As a coda to my post, consider this howler:

World's Worst Typo Leaves Publisher Reeling

An Australian publisher is reprinting 7,000 cookbooks over a recipe for pasta with "salt and freshly ground black people." ... The reprint will cost Penguin 20,000 Australian dollars ($18,500) ...

This incident was mentioned in a book I read not long ago about the fine art of editing to a high standard.

It appears that tiny slip cost some poor sod real money. If the writer is sloppy or inconsistent in his/her usage standard, the proof-reading job becomes ten times harder. The writer probably accepted the wrong spell-checker suggestion when he/she was bleary with late-night fatigue.

There are a number of elements of British English that would get an American student marked wrong on an English exam, and vice versa.

This is because half the point of higher education is to master pedantry. There's a huge overlap in the cognitive equipment required to perform careful scholarship and lint-picking misplaced letters and words.

Students aren't actually marked "wrong" on their tests, despite the convention to speak about it this way. Their answers are marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable".

In an undergraduate course in computer science on an assignment devoted to algorithmic efficiency, I had a program that ran two orders of magnitude faster than the class median marked 6/10 because I didn't write my program in the mandated coding style with the mandated level of inane comments (requirements which I rejected then, and have continued to reject ever since). The professor liked Pascal and hated C. My coding style was closer to K&R and P. J. Plauger than Wirth.

Jon Postel

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

In order to be maximally conservative, one must strive for some degree of consistency. There's no way to do this without adopting some kind of norm.

There's a reason why some editors strongly prefer the Oxford comma. If you don't use it (I tend not to), there are situations where you can end up with your sentence not saying what you intended it to say.

Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

In the worst case, you can end up embroiled in a libel lawsuit. Many of the stylistic codifications accused of pedantry are similarly battle tested.

The additional social process that sometimes takes this too far is that you get a team of editors working on manuscripts from multiple authors. If every author has a different style guide, or the editors don't have a consistent reference, the group effort to achieve a consistent manuscript quickly degenerates.

Unfortunately, this often gets taken to the extreme limit, until you have obscure rulings on the picayune whose utility is obscured in the mists of time.

I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter, inserting two spaces after the sentence final punctuation mark. In the younger generation, this is portrayed as a fuddy-duddy convention. Do they even know that an advanced typesetting system sets the inter-sentence gap differently than the inter-word gap when they make this declaration?

I continue to use the double space convention when typing because it makes it easier to proof-read what I've written. My eyes are used to the double space to help me quickly navigate my sentence boundaries. And the extra space is pretty much effortless to type.

Going to the extreme of portraying the established conventions as nothing more than a bunch of "he said / she said" is complete bullshit. It's difficult to come up with a set of conventions that maximizes the conservatism (in the Postel sense) of a written text. What's the logic for coming up with your own? It's not so different than coming up with your own software license. There's a significant likelihood that what you come up with isn't legally solid, and there's a considerable burden imposed on everyone else to navigate Yet Another Vanity License. Why don't you also roll your own encryption method? It could work.

For me where it goes to far is when the standard authorities (e.g. Chicago Manual of Style) seem to forget that language standards are living standards. The underlying technology changes and the publishing demands also change. What was justifiable thirty years ago is perhaps irrelevant today.

I personally can't stand folding punctuation marks under an end-quotation mark. As far as I'm concerned, that's a matter for the layout engine, if it ends up being done at all. On the input side, it's just semantically wrong. All you get for it is a slight improvement of the visual tidiness on the printed page, at the cost (sometimes) of creating ambiguity in the reader's mind about whether the punctuation mark belongs to the quoted material, or not. Only a crazy person advocates at the same time for the Oxford comma (which averts ambiguity) and for end-quotation punctuation folding (which introduces ambiguity). Aesthetics or semantics? Make up your damn mind! (For myself, I use the Oxford comma as necessary and I make a point of being able to identify those cases.)

