If the earthquake were in... Antarctica or Greenland, you might have a good case.

Eh? This is seismology, not climatology.

Damn!

I was just about to (sarcastically) blame fracking and Sarah Palin...

Yep. It's wierd because the symptoms can correspond with many different causes. For example, the climate change thing makes sense because bees can be tricked into thinking it's spring and start foraging or even swarming in the middle of winter when they really should stay in the winter cluster. The occasional warm day is good for them to be able to get out and void themselves, but longer periods of significantly fluctuating weather can be bad.

But it also matches other problems. Diseased or dying hives often lead to "desperate" swarming where bees start abandoning the hive to try to establish a new, safe place. Most of these swarms, however, will die. The behavior could be seen as a general "exteme stress" behavior. It could also be seen as a neurological disorder from pesticide exposure.

In short, it could match almost any possible cause. And probably is a result of many of them.

I dunno, they might be a bit boring.

I think it's important to ask questions because there's been literally "dozens" of different things "definitively linked" with CCD. The public likes to seize on neonicotinoids, but they're probably one of the least supported of these many different "definitively linked" reasons. Whole countries have gone so far as to outright ban neonicotinoids, with no effect on CCD. France, for example, banned them. The next year they largely switched to blaming the condition on Asian Hornets when the decline rates didn't decrease.

The problem is that when you ban a certain pesticide, people start using others. And going from neonicotinoids to organophosphates is a massive step backwards in terms of general safety, not just to pollinators, but especially to more complex animals as well. But the biggest problem with the neonicotinoid theory is that neonicotinoids are only used in a small fraction of the areas where CCD exists. Bees can only fly several kilometers from the hive, they're not going cross-country and picking up every pesticide in every farmer's arsenal. It even exists among people who are in places where no pesticides at all are used.

It's easy for the general public to latch onto a particular cause. But once you learn more about beekeeping you realize how incredibly much out there is that can utterly f* up a hive. And which have in history regularly collapsed bee populations, far worse than the collapses we have today. Trachael mites once nearly obliterated beekeeping in Europe, saved mainly by the development of the Buckfast bee. Check out this very inexhaustive list of bee pests and diseases. There's even some really counterintuitive effects in that small levels of some pesticides can actually increase hive survival rates, in that they're deadlier to bee pests like mites than to the bees themselves.

The public also tends to totally understand colony collapse disorder in the first place. Normal winter colony death levels are about 15% in most locations (though where I am it's higher). CCD raised the US average to about 30% at its peak. This is painful and expensive to beekeepers, but it has literally no impact on the ability to sustain bee populations. A new beehive can be started with just a queen and a handful of workers. Hives can be made to produce queens en masse through proper management. Hence people can mail order starter hives, and there's never going to be a threat to the ability to produce these starter hives - a single hive can make many dozens per year. Even normal hives not managed for breeding starter hives will naturally produce several swarms every year; beekeepers try to discourage and/or catch these swarms.

In all likelihood, neonicotinoids are one among many different stressors to bees in the modern era that causes CCD. Modern bees are much more "stressed" than bees in the past. We've created an environment where new bee pests and diseases have spread far and wide to bees that never would have encountered them in the wild. We raise them on corn syrup and sugar water in the winter (good for reducing dysintery and increasing honey yields, but robbing them of certain vitamins and minerals). We transport them on flatbed trucks hundreds or thousands of kilometers (these are animals that get confused if you move their hive a couple meters; their ability to navigate by sight is poor, they're best navigating by the sun and dead reckoning). And countless varieties of poisons, even unintentional ones, affect them every day of their lives. There's so many factors now that weaken hives that any "new" factor to an area can push them over the edge.

I'd really like to read the paper but unfortunately it's down. But for example, do the neonicotinoids add a UV signature to the liquid not present in the sugar water? That would have little to no influence in the case of flowers in nature (where they're not looking at the nectar, and there's all sorts of other chemicals in the nectar). What other chemicals are in the neonicotinoid solution (they're rarely pure, they usually have all sorts of other chemicals to increase their effect)? What's their cleaning and handling procedure for preparing and filling the sample containers? I want to know how they controlled these experiments against factors that humans can't detect but bees absolutely can.

