It is spelled "pedo-" in USA spelling and "paedo-" in British spelling.

This is not true. I've changed "biking" to "walking" in Google Fit so I know it works.

Funny thing is that after I did that (it was during the first week I used Google Fit) it has never confused my walking with biking again - even though I've set numerous "speed records" as I got fitter.

I've been a programmer for more years than I care to mention, and never - not once - has the speed a coder types at been an issue. But fine. I'm sure there's some coding somewhere where typing speed is a significant factor.

Speed coding contests, perhaps?

Swordfish-style hacking-with-a-gun-to-your-head situations just don't crop up that often in my experience - I lead a rather boring life in that regard - but I guess that might count as well.

So what experience do you have that leads you to be so adamant that typing speed is a major factor in coding?

No, he had it right.

If you look at what you actually spend time on when going from specification to release, the actual typing of code is a minor part, and as such your typing speed is largely irrelevant.

I have a colleague who can't touch-type to save his life, uses the mouse to copy/paste/undo (and even step through the debugger - drives me crazy), and while he may take a little longer to type in his code, it's so small a difference to not matter even in the slightest.

This is one death penalty I can get behind.

Aren't they all unique?

No, that's my non-scientific objection to his anti-science rant. A plea against ignorance and the wilful discrediting of a lot of hard-earned science, if you will.

This guy put it a lot better than I ever could; in short, calling these hypotheses "guessing" is ignorant as well as insulting, both to the scientists in the field and to everyone's general level of intelligence.

It really doesn't.

A hypothesis has to make sense, has to be based on observation and/or our best current knowledge of the subject matter. Ideally it is testable somehow, even if only mathematically or theoretically.

A guess doesn't have to have any of those constraints. "Aliens did it" is a guess, but it's not a hypothesis.

That's... really selling science - and the scientific method - way short.

It's not "guesses", it's hypotheses, which are by their nature our best explanations of something given our current understanding of how those things work.

Calling these "guesses" reduces all the science that's actually going on and puts it on the same level as Joe Schmoe's wild-ass guessing on subjects he's not familiar with.

There is a world of difference between Joe guessing what happened in the early days of the universe and a scientist that has devoted several years of his life studying the matter putting forth a hypothesis of what happened.

Please don't paint these as the same thing, it's just doing the anti-science folk a service, and the rest of us a disservice.

Thank you Captain Obvious.

Although you should perhaps note that the term "stargazer" is often used as a description of "an observational astronomer, particularly an amateur".

Yep. 300,000 1-megaton yield nukes at 1 metric ton each.

The proposed design had a departure mass of 400,000 tons, with a 50,000 ton payload.

While not chemically-propelled, Freeman Dyson calculated while working on the Orion project that one of those magnificent bastards could achieve 3.3% of the speed of light (0.03c, 10,000 km/s, or roughly 22 million kph - give or take a few hundred thousand mph - by firing a shaped-charge nuclear bomb behind it every three seconds for ten days straight.

At that speed, Alpha Centauri is just 133 years away, and these ETNOs are really not much farther than down the road to the chemist.

It's a shame that project never came to anything but a few chemical proof-of-concept scale tests.

"Why choose the lesser of two evils? Vote Cthulhu for President 2016"

You recall correctly; Pluto hasn't even made it half a lap around the sun since we discovered it.

It was discovered in 1906, 108 years ago, and it's orbital period is 247.68 years.

Only true for a subset of "process information" - those that lend themselves to computerized calculations (i.e. math).

Humans are rather faster and more accurate than computers at just about any other task.

Also, saying that "all that's missing is sentience" is missing the point that it is exactly this sentience that is the hard (and rather badly defined or even understood) part. We just don't have a clue what sentience is, so there's no way we can even begin to emulate or implement it artificially.