way or another. The point isn't an atheism v. Christianity issue, but about Spencer's specific religious belief. And yes, funding issues are a problem, and they are worth paying attention to, but there's very little funding that only goes to specific goals, but rather simply to stud climate issues in general. When funding is more motivationally directed that's a definite problem, but that's only a small fraction of total funding.

Spencer has contributed specific work in peer reviewed journals that is part of the scientific discussion, but his overall opinion on climate change is motivated more by his own religion than anything else. He's both sympathetic to intelligent design and signed a statement which said among other things ""Earth and its ecosystems – created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)#Climate_change Essentially he believes that climate change isn't happening because his religion won't let him. Note how that statement wasn't even just about climate, but about ecosystems as a whole. Christy doesn't seem to have that same sort of underlying motivation and might make more sense to pay attention to, but in this context, the vast majority of experts disagree with both of them, and when dealing with complicated scientific issues, using expert consensus is a useful heuristic, that's before we get to the serious issue that not only is the expert consensus clear, it is a consensus about some very bad results, not just a consensus about an issue which doesn't have substantial impact.

I sometimes wonder if Google Glass is going to be another CueCat. Somebody thought it was a really neat idea and pushed it hard, but nobody else thought it was a neat idea and it died.

People view Google Glass as creepy and weird. That's hard sell, even for Google.

...laura