Although, on average, men and women are about the same, men have a higher variance.

You're the third +5 I've seen in this thread with that assertion. Can someone link a study or group of studies that supports this?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but seeing it so often with no source makes me wonder if it's become "common wisdom".

I received several full ride offers to college. But it was because I worked my ass off. I was only modestly talented.

The quip "The world needs ditch diggers" can easily be extended to "The world needs moderately talented ditch diggers". No one stands on their own shoulders, and even the best of those math whiz's will need someone who can understand most of what they say and can check their math, or do some more mediocre work of their own that helps out the "smarter" person.

To put it in a car analogy, it doesn't matter how great your engine is if there aren't wheels to go along with it.

To put it in a programming analogy, the lead developer/architect will always need someone to implement dwim().

Even if you can't be great[1], you can still be good, and most times that's good enough.

[1] I question that assumption; introspection is an incredibly useful quality that a lot of people, even seemingly-smart people, lack. You appear to do a lot of it, so you can probably go further than you can imagine right now.

Everybody says "Think of the children"
Nobody says "Think of the children's future"...

Yes, anything that puts science to a face and makes it approachable, normal and something to be admired or respected is always a good thing.

Cast your wishes carefully.

Any person who can be pointed to as someone both scientific and popular can be useful for the general population, but also creates an easy target. We've had stories on Slashdot before about companies/people trying to get as much personal e-mail as possible about scientists, not because they believe they can find evidence of forgery on the part of the scientist, but trolling for any kind of negative character trait they can parade into the press. Does he curse a lot? Like hiring prostitutes? Is a closet homosexual? Doesn't hold the door open for women? Once an accusation sticks (even a false one), then they only have to use a broad brush to paint those traits on all like-minded scientists; sadly, our population will eat. It. Up.

I guarantee you there are more than a few people who have the personal goal of digging up heavy dirt on Neil deGrasse Tyson. If they could find evidence of financial fraud, a torrid love affair, or (jackpot!) pedophilia it would spread across our 24/7 news networks like wild fire.

If we had a number of scientists highly-respected by the public, such tactics wouldn't be as useful, but right now in the general public there are only a half-dozen or so. If someone polled random folks on the street you would likely get few more answers than Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye

that we shouldn't question the science that is proven.

Where does he say this? I would not be surprised if he said something against deniers--climate-change for instance--but these kind of people aren't asking questions.

Imagine two people have a debate about what kind of fruit something nebulous is. Person A goes "It's round and has a warm color, so some type of citrus, and based on the size I'd say it's an orange." Person B goes "NO IT'S NOT" Person A asks B "Why do you think it's not an orange?" Person B responds "IT'S NOT AN ORANGE."

This is what many politicians and non-scientists due when presented with a scientifically-driven theory (scientific sense, not layman) that conflicts with one of their motivations (power, profit, etc.) These are "deniers". There are some, few of whom get any time on news channels, that are presented with the idea and go "Okay, but your original conclusions say that X would happen, but instead we are experiencing Y, something similar-but-different. How do you explain the difference?" These are people who ask questions, and those who ask a lot of questions like this are "skeptics". Good skeptics are useful in science (better if they can do their own science to show new results or invalidate old ones), and I would be quite surprised if NDG was talking about these kind of people.

This is like saying "Why would you pay for [$NICE DINING ESTABLISHMENT] when you can get a hobo to feed you poop for free?" (Or, for those who require car analogies, "Why would you purchase a vehicle when you can jump on the back of a bus for free?")

I suppose if you're the type who likes having a selection of ~40 songs 90% of the time, separated by annoying commercials and whatever the "DJ" spews forth, then radio is fine. Personally, when I want to listen to music, I want to listen to just music. Preferably of a wide variety and stuff I know I'll like, so all my devices that can have music on them do, from my personal collection (bought-and-paid), including my car. Sure, I might miss out on some new music I would enjoy while driving, but I will happily do so over having to deal with the crap surrounding it. I listen to Pandora One while at work or home, which I pay for to also get rid of the commercials, so I'll hear the new music anyway.

I did so in response to FireFox's default being changed to Yahoo!; I knew I didn't want Y!, but I didn't really want to go back to Google for the same reasons as you. DuckDuckGo was one of the other options immediately available (dunno if it came with it or I had installed that as an option years ago) and now I use that for my default.

