Snippet of a recent conversation:

Friend: "...and people are even 3D printing houses!"

Me: (skeptical look)

Friend: "It'll work!"

Me: "I have no doubts that the technology will function just fine. But in this case, it's not the technology that's the problem. We could have cheap housing all over the place, presently, and solve a million housing problems. But the problem isn't the technology."

Friend: "Well what else would it be?"

I explained about Seattle City's law that you can only have 8 people living in a housing unit, regardless of the size, and that this is on the liberal end of things, as far as most cities go.

I explained about zoning, and restriction, and neighbors.

I explained that if you could snap your fingers and make floating or underground housing, for absolutely free, either above or below the city of Seattle, people would rage with anger and complain of crime, undesirables, unsightlys, and plummeting housing values.

The middle class stores most of its wealth in its houses, and so everybody has a gigantic freak-out if anything happens to cause housing prices to go down. We hold as a society the notion that a house is an investment vehicle, and will do anything in our collective power to make sure that housing prices go up, up, up, faster than the rate of inflation. We'll talk about "quality" and "community" and "clean neighborhoods," whatever it takes, to make sure that the next generation spends more on our houses than the generation that came before.

What use is a 3-D printer that can print houses with ease?

What use are robots that can programmatically generate great housing in a for-loop?

I mean, besides becoming "the enemy of all humankind" and having all federal, state, and local laws applied against you with every bit of scrutiny that can be mustered?

You "study the humanities" not so that you learn some kind of scientific truth about the human being. You study the humanities so that you aren't naive, and waste the investment everybody's put into you.

Well tastes differ of course, but Spider-Man is supposed to be the "everyman" hero. And not even a regular "everyman", a smart but kind of dorky and awkward "everyman" who just lucks into his powers.

Superman is born with his powers (but doesn't consider himself "special" despite that.) Batman develops his "powers" through hard work and dedication. (Obviously being rich helps a lot, but also obviously not every rich person can become a superhero.) Captain America is, generally speaking, rewarded with his powers because he is at heart a great person. Or along the lines of the old adage, some are born great (Superman) some achieve greatness (Batman, Captain America) and some have greatness thrust upon them (Spider-Man.)

If you take Spider-Man and make him less dorky and awkward he seems a bit less like the everyman, at least to the dorky and awkward people who comics are (or at least used to be) most popular with :) If you change his backstory from "stumbled into powers" to "was destined to gain his powers from his parents", then you're really changing his character type, even if it's not immediately apparent. He's no long the type of character that became popular with his fans in the first place and, as you say, if the everyman wasn't your type of superhero to begin with then there are already a lot of other options.

I'm obviously at in advantage because i live in SoCal, but when i switched to T-Mobile at the start of 2010 i thought their 3G network was pretty good. When my phone started malfunctioning in... mid 2011 i think? and couldn't hold a 3G connection anymore, i thought their Edge network was slow, but i made do. When i got my new phone in late 2013 i thought 4G was blazing fast. Fast enough that i don't even bother switching to wireless at home. (That choice is influenced by being on the $30/month unlimited data plan and the fact that our wireless router can be a bit wonky at times.)

I haven't found anywhere outside in OC or LA where i can't get signal, except for some spots near the top of the Runyon Canyon Park, which i can live with. When i was on 3G or Edge there were a couple buildings that i couldn't get signal inside of very well (unfortunately one of those buildings was my office =) but since switching to 4G that problem seems to have disappeared.

(Except for the lunch room at work. I can't get signal in the lunch room. No one, no matter what their carrier, can get signal in the lunch room. They must have built it out of lead or something.)

(random musing: I like pink motorcycle lady, and don't remember anything distinctive about her voice at all. I don't really think she's any better or worse than CZJ was.)

I'm judging this based almost solely on the trailers, but the new Peter Parker does not seem dorky enough. He looks like they tried to make him into a hipster instead. The CGI in the trailers, especially for the second movie, makes me think "video game" more than "action movie". And all in all i just don't see the point of Spider-Man reboot so soon.