I'm sure most people sense that the argument in favour of standard usage as "just another style" mainly comes from people who wish to avoid effort and mastery rather than double down in the honourable spirit of Jon Postel.

How often do we need to repeat this mantra to people?

Not quite so often as you think, if this is just an excuse to regard an accessible, but possibly degraded primary copy as worse than having no backup of your backup at all.

Having in my possession a ZFS backup with some corrupt nodes, I could still have a provable hash from the Merkle tree of the content desired, which I could recover from a corrupt primary copy (i.e. the live drive itself) with no concern whatsoever about the corruption, so long as the checksum matches.

Anything that can go wrong in a primary copy can pretty much also go wrong in a backup copy. Hot media is more likely to fail due to write errors (or overwrite errors) whereas cold media is poor at prompt notification of physical degradation.

The rule of Occam's orthogonality says don't brick the primary device unnecessarily.

Here's the best part: they can audit the security of nearly a half a million lines of code in "several months".

You don't need to look for kidney stones in bone marrow. Most likely what they are doing is better described by "screening" rather than "auditing" even though the later is the conventional word.

Algorithms (such as ciphers) tend to be fairly easy to cover with test suites, whereas memory management and handling of randomness sources are both fraught with peril and difficult to formally test.

It really helps to reduce audit coverage if your code analysis tools can eliminate big chunks of code as purely functional with no side-effects on system state. A purely functional function would not include code that performs heap-based memory allocation, and would exclude the vast majority of system calls.

Even so, I suspect there's a pretty steep gradient on where to direct your best attention to identify misguiding coding constructs (approaches that are worse than wrong)—if you're not determined to check for identify kidney stones lurking in bone marrow.

Would have been nice if TFS had included an explanation of what the TSYNC feature is.

This would be inconsistent with masses of people clicking into the discussion thread going "WTF?" and then sticking around to post a comment.

I'd quit Slashdot in a heartbeat (abandoning what limited loyalty remains) if I were willing to wade through the alternatives in search of an alternative forum in which the paragraph as a unit of discourse has not yet been un-invented.

Back in grade nine, back in the 1970s, in a school where the majority of students ended up in vocational college, I already held a low opinion of people who charged ahead with the lingo-of-the-day without providing the least context. Slashdot in its current incarnation routinely falls below the personal standards I used to judge my 14-year-old classmates back when Star Wars was the hottest property in known history (I was quietly polite about it, but none of those people became my friends). Every freaking time a Slashdot story does this (i.e. pretty much daily), I have a grade-nine flashback to the least nerd-compatible environment I've ever been forced to endure.

Edge has a pretty good piece today: Yuval Noah Harari in conversation with Daniel Kahneman.

I don't have a solution, and the biggest question maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people.

He merely means by "useless" the portion of the population who have no skills at anything that can't be better done by a (recently or soon-to-be-invented) machine.

There's no fixed algorithm for ensuring that one remains a viable member of the "useful" population, but I'm going to continue with my grade-nine policy of gravitating toward those who 1) employ paragraphs when engaged in written communication; and 2) provide adequate background before lapsing into the lingo-of-the-moment.

As I said, there's no fixed algorithm and I might well be wrong, but from where I presently sit, I'm voting as stated on this matter with my entire bag of skin.

an hour earlier

An hour earlier than what?

Humans have been phase-locked to the mean solar day for just over 200 out of the last 6 million years.

1883: Railroads create the first time zones

Not even the sun is phase-locked to mean solar time. There's this little detail called the Equation of time whose discovery dates back to the Babylonians, which governs annual variation in apparent solar time. Apparent solar time just happens to be the primary zeitgeber on circadian rhythmicity in all mammals (that I've heard of) and a great deal more.

The majority of people feel that DST is a bad idea and want it to stop.

Majority of what population? People living north of the 49th? I doubt it.

