It doesn't assign a heapiness value, though: it assigns odds of something being a heap. That still treats heaps as a crisp set. Compare: a probability function will tell me the odds of a die rolling a six, but it still either the die does or doesn't land on six; there is no "slightly six" in dice, there are just the odds of being either completely six or not. That's not the case with heaps: a collection of grains can be only slightly heapish, or very heapish, which is something different than being slightly or very likely to be (completely and unambiguously) a heap.

Europeans think 200 miles is a long distance; Americans think 200 years is a long time.

(And 2000 years ago is still pretty recent, even just as far as human history goes. That's closer to the Moon Landing than it is to the building of the Pyramids of Giza).

The formalism of use here is not probability, but fuzzy sets. The Problem of the Heap basically highlights that "heapishness" is not a crisp property; there is not a clear-cut line between heaps and non-heaps, rather the demarcation between heaps and non-heaps is fuzzy. A collection of grains of rice can be more heapish or less heapish, and sufficiently non-heapish (for a given purpose, context, etc) collections can be called simply "non-heaps", of sufficiently heapish collections likewise simply called "heaps", but there is never a sudden switch from heap to non-heap.

Probability doesn't express that properly, because it still speaks as though a given collection either is or isn't a heap, and adds the further complication that two different collections of the same number of grains may be a heap and not a heap respectively, though their odds of being a heap are the same.

Going back to chickens: it's not that over time, successive organisms got more and more likely to be chickens. It's that over time, successive organisms got more and more chickenish. Chickens are not a crisp set. Chickenishness if a fuzzy property.

But stillsufficiently chickenish birds came before sufficiently-chickenish-bird eggs, because a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, not necessarily an egg containing a chicken embryo. (Consider: when you buy unfertilized eggs at the store, are those chicken eggs or not?)

This is tangential but I just have to comment that there is so much presumption in your suggestions. That he has retirement savings that he could live off of. That he has a house he could sell. Especially that the alternative to owning a house would cost LESS than owning one — why would anyone ever buy if not to escape the infinite debt that is a life of renting until you die?

In my 20s I wanted to spend my life doing things to enrich the world, art and writing and philosophy, but got sidetracked from those things by the need to get a stable enough life that I could do those things without ending up homeless or starving again —after that happened or nearly happened too many times for comfort. Now as I'm approaching middle age myself, it's becoming clear that it's going to take my entire productive life, if I'm lucky and things continue going as well as they recently have started to, to get to a point where I don't have to work doing pointless things that contribute nothing of value to the world just to have a place to sleep, and can actually start doing something worth doing with my life when I retire — if I'm lucky enough to ever actually retire, since it'll likely be by retirement age that housing is secured and I can start saving up food money to live off of for the few years I'll have left, and that's ignoring the probability that by then I will likely have medical expenses destroying any ability to save like that anymore.

So the alternative to "toil[ing] away the rest of my life working for The Man doing trivial things" as the GP put it isn't "sell my house" or "live off my retirement savings", it's "sleep in my car and beg for food money". In either case I lose out on actually doing anything worth living for, but in the former case at least I'm living a comfortable pointless existence.

The mold dies once it reaches my stomach anyway, and it's already there by the time the wine gets anywhere near it, so I don't know what you're talking about with "kill the fungus". But seriously, bread and water with a roquefort? That leaves a meal of the strongest savory-flavored food in the world, paired with no other flavors of note (depending on the bread you're thinking of). Gotta add some variety in there, and the sweet and sour notes of a rich fruity wine contrast the savory cheese beautifully.

I also have a very high alcohol tolerance and don't care much for the taste, so I never understood why drinking was attractive at all. (With the exception of drinks that actually do taste good, mostly paired with good foods; I do like a nice sangria with my roquefort cheese).

I eventually discovered that I could get drunk if I combined hard liquor with caffeine. And I still didn't understand why that feeling would be appealing. Why would anyone enjoy having poor motor control and cloudy thinking?

Now a drug that made you hyper-competent, that I could see the appeal of; and it would probably be the downfall of me, assuming side-effects and addiction are the price of that temporary boost.

To be complete, Adams' story was far from complimentary of the B-ark people, too. In fact it's mostly just ragging on how useless and incompetent the B-ark people are (and how they completely ruined the world they eventually settled on), and only mentions in passing how their homeworld also collapsed in their absence.

Don't invest in and artificially scarce commodity.

You mean like Bitcoin?

In mathematics "almost" denotes an infinite set minus some finite subset, so if there are only 10 billion galaxies that can support life and the universe is infinite, then the universe is "almost lifeless": infinitely lifeless except some finite subset with potential life.

Of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, only one in 10 can support complex life like that on Earth

10 percent of 100 billion is still 10 billion galaxies. That's a lot of real estate. Even if you apply all the other characteristics that give rocky planets in the habitable zone of their star billions of years to evolve life. There are features like having a Jupiter in a circular orbit instead of an elliptical orbit or a moon that creates tide pools. That's a lot of habitable planets and a lot of potential for intelligent life.

Netflix has a really interesting series narrated by Laird Close called Life In Our Universe that covers the topic in great detail.

"There may be times when they want the cars to drive them, but they won't be buying autonomous-only cars."

A future where people can opt out of buying an autonomous car sounds great but it's not feasible economically. Traffic lights and traffic signs are all things needed for cars being piloted by humans, autonomous cars don't need them. At some point we'll be spending billions maintaining human-readable infrastructure and road rules when there are fewer and fewer actual humans driving.

It's just like the Sunpass you use out on the tollway in Florida. There are fewer and fewer options for driving on the tollway when you don't have a sticker. It won't be long before it's mandatory. It's the same with autonomous cars. Once cars start to take over the day will dawn when we don't want to collectively maintain the signage, traffic lights and human readable infrastructure.

Elon Musk isn't just daydreaming, those are product announcements. It would have taken NASA 15 years and billions in contracts to create a reusable booster, it would have crashed more often than Musk's prototype and ended up costing more on a per-launch basis than one-shot boosters. NASA is why we can't make big steps into space.

The proof of that statement will be when Musk comes sailing in with a reclaimed booster in tow.

The top 1% of American income earners pay 24% of Federal taxes per the Congressional Budget Office.

If you look at the actual CBO report, it shows that the top 1% of income earners are paying less tax now than they did in 1995, even calculating the new higher 2013 rates.

Nice try Koch brothers.

Punishing people for speaking is tantamount to prohibiting speech. Virtually every law against anything is a declaration to the effect of "if you do this, you will be punished"; so if you can legally be punished for doing something, it is effectively illegal to do it.

I lived in Titusville for two years covering the end of the space shuttle program and the private space industry is not going to save that area. Most of T'ville's problems are self-inflicted and, even as businesses continue to close and young people can't move away fast enough, government leaders are not investing the kind of money in the type of projects it would take to attract new businesses.

For decades T'ville was anti-growth and most of the policies still cling to the dying relic of the area, which is a study in decay and abandonment. Titusville is a craphole and there's little to recommend the area. It's ironic they're still looking for space-industry solutions to save them.

Titusville is not yet Detroit, a city verging on complete decay.

The author obviously didn't spend much time there because that whole area is decaying. The restaurant he was talking about is called Dixie Crossroads down on Garden and it's not a place locals frequent, not that there are a lot of options.

And I'm still not convinced that NASA is the right organization to define the future of space travel, but that's a different discussion.