I've seen all the Marvel movies (great.) I saw Man of Steel (okay movie with significant problems that have already been hashed over.) I saw Wolverine (not perfect, but a lot better than the Origins movie). And i'm going to go see Days of Future Past. I have almost zero interest in seeing the second take of Spider-Man 2. Nothing this review has said really changes my opinion (i don't think Spider-Man really needed that much shading) and some of the things i've read in other reviews have helped bolster that opinion. (Rewriting Spider-Man's backstory via his parents to make him a "destined child" kind of strikes me as wrong.)

"but their ID-checking gun seems to default to an unfireable state, which might not always be an attractive feature."

I'm sorry, but that's the _only_ feature of this gun vis-a-vis a regular gun. The whole point is that it has to be "activated" by some specific method before it will work, in an attempt to verify that only the "right" person can use it. The details may differ, whether using a watch such as in this case or other proposed methods using fingerprints or other biometrics, but the fundamental concept is that the gun doesn't fire unless that condition is met.

Why in the world would you pay extra for a gun that checks your ID, but then decides to default to a fireable state even if you fail the ID check? If that's what you want you could just get a regular gun that doesn't bother checking your ID to begin with.

If you don't like the fundamental concept, don't buy the gun. If you don't like the idea of laws being passed in relation to this concept then write to your congressperson and/or vote for someone else. But complaining that the gun does exactly what it is designed to do is just dumb. (And needless to say, harassing and/or threatening employees of the company that sells them is just insane.)

Drive a motorcycle. You'll either be driving, or you'll be dead. I promise you won't be texting (for very long)!

Hey mom? Sorry to bother you, but AOL got hacked, so could you please change your maiden name? I need a new answer for my security question.

Apps are becoming progressively worse, not better, over time. In the early days there were a lot of cool apps written by people who just wanted to write cool apps for a cool new tool.

Now with the preverse incentives of the app market, the app store is saturated by apps trying to squeeze a maximum amount of money for a dwindling amount of useful application.

In app purchases, in particular, are well on their way to completely destroying gaming at all levels.

Every free app you download any more is ususally worthless until you shell out significant amounts of money in IAP to make it usable, and then its still usually still not good

I'm all for paying software and content developers for their efforts but the methodologies for achieving this in app stores and on the Internet in general has completely failed.

Increasingly the only thing I use my tablets for is an ereader. They excel at that, but for just about everything else the app comcept has failed.

No, it doesn't. Velikovsky theorized that Venus was ejected from Jupiter. We have no good theories for how or why a gas giant would spontaneously produce and then eject a smaller terrestrial planet, not to mention no physical evidence that i've seen that it has ever actually happened.

What is going on here is that some of the material in Saturn's rings has accreted together into a moonlet. It's already been theorized that that's how at least some of Saturn's other 100+ moonlets were formed. The only reason that this is at all a surprise is that A: there's still enough material left in the rings after forming all the other moonlets and B: that we're caught it in the middle of the process . And as for (B), i haven't seen any estimates of how long it's been going on, but i suspect that it's been taking place slowly over millions of years, and we're only seeing it now because we've finally gotten sensitive enough instruments in the right position to detect it.

If so then in one case we have a tiny moon, one of over 100, being formed by a known method over a period of millions of years. And in the other case we have the 2nd largest terrestrial planet, one of just 8 planets total, being formed by an entirely unknown method over the period of a couple thousand years.

The first case provides absolutely no support for the second case.

As for "Hot Venus", that doesn't really provide any evidence for Velikovsky unless you don't believe the greenhouse effect exists.

And i don't know what radio signals from Jupiter have to do with Velikovsky's theories of planetary formation, so i can't really address that.

Oh sure, they're _interesting_. But lots of people make interesting predictions from random theories that aren't based on any solid evidence. Some of those people we call science fiction and fantasy authors, and others we call crackpots, depending on whether they think their "interesting predictions" are actually the truth or just a form of entertainment.

You're only half right. These days no one has a problem with proposing that myths may be based on scientific realities. There have been intriguing proposals about the relation between the myth of Atlantis and the erruption of Thera, a similar or identical link to the parting of the Red Sea, and several interesting theories about what might have inspired the various deluge mythologies.

The problem with Velikovsky is that his proposed solutions were batshit crazy. If the Uniformitarians were insisting that 2 + 2 = 3, then Velikovsky was right that they were getting it wrong. But his proposed counter-solution was that 2 + 2 = 10000!