Majority of people who wish pi was equal to 3 and that the earth's orbit were circular? Almost certainly, even though I don't think these two simplicity boners are conceptually compatible.

When you begin counting the cost of nuclear, you've got to count ALL the costs. Including, as at Fukushima, basic engineering errors that ultimately cost astronomical amounts years after construction.

Do you know what the lead engineer of the GE design team for the original Fukushima reactor drove around town? A 1959 Edsel Ranger.

Certain mistakes were made back then in the heyday of mature industries like OS/360 and the Boeing 707 that we no longer make. Even the outlandish and highly inflated AI claims from the same era (which were held against the entire discipline for 50 years) are now almost becoming reality with deep learning. Times change. Even for AI. Even for nuclear.

Semi-retraction: Although I just made up that bit about the Edsel, I can't actually claim it's a false statement.

You're somewhat delusional if you believe this was pure fat loss. I regard it as a disservice to give people the impression that this kind of fat loss is either possible or healthy.

At the level of exercise required to sustain a caloric balance of -2700 calories per day over four months, the body would become severely protein challenged. Even converting fat to energy increases protein demand, as those organelles burn hard and wear out.

What happens with formerly fit individuals who then become obese is that these individuals actually have extremely large reserves of skeletal muscle (obese people tend to have extremely strong legs for practical reasons, it just doesn't seem like it as hefting their own body weight consumes most of their strength). As this kind of person goes into an endurance exercise program, he or she actually needs far less muscle mass than they have starting out.

If his story is true, I bet he lost a great deal of skeletal muscle mass in addition to a lot of fat. The muscle that remained would be extremely fit and efficient, but less strong.

A similarly obese person without the muscular reserve would be flirting with death in attempting to replicate these figures. If his story is even true. And if it is true, why did he quit and put all those pounds back on again? Could it be that his body figured out that the stress of the program was unreasonable to begin with?

Did he actually measure his body composition before and after, or did he just take a weight difference and presume that anyone who exercises that much couldn't possibly have shed any muscle mass?

I don't feel like digging up particulars I last read five years ago, but I distinctly do not recall having ever read anything credible which suggests this level of weight loss can be achieved on a pure fat-burning basis.

You can always find another language that is better at it on every single aspect you look at. Jack of all trades master of none.

Master of Jack is the one thing where no other compiled language triumphs over C++.

If you're sure on day one that there are language features your project will never need (on any project fork)—cross my heart and hope to die—then go ahead and pick a less cluttered language better suited to your constrained subdomain.

What you're really saying here is that you'd rather work in a constrained subdomain—pretty much any constrained subdomain—than hump around on crowded streets hulked up with a universal camera bag (source Mumbai-based photojournalist Dilish Parekh).

It appears to me as blue and black. Definitively. First viewed as a whole image, full screen on a tall portrait IPS and then checked on a second landscape IPS (these two screens long ago adjusted to show matched colours).

Both the black and blue appear to me somewhat blown out. Actually, the mottled black almost appears as a mutant non-colour unlike anything one sees in real life (the colour balance algorithm of a digital camera subtracting blue from the black is a perfect explanation for this).

If I scroll so that I can only see the top of the dress (down to just past the horizontal black band across her upper back) I can almost conceive of how some people see this dress as white and gold. What I actually perceive is an ambiguous image under false, untrustworthy light.

In my bedroom I have several unusual light sources which I regularly use. In addition to an incandescent lamp, there an extremely yellow bug lamp and a bright and narrow-spectrum blue LED light intended to shift circadian rhythm.

I love the yellow bug lamp because it's initially so dim I can turn it on briefly while my wife sleeps to find my socks, plus I often use it for reading late in my day so as not to expose myself to blue light. I also had red and green light sources for a while, before I discovered yellow bug-light perfection (the red and green bulbs were 40 W coloured-glass bulbs that constantly smelled bad because they instantly baked any stray dust—a failed experiment).

