Ah, but you forget that it potentially habitable.

This reads like the voice-over for one of those embarrassingly poor 'documentaries' you sometimes see, where the producers have tried to sensationalize a fairly standard, scientific subject, and draw it out to fill a whole hour, when it could have been adequately explained in about 10 minutes. A shame, really, because the subject is in fact quite interesting.

However: waves don't move patches of water half-way around the globe; the actual water more or less stays in place. A wave is simply energy propagating through a medium, and it is quite astonishing to hear that an ocean wave can travel that far without dissipating, because the expectation is that it would spread out in a circular pattern and thus grow weaker with distance. I would have been interested in hearing what the explanation is.

Hmm, let me see; during this recent exchange, how many Israelies were killed or injured? You mention 1 elderly lady, so that is 1 that I have heard of so far. You also mention 20 civilians in Gaza, but in the same breath imply that it is probably their own fault. Now, if you step back a bit and look at what you are saying, can you understand why so many people in the rest of the world feel less than convinced of your sincerity?

You guys enjoy the protection of the US, you have overwhelming, technological advantages over your opponents, you have throughout history shown little to no interest in finding peace with your neighbours, and a large proportion of people outside of Israel feel that you are engaged in shameless landgrabbing, apartheid and collective punishment of the Palestinian population. And as your own words demonstrate, you don't actually give a sh*t about it; but you still expect the rest of the world to feel sorry for you.

This is what I think should happen: the US should withdraw all military and economic support from Israel with about a year's warning. Then you guys will have a bit of time to try to find another way to deal with your neighbours - I suspect you will become really nice and open to sincere negotiations and find a solution that is sustainable in the long term, instead of being the bully hiding behind America's skirts.

As a side note: I am not an anti-Semite. For one thing, I don't think the state of Israel are worthy representatives of Judaism (just like 'Islamists' are not Muslims), and any way, Jews are not the only Semites.

I think the summary rather overstates the case. This virus, if a virus it is, doesn't so much hint at the origins of life as it puts a new perspective on the origins of viruses. The origin of life probably lies much further back in time than the emergence of viruses, certainly if viruses are 'degenerated' life-forms, evolved from cellular life.

Seen in this light, this new virus could be a primitive virus; but it rather begs the question whether 'virus' is actually a well-defined, mono-phyletic group. It seems quite reasonable to think that viruses have evolved many times during evolution. Firstly, although life is said to have begun when certain things came together and formed cells, there must have been a period when life or proto-life was more like a diffuse soup of components that would be part of cellular life, and while some of these combined to become cells, others may have become viruses. They may have evolved again at a slightly later stage from plasmids, pieces of genetic material that move between cells (or plasmids may have evolved as an extreme form of viruses, who knows?), and they may have arisen once more from bacteria or similar.

Virii? Nitpicking, I know, but that particular abuse of the language makes me cringe, it really does, because it is so bizarrely and emphatically wrong on far too many levels.

Even if 'virus' had been the singular form of a latin word, the plural would not have been 'virii', with double 'i' at the end. 'Viri', possibly, but 'virii' would have to come from 'Virius', a personal name - check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

Finally, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...:

Etymology

The word is from the Latin virus referring to poison and other noxious substances, first used in English in 1392.[10] Virulent, from Latin virulentus (poisonous), dates to 1400.[11] A meaning of "agent that causes infectious disease" is first recorded in 1728,[10] before the discovery of viruses by Dmitri Ivanovsky in 1892. The English plural is viruses, whereas the Latin word is a mass noun, which has no classically attested plural. The adjective viral dates to 1948.[12] The term virion (plural virions), which dates from 1959,[13] is also used to refer to a single, stable infective viral particle that is released from the cell and is fully capable of infecting other cells of the same type.[14]

IMO, since 'virus' is a modernism - an old word used in a completely new way - it is reasonable to treat it grammatically as a modern word: one virus, multiple viruses, just like 'one bus, several buses' ('bus' from 'omnibus', but let's not go there). Apart from that, you would use a a nominative singular here: '... our virus overlords ...'

Please forgive me if I try to inject a bit sanity into the discussion.

