Ths slashdot summary doesn't seem to be based closely on the linked articles:

The linked articles don't discuss a "cold turkey" government-mandated switch to metric (which was never a realistic possibility given the nature of American culture and politics). They discuss incremental government-mandated measures. Some of these measures have already been carried out: requiring food labeling to be in both US and metric. Some have been stalled legislatively: eliminating the US units from food labeling.

It would be great if we could get road signs to be switched over to dual units. E.g., congress could pass a law saying that on the interstate system, any time an old sign is replaced with a new one, it has to have dual units.

These incremental measures would be incredibly easy, and would require no new taxes or increase in government regulation (just changes to existing regulations). That's why it's so pathetic that the pace of implementing these measures has been so slow.

I teach physics at a community college. My students are a bell curve, extending from folks who are very bright and will transfer to elite four-year schools, all the way down to people who really shouldn't be in college. The bottom half of this bell curve is probably pretty representative of the population of the US.

Some characteristics of people in this range: (1) They tend not to understand at the conceptual level what the operations of multiplication and division are about. (2) They tend not to have any habit of checking whether their answers make sense in order of magnitude. (3) When they learn some new mathematical concept, they memorize it as a rote procedure, and therefore when they don't use it for a month, they forget it completely.

My students are mostly science majors, so they end up developing some facility with the metric system, but it's an uphill climb. For most people, what happens is that they learn the metric system in grade school, and then they never use it in everyday life, so they forget it completely and utterly.

In the U.S., the existence of organized crime has historically been largely due to the government trying to dictate to people what substances they could put in their bodies (as well as prohibitions on other victimless crimes, such as prostitution). The government created Al Capone by prohibiting alcohol, so I don't really think we should be falling over ourselves to thank the government for catching him and putting him in jail. And it wasn't the FBI that caught Capone, it was the IRS and the Bureau of Prohibition, which was a separate organization at the time.

The end of Prohibition could have put organized crime out of business, but luckily there was another illegal substance, heroin, that people wanted, and ca. 1950 the Sicilian mafia started profiting heavily from that. I don't know how accurate it is to say that the FBI brought down the Sicilian mafia. Joseph Bonanno disappeared. Carmine Galante was originally caught by the NYPD, and was in and out of jail for parole violations; the New Jersey State Police brought him in at one point. But even if the FBI did play some role, it's just another case of the government creating organized crime with drug prohibition.

Today we have various other drug gangs, such as the Crips and Bloods and whatever. Drug gangs will continue to exist for as long as the government decides to continue the War on Drugs. The day they give up and start looking at drugs as a public health issue, the drug gangs will evaporate. Until then, it'll just be more of the same.

The US has the world's highest incarceration rate. (South Africa used to hold the title, but now we're the champions. Go, USA!) Determinate sentencing has started to make jury trials a thing of the past. In some federal jurisdictions, as few as one out of 200 criminal defendants goes to trial. Defendants are so afraid of going to jail for life that they will plead guilty to virtually anything. Defendants are manipulated into giving evidence against other people in return for not going to jail. Those other people may or may not be guilty -- if A can avoid life in prison by accusing B, that's an awfully strong incentive for A, even if B is innocent. We've had the right to trial by jury since the era of the Magna Carta; now we're losing it because of an obsession over the victimless crime of drug use.

You do not have to be paranoid to be extremely mistrustful of the FBI. In fact, "paranoid" would be a word that would be more accurately applied to the FBI itself.

Read up on COINTELPRO. The FBI actively worked against the civil rights movement, targeting individuals and organizations such as Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They built up an 1800-page file on Albert Einstein, who was involved with "communist front" organizations such as the American Crusade Against Lynching. They tracked his phone calls and went through his trash. The FBI has a long history of anti-union activity, starting from the era of the Palmer Raids, continuing through the McCarthy era, and on to the present day, with, e.g., arrests in 2010 of peace and labor activists of the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee.

No way would I ever cooperate with the FBI in any way. They're a threat to democracy. Always have been.

Your explanation of their surveillance and infiltration of Occupy is awfully naive. Trying to open a bank account on behalf of a group of people isn't the kind of thing that merits the creation of a "network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity."