I miss some stuff about Google search--like the "instant facts" that often told me what I wanted to know, directly on the search results page--but I also find DDG to be competent enough to turn to Google very little.

When I realized the difference after I upgraded, I actually changed my search engine to DuckDuckGo because I wanted to give that a shot rather than defaulting back to Google. So even if people didn't stick with Yahoo, the change may have helped other search providers.

The world needs ditch diggers too.

And it would do even better with educated ditch diggers.

Plus, with buses, they can make smaller buses that have more routes and can also respond to demand to better stick to schedules. (If 13 people "check in" at Bus Stop B but no one at Bus Stop A, then the bus can take a shortcut that avoids A and goes to B sooner, to better handle the larger amount of people waiting to get on.)

1) convince the unions to let us

Even if the tech is viewed as very mature by every automotive professional, Average Joe will still view it with heavy skepticism. Having a human who could take control in the event of a bad situation will alleviate a lot of concern, regardless if the human could not realistically do anything useful even with very early warnings and a sharp eye. Public trust will probably grow at the same rate as bus drivers quit/retire, which brings us to the union solution: Attrition. Everyone keeps their job and rate but does less. Make them drive the bus in and out of the storage facility to keep their driving skills up and give them busy-work. No new blood, raises are probably capped off, but the drivers can keep working until they quit/retire or a specific amount of time (like 5-10 years) has passed.

While I've not dealt with a union directly (only felt some indirect effects, like not being able to move my own desk), I think that would be acceptable. As an added (evil) bonus, the driver can be a scapegoat if a bad accident occurs.

(I wonder if buggy whip makers had a union that had to deal with this...)

Interesting, thanks for the reply!

A vehicle may decide that a pothole is actually an obstruction, or that the railroad track is the end of a road.

Very nice post. This particular line made a question pop into my head: Do we have any human-driven cars that have a companion AI "driving" a virtual car, where the AI is doing risk aversion and noting where the human differs from the AI for later review and/or machine learning?

Using your example, the vehicle "sees" a railroad track but, because of the sudden shift in terrain, thinks it's an end of the road. The AI, in its virtual car, starts applying the brakes, but the human maintains speed and keeps on going. The AI notices that the terrain has resumed expected road conditions, that they haven't crashed or fallen off a cliff, and marks that point as an event to review.

The *actual problem* with nuclear is that practically every other option is cheaper and lower risk.

My (admittedly limited) understanding is that one of the major problems with both solar and wind power is the fluctuation. Yeah, solar is great for running A/Cs on hot summer days when the sun is shining bright, but not as useful for heaters at night in the winter.

So unless power transmission tech improves that you can run cables thousands of miles with minimal loss, or battery tech improves that extra power stored during the day is enough for night, you need something else to generate the power that can cover non-productive times for the other sources. If our goal is to get rid of our reliance on coal and fossil fuels, what other option is there but nuclear? If you're lucky you live close to a hydroelectric source, but not everyone is.

(I also understand there are problems with standard power plants not being able to spin up quickly to meet demand, and assume nuclear would have the same.)

I prefer ever-increasing copyright maintenance fees. If Disney is willing to pay a billion dollars a year to keep Mickey, fine. But for most works, the copyright owners will eventually decide that it's better to release it into the public domain.

You and I are of the same mind. This does away with the whole problem of corporations owning copyright, as well.

My thoughts specifically are about doubling/halving price/time, respectively. You start with a regular fee and a regular term (I think the original term was 14 years? Sounds good to me.) After 14 years they can apply for a renewal, which will cost them twice as much and last only 7 years. The chart would be:

Renewal...Cost...Length
0..........X........14
1..........X*2......7
2..........X*4......4 (we'll be nice and round up)
3..........X*8......2
4..........X*16.....1
[...]
N..........X*2^N....1

Mickey is 85, so under this system Disney would have had to pay X*4.61*10^18 to renew this year (even with X=1, this is far larger than the entire world's Gross Product, so Disney would have had to give up decades prior.) As an added bonus, the increasing renewal fees can be used to subsidize initial applications, making it easier for smaller companies and individuals to copyright.

The recent run of Cosmos (with Neil deGrasse Tyson) has the episode The Clean Room which is mostly about figuring out the age of the Earth, but also spends some time discussing Clair Patterson (by way of his ultra cleanroom) and his battle against oil companies.

Corporate coverups are not a new thing, and yet people continue to give companies and company-funded studies the benefit of the doubt despite what history teaches us.