We consulted our lawyers, and they assure us that it'll be cheaper for them to pay us off than fight us, so free money!

ha, yeah, I suppose I /still/ have no idea :P

What I meant is while western music scales mathematically divide the octave into 8 intervals (12 including the black keys), Thai instruments divide their "octave" into 7, which is part of the reason why Thai and other asian music sounds... exotic to westerners.

Here's someone who knows what he's talking about...
https://books.google.com/books...

Also a herpetonic scale sounds cool because imagine a bunch of shiny lizards playing in an orchestra

Separating really small objects of almost the same density as water (0.91â"0.96 g/cm3 - they are made from polyethylene) is not easy, and the fact is that they pass through all existing water treatment works. Plastics are in fact a serious environmental issue, 1) since they often leak hormone-like chemicals, and 2) because plastic objects are mostly not broken down into their chemical constituents, but instead break up to form very small plastic splinters and fibres. These are now found everywhere in our food chain; certainly in anything that starts life at sea: fish etc. We still don't quite know what harm they cause - the great worry is that thei will turn out to be as harmful as asbestos. Is it a good idea to allow the industry to pump these largely unnecessary products out, when it seems likely that it will cause massive problems for society down the line? Health problems cost society money, not just in form of hospitals, doctors etc, but also in lost productivity - prevention is better than cure, and it is also better for business in the long run.

Sand is a natural material, and the environment already knows how to deal with it. I don't know exactly why they prefer to use plastic, but I'll bet it has to do with thei short term profit. Maybe it is a selling point, or was - I remember when it was first introduced and you suddenly heard a lot about how harsh the old kind of toothpaste was to your teeth. In reality it is probably no more than a selling point, like the current craze for putting triclosan in everything - which doesn't actually kill bacteria, but is likely to harm our health in the long run (both directly and by breeding resistent bacteria; when will we bother to learn?)

25 years, you say? It feels longer, somehow. Don't worry, I can see everybody's eyes glaze over, so I won't go too far down memory lane, except to say that there was actually a time when when Windows was cool and fun to work with. By gods, it was a load of crap, back then, but fun to code for, for that very reason. I used to spend 90% of my time commenting out code sections until the latest, spectacular error went away; that was how I learned to program properly in C. There is nothing like having to debug Windows running in real mode to bring home the idea that you must always initialise variable and check returned pointers. I sometimes miss the "hardship" in a perverse sort of way.

Once when I was a kid, my mother gave me some Thai classical music to try to convert to a Western score. I had no idea...

Not necessarily. Greenland ice core records show that in the past the planet has seen temperature shifts of up to 7 C in as little as 30 years. 7 C is huge. It's like transporting Moscow to Rome. Of course, we have no idea what caused such rapid changes in the past. It wasn't CO2 levels, or particulates.

I would. If one or more isolated populations managed to survive more than a couple of generations after the event, I think it's highly likely that they'd continue to survive indefinitely. The worst of the changes would be past, and they'd clearly have learned how to survive in the new environment, else they'd have died sooner.

Human intelligence makes us highly adaptable, as evidenced by the extraordinary diversity of environments in which we live, and lived even before the advent of modern technology. Humans who lack the necessary knowledge of how to survive in a particular environment are at severe risk of death any place on the planet, but if they manage to survive for even a year or two, odds are that they'll have learned enough to be able to extend that time almost indefinitely.

I've been getting a bunch of BLU phones for the kids for about $20 - $30 a pop.
http://www.amazon.com/BLU-Unlo...

They're by no means nice phones, but they have a good feature set, and we haven't had any problems with them that weren't caused by dropping them into puddles or sending them on a ride through the laundry machine.

BLU also has a slightly larger one with a full Blackberry-like keyboard for texting that also has a broadcast TV receiver instead of just FM radio.

Er, just trolling for mod points, and I guess I know my audience for the most part... I was really just looking for a nice place to link to that funny image, and your post sounded smart (though TBH I didn't really understand what position you were arguing for or against, but I agree with the statements you made).