There are all kinds of possibilities. Your #1 actually doesn't seem to fit, since they observed that the time-sequencing of the events worked both ways. Having psychotic symptoms at one time was correlated with smoking dope at a later age, but smoking dope was also correlated with psychotic symptoms later.

Some other possibilities:

3) Some genetic or environmental factor tends to cause both marijuana use and psychotic symptoms. (The summary explicitly mentions the genetic possibility.)

4) Smoking marijuana is correlated with methamphetamine use. WP says, "Methamphetamine induces a psychosis in 26-46 percent of heavy users." Marijuana is used by about 5% of people in the Netherlands. Rates of psychotic symptoms seem to be about 4% in most populations. I.e., both of these things are fairly uncommon. Since psychotic symptoms are so uncommon, and methamphetamine causes psychotic symptoms so strongly, it would only take a very, very small correlation between grass and metamphetamine to cause a huge excess of psychotic symptoms among marijuana users.

5) The standard definition of psychosis includes "hallucinations and delusions and impaired insight " (same WP article). Well, what's the reason people get stoned? It makes them feel a certain way. To people who are not stoned, they often seem peaceful, silly, and stupid. Stupidity is not all that different from "impaired insight." Marijuana is also a drug that is hard to classify, but in some ways it acts like a hallucinogen. And I can think of one person I know who smokes a lot of marijuana, and he often gets unrealistic ideas while he's stoned -- could they be considered delusions? Maybe. There seems to be a lot of overlap between the criteria a psychiatrist would use for diagnosing psychosis and the desired effects of marijuana. Are psychiatrists able to distinguish between the desired, temporary effects of the drug and permanent set of psychotic symptoms? What kind of questions are they asking their patients? I doubt that they ask them, "are you hallucinating right now?" I bet they ask them things like, "do you ever hallucinate?," or "within the last month, have you hallucinated?"

I frequently review books on amazon that I bought and read 30 years ago, or that I checked out of the library. If I buy a book on amazon as a Christmas present for someone, should that person not be able to review the book?

Authors are a tiny percentage of the population, and they have an extremely strong incentive to write fraudulent reviews (good ones of their own books, bad ones of other people's books). Locking them out of reviewing therefore has at least one very big advantage, and no very big disadvantage. Your proposal, on the other hand, would affect a very large percentage of reviews (probably a majority of the ones I've written), and yet it would provide very little benefit, because most of the people locked out would be those who had no incentive for fraud.

What this all really points up is a more fundamental and unfortunate thing about amazon's system, which is that it's the handmaiden of a big commercial enterprise, and due to network effects it has very little competition. They deleted that high school kid's copy of 1984. Now they've deleted reviews that authors submitted in good faith. Even if it's run by angels, amazon and its database will not be here forever -- what's the half-life of internet-based businesses, 3 years? 10? It's said to see millions of people all over the world putting so much effort into something that is destined to disappear. This is totally different from Wikipedia, for example. If WP's fund-raising drives fail, and they have to shut down their servers and fire their employees, nothing will be lost.

As I understand it, yes, it was a long shot, but the theoretical motivation was that if it existed, LHC energies were the best-motivated place for it to show up. The theoretical motivation is that it makes the Planck scale the same as the electroweak scale. (What we think of as the Planck scale would not actually be the Planck scale.)

The WP article says the physics case is the following:

        "1. Measure the mass, spin, and interaction strengths of the Higgs boson

        "2. If existing, measure the number, size, and shape of any TeV-scale extra dimensions

        "3. Investigate the lightest supersymmetric particles, possible candidates for dark matter"

This is very weak.

#2 is pretty much dead, since the LHC's observations don't look very compatible with large extra dimensions -- http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.3375 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.5830 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4683

#3 is also pretty weak, since the LHC has disappointed the many people who were sure it would find supersymmetry. The strongest physical motivation for supersymmetry is at the electroweak unification energy scale, so it's looking less and less likely that it exists, based on LHC data at that scale. If the LHC can't even see it, then it's unlikely that the ILC, operating at an energy an order of magnitude lower, would be able to see it.

So the only justification would seem to be to thoroughly characterize the Higgs. Is the LHC really incapable of doing this?

In general, the LHC results are turning out to be every particle physicist's worst nightmare. So far, it's confirmed the standard model and failed to turn up any new physics.

I suspect the reason Japan is such a good candidate is that the Japanese government's main vehicle for pork-barrel politics is construction projects.

