The tl;dr on the Pacific Institute paper "Hummer vs Prius" is:

1. Someone else wrote a paper called "Dust to dust" that claimed the lifetime energy cost of a Hummer was less than that of a Prius.
2. The "Hummer vs Prius" author disputes the "Dust to dust" paper's conclusions because they used arbitrary figures for lifetime mileage, energy used in manufacture, and so on.
3. The "Hummer vs Prius" author claims a quick recalculation shows the lifetime energy cost of a Prius is, indeed, lower than the Hummer.

The landing strategy is quite spectacular, though unfortunately no-one's going to be there to observe it.

The Hoover dam does more than just make electricity: it is part of the system of dams that control the Colorado's propensity to flood uncontrollably, and this control allows a stable agricultural system to flourish, which feeds tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people. You know, rather than the fields being wiped out every ten years, or permanently flooded like the Salton Sea.

Lake Mead is named for the genius from the Bureau of Land Management who made this happen. He was from the government, and he was there to help.

The GP was both unnecessarily rude and wrong, and the parent addressed both issues nicely.

There used to be much enthusiasm for neural nets, but it turns out that modern machine learning techniques do better on the few problems neural nets can do. The modern approaches are all matrix algebra, and you usually work in Matlab. Much of that stuff is parallelizable, and what you want is more like a GPU than neurons.

Since the stated objective is to simulate a brain, I doubt that marix algebra is going to cut it.

And I disagree with you, because of the signature you are using, and because it is not true that to know that there is no god requires omniscience. I am not omniscient, but I know there is no God and I know there is no God because God is unknowable. The postulate that there is a God has been thoroughly investigated over the centuries, and (as your signature implies) every phenomenon that could be attributed to a God - any God: Thor, Athena, Ba'al, Shiva, Jehovah, Caligula, Jesus, and so on - can more readily be attributed to other causes, including being products of human imagination and fantasy, because they do not stand the test of falsifiability. But let's suppose you're right, that your post and signature are correct.

First, to restate your signature, it is "probably impossible" to unambiguously ascribe any natural phenomenon as being caused by a God: this includes answering prayer, being the creator of the universe, or the "divine spark" behind all life. In other words, it is not necessary to postulate an omniscient being, a quality you yourself claim is only for Gods, to explain anything that actually does exist, or anything that happens, for that matter.

If such a universe were created by an omnipotent, omniscient God, where does God appear? You say: "probably nowhere" (probably). But at least, by your ouw admission, God is an improbable hypothesis, and useless for making predictions about outcomes, or else there would be evidence one way or the other, and it would no longer be "probably impossible" to know. At this point, I can state unequivocally that God is not a falsifiable hypothesis, and therefore not part of any reality that we participate in: and that is our test for existence. Therefore God does not exist.

So, you see, no omniscience is required. I don't know your eye color, and didn't need to.

The centers of mass do not have to be aligned, if by aligned you mean that they lie on a straight line. They just all have to lie on a plane, which is always true of any three points - unless they all lie on a straight line or coincide, and in either of these cases there is an infinite number of planes that bisect.

A volume of uniform (non-zero) density has a center of volume at the same place as the center of mass.

The Stone–Tukey version of this theorem is a generalization of a simple case.

Consider a ham sandwich, with two slices of bread around a slice of ham. Each of these components has a center of gravity, and if you slice any one of these with a plane that passes through the center of gravity, then the two halves will be equal in mass.

Three points in 3-space define a plane, so the unique plane that passes through the three centers of gravity divides both slices of bread and the ham in half.

The general case states that you can divide n finitely measurable objects in n-space with an n-1 dimensional hyperplane.

That hasn't been the choice for a long time, not, perhaps, since 1988, when the candidates were George Bush Sr and Michael Dukakis, who Bush successfully tarred as "liberal". Since then, because of that use of "liberal", the options have been Right and Center-Right, with the Right-wing candidates becoming more extreme with each election.

On the left, Progressives view Obama as being to the right of Reagan.

FTFY.

That is one part of the legacy of Enron. They lobbied hard for the free market system you have in Texas, it was the brilliantly intelligent part of what they did, the core business. The clever-but-incredibly-dumb part was the three-card monte debt hiding scheme they used to inflate their profits from loss-making projects: that was what brought them down and destroyed their employees' pension plans.

This AC surely deserves an audience.

Less mass.

Consider a sample of n particles as a crystal, and a sample of n similar particles as a fluid or gas. The atoms in the crystal have very little motion relative to each other, while the particles in the fluid (or gas) have a lot more motion. More motion means more mass, by a factor of 1/sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2) times the rest mass (IIRC) for each particle. The sum over the sample for the crystal will be less than the sum over the sample for the fluid (or gas).

There's so much anti-tax rhetoric around here, it's a pleasure to read someone give a good argument that demonstrates why the rich should pay taxes, and the taxation system needs to be fixed so that they do.