Paleo: all meats in america are processed to some level, and red meat has been directly correlated with an increased risk of prostate and colon cancer. various additives like nitrites and processing methods such as using carbon monoxide to improve meat color, actually involve carcinogens or cancer suspect agents in their execution. Factory farming and the prolific use of sterroids and hormones in all american meat have virtually guaranteed an increased risk of cancer. enjoy significantly elevated levels of cholesterol, and supporting a fundamentally unsustainable concept of factory farming that contributes to everything from climate change to aggressively resistant bacteria and viruses.

This is a specious argument, a man of such extreme wealth will have zero problems acquiring whatever form of meat his heart desires. Should he want only American Bison filet every day then he can afford an immense herd where one individual is killed to provide him his daily cut of meat.

Life expectancy didn't exceed much above 30 until the upper paleolithic, around 30,000 years ago there was a steep rise in the number of teeth from individuals older than 30. There were of course those who managed to make it to what we would in modern times consider old age, but from all the evidence we have they were extreme outliers until around that period.

I would say I'm pretty much a technocrat, in that I would take hard data over what feels correct or what has always been done any day. If the data show beyond any doubt that working with children in the manner that the article suggests produces better results than thousands of years of corporal punishment evidence, then I would follow the study regardless of what anyone else did.

The problem is that when you're working with people, especially _all_ the people, studies only get you so far. Average IQ is 100 -- so lots of parents are below that. Some parents are poor, or work 3 jobs, or don't give a crap about their children. Whenever I see bad behavior, I have to remember to reserve judgement because of these facts. Some parents lack the ability to reason with their children -- and no parent can reason with a preschooler sometimes! I have 2 little kids and really don't want to screw them up too badly. I'd like to think that treating them like human beings who need training works better than "My dad beat me up all the time, and look how well I turned out!" It must be a pretty lousy job being a social worker for a state child welfare agency and seeing children from the entire cross section of the public as opposed to what you are exposed to regularly.

It seems to me that the study boils down to a consequence of the old adage "Children learn what they live." If your household is a nice tranquil place with two academic parents who take the time to raise their kids, the kids will turn out better than those from a household ripped from an episode of Cops. Now, there's some scientific data behind this, showing that children can model the behavior they're exposed to.

Thanks for the nostalgia! I remember when people tried to claim that with a straight face back in the 80s, but no one believed it even then. Can you imagine that someone actually said that ridiculous crap in seriousness once? I'm glad we've moved past those ludicrously mind-bending contortions and can laugh about them now, knowing full well that no one actually thinks that way anymore.

Bzzt. I can share hugs, music, friendship, laughter, pain, and joy with others, but I wouldn't call any of those "possessions".

That presumes scarcity. If I share your post on Twitter, you are not deprived of it. Neither would I be.

Whatever the environment, there are jobs that require someone just to be there waiting for something unusual to happen. Even in the nuclear missile bunkers, I bet they spend about 95% of their time sitting around waiting for an alarm they hope never comes. You can only clean so much before it's time to lean. So what if OP works in a clean room? I bet there are plenty of "I'm paid to sit here" jobs in there, too.

Are you joking? I thought it was well established that there were chemical weapons in Iraq we just only found weapons designed by us, built by Europeans in factories in Iraq. And therefore the US didn't trumpet their achievements. In the case of Iraqi chemical weapons, the US established that Iraq had chemical weapons not because they said so but because Western countries had all the receipts.

Uh, with a court injunction you can force ISPs to route a given IP or IP block anywhere you wish.

The I,K, and M root servers are outside the US and are controlled by entities which the US can't directly bully into doing their bidding.

One of the state universities by me is offering a "pre-intro" CS course that focuses more on the absolute basics before stuffing them in a programming course: CSE 110 It seems to me that this is a good way to scare away people who don't actually want to do CS, and to fill in gaps in knowledge that today's students would have. It's interesting that this is different from the high level survey course for non majors, and it's only a "suggested prerequisite" for the more programming and logic-heavy traditional Computer Science I, II and III.

To me, that seems like a good idea. Typical students who think CS is a good fit because they've messed around with computers are different from those of previous times. Most will not have the low-level programming, algorithms and other experience that people had to have at least a familiarity with back before the app revolution. See my other post in this article -- writing a Minecraft mod or cooking up a web application in ReallyCoolFrameworkOnRails doesn't give you the same low level understanding of how a computer actually does all the magic it does.

Everyone seems to be pointing to this as a gender issue, but the way I see it, it's a way to get more students interested in the stuff that _most_ of them will be doing with a computer science education.

The world has changed significantly since I graduated college almost 20 years ago (with a STEM degree that wasn't CS.) In 1997, the year I got out, the dotcom bubble was just inflating and all the protocols and "glue" that make Web applications work were just starting to be enhanced and built out. Fast forward to now, and there's so much abstraction in typical computer systems that many "coders" writing web applications don't even deal with system-level code. There are a billion web frameworks that keep getting cycled through every 6 months as the new hotness, and tons of new languages to run on them. This group of people will be better suited to learning enough logic to keep them from doing stupid stuff in their framework of choice, and this seems to be what the course focuses on. It acknowledges the reality that many CS grads aren't going to be sitting down in front of the terminal and writing hardware drivers, or doing embedded systems work.