I have pretty good sense in my bedroom of which colours are more or less trustworthy under vastly different lighting conditions. Even under my narrow-spectrum blue light (in an otherwise dark bedroom) I can't make anything white look like this photograph. In my bedroom under a pure blue illumination (75% between 450 and 480 nm, centered at 464 nm; with 490 nm attenuated by 10 dB compared to the spectral peak) the highlights on my white sheets where the light is strongest are more saturated, and the dimmer regions are less saturated, opposite my impression of this photograph.

Perhaps people who spend a lot of time watching TV in dark rooms where people are wearing white clothing are conditioned differently.

I imagine you'd start by laying down a set of climate benchmarks, agree on what is an acceptable variation under normal conditions, then should the averages begin to venture beyond those on the regular basis ...

I don't think you've read much Taleb. Your "benchmark" sounds like something freshly checked out from the LTCM Lemma Loans Library.

In a sufficiently complex system (Rule 110), means are not guaranteed to exist (Cauchy--Lorentz distribution).

Jay Rosen on Edge.org:

Still, we would be better off if we knew when we were dealing with a wicked problem, as opposed to the regular kind. If we could designate some problems as wicked we might realize that "normal" approaches to problem-solving don't work. We can't define the problem, evaluate possible solutions, pick the best one, hire the experts and implement. No matter how much we may want to follow a routine like that, it won't succeed. Institutions may require it, habit may favor it, the boss may order it, but wicked problems don't care.

And he's specifically thinking about this particular problem.

Know any problems like that? Sure you do. Probably the best example in our time is climate change.

It's an open question whether the earth's climate is still considered to be a wicked problem 500 years from now, or five million years from now. Even a future Extropian Eloi might find themselves stuck with having to participate in a climate lottery.

I have a circadian rhythm disorder. Not long ago I free-ran at 25.5 hours for several years. Advancing by 1.5 hours per day, you're making adjustments to the world around you ever two or three days. Endlessly. I would have mortgaged a minor limb to change my rotational period from 17 days to 21 days. Just to be able to stay in a consistent phase with the day of the week would have been a major blessing.

I had previously tried melatonin with mixed success. At best, having exhaustively worked through many doses and times, it seemed to reduce my period to 24.25 hours, a little less than 2 hours per week. This is no bed of roses, either. And the melatonin was taking a three hour chunk of out every evening where I was yawning like a date-raped hedgehog waiting impatiently for a fresh coat of paint to dry in his homey bungalow, listless and unable to anything more complicated than cook dinner—usually a fairly simple dinner.

Recently I tried melatonin again in a sustained-release formulation (newly discovered at retail) and this magically worked much better. At a large dose, I'm able to stay on a 24-hour day permanently, over very close to it. The daily date rape continues to suck.

At lower doses—minus the daily date rape—I seem to stay near a 24-hour day, with unplanned excursions when it all comes unglued. This might well be addressed by further tweaking. I've ever so close now to having the best of both worlds.

The operative parameter with circadian rhythm disorder is that there's no such thing as "merely" a flesh wound for a haemophiliac. My clock drifts because there's something broken in the entrainment circuit. A haemophiliac bleeds because there's a gash or puncture or rash, but he continues to bleed because the blood chemistry required for blood clotting is MIA.

A normal person experiencing severe jet lag (say a trip to Japan or Australia) is in a horrible, unpleasant, barely functional place. In my metaphor, you feel weak because you're gushing blood. In this state, your clotting reflex (if you have a clotting reflex) is actually on overdrive. The stress is horrible, but the body is rapidly adapting and compensating. If you make it through the first day, you hope the second day will suck a little bit less, until after a few days, it hardly sucks at all, then you're body finishes making the adjustment, and everything becomes normal again.

