Yes the critical universe was always rather improbable but the early supernova data pushed us into eternal expansion (before it was realized that it was actually accelerating) which ultimately is the same thing: heath death.

I don't buy the religious input at all though. The reason for assuming a steady state universe was simply because the local universe appears relatively constant and unchanging i.e. in a steady state. It is only when you look at the largest possible scales that you realize that things have changed very significantly and that has only been possible in the past century. Indeed one of the strongest proponents for the 'steady state' universe was Fred Hoyle (he actually coined the term Big Bang to deride that theory) who was a lifelong atheist.

You are comparing apples with oranges. Our common, everyday words are far more like German than French: bruder=brother (vs. frere), Ich war = I was (vs. j'étais) etc. However our more complex words are largely from French e.g. economics=economiques (vs. Wirtschaft).

One of the things which makes French so much easier than German to speak for an Englishman is that if you don't know the word (which usually means rarer vocabulary) you can often get away by picking a suitable English word and saying it with a French pronunciation (it does not always work but it is worth a try). With German you cannot do that since the overlap is with the simple, everyday words that you learn when you learn the language. This makes it far harder to both speak and to understand since you have to relearn every word in German whereas with French not so much.

Not really. Before we had Dark Energy the ultimate fate of the universe was to expand up to a finite size and sit there for ever until all the stars died and the Black Holes evaporated leaving and empty, dead universe going on forever.

Now we have an unknown fate since we have no idea what will happen when the Dark Energy density causally disconnects points at the Planck-length, the so-called "Big Rip". I'll take the unknown over permanent, eternal heat death any day.

...and right up until the invention of the transistor computers would never be smaller than a large room or a small house. I would not be so sure about there being no clever idea possible unless there is a mathematical proof to support it. Until recently there was no need to go parallel now there is a growing need to be able to program in parallel and necessity is the mother of invention. While parallel does incur an overhead as CPUs become more parallel and less serial this will presumably eventually overcome the cost of the parallel algorithm.

You might be right but I'm far less certain of it. The problem we have is that further shrinking of silicon makes it easier to add more cores than to make a single core faster so there is a strong push towards parallelism on the hardware side. At the same time the languages we have are not at all designed to cope with parallel programming.

The result is that we are using our computing resources less and less efficiently. I'm a physicist on an LHC experiment at CERN and we are acutely aware of how inefficient our serial algorithms are at using modern hardware. What we need is a breakthrough in programming languages to be able to parallel program efficiently, just like object oriented programming allowed us to scale up the size of programs. Until this happens I agree than not much will change but if there is some clever CS researcher/student out there with a clever idea for a good parallel programming language the conditions are right for a revolution.

Making one program free while the rest remain expensive (all subjects should be free like they are in school) is not a good way to motivate students to take a STEM degree. You will end up with lots of poorly motivated students who cannot afford to take the subject they really want. The best way to ensure that students want to take STEM is to ensure that there are lots of well paid jobs waiting for them. This provides monetary incentive to people planning to make a career in STEM which is what you want.

The problem with society today is that STEM is viewed as hard by most students and leads to a job which is ok but requires real work. Compare that to the view of subjects like business studies or law where the view is that you can get a well paid job and have to do far less actual work to get the same (or even better) salary. That's not to say that there are a lot of really hard working lawyers and MBAs out there but the general perception is that you can get by doing far less work if you want to and still get a better salary than a STEM worker at least based on my interactions with prospective students.

The other reason he doesn't stand a chance is because of Hollywood accounting which ensures that even major blockbusters never make a profit so there will be no profits to capture.

Physically perhaps but in terms of internet presence I would doubt it. As a non-American I'd think this was an entirely appropriate response if it were the US. It has the beauty of being non-violent, extremely humiliating and very effective at preventing them from engaging in further cyberattacks. This should send such a clear message that hopefully even their insane government can understand it. Indeed if anything it seems so well thought out and proportionate that it seems unlikely to be the US government given their previous record.

