Never has an apostrophe made me so sad.

OK, this is a horribly shameless self-plug, but hey, it's directly relevant. I started two projects aimed at tracking reference statistics: Libstats, which is PHP-based and open-source. I'm also one of the founders of Gimlet, which is hosted and closed-source, but provides a similar workfow.

If you're looking to spend some time delving in code, Libstats is looking for maintainers -- I'm no longer working in libraries, so it's largely orphaned.

More importantly, it's important that if you screen positive, the confirmatory tests and treatment yield a better outcome than doing nothing would have. Lots of people can point to a friend or relative for whom early detection treatment saved their life; however, if someone dies from the treatment of a cancer that would never have killed them, how will you ever know?

Cancer is dangerous, but it's important to remember that cancer treatments are dangerous as well. People can and do die from complications from surgery and chemotherapy.

The funny thing is that the "individual mandate" is actually structured as an income tax ($695/year or 2.5% of income, whichever is greater) -- having health insurance merely exempts you from the tax. There are no special criminal penalties for not having insurance. See this article for more details.

Well, if you're a minor, you'll be covered by Medicaid. If you're a senior, you'll be covered by Medicare. So it's more accurate to say the government is "giving a tax exemption to people between the ages of 18 and 65, if they buy an expensive product from private insurance companies." Which is pretty definitely in their power.

Constitutional arguments against the mandate tend to be based on an incomplete understanding of the law. Which, given media coverage, is not surprising.

Even if they went along with this "service", all it takes is one of the Four Horsemen of the Infoclypse

From what I've seen, two ponies and a small dog would probably be enough.

There are conditions (Parkinson's, epilepsy, severe depression) in which people get electrodes implanted in their brains, with (sometimes) therapeutic benefits. Optical stimulation can be much more precisely targeted and controlled -- with good DNA delivery vectors, you can target specific cell types, or the neurons connecting two brain regions. Optical stimulation, I believe, also causes less cell damage than direct electrical stimulation.

It's not the kind of thing most people will ever need, but if you have a condition that will probably only respond to brain surgery, this has a lot of potential.

Clinical trials are probably a long way off, though.

The summary is a bit remiss in not mentioning Karl Deisseroth's group at Stanford, who have really made this technique practical. I'm at a different (also good) neuroscience lab, and his group's work looks like magic to me -- they've crossed a lot of t's and dotted a lot of i's. It's really, really elegant, and has a lot of therapeutic potential in humans.

They've made a great video showing optical control of a mouse's motor cortex, and the lab's main optogenetics page has some publications.

We're a democracy -- one with many flaws in its implementation, but a democracy nonetheless. In a very real sense, the government is us.

While that's partially true, with no telco regulation you get stuff like this, which isn't particularly good for anyone.

Also, one of the other "natural" monopoly resources is right-of-way -- the right for someone to come onto your property to install or maintain the utility. Balancing the benefit of an efficiently-run utility and individuals' right to sovereignty on their property is nontrivial -- and a big reason for government-sponsored monopolies.

You don't need physical access, just the ability to run code as the logged-in user. So any number of browser driveby attacks or emailed trojans should be able to grant an attacker irrevocable access to your dropbox.

If true, this is actually a big deal.

What do you mean? The "b" tag hasn't stopped working, and table layouts still render just fine. Hell, the "font" tag still does what it used to -- just make sure you use an old DOCTYPE. Hell, leave it out altogether, and the browsers will be even more likely to render your grandparents' pages in quirks mode.

No one is forcing anyone to adopt the new standards. For a lot of people, however, the new standards are a big win.

For example, you could make your grandparents a stylesheet that'd let them use much simpler markup when editing their pages.

Honey can actually expire. If it crystallizes enough to leave the liquid fraction with high enough available water content, the liquid fraction will ferment. This generally only happens with honey that started with a higher water content than is really desirable.

Salt... erm, yeah. Maybe it's the amount of time before clumping can be expected in a humid environment?

Disclaimer: I have not read the original paper.

This is really not a big surprise. The researcher has probably run many, many experiments. Many of them doubtless turned up nothing. But, by chance alone, an experiment has a 5% chance of showing an effect with 95% confidence -- that's what p < .05 means. It's like rolling a natural 20. If he's run, say, 100 experiments over the years, he should have something around 5 rather convincing results to show for his efforts.

Next, hundreds of other researchers request his materials and run the same experiments and... shock! A bunch of them show the exact same effect! Now, not only has one research lab demonstrated evidence for ESP, but the study has been successfully replicated by researchers around the world!

All of this, of course, is just by chance.

And really, you see this all the time in other fields (at least, in the fields I work in). It's just very vey very very very easy to convince yourself that the reason your earlier experiments didn't work out was that you made a mistake, and the reason this one did was that you did everything perfectly.

A few years ago, there was an excellent essay in PLOS One Why Most Published Research Findings Are False about these (and more insidious) effects. Should be required reading for scientists.

Wouldn't it be great if someone would start a pay-as-you-go scheme for electricity? Or long-distance telephone service? Or gasoline?

Flat-rate services rely on light users subsidizing heavy users. If the rates are fair, pay-per-use is a good idea -- certainly better than arbitrary data caps that might get enforced god-knows-when.

And yes, people with lots of money can afford to buy more stuff. That's how it works.

If you get 100 miles per charge, you'll be looking at renewal after 600,000 miles. 300,000 if you only get 50 miles/charge.

Either case is an awfully optimistic lifespan for any combustion engine-based car currently on the market. You'll certainly spend more on repairs over those half-million miles than you did originally on the car.