For a person such as myself trying to maintain a 24-hour day without melatonin, the process goes the other direction. Light jet lag turns in moderate jet lag, and moderate jet lag soon becomes severe jet lag, and severe jet lag soon gives way to waking hypnagogic hallucinations. Every one of my attempts to force myself into adherence with the 24-hour clock on will-power alone developed along this path over two weeks. I was as cognitively impaired at this point as that time I got a bit too carried away in a bout of binge drinking, to an extent I never repeated again. And still the bleeding continued. By this point your will-power is so diminished, you need a jeweller's work bench and a steady hand to make even the smallest life decision. You know you're suffering like hell, but you've almost forgotten what crazy notion drove you to try maintaining a 24-hour waking day.

From French invasion of Russia:

The cold was so intense that bivouacking was no longer supportable. Bad luck to those who fell asleep by a campfire! ... One constantly found men who, overcome by the cold, had been forced to drop out and had fallen to the ground, too weak or too numb to stand. ... Once these poor wretches fell asleep they were dead. If they resisted the craving for sleep, another passer-by would help them along a little farther, thus prolonging their agony for a short while, but not saving them, for in this condition the drowsiness engendered by cold is irresistibly strong. Sleep comes inevitably, and to sleep is to die. I tried in vain to save a number of these unfortunates. The only words they uttered were to beg me, for the love of God, to go away and let them sleep. To hear them, one would have thought sleep was their salvation. Unhappily, it was a poor wretch's last wish. But at least he ceased to suffer, without pain or agony. Gratitude, and even a smile, was imprinted on his discoloured lips. What I have related about the effects of extreme cold, and of this kind of death by freezing, is based on what I saw happen to thousands of individuals. The road was covered with their corpses."

Yes, all my forcible 24-hour experiments ended at some point in the third week when I would blindly stagger into my bed with the hint of a smile upon my discoloured lips. The only difference is that after a sixteen-hour sleep of the dead, I actually woke up again feeling like a million bucks. When I used to bike tour, I would become so ravenous that a simple peanut butter sandwich would taste like nectar of the gods. This was like waking up after your best sleep ever, multiplied by nectar_of_gods / peanut_butter.

The cure for people who lack the cognitive equipment to distinguish bleeding from haemophilia is Insomniac by Gayle Greene (520 pages, 2008). Gayle is a professor of English with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Somehow she's managed to stay employed at a high level despite her intractable sleep disability. I admire her grit. Think Mattie Ross bunkered down in a survival shelter for thirty years to outlast nuclear winter.

Some of the feedback on this book suggests that the author is a sharp-tongued and doth protest too much. Somehow I imagine that most of this criticism comes from the same people who regard the loss of yet another 1/2" of leg room in cattle class as being worth a half-hour bitch session with their seat mate. I have a feeling Mrs Greene's sustained snark—sleep loss affects the mood like PMS on steroids, that's the whole point of her book—quickly becomes hard to bear for people who enjoy complaining about minor things.

What does the Lubyanka, Hanoi Hilton, and Abu Ghraib all have in common? Sleep deprivation. Tough customers who are willing to endure the physical abuse, soon discover that extreme sleep deprivation dissolves your identity and spirit from the inside out (taken too far, it ultimately destroys your thermo-regulation, and then you die).

Case 0: Your body gets used to the 24.7 hour day, with no physical symptoms. Whatever zeitgebers are influencing your body clock are sufficiently strong to achieve normal entrainment to a abnormal entrainment period.

Case 1: The extra forty minutes gives you a mild case of jet-lag, but the jet-lag causes your body to adjust proportionately. Maybe a permanent state of mild jet-lag is just the cost of doing business on a 24.7 hour day.

Case 2: Your body fails to track the lengthened sleep period. You go in and out of jet lag on a week by week basis as your internal body clock syncopates with your sleep routine.

Case 3: Your body fails to track the lengthened sleep period, and the constant stress drives your sleep clock into some horrible non-state that never abates.

Case 3A: You somehow managed to cope with this by adopting a fragmented, irregular sleep routine (best attempted by those under the age of thirty, when energy reserves are high enough to ride the dips out).