Really? Since the neolithic was later than the paleolithic what did people do that dropped the life expectancy so much? I realize that the number is heavily skewed by a large infant mortality rate and that those surviving to adulthood lived a lot longer than the average but still to drop 10 years while technology was improving seems very strange - how robust is the data supporting this huge drop?

What happened to stimulating the brain via the old fashioned method by having an exciting, provocative story populated by diverse and interesting characters? Have Hollywood fallen so far that the only way they can stimulate people's brain now is by the direct application of voltage?

No, not until your credit card has been charged. If they have done that then you have them under the credit card agreement but before that they can wriggle out of it as a mistake under their own terms.

Given the context - which is a post of Slashdot and not a paper - I'd stick with countless as in "too many to be counted" or "very many" given that I'm not willing to put in the large amount of effort that would be required to actually count them. Rather than the hugely overly technical considerations you are engaging in there is a very easy way to simplify this.

If I start with the glass on the table then there are is a very large range of momenta I can give the glass to arrive at the state where it is shards on the floor so long as I don't care which particular set of shards it makes. To convert from any given set of shards on the floor back to a glass I have to give each shard a precise linear and angular momentum such that they will reassemble themselves into the glass. Hence in the phase space of all possible momenta for all the shards I have to hit a single point where as for the reverse just have to hit a large area in a far lower dimensional phase space. The same applies to glasses colliding in space.

In the high energy limit the same will apply. The nuclei of the glass will collide to produce hadronic showers, each particle of which will have its own 4-momentum. However in this case it is clear that you cannot reverse the system since some of the interactions and subsequent decays will involve the weak force which we know is not symmetric under time reversal.

Have you actually ever taken a cab in London? The problem is the exact opposite of what you describe with only ~5% from minorities to the extent that they are trying to recruit more. As for "untrained hipster" they are required to pass The Knowledge before they get a license. They may have somewhat colourful characters but I've never had one who is not extremely competent, knowledgeable and driving a clear, well repaired cab.

....or C) that you forgot to account for entropy. To study time reversal violation you must have two states with identical entropy or you must account for the effects of entropy. The reason that a glass falling from a table and shatters is far more likely than all the pieces of glass coming together, leaping off the floor and forming a new glass is because of entropy. There are countless ways in which a glass on a table can be converted to broken shards on the floor but starting with the shards there is only one way that that process can be reversed.

Ummm...yes but the reason for that is because the fundamental physics governing the particles of which the starlings are made up prevent time travel and moving faster than light (which are actually one and the same). Assuming you are building a model out of simple, plastic lego bricks then regardless of what you are building we know that it will not be a conductor of electricity because the bricks you are building it from are all plastic insulators. Studying the fundamental physics of a system lets you know what is possible.

For example we know that there is a fundamental arrow of time despite the fact that at an everyday scale this is completely obscured by entropy. You could study all the flocks of starlings you like but it would be impossible to show that you have time reversal violations in it...and yet since the particles in that system are subject to the weak force we know that at some incredibly tiny, insignificant level it is there.

Whoa there it is a LOT simpler than that. If you have a system in state A and it changes into state B then your process is A-->B. If you reverse time then the process you have is B-->A. Now if both these states have identical entropy there are no phase space arguments to favour one state over the other and so both processes (A-->B and B-->A) should be equally likely if the laws of physics are the same with regard to the direction of time.

What these experiments showed are that for some systems A-->B is more likely than B-->A and so the laws of physics define an arrow of time. If time were reversed then A-->B would become less likely than B-->A which is how you could detect it. It's the temporal equivalent of looking in a mirror. If you have a perfect left-right symmetry you cannot tell wether the image you are looking at is the real object or the reflection. However if the object is not left-right symmetric it is easy to know which image you are seeing.

So it does prove that there is an arrow of time. Perhaps you ought to spend a little time understanding the physics before you start applying simple logic: it tends to lead to more accurate conclusions.