Firstly, there were EU rules in place, which required ISPs etc to keep records of who contacted who, how long they had to keep them and under which circumstances they were required to disclose this information to the police. These rules were overturned, and the UK government rushes a set of laws through, that put the EU rules back in power at the national level. IOW this is not a sudden introduction of new, sweeping powers to spy on UK citizens, it is merely a continuation of a set of rules already in place. It is also rather dubious whether this qualifies as 'spying on UK citizens', since this is about keeping records that the telephone companies already make, so they can bill their customers. Before the rules were introduced, telephone companies followed their own, internal rules, some keeping records for years while others kept them for a short period.

Requiring telecoms to keep their records for a minimum period of time is actually not exclusively bad, because as a customer you have to right to see your own records, which means that you can actually go back to the company and say 'Look, I never called that premium rate number for 2 hours every day while I was away on holiday, so somebody must have hacked you system'. This is one of the things the telecoms don't like at all, because it costs them money.

Finally, telephone records have been in used for solving crime for many years. Assuming that you are not part of a criminal organisation, you probably don't want large, international gangs - the people smugglers, the drugs cartels, the illegal arms traders, the pedophiles etc etc - to get away with it easily? So, in the absence of keeping telephone records, how to you propose that we, as a society tackle these problems? True, right now it is the job of the police, but in reality fighting crime is in the interest of all and is ultimately everybody's responsibility. So, tell us all, how do we fight international, organised crime without keeping an eye on what everybody is doing? After all, criminals look exactly like anybody else.

AFAIK, a judge is still allowed to state his political opinion as a private person. However, the job of a judge is to judge according to the law, full stop. The probing and questioning of legislation is the job of Parliament, not least the House of Lords, as well as common citizens. This is how society is intended to work - separation of powers and all that - which is why judges and police are not allowed to ignore the law (or make up the rules as they go along).

If you, as a citizen, feel that a law is wrong, it is your right, and IMO your duty, to come out and say so in public, and even to campaign for a change; this is probably the main purpose of your freedom of speech: to allow you to express your political opinions, so that legislations does not move too far away from what people think is just and fair.

Well said :-)

Of course, the problem we have now is not whether we can avoid climate change - we can't - but whether we can avoid running completely off the tracks. Even if we were to stop burning fossil fuel right now, we are still looking at continued climate change for a least a couple of centuries, and the best we can do is to try to limit the damage. We can adapt to the changes that are already unavoidable, but we would be very hard hit if whole ecosystems were severely disturbed all over the world.

But I really don't understand the hysterical denialism; to me it looks like there are massive opportunities - when there are big changes afoot, there are always more opportunities, if you are clever enough. Isn't that what being American is all about?

I disagree. Java and Python - or any other programming language - are tools and only in widespread use because they fulfill their purpose well. It is a mistake to think that a programming should aim to make programming easy - designing and writing programs are fundamentally difficult tasks, and the only way you can make coding feel easy is by hiding away the complexities behind an API; but the cost is always to narrow the scope of the language.

Java and Python have both found a very good balance between generality and ease of use; my fear is that if you don't learn the hard, but more universal programming techniques from the beginning, then you'll never learn them and you'll always be a user of tools that you don't fully comprehend. It is a lot easier to move in to Java, Python or any other "easy" language, if you start from C++, than it is to go from Python to C++, for example.

One would hope that Java or Python is not the only programming language that is learned; it should IMO be mandatory to also learn at least C and possibly assembler of some sort.

Indeed. As it turns out, the greatest threat to mankind is not necessarily from power-crazed world-leaders sitting on huge arsenals, but from people who didn't care enough, didn't think far enough ahead and didn't understand what they were dealing with.

Very amusing. However, as someone who's actually been in Beijing several times (I held a work permit in China for 3 years among other things), I can tell that things are a bit more nuanced. It can be grim, sometimes, but most of what is claimed to be smog in the stereotypical press-photo, is actually dust from the arid north-west of China (Inner Mongolia); when the weather is dry and the wind is from that corner, everything gets coated in very fine powder. I don't remember pollution being a huge problem - it isn't good, mind, but it isn't anywhere near what London and other industrial cities used to be like.

