I'm a professor at a university in upstate New York. Would you be interested in giving a talk here? How could I arrange that? What kinds of talks do you have that would be of interest to engineering students and faculty? (Or would Kelly's work be more interesting to such an audience?)

When you're hanging out with your friends, in person or online, you can use the English language any way you want. Seriously, I don't care.

But if you want to write something that is meant to be professional, where you expect some respect, then English has a set of rules for you to follow. The rules are an arbitrary consequence of history, but exactly what the rules are doesn't matter. What matters is having SOME kind of standard for common communication. There's no reason red should mean "stop." We just accept that as a convention, and if you don't follow it, you're going to crash. By having these common language conventions, it aids in clear communication that reduces ambiguity, and clear commuication has self-evident value in in science, journalism, politics, diplomacy, and countless other areas.

I get what you're saying. And you're right. "Docile" is exactly what they're after, in the negative sense of having people calm because they think everything's just okay.

That being said, maintaining a CALM population is generally a good thing. We'd prefer to minimize violence.

Of course, disinformation is a bad thing, and it's important that remain in a condition of philosophical debate over what's good and bad, and what the NYPD is doing is interfereing with honest philosophical debate.

In the information age, reasonably well trained scientsts are probably better than they have ever been. However, a lot of anti-science politics and an increasing list for sensationalism in the media shed more light on scientific failure than in the past.

Science is built on failure. And incrementally correcting it. It's how we learn. If you have enough brains to accept that all of science is to some lesser or greater degree "probably approximately correct" based on what we know, and what we know will change, then you won't go insane thinking that science is in any way like those religions people chase after because they want TRUTH RIGHT NOW. Neither religion nor science will give you perfect truth right now -- just only one of them is honest about it.

A lot of people have fundamental intellectual problems accepting uncertainty or non-binary reasoning.

The wikipedia article on GSE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapefruit_seed_extract) is interesting. Basically, it's the preservaties (such as Benzethonium chloride) that actually confer the antimicrobial properties.

The reason that so many people believe that homeopathic medicines is that most of them actually WORK, because they are "contaminated" with actual medicine. For instance, there's this zinc-based nasal spray that is advertized as homeopathic, but in fact it contains a non-trivial amount of the active ingredient. It's advertized as homeopathic (a) as a marketing gimmick for those who buy into this stuff (note: people who believe in homeopathy don't read labels or even understand what's on those labels) and (b) probably some way to get around FDA regulations.

Ever heard of grapefruit seed extract? Supposedly it's this powerful antimicrobial agent. Except it's not. Often the product also contains an actual antimicrobial compound as an "inactive ingredient."

I have no idea how companies get away with this. I mean, if it works, that's fine, but to lie through their teeth about what does what in the product?

There's one reason I'm very glad Blurred Lines exists: Word Crimes

Currently my favorite song.

I'm no musicalologist, but I just don't see a massive resemblance. I carefully listened to both songs. The beats are substantially similar. For instance, the pattern of the cow bell (if that's the name of the instrument) is basically the same. However, Blurred Lines layers a bass line and melody on top of it that are completely different. There's also some similarity in the high singing voice.

So, if stealing a percussion pattern is copyright infringement, this is going to cause all sorts of trouble, because artists rip off melodies and guitar riffs all the time.

Yeah, because it's too hard for you to Google something.

I am not alone in the opinion that the horrible American diet does not only cause obesity. It also causes all manner of health problems, including mental ones. If people ate healthier foods and therefore got the nutrients their bodies need, and eliminated the excess simple carbs, pesticides, pollutants, and common inflammation-causing irritants, then people would feel a hell of a lot better. We already know that depression is linked with brain inflammation, which diet customization can ameliorate. Depression is also linked with poor diet because serotonin is stored in the gut lining, which is commonly eroded in people who eat a bad diet. That's why so many people say SSRI's don't work -- there's no serotonin to selectively reuptake inhibit.

And of course, no MD would ever be smart enough to tell you to take 5HTP. That's the other problem. We're trained to think of doctors like they're priests. They're just technicians, many of whom just barely made the cut. And I wear to you, the first thing they do when you enter med school is excise the parts of your brain that contain any nutritional knowledge. When a gastroenterologist tells me he doesn't believe in food allergies, you know there's a problem. So, the one group of people we should be listening to for nutritional advice know absolutely nothing about it. In fact, it's a general incompetence among MDs (remember, most are just technicians specializing in narrow areas of medicine) that is the reason so many people are afraid of vaccines. Who's pushing the vaccines? The same people who tell you your chronic symptoms are all in your head. (Those chronic symptoms are probably nutrition-related, BTW.)