Case 3B: You don't manage to cope with it, and become permanently trapped in hazy zombie gulag house of mirrors (stress-induced haemophilia).

Next we have the orthogonal matter of whether your sleep routine tracks your living environment, of whether your sleep routines syncopates with your living environment.

Case 0: Sleep and environment track together. You might or might not suffer from the length of the circadian day imposed upon you, but at least if you are suffering you can make stable plans to work around your suffering.

Case 1: Your sleep might track the rotation of Mars, but the living environment on Mars marches to its own drummer (like the submarines some have mentioned). Every you wake up with a different orientation to the environment around you. If you're bleary, weary, and far from your best from the moment you awake (and for much of the day) this is an extremely challenging environment to live within.

Case 1A: The daily drift is smallish, maybe an hour a week or a little more. You'll have enough stability in your routine that the changing phase can be managed incrementally.

Case 1B: The daily drift is large, 20 to 40 minutes a day. You'll be able to adapt incrementally, but you'll be aware of having to manage this all the time.

Case 1C: The drift is huge, 40-70 minutes a day. You'll think consciously about the phase-of-the-day first thing on waking, last thing on retiring, and at every meal time in between. It will be Monday morning, and you'll think back to Monday morning from the previous week like a time when you lived in an entirely different country. You'll probably buy a Pebble watch and program it to constantly display your internal body clock as well as the local time the coordinates your living environment.

Case 1D: The drift is stupendous, 70 minutes or more a day. Not only will you buy a Pebble watch and program it yourself with a custom calendar for a "market of one person" (Gershenfeld). You'll create strange names for each and every phase relationship, so you can keep track of your incessant daily adjustments cycle over cycle. You'll be overheard muttering to yourself "it's the third day of the spider, Brumaire the seventh" and people will think you just teleported onto planet earth from the Second Revolutionary Epoch of the Ferengi Reformation. If you're the conscientious type, you'll experiment with prescription amphetamines. This will help to some degree, while drawing you into whole new vistas of personal weirdness, which you'll welcome with open arms because you're so damn fed up with the incessant, all-too-familiar weirdness. (If you're not the conscientious type, your medicine cabinet will soon resemble the pagan love-child of Glenn Gould and L. Ron Hubbard).

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.
                                                                — Daniel Kahneman

There's an interesting corollary to this wonderful gem of wisdom. Nothing adds up as fast as a circadian drift of five minutes per day when you stop thinking about it.

When you really live with a condition like this, if it's mild, there's this tendency to start thinking about life issues, like the recent fight with your bunk mate, and forget about your small problem.

Just five minutes a day sustained for five weeks—e.g. a thrilling library book you've already renewed once because you never even got around to cracking the cover by the time the original due date rolled around—turns lunch into breakfast.

People get this all wrong because they think in terms of homeostatic jet lag (i.e. jet lag minus the haemophilia term). And they get this wrong because they forget that time soon slips by in months, seasons, and years. Finally, people get this wrong because they don't think clearly about whether the period stress lies within the zone of biological accommodation, or lies outside the zone of biological accommodation (and when it lies outside the zone, whether the stress is ignored or induces the entire system into chaos).

The SCN is actually a complicated little thing. Here's a recent paper (2014) which provides a good starting point for anyone interested in the literature.

The clock shop: Coupled circadian oscillators Here's a paragraph extremely interesting to me, personally, as I have not before encountered the GABA pathway:

Decreasing GABAergic tone by genetically deleting the Na(V)1.1 sodium channel leads to impaired communication between the ventral and dorsal SCN and, intriguingly, a longer circadian period. Furthermore, pharmacological blockade of GABAA receptors or reducing GABA release with Na(V)1.1 deletion decreases the ability of the SCN to adjust to shifts in the light cycle, presumably by impairing communication between ventral and dorsal SCN. Thus, GABA appears to play an important role in long-range, rapid synaptic communication in the SCN to facilitate entrainment to environmental cycles.