We have pretty good evidence that the solar system is in a fairly stable situation in regards to the major bodies. There's certainly no astronomical record of any significant changes for the past several hundred years. (And i suspect much longer if one takes Chinese astronomical observations into account.)

But we are supposed to believe that between about 10k years ago and approximately 1 AD, the solar system underwent a MASSIVE reconfiguration. One or more new planets were created and several planets, including Earth, significantly changed their orbits, involving several VERY close passes between those planets. Then after all those planets finished swapping places and crossing paths with each other they just settled down into a configuration that just coincidentally also could have been stable for the last several hundred million years, and then haven't budged an inch (metaphorically speaking) since then.

The other theories i mentioned in the first paragraph have good physical evidence to indicate that they are at least plausible. As far as i'm aware Velikovsky had no physical evidence supporting his claims. In fact the full version of his theory is something like "If, in total contradiction to all present appearances, the solar system of a few thousand years ago was an entirely chaotic system, AND we rewrite several portions of recorded history to make points in different timelines line up better, THEN we might be able to explain certain myths." I'm sorry, but Occam's Razor just does not work that way.

Just to push another free online alternative, i've been using FreeTaxUSA.com for several years. They'll file your federal taxes for free, but charge a fairly small fee to file your state as well. (I believe it was about $10 the last time i paid, but may have gone up since then.)

I used to pay that small fee, but then last year(?) CA started their free efile thing, so now i do my CA taxes for free via the CA website, and my Fed taxes for free via the FreeTaxUSA site. If more and more states start pushing the free efile thing then i expect FreeTaxUSA will have to rejigger their business model, but in the meantime it's a good thing for me.

Of course i have very simple taxes, so i can't say how either system would work for people who actually have credits and loopholes they want to use. Based on the comments i posted at the time it took me 12 minutes to do the state and 27 minutes to do the Fed. (Though it might have taken me a little longer if FreeTaxUSA hadn't saved some of my settings from last year.)

I'm kind of glad neither Velikovsky nor James P Hogan are still alive to blow this out or proportion. Velikovsky had a fundamentally good idea but got carried away with it, and James P Hogan wrote some good books related to the subject before his brain went soft in his old age.

That's nothing! Look at how many wikipedia articles there are for Redundancy!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And thus immediately after he explained how people are bad at comprehending the confluence of small probabilities with large numbers, you demonstrate the principle.

Yes, it might be only a 5% chance that _anyone_ finds that gold coin, not 5% chance per person. The issue is that it's not just one gold coin, there are a bunch of gold coins, each of which only has a 5% chance being found. The odds of someone finding a particular coin are small, but the odds of no one finding any of the coins is even smaller.

The odds of a particular skydiver having a close encounter with a particular meteor are astronomical. However many meteors surive atmospheric entry each day and many people go skydiving each day. The odds that every skydiver that day will be far away from every meteor that day is _much_ lower. Still not common, but much lower. And the odds that it doesn't happen to any skydiver on any day in the year is another couple magnitudes lower.

Then on top of that, what are the odds that a balloonist has a close encounter with a meteor? Or a hang glider?

Instead of a skydiver encountering a meteor, it could have been someone falling out of a plane without a parachute or having their parachute fail but surviving the fall anyways. (It's happened a couple times in history.) Or a meteorite hitting the ground somewhere famous in front of a bunch of tourists. Or an practically infinite number of other very unlikely things that don't involve either rocks or people falling out of the sky. If either of those stories had happened instead we'd still be saying "wow, what were the odds of that happening?"

If you can think of something that has exactly a trillion to one odds of happening to anyone in their lifetime, the odds of it happening to anyone on the planet aren't good. If you come up with a 1000 different things with those odds that are entirely unrelated to each other, then the odds that at least one of them will happen to someone on the planet are pretty high.

Until the Chinese actually try to live on the moon for any period. Horrible temperature profile, little to no water excepting maybe at the poles, some of the nastiest dust in existence getting in to everything, hard vacuum.

Mars is a paradise compared to the Moon which is why if you are talking about a colony it makes a lot more sense than the moon or just about anywhere else in our solar system Only problem is the transit time.