A high school in the southeastern US switched their lunch program to all healthy foods. McDonalds out. Salads and generally good variety in. Behavioral problems went down, absenteeism went down, grades went up. No surprise there. (Incidentally, shifting high school hours slightly later in the day, to adapt to the teen sleep cycle, has some similar effects, so we can't say it's ALL nutrition. That's just one major factor. Imagine doing both!)

Eat better.

The US has a population of almost 320 million. Between 1% and 2% of the US population has a doctoral degree. Let's use that as a proxy for people with a STEM degree of any kind. That suggests that there's somewhere on the order of 3 million people in the US with a tech degree. If all if them were looking for jobs, then only about 1 in 6 would be able to find one. That being said, I can't tell you how many currently-filled positions there are. This probably accounts for the rest.

Let's keep in mind that most tech degrees aren't worth the paper they're written on. There are universities turning out uneducated graduates in droves. Even the good schools manage to graduate plenty of morons with passing grades. If this weren't the case, then companies like Google wouldn't feel motivated to put interviewees through these grueling, demoralizing, dehumanizing interviews. I don't like that approach to interviews, but it is an effective way of eliminating the huge numbers of college graduates who managed to pass without acquiring any skills. If the colleges had higher standards, this wouldn't be necessary.

People who can't find jobs say there aren't enough openings. Companies with plenty of openings complain that there aren't enough (good) IT graduates. Both are true. There are inordinate numbers of IT graduates. There are also plenty of jobs (open and filled positions combined).

We hear about a lack of IT jobs because the majority of IT graduates can't find jobs. When a majority complains about something, we hear about. What's left out of this is that the majority of IT graduates are also woefully unskilled at IT, although they either don't know or don't care. They spent more energy on cheating than studying, but they (or their parents) paid for their degree, and they feel entitled to get a job. Too bad they're completely unemployable.

Back when I got my bachelors degree, there was a major employer in the area that hired a lot of local graduates. Mostly they would hire them with only a cursory interview. Every single hiree, regardless of skill, was paid $30k/year (this was the mid 90's) and put through an extensive training program. Think of it as 3-month interview or probationary period. If you couldn't hack the training program, you were let go. If you passed, your skill level still didn't matter, because every one was stuck at the bottom of a waterfall design process. All you would do all day, every day was go through a stack of papers, where each paper corresponded to one function or procedure, and you would code them one at a time. Completely mind-numbing. But this company was successful at meeting predictable deadlines by employing thousands of relatively mindless IT graduates. There are still lots of companies like this, and they have to be, because this is the quality of the typical IT graduate. Those companies that adapt to the lowest common denominator do well. People get hired, and they get plenty of employees.

But we're in a super star culture. Companies want super star engineers, and engineers (however unskilled) want super star jobs. And that's where all the complaints (from both sides) are coming from.

(a) The linked article doesn't list the good and bad species. Does the original? Is it behind a paywall?
(b) How can I order some probiotic pills with just the right good ones?
(c) Why are probiotic pills so limited in the species included?

Depending on the frequency band (i.e. not terahertz), it's not that hard to make an arbitrary digital signal encoder that produces an analog signal, after a little bit of filtering. For instance, it's common enough to do audio by wigging a single bit and then passing that through a low-pass filter.

If they're claiming to do it without ANY analog hardware, then I call BS. However, there is filtering inherent in the digital circuits. I could imagine using a genetic programming to learn code sequences that produced desired signals as basically cross talk. However, process variation could really muck with that.

As for receiving, that's not too hard either. Say you want to receive a wide band of frequencies. You can make a band-pass filter in the analog and convert that to digital using an ADC. Once in the digital domain, you can separate the channels using fourier analysis or Taylor series.

Let's face it, people: Hacking is boring to watch. At the same time, do you think they weren't going to do a cyber-inspired CSI show in the Internet era?

My wife's (an attorney) gave me another example of something that would be as interesting as a technically accurate "CSI: Cyber":
"Law and Order: Bankruptcy Court"

And that's about right.

I like SmallTalk, and I like C. However, their syntaxes are very different. Objective-C mashes them together in a way that results in a very inconsistent feel to the syntax. C++, on the other hand, is just a logical extension of C syntax. Sure, there are some advantages to Objective-C's message passing approach. Well, if you consider silent failure when you pass a message to a null object to be an advantage.

Objective-C predates C++, and it shows. Someone shoehorned in OOP in a way that was borrowed from a totally different philosophy. Then Stroutrop came along and did it right. Some people may have complaints about C++ at an abstract level, but at least the language is internally consistent (or more so than Objective-C anyway).