Just the very act of hooking electrodes up to bee neurons I'd have concerns about. Is there any induced electric field involved, or even rubbing against the bee hairs? Bees transfer information to one another via dances, such as the waggle dance. Bees build up an electrostatic charge on their body, and a waggling bee imposes an electrostatic force on the antennae and hairs of all adjacent bees, causing them to feel dance over a short distance. Their stereoscopic sense of the dance lets them know the direction, and that combined with the time allows them to work out a direction to a food source relative to the (moving) direction of the sun. It functions like transferring a memory from one be to another. There's also "negation" behaviors, by other bees who don't like the information giving out; they have a different frequency buzz to say "don't go there", and sometimes different bees may even fight with each other over what's good and what's bad information.

Also note that the linked articles refer to a second study published simultaneously which showed no effect on honeybees next to rapeseed fields sprayed with neonicotinoids versus an altogether unsprayed field. Which is pretty remarkable, because you expect almost *any* pesticide next to your hive to have a profoundly negative effect on it.

I'm sorry, but calling flagging a "troll" because they misread an article is beyond the pale. None of their behavior was "trollish". Saying that a study is flawed is in no way shape or form engaging in "fraudulent research", aka, deliberately falsifying data to push an agenda.

The Nature article appears to be down. But I have to caution, studying bee behavior is very difficult. Many of our senses, bees lack or have only at low resolution. But they have a number of senses that we don't. They see UV. They see polarized light. They sense electric fields. They're sensitive to a lot of chemicals that we cannot detect. And so forth. It's very, very easy to accidentally give bees signals, which will alter their behavior, that you didn't realize you were giving. I'd like how they attempted to control for all of this, but unfortunately that's not possible now.

... instead of the shitty ad-filled blog

http://googleonlinesecurity.bl...

In the same way that differential air pressure "repels gravity" to keep a plane in the air???

Why didn't the rubber absorb the sound, so that no one heard the master's scream?

Sounds like somebody couldn't figure out how to set up GPG.

Nobody said that the nerves are going to work. Post transplant, the person will certainly be paralyzed from the neck down. That's why this kind of surgery is only appropriate for a paraplegic whose body is about to fail. He or she is not going to stop being a paraplegic, but might get many extra years of life by acquiring a robust new body.

FWIW, the only time I restart systemd is to update the kernel, or I guess systemd itself (though the kernel changes more often and thus I can usually lump the latter in with the former). If you do live-patch your kernel, then you can do the same with systemd - it has a command to re-exec itself while preserving state.

I'm sure it isn't perfect, but it is as robust as anything else I've used on Linux. There are fairly few daemons that I've never seen need a restart sometime in the last 10 years.

Of course the retirement funds weren't bailed out. They didn't have to be, because the companies they invested in were bailed out instead. If the various investment banks were allowed to fail then they'd probably all crash and so would everything all those retirement funds were invested in. THAT is why those companies were too big to fail in the first place.

If investments were just a toy for the wealthy then we could let them play their games and take their haircuts. The problem is that the investment sector affects everybody, so we have no choice but to intervene when things go wrong. That gives us the right to prevent things from going wrong in the first place, even if it means the rich can't play their games any longer...

While I agree with many of your points, often these records become important after the fact.

Suppose I have a record of every letter sent from anywhere to anywhere. Then somebody blows up a building or whatever and are now known as a terrorist. The database allows you to obtain a list of every letter that had his address somewhere on it. Or any letter sent to a suspicious address which originated in his vicinity even if it didn't have a return address (such as if it were dropped in a mailbox). That kind of information can be useful to expand a network of suspects.

It is like having a record of every phone call for the last 30 years. It is hard to look at call patterns and tell who is a threat. However, if somebody blows up a building you can figure out who their college roommate was, or who they dated in middle school. All kinds of relationships that would not be obvious if you just talked to somebody's neighbors or looked at their recent credit card / phone history become apparent. Maybe their former girlfriend works for the TSA and was on duty when a terrorist slipped past security, but there weren't any phone calls between them in the last 10 years. That is a lead that might become apparent with long-term record retention that would be missed without it. Of course, such techniques inevitably involve looking into the cases of people who are almost certainly innocent. If the girlfriend wasn't involved, pursuing her might mean neglecting other leads that are real threats.

Data is just data. However, there is a lot you can do with a targeted search once you know what you're looking for.