The density of the microbeads is actually slightly less than the water, though that can change if they attract dirt. As for settling out, yes hypothetically if you put them in an isothermic tank of completely still water then maybe over the course of a couple months they would all float to the top. However, there is no time for that. In actual treatment processes there are always currents, both from the flow through the system and from thermal gradients, that will keep them mixed in the water column. The treatment process is just not designed to remove them.

â(TM)Hâ(TM)eâ(TM)lâ(TM)pâ(TM)!

I thought anthropogenic global warming was solving that?

The article is also based on some terrible reasoning, like:

That means there will be no asteroids left in the Solar System, because they all will have struck Earth, in another few hundred million years. Think someone’s overestimated something there? Yeah, me too. Let’s take a look with the flaws in our fear-based reasoning.

Yeah, in a universe where our solar system is some sort of perfect steady state. Which, of course, it is not. Asteroids collide or - more commonly, come close to other bodies and gravitationally interact - and throw each other into different orbits. When that happens, non-Earth-crossing asteroids can become Earth-crossing ones. For example, one of the candidates for the K-Pg extinction event is a Batisma-family asteroid. This family came from an asteroid breakup 80 million years ago.

A person well versed in the field would be aware of the fact that asteroids are not in some sort of unchanging steady state. Which is why they're the ones paid to do the research on the subject.

And more to the point, we really don't have a good handle on what's out there. We have trouble making out dwarf planets in the outer solar system. We really have no bloody clue what could be on its way into the inner solar system, apart from studying how often major events happen.

And on that note, another flaw in his logic, given that until recently, the vast majority of Tunguska-style events would never even have been detected, having occurred over the oceans, remote deserts, the poles, etc. So by all means it's perfectly fair to say that the fact that an asteroid hitting earth is more likely to hit a remote uninhabited area is perfectly fair. But saying that while mentioning the rarity of inhabited areas having been hit in the past is double-counting. The historical record is evidence of how often they hit populated areas, not how often they hit Earth.

Lastly, his claim that only one person has ever been "hit by an asteroid" is ridiculous. 1500 people were injured by the Chelyabinsk one in 2013 badly enough to seek medical attention. Yes, they weren't "hit by rocks", but that's not what large asteroid impacts do; they mostly or completely vaporize by exploding in the atmosphere and/or on impact. And there's lots of reports throughout history of people getting struck by asteroids; just because they weren't documented by modern medical science doesn't mean it never happened. Seriously, what's the bloody odds that the only person to ever in historical times be hit by an asteroid would be in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation? Now what's the odds that someone being hit in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation would be well documented, publicized, and believed?

Just a lot of really bad arguments.

Can you imagine the dystopian dictatorship where trekkies come to power? All of the halls of power full of people walking around in spandex and fake ears and brow ridges, the fed directed to work toward the absolution of currency, the military directed to accelerate development of phasers and for all recruits to undergo "Kobayashi Maru" training.... NASA would finally get their proposed $18,5 billion dollar annual budget passed - except that the bill would have the word "annual" crossed out and the word "monthly" written in its place. National anti-bullying legislation would be passed, probably with a name like Spock's Law. And of course they'd insist on referring to the UN as the United Federation of Planets.

Hydrogen gas was used by the Nazis too...

In a theological sense, modulo the crawling, sure. This is the Meaning of Life we're talking about.

And of course, actual "good guys" don't have to continually describe themselves by that label because it's apparent by their actions.

As someone who uses DuckDuckGo, I have to point out that that's a misleading suggestion. If other engines start doing this, it may well end up in DDG as well.

DDG relies heavily on the indices of others and many of the crappy trends in modern search engines are filtering into DDG. Search terms are replaced by synonyms and common misspellings, all searches seem to be boolean OR searches and terms are dropped without any notice at all, etc. More than that, any dissatisfaction with the results is dismissed and blamed on the other indices that they use.

Honestly, if it weren't for the extremely addictive bang searches (holy shit are those awesome), I'd probably ditch DDG. I know that you can implement those in Firefox, so I might get around to that eventually.

Now THAT, sir, is a theory.

It's kind of like that Metallica line: "Come crawling faster / obey your master. . ."

It also has a CCID compatible secure element, so you can use it to store your SSH keys. Instead of setting up OTP on each server and pressing the button, just add the NEO's key to .ssh/authorized_keys on each host. Much simpler.

It also acts as a OpenPGP Card and has support in Android for signing/decrypting email.

"You wouldn't understand."

"I wouldn't expect you to understand."