spoiler alert:

What bugged me far more were the "point and shoot" orbital transfers. To descend, you decelerate, and vice versa. Your average audience member has never heard of a Hohmann transfer orbit, after all. The transfer to the Chinese station was almost as bad as the star trek TNG where a radioactive space barge is towed (apparently radially) straight from a planet, through an asteroid belt, into its sun. Of course, it is difficult to imagine Bullock's character working out the burns for orbital insertions in zero g with no prior experience. She would need an app for that.

Despite these groaners, I greatly enjoyed the movie. It is far better than most anything Hollywood has done in this genre.

I can confirm this. I had coccidioidomycosis years ago and recovered on my own with no medical treatment. I have had no symptoms for more than 20 years. It was pretty bad when it hit me, I was weakened. The immediate effect is weakness. It laid me low for about two weeks. But then I recovered, and it faded away.

Crowds can be so ignorant.

What is this vulnerability of a dam? Other than earthquakes, volcanoes, erosion, design errors, and tons of dynamite, I mean. I'm reading speculation about how control systems and whatnot might be exposed to nefarious internet packets from China. Dams are generally rather sturdy constructions. That's why they hold back all those cubic kilometers of water. Is the worry that floodgates will be opened and downstream havoc will result? Surely there must be interlocks in place to prevent that.

Dams can fail. According to Wikipedia, the biggest dam failure in history was in China.

Have you heard of Ting mobile? I have a plan in Illinois with two smartphones on