Think about it -- to build a web application in the 1990s, you had to first design the entire database schema and set that up on a system somewhere. Then, you had to write code to have your web application talk to the database to get information in and out. Then you had the whole presentation layer with a combination of static and dynamic HTML plus all sorts of crazy CGI, Flash, ColdFusion or whatever glue code to get everything working. To build an iPhone app now, download XCode, pick a sample project and just glue together all the huge chunks of pre-built functionality. The focus on the app becomes the presentation layer because everything below that is solved for you. This is how a bunch of ex-fraternity "brogrammers" can build Tinder or Uber and make $40 billion in Monopoly money...there is obviously some technical talent behind it, but the app itself is relying on huge amounts of pre-integrated, well-documented libraries.

A student coming into CS now sees apps, social media and mobile devices. How do you keep them down on the C++ and data processing farm when this is the current face of computing? The reality of it is that some parts of software development are no longer only for the nerdy crowd. Apple put computers into hundreds of millions of ordinary peoples' pockets. They are now a consumer electronics company more than a computer company (and their current crop of Macs seems to reflect this.)

That's too high, most estimates are ~80-100 gallons per person per day, average houshold size is 2.6 so that puts you closer to 100,000 gallons per household per year. I also question how those estimates are so high, my family of 4 averages closer to 50 gallons per day at home based on our water bill and we don't do anything extreme, we take regular baths, wash our clothes by machine wash, run the dishwasher every other day on average, brush our teeth twice a day, etc. The only "conservation" effort we put into water is not watering our lawn, in fact I drilled out the restrictor in my shower head because I HATE low flow showers and I believe I've got an old school high GPF toilet since my house is from 1963 and most things have not been updated in it.

One of the things that is fueling the insane hype behind the Web 2.0/mobile/social/app/whatever bubble is the fact that any group of startup kids can use tools to build an app. Just like any group of startup kids could build a website capable of processing payments in 1997, add in a shaky business model and all of a sudden, "this time it's different." Apple, Google and other smartphone OS vendors have rolled out some really cool stuff and basically given everyone a tracking device with all sorts of sensors attached to a full-powered computer the size of a phone. The problem is this -- the nature of the user interface hides the fact from ordinary users that all of their location and other data is being shared with the app developers. Android does a little better with privacy controls, but basically all this stuff is hidden from the user.

Ordinary users, i.e. non-techies, see the shiny app interface and (understandably so) don't see that the "free" services the app provides are paid for either through marketing/advertising (eyeballs in dotcom bubble 1.0 speak) or selling your data to a third party. And even if they knew about it, most people would want the benefit of hailing a cab on demand more than their privacy. It would take some serious user education, and a few very high-profile leaks of customer data to change behavior, and I don't think it would even be possible if that happened. People like their free apps. I would pay Google for a subscription to their search engine if I could be assured my information wasn't being harvested, but I know no one else would want this.

On the positive side, sitting on the sidelines and watching from my comfy seat, it looks like Bubble 2.0 is starting to reach the top. We're already seeing the insane valuations and VC investments, have had a couple high-profile revenue-free IPOs like Twitter, and the next phase is coming. Soon as interest rates start going up and the stock and VC bubble money stops flowing, things will calm down again. When you start hearing startup-speak more and more in the financial press, it's time to sell and wait for things to collapse again. It really is the dotcom bubble all over again, but this time people are carrying their web browsers in their pockets and companies have direct access to their location and habits.

I'm looking at you Phoenix.

I've noticed that a lot in the West (I'm an east coaster -- the cities here just don't have the land available to do this anymore.) Western cities with miles and miles of flat territory around them tend to have these "planned community" developments where an entire city will be built on thousands of acres in one shot. Even if it's a planned city, people still need to go in and out of it, especially if your planned city has destinations like office parks or stadiums. (Didn't Phoenix do one of these to try to build up the area around their football stadium? And I'm sure I've read about huge abandoned planned cities in Vegas after the housing collapse.)

Where I live (metro New York,) you don't see these big bang developments -- you see random little developments sprinkled around the edges of the "insane commute zone." Northern New Jersey and Long Island have this - the first-line suburbs (example: Nassau County NY) are completely built out and full with zero land to spare. The problem is that much of the housing stock is from the 40s through the 60s on tiny lots. People still want the 2 acre lots and the 6000 sq. ft. monster houses, so they start creeping further and further out. When enough people do this, the infrastructure that was designed for a much less dense population gets overwhelmed. After about 20 years of this, more lanes get put in, encouraging more development, and making the problem worse.

Eminent domain those house and get some more lanes in.

Last time I was in LA, I noticed that lanes are not the problem. Some of the freeways are five to eight lanes in each direction. It's a crowding problem, not a civil engineering problem. Everyone is trying to get to destinations inside that corridor, _and_ through that corridor to get to other destinations. Since metro LA is hundreds of square miles of mostly low density development, travel distances to get anywhere are longer than they would be in a more compact city. Now, this Waze app is using drivers' smartphone realtime data to steer people off this road and onto surface streets, which makes the overall problem worse.

Part of it is the human factor -- yes, I know Google will perfect the self driving car in 2015, yada yada yada, but for now, you have people driving cars. People get into accidents. People have reaction times that mean they can't take their foot off the brake the instant any stopped traffic clears. (Try this sometime at the end of a long line of stopped traffic when the light turns green -- watch how long it takes for the light to turn, then Car 1 to go, then 2, then n, then you. Each driver has built in reaction delays that make this process longer than it would be in an ideal environment.)

That particular stretch of road (405) is pretty much the _only_ north south passage through that part of LA because of geography (and crappy urban planning.) It could be 30 lanes in each direction and still be slow.