The biggest problem in Beijing is the continental climate - summer like a blast-furnace and the winter is bitterly cold. But go there around April, and it is the loveliest city in the world, green and flowers everywhere.

So, you'd prefer to keep crapping in your own pants rather than getting cleaned up and perhaps learn better, personal hygiene?

I think you are just against change because you are afraid of what that change might imply. It's a bit like telling a meat-eater that he should be a vegetarian - there is no end to all the arguments against that ever happening, ranging from issues about fundamental freedom, to mistaken ideas about human biology to outright denial of well-established facts. But at the end of the day, everybody could change their diet and would enjoy vegetarian food - it is just a matter of getting used to it.

Same thing with our reliance on fossil fuel and gross over-consumption. No-body actually needs two magnum bottles of fizzy drinks every day, nobody needs ready-meals, excessive wrapping, idiotic soap operas, assembly-line muzak etc. In fact, everybody would be a lot more comfortable in their lives if most of that crap was cut out altogether. The myth that capitalism, freedom and self-determination are inseparable from constant, economic growth and ever-increasing consumerism is perpetuated by those who would stand to lose profits if we chose to live healthy lives in a sustainable society. Yes - big corporations, that's who.

I think the issue here is more about the public perception of what "faith" is. The word as such has meanings like "trust" and "confidence in ..." - and the sciences spring very much from a positive faith in reality being the work of God. While the belief in a supernatural being is no longer part of science, it is still driven by the same, fundamental faith in the existence of an ultimate truth, that we can never fully know, perhaps, but which we can get closer to, little by little, by applying logic and scientific method to observable facts.

It is almost incomprehensible that "faith" is now generally accepted to mean, not a deep trust in God as the reason behind reality, but a fundamental distrust in everything that conflicts with one's view, even to extent of ignoring or misrepresenting simple, observable facts. It is also a relatively new phenomenon; there has always been wild-eyed fundamentalists, who would deny what was clearly visible, but they were not regarded as representatives of mainstream views - I think that came about mostly as a reaction to the hippie-movement.

Whatever the cause may be - in my view, what is needed is that we as scientists take back the claim on faith. As a scientist, you are willing to sacrifice your view of the world every day; each time you perform an experiment, you know that all your dearest theories may be proven wrong. Is that not faith? A trust in the ultimate good of knowing the truth a little better? Even the most atheistic, anti-religious scientist has more faith in their little finger than all the world's bone-headed fundamentlists together.

Steak? The OP talks about a better oven design - who cooks a steak in an oven?

Anyway, back to the subject. I think cooking is not so much about 'follow this recipe exactly' but more about using skills like observation and taking appropriate actions. Of course you can bake a bread by measuring out ingredients and so on, but the result will vary, because the ingredients will not always be identical - humidity or protein content in flour, for example will vary from batch to batch.

A much better way is to work towards a certain criterium - for bread you will knead until the right consistency and elasticity has been achieved, you bake at the approximately right temperature until you observe that it fulfills the criteria for being done etc. Understanding the importance of observing and adjusting appropriately is what makes the difference between a good cook and a mediocre one.

Whether the proposed oven design is better or not depends on what you want to achieve. From the very superficial glance I threw at the OP, it looks like his objectives are different from what I want. I don't want a fully automatic 'food-maker'; to me the perfect oven is one where you have good, manual control over the parameters, where I can choose whether to use radiation heating (top, bottom or both) or fan-assisted heating, and which has no automatic functions other than a timer to remind me to look at how far things have progressed. Bear in mind that people have been able to cook very good food for millennia using very primitive tools

The fact that so many never use the internet could be because the internet does not actually give them anything they want. 30% sounds like a lot - if that is accurate - but how does that compare to how many that don't use a smartphone or watch TV? Even if you are not a luddite, you may find the price is far too high, considering the benefit you would get from it. Internet is a very much like cable TV, where you get access to an impressive 500 channels, but most of them just run near-identical soaps and reality shows, which you can get for free on BBC already, in some form. Why pay for that on top of your licence fee?