But. My only use of poetic license has been with tense, not an attempt at neologism.

It's an exciting time to be alive; with quality of life extension, space exploration, and artificial intelligence on the very real scientific horizon.

If only we can resolve our speciescidal tendencies.

Indeed. With all of the stuff that we have no clue about there in our solar system, why spend so much time on the second-best studied body on the solar system? I'd take a single Titan-exploring tiltrotor VTOL craft over a hundred new lunar rovers.

"Love" is the nice way to put it. "Largess at the expense of all other solar system exploration" would be more accurate. Here's a graph. And it's always the same stupid justifications - how many times can we pretend to be excited about "revelations" that Mars was once in its past a wet place? Or that we're going to stumble into life any time soon in its perchlorate-rich, destroys-organics-on-contact regolith?

And it's not just huge amounts of money that they're wasting - they're also throwing away most of the remainder of our plutonium supply. At least there's money to start making it again, but it'll take time. Plutonium is precious, and it's needed for outer planet missions.

I hate to be the one to tell you but academia generally pays poorly outside of the US. More so in a country like Russia that is still clawing its way back up from the economic collapse that occurred during the transition from communism to capitalism.

Perhaps if most of the country's wealth wasn't concentrated in the hands of a handful of corrupt oligarchs who live like a modern version of Roman emperors they'd be able to pay researchers a living wage.

Look again at a piano keyboard. Notice there are 7 white keys and 5 black keys for each octave? There are seven letters in the western scale, so people get confused by that.

But it's even more confusing, as the western scale divides the octave into 12 notes, and then does LSD while smoking crack before inventing the notation for those 12 notes and related "keys". If we ditched the oddball half-step from E to F, we'd have 6 letters with sharps and flats giving 12 notes/octave, and it would all make much more sense when compared to the 7 notes/octave of the Thai scale.

You can divide up the octave many ways and still find pleasing harmonies - interference patterns between nearby notes being themselves notes which must fit with the chord. You can use a traditional scale, or do your own oddball thing (as Rush did on later albums, where the scale is offset a bit from where we expect, making it sound like a tape played at 80% speed).

Stop treating everyone as children. Adults are moral entities with agency, and can damn well decide on their own whether to wear a seatbelt or not.

Exactly: we seem t have a collective fetish for forcing others to make the same choices that we would, instead of respecting one another as people just like us, each with the right to find his own distinct path to happiness.

Shamefully, I actually read TFA. It has a lot of great background on the problem, and is a fine read for someone who hasn't ever looked into cosmology before, but it actually has less information than the Wikipedia article on using the 21cm "hydrogen line" to observe the "dark age" of the universe. Prettier pictures than Wikipedia, though.

You don't need "antigravity" (which in all likelihood is impossible). Diamagnetic hoverboards would be possible... if we could make ridiculously powerful, compact halbach arrays in the board. Also you'd need a clever mechanism to detect and deal with flying over ferromagnetic material, or otherwise it's going to smack into your board really hard.

Both diseases often overcome a patient later in life, leading us to believe the degenerative effects might be forestalled further by the introduction of healthy young nerve cells.

It is helpful for the study of all human neurological problems, as human neural cells are difficult to acquire for research purposes. FTA: most research is done with a line of rat neural cells.

Can you actually find torrents for academic journals? That would be quite a public service by whoever's taking the time to scan them.

I would think that open-source SaaS products would be, if anything, MORE viable than open-sourcing a traditional, locally-hosted application. The code only gets written once, so the provider isn't really producing a product afterwards. This makes it hard both to keep rivals from releasing the same product, or to charge for the product in the first place. With SaaS, you're providing maintenance, hosting, and reliability to your customer continually. Any competitor would have to do the same thing, keeping the bar to entry high.

Right. After they borrowed their very name from some prior art, it seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle a gateway kitchen accessory.

To be fair, (FTA), Senior Luckey was hired by the plaintiff to build a head-mounted display, which is seemingly word-for-word the letter of his Kickstarter.