But just to explain my AGW analogy... should we be worried about asteroids enough to spend money on asteroid interceptors, even though any kind of payoff is likely only once every 70,000 years or so? Should we be worried about climate change enough to spend money on trying to cram more people onto Earth, or just let the natural cycles of mass extinctions and famine run its course?

The fine article is somewhat silly, because first they complain about how bad at statistics people are, but then go through the math that the odds of anyone dying due to asteroids are 1 - in 70 million per year.

which is
1. a bit ridiculous that the population will hold steady at 7 billion the forseeable future, not that it matters because humans have difficulty relating to any population above a couple hundred.
2. over enough millennia, even with those odds, we'll see definitely see something. Probably not in our lifetimes, but likely on a civilization scale of 10,000 years.
3. Yes, TFA mentions that most of the solar system debris has already been absorbed by Jupiter and the like, but seems to ignore some other million-year scale cycles for encountering space debris http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...

Are people fear-mongering? Definitely. Is any effort we make to tackle the miniscule risk of asteroid impacts or climate change wasted? No. Are historians in the distant future going to look back on our culture and and say "silly fools, they wasted so much time and effort worrying about X that they didn't notice the real issues piling up to destroy their civilization" no matter what we do? Hell yes.

Yeah, large, mass-extinction asteroids are only a problem every 70 million years.

By that logic, why even bother worrying about AGW, since even by the worst predictions it won't have any horrible effects for the next 100 years or so. So just sit back, relax, and enjoy life! .... there's nothing that could possibly happen that Earth wouldn't completely recover from in a couple million years.

http://weknowmemes.com/wp-cont...

This. If you know anything about lawyers and law, the first tenet is NEVER ADMIT FAULT. No good can come of it. People might then expect you to pay for damages or whatever.

Environmentalists make the mistake thinking that conservatives are stupid. That is not the case. The only thing they care about is that they will not have to pay for or be part of the solution. Any time you spend trying to convince them otherwise is wasted.

The other bit is that politics is never proactive, always reactionary. No environmental protection or anti-pollution law was ever passed until something was already FUBAR, be it due to the London yellow fog, or smog over LA, holes in the ozone layer, or Chinese urban centers shutting down due to respiratory issues. The politicians will maybe finally get around to doing something substantial about AGW after there's a refugee crises from low-lying areas, like the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Louisiana, Florida, etc. Chances are, they still won't blame AGW, since it'll be sea swell from a hurricane/typhoon that does those population centers in, but at some point they'll get tired of throwing money at those places to rebuild. Fortunately there are already a lot of migrant refugee boats in the Mediterranean and Andaman Sea for other reasons, so we're already slowly building a framework for dealing with these kinds of things.

There are some kickass "glacier calving" videos on youtube, though...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There's the bit at the end that shows glaciers have been receding more in the last 10 years than they have in the last 100 years, so there's that...

Was parent modded down due to lack of citation? Maybe they were referring to this?
http://www.prb.org/Publication...

I still can't get my head around this; a guy is allowed to hold off a vote on legislation by talking, because in the US there is a rule that makes it impossible to do what would happen in other, democratic nations, namely that a couple of bailiffs would gently lead him away until he regained his sense. In some cases this can mean that a vote cannot be held before a deadline, so in this situation a single bully can veto legislation that the majority wishes to pass. And this is applauded as a courageous act of ... what? And the defence of this practice is, no doubt, "freedom of speech"; funny how "freedom" so often mean "your right to do as you please", not "my right to stand up and give you a well deserved slap", figuratively speaking.

The real reason that this kind of idiocy is allowed, is not that it is about an important freedom, but simply that is does not matter in the bigger picture. It looks spectacular, if only because it is spectacularly boring, and it gives people the illusion that their freedoms are real, but the deals have already been done in the board rooms, where the real power lies.