I'm pretty sure part of my problem is that normal light-cycle entrainment has almost no effect on me. I've even used the Philips goLITE BLU (what sleep-deprived marketing drooloid styled that handle?) Light exposure when I'm sleeping does, however, substantially reduce my sleep quality; and white light exposure late in my circadian day does increase my latency to sleep onset. Phase effects? Forget about it.

In electrical engineering terms, coupled oscillators can exhibit degenerate coupling modes (usually where one flips over, and the coupling phase changes by 180 degrees). This was recognized from the mathematical model, then a light/dark stimulation program was devised to see if it could be triggered in an animal model (hamster is what I recall), and it was actually observed. (I haven't looked at that paper for years, so I'm rusty on the details.)

As I presently understand it, the SCN is actually just a reference clock. Nearly every tissue in the body contain local "clocks" that govern gene expression patterns. Most of these local clocks are coupled to the global reference clock, so the entire system stays on Moscow Standard Time. This prevents the liver from going into a metabolic housekeeping cycle right before the main daily feed.

The brain, in particular, does an immense amount of housekeeping. When all this housekeeping is coordinated (aka consolidated) we call this "sleep". Mess up the sleep program badly enough, and different subsystems in the brain begin to schedule housekeeping pretty much at random—including while you're wide awake. The sleep expert James Maas has some online talks where he discusses microsleeps and the neurological function of sleep spindles (recently discovered, and extremely interesting).

Also recommended is The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery by D. T. Max. This book is not quite what it pretends to be.

First, members of this family sleep just fine until they reach a certain age. In this respect the condition resembles Huntington's disease. Then because of what is now believed to be a prion disorder, their ability to regulate consolidated sleep goes MIA. The afflicted quickly descend into a personal hell, and die without fail inside of two years. The meat of this book, however, concerns the scandalous history of breeding in and in and its probable contribution to "mad cow"-ish diseases in modern livestock. (Like the fat slav Mengele threw into an ice-water swimming pool who survived for forty-two minutes[*], prions laugh at bleach or steam for a long time.)

[*] Research shows that forty-two percent of all statistics are made up on the spur of the moment.

WARNING: The above book is not suitable for deregulationists (NSFD). There is, however, a fat chapter devoted to an alleged, convicted, and largely self-confessed pervert who pursued his deviance on an epic canvass.

Finally, the commonly-accepted 25-hour circadian day is complete hogwash. As I recall it, the original experiment erred in not sufficiently reducing ambient light. Sensitivity to low light levels was not properly understood. All recent research places the endogenous rhythm at just a hair over 24 hours.

Bah, I just typed so much I can't be bothered even to skim it for obvious errors.

Do not do anything on the internet you would not do in your front lawn.

Unimpeachable advice, if you've satisfied with having 100% of your brain devoted to the problem of what idiots with power might possibly think.

There's a name for what happens when people draw false conclusions from information they've obtained by skulking around that was never intended for their ears in the first place: it's called situation comedy.

Your advice is a prescription for madness on a global scale.

But then the gravity (paradoxically) gets weaker, and the density of air filling the shaft gets larger, meaning that you slow down tremendously.

I'm pretty sure that 80% of the time that the word "paradoxically" shows up, what it really means is "don't worry your pretty freckles thinking too hard".

Maybe we need to invent the companion word "patradoxically" to mean "this is actually completely obvious, but since you have freckles, we'll pretend that it isn't".

I suppose some law of gravity as conceived by a clever ten-year-old could be extraordinarily high at an epsilon displacement from the centroid of a just-a-titch oblate, spherical mass, but then you'd have to postulate a tiny black hole at the turtle point, protected by a hard chocolate coating of quantum-gravity exclusion effect (or a really, really strong, short-distance-repulsive nuclear gasbag force).