The only way this would work is to place height restrictions on the different classes of seat. I'm an academic and when travelling for work I have to purchase the cheapest ticket. Without a height restriction I would then be forced to purchase a ticket for a seat I physically could not sit down it (I already have to pull out the magazines on US carriers to allow blood flow to my feet).

This can then open the debate about whether it is reasonable for an airline to charge someone extra just for being tall - something they had no control over and which is gender-biased. After all they don't charge more to provide special meals for those with dietary preferences or religious beliefs and, with the exception of medical conditions, that is a voluntary choice. Nor, I hope, do they charge disabled passengers extra for transporting wheelchairs etc.

That depends. Having a holistic view of history is a good idea. Having a history teacher try to teach the Big Bang and Cosmology is a very, very bad idea.

Tcl is strange in a number of ways. One is that you don't assign variables by saying "x=5", you write "set x 5" instead. Nor can you do any calculations outside of the expr command (in most cases), so instead of writing "x=5*y+3", you would write "set x [expr 5*$y+3]"

I'm still fond of Tcl/Tk, in spite of that. :) What other language can give you a text editor in one line? "pack [text .t]"

No one's mentioned Objective-C's bracket notation for calling methods. Instead of obj->method(argument) or obj.method(argument), it's [obj method:argument]. Perfectly logical I'm sure, but the few times I've tried to write Objective-C code I've always had a hard time wrapping my brain around it.

If they have access to the web, then they have access to chatrooms and instant communication. Would you be okay with students bringing in a physics post-doc to answer the test questions for them? That's what Internet access would allow.

I get your point, but it opens a whole can of worms. If we could trust all the students to only refer to reference materials on the webmaybe if students valued the exam as an educational experience more than as a contribution to their GPA. But changing that is a much bigger task than just letting students use tablets or laptops during an exam.

It's not quite as trivial as that. I have engineering students in college who use the "10^x" button for scientific notation instead of "EE" (or whatever it's called on your calculator), and so when asked to calculate 4/(2e3) will end up with 2000 instead of 0.002 (because they type 4 / 2 x 10^3).

Well after this he'll have plenty of great material for a 900-year prequel that will tackle some different, but still very troubling, social issues.

I remember being thirteen. I did not go around threatening to rape or kill people. Maybe these assholes will grow out of it, but at the moment they are thirteen-year-old assholes, and their age is no excuse.

Clearly string theorists since, according to the summary, it creates a "dodecadron" cross-section. So having a cross-section somewhere between a 2D dodecagon and a 3D dodecahedron it clearly relies on converting the block into some multi-dimensional object with a strangely dimensioned cross-section.

I think this is the result of a very narrow view point when making the map. They seem to only care about censorship by the state through direct laws. Increasingly in the US, and so some extent the rest of the western world, it is not government which restricts our rights but companies. They need to make a second map showing countries where companies have used laws to force, or bully, people into being censored through the threat of massive financial penalties.

They already have done several years ago. Wherever you are is about 5-6 years behind the times.

Actually that's not correct. The SM specified neutrino masses as zero just as it does the photon and gluon masses...or would you argue that those are free parameters as well? However I'll grant that this is not exactly a major change which is why I asked specifically about neutrino oscillations. This introduces 4 entirely new free parameters which were never included in the SM and while oscillations require that neutrinos have a mass the reverse is not true i.e. even if you give neutrinos a mass they do not have to oscillate. Hence I see no possible way that you can call this anything but new physics beyond the SM.

How about I turn that around and say that Einstein showed gravity can be modelled by the curvature of space-time but in reality it is a force? The fact of the matter is that, at a fundamental level, we have no clue what gravity is. However you can represent it very well by a spin-2, mass-less particle which couples to a particle's 4-momentum (the caveat being that you cannot make this theory work without an energy cut-off at some scale for which there is no justification). Until we solve quantum gravity we simply do not know what gravity really is but, if I were to bet, I suspect the latter is closer to the truth but needs some correction for the quantum structure of space-time which is something we have no clue about.

Yes, and if anything it would be worse. The current problem comes about because we cannot scale the Higgs corrections up to the Planck-scale where we know there is new physics. If we remove that scale then we have a theory which has no upper scale limit and so should generate infinitely large corrections to the Higgs mass i.e. we go from an incredibly unlikely 1 in ~10^34 chance of the corrections giving such a light Higgs to a zero percent chance of the theory giving a light Higgs, or any Higgs with a non-infinite mass.

You are getting your 'g's and 'G's confused. In the muon g-2 experiment the 'g' is the muon's anomalous magnetic dipole moment. This is a precision test of Quantum Electrodynamics. The high order corrections to this will involve Fermi's constant (G_F) due to W and Z loops but these contributions will be incredibly small and were this any other experiment I would have said negligible but perhaps not in this case given the incredibly high precision involved. Neither of these constants have anything to do with the gravitational constant (G) nor the local acceleration due to gravity (g). So we are not comparing the two.

If there is no evidence of BSM physics yet then how would you classify neutrino oscillations?

As someone who has not been involved in neutrino physics (at least until very recently) I'd agree that neutrino oscillations are the first physics discovered that is beyond the Standard Model. In addition even if the g-2 experiment gives a 5 sigma discrepancy it tells you very little about what any possible new physics - to do that you have to produce the new particles directly and study them.

The corrections to the muon g-2 experiment are now so high order that they involve QCD loops. These are non-perturbative and incredibly hard to calculate correctly so all a 5 sigma discrepancy may mean is that the theorists have got the calculation wrong. Indeed this has happened before with a 3 sigma g-2 'signal' going away after an error in the theory calculation was found by the student of one of my departmental colleagues.

If I show my bias then I would say that the best chance of new physics is the new LHC run starting in March 2015 where we have almost twice the energy of the previous run and higher luminosity. This should at least double the reach of the LHC for new physics over the next 3 years. After this run any sensitivity gains to new physics will come from increasing luminosity and so take far longer to achieve, perhaps giving one more doubling of the reach but over the next ~15 years and with a lot of work involved since the high luminosity LHC upgrade has incredible background rates!