Tor has links to online versions of the nominees for Short Story, for Novellette and for four out of the five Novellas.

Of Ted Chiang's six stories written since 2001, four have won the Hugo award, one was nominated for the Hugo award before Chiang withdrew it from consideration (saying "The story that was published isn’t the story I wanted it to be."), and the sixth was a 1 page speculation for Nature magazine.

After all, it deals with a graph whose nodes and connections are already known exactly.

The more interesting part comes when you move to a graph like the link structure or underlying router structure of the internet, which is both orders of magnitude larger and changing rapidly -- even if you could take a perfect snapshot of it, by the time you finished analyzing that snapshot the network would have changed quite a bit in the meantime.

What Lovasz has been doing recently with his work on "graph limits" is providing a framework for analyzing such graphs. You can imagine global properties of the network approaching some sort of fixed equilibrium and hope to analyze that equilibrium without actually knowing the details of how the network is changing. I don't actually know if the work has been used in practical applications yet, but the concept goes far beyond just redrawing planar graphs.

In Newport Beach, the library receives roughly $318,000 in state funding (source http://articles.dailypilot.com/2011-01-14/news/tn-dpt-0115-library-20110114_1_library-budget-newport-library-library-funding ). I can't open the Newport Beach budget documents at the moment, but recently the city referred referred to $132,500 cut in library funding as a "2% reduction" in the library's budget (source http://www.newportbeachca.gov/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=4738 ).

So by my count the library's facing less than a 5% cut in its budget if every last cent of state funding is cut. And yet they're talking about eliminating books. This smells more like passing the blame to the state and/or trying to get publicity/sympathy rather than an actual budget crisis due to reduction in state funds.

Steroids, no. Other drugs, maybe. Top level chess games can last for 5-6 hours on end, and I could see players taking some sort of aid to keep concentration going for that long a period.

In Catholic Theology, the Immaculate Conception doesn't refer to the Virgin Birth of Jesus, but to the conception of Mary without original sin.

I guess it's possible that these baby boa constrictors are especially sinless, but you probably won't be able to decide on that issue by reading Biology Letters.

Over a century ago Edison was making sure Alternating Current was used in the Electric Chair, in order to make it seem more dangerous and associate it in people's minds with electrocution.

Agreed. I speak from experience. My first job was for a small company where the bosses loved cars and stuff that I considered "macho B.S.". Was I an elitist? Yes. But, I feel that my problems extended beyond "being the first on the chopping block". It was a fully unsatisfying experience, being the guy who just shows up, pulls his 8 hours, and leaves. I may not be ecstatic about every job I have, but fitting in is now a big requisite when I go on interviews.

(And I admit that I was a snob. I should have tried harder to fit in. You are preparing for the next few years of your life. Do you really want to half of every day alone in a cubicle? Or do you want some social interaction at the water cooler/lunch room/whatever?)

Is it wrong that I was hoping this didn't refer to the women's eyes?

Humans need a pressurised environment and a continuous supply of oxygen/food/water, and generally prefer to be returned to earth at some point.
Robots need none of this so can be sent with a lot less mass (cost) and dont need resupply or recovery. So even if they are less capable than humans, you can send more of them for the same cost and they can stay a lot longer.

So how do you get an accurate count of the people who want your product? You can't. Also, what do you mean by "want"? Are willing to try it for free? Are willing to pay for it?

It's rather obvious that the number of people who are willing to try something for free is far bigger than the number of people willing to pay money for it. Yet the industry's estimate compares the number of non-pirates who were willing to pay the asking price to the number of pirates who were willing to try it for free. It's comparing apples to oranges. It's a completely meaningless statistic.

But a hard upper bound is not the same as a meaningful estimate. The number of iPhone owners also gives an upper bound to the number of lost sales.

But more than that: the industry's logic that "anywhere between 0 and 80,000 == 80,000" is completely wrong, yet that is what they do: they don't claim that this is a (very loose) upper bound, they claim it's the number of lost sales. And that's a lie.

True, but which of the following two claims would you say is most likely:

A/B =~ (C+D)/(E+F)
E =~ 0

The industry is claiming the second one is true. TFA says the first is a more reasonable assumption. I'm inclined to agree with TFA.