This is really, really stupid. At the commnuity college where I teach in California, an AA degree requires a minimum of 60 units. Fees are $36/unit, and you also have to pay a $16/semester health fee. That's it. Total cost for a two-year degree: $2224. No "hacks" required.

And this is all assuming that you don't qualify for any merit- or need-based grants. An awful lot of our students qualify for Pell grants and fee waivers.

For typical working-class people, the financial problem with getting an AA degree isn't the cost of the coursework itself. The problem is that you have to pay for rent and groceries, and if you work full time, you'll have to take such a small course load every semester that it'll take you a decade to finish two years of college. One way around this is to cut your expenses, e.g., by living with your parents and not owning a car. Another way is to take out loans; if you have a low income and aren't dependent on your parents, then you qualify for subsidized Stafford loans, which have a low interest rate. If you're a veteran, the new GI bill allows you to get a stipend that's enough to live on, based on your zip code.

Anybody in the US who claims they're being excluded from a college education because of their income is full of baloney. Our state and federal governments spend lavishly to subsidize college education, and the subsidies are set up very carefully so that working-class people have a good enough deal to have access.

The real reason that working-class people get excluded from higher education is that they often got terrible K-12 educations, which didn't prepare them for college.

I think there are problems with using the anthropic principle for this. One is that the observers would be astronomically more likely to be Boltzmann brains than observers like us living in an entire universe that is not at maximum entropy.

I had a professor - an Emacs fan - who had a saying, "all software will eventually expand until it can send and receive email." It seems that needs to be amended to "all software will expand until it becomes an operating system."

No, CP violation doesn't explain baryon asymmetry. CP violation is part of the standard model. Baryon asymmetry isn't explained by the standard model.

I wouldn't really describe this as confirming the arrow of time.

The really powerful arrow of time is the thermodynamic one. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases. This thermodynamic arrow is essentially the same arrow as the psychological one, which allows us to remember the past but not the future, and all the other ones we see in nature, such as the laws of black hole thermodynamics, which say that the area of a black hole's event horizon always grows with time. This group of time-arrows, which are all essentially the same time-arrow, appear to occur because the big bang was fine-tuned to be extremely low in entropy, with its gravitational-wave degrees of freedom inactive. Nobody knows why we had a low-entropy big bang, when a random choice of initial conditions would be overwhelmingly more likely to produce a maximum-entropy one. (In particular, inflation doesn't explain it. Also, statistical mechanics doesn't explain it, because to produce the second law from statistical mechanics, you need to assume a low-entropy initial state.)

This paper is about an arrow of time that is obscure and completely unrelated to the others. It has to do with the weak nuclear force. Unlike the others, it has essentially no effect on the world we see around us.

TFA focuses mainly on content-based restrictions, such as prohibiting people from quoting certain passages from the Koran. But along with these restrictions, many schools now have extremely onerous "time, place, and manner" regulations. Although these are written so as to be blind to the content of the speech, they're often absurdly restrictive. I teach at a community college in Fullerton, California, where last year the police murdered a mentally ill homeless man. This resulted in murder charges being brought by the DA, and a city council recall. I wanted to set up a card table on my school's grassy quad to collect signatures for the recall petition. I went through the process of registering officially, and the restrictions were just nuts. They have two very small patches of grass, over at the corner of the quad, which are marked on the map. I was forbidden from approaching people as they walked by. A lot of colleges refer to these tiny patches, apparently without any consciousness of irony, as free speech zones.

As far as I can tell, the intention is simply to create conditions that make it absolutely impossible for students to stage anything like an actual political rally or protest. You simply wouldn't be able to fit more than about 10 human bodies into one of these free speech zones.

The Library of Congress system, unlike Dewey Decimal, is free for anyone to use.

Only over wifi, so this isn't much of a feature. And it's only to other Blackberry users who also happen to be on wifi, making it even less useful. And in general, voice is on the decline which is why some carriers are moving to unlimited voice & tiered data. Personally I've had over 4,000 rollover minutes from AT&T for 3-4 years, and that's with many expiring each month and with my wife and I sharing their smallest plan (500 shared minutes/month).

So this is cool, but I can't imagine this will sway anyone's opinion about buying a Blackberry or not.