Producer: No! Leave it in - a minor human slip will make it more believable.

Turns out that the demographics didn't have much effect on where the war was started.

Your wife, like all other scientists and amateurs with sufficiently powerful telescopes, is in on the conspiracy.

(Is she evil, or did they threaten to kill her cat if she didn't cooperate?)

I recently saw an article (here?) about a study that found that subscribing to conspiracy theories correlates strongly with a low self-image.

But you've got to research it while drinking heavily, so you'll understand the stories from the perspective of the intended audience.

I have a little scar in one eyebrow where my younger brother poked me with a hot coathanger while toasting marshmallows at the beach. I'm about half an inch from being blind in one eye due to a campfire.

They also tend to contain a lot of superstition, prejudice, ignorance, outright nonsense, and religious/social/political spin.

(Just like secular literature.)

That second link has been posted here recently enough that my browser still shows it as visited. It *uttterly* failed to support the claims of the person who posted it, leaving the impression that they hadn't actually read it. Or maybe read it and didn't understand it. Or maybe read it and understood it, but thought they could get away with misrepresenting it. Who knows...

In your case... uhm... what claim about history, religion, or ghost stores do you think it supports? Merely posting a link doens't win a vague argument, nor does it make your personal beliefs real.

Hitler would have pushed the button just before he pulled the trigger.

MAD only works when all the owners of knukes are reasonably sane.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... Shanzhai not shenzhai

On an evolutionary time scale, this is a snapshot. "Europeans" meant something for several thousand years, but the intermarriage and population growth and travel will commingle DNA in a century or two (evolutionarily known as an "instant"). I'm white and have native American DNA, most black / African Americans are dark skinned and have loads of European DNA, etc etc. These DNA results are interesting but it's like trying to follow a weather pattern, the geographical barriers are toast.

Have been to these markets in Shenzhen and Foshan, and to similar marketplaces in Cairo and Lima and Jakarta. In Chinese there is a word "shenzhai" I think which means to "hack" or copy, but it doesn't have the nefarious English connotations. It's more like a musician jamming someone else's guitar riff, it's seen as a talent worthy of applause. Slate had a great article in 2012, "The Chinese Steve Jobs is Probably a Pirate". I'm now working with 3 researchers at universities to document what we call the "Tinkerer Blessing", which is the opposite of the "Resource Curse"... correlating that emerging markets with a lack of natural resources develop better through technology repair and "grey market" activity. Simon Lin of Acer, Terry Gou of Foxconn, both started in video display refurbishment, by the way. http://www.slate.com/articles/...

While it's popular to cheer for victims of lost jobs and the unemployed, the brutal truth is that unemployment is 4% (in my state) and asshole-dom is about 14%. We look forward to MS-less resumes to grow our business. There's a shortage of smart employees, and until we figure out how to educate the emerging intellect-nots, medium-tech industry needs the dis-employed. Or immigrants. We are color blind, we don't care.

Dark matter simply means matter that is too small to be detected by what humans have so far developed to see, but which gravity study suggests should be there. Seventy years ago, Pluto was probably "dark matter". Giving a name to "everything" we can't see and then finding evidence that there's something more is a bit curious. What hasn't been "seen" yet is "dark". We will eat away at "dark" matter one snapshot at a time.

If the code-writing industry is going to rely on civil court judges and federal patent clerks to make the decisions, the firms with 2 lawyers per coder will win out. If the code-writing industry goes to no-patents, it will be from each coder according to his ability, to each according to his need. The only solution is for some industry gurus to come up with some rules which everyone agrees to abide by, and then to submit the concensus in friend-of-court decisions. I have no idea whether anyone in the industry is prepared to even define the 80/20 rule, but if they can agree on the WORST patent decisions (either way) and get some concensus on them, and then try to find commonalities in what made those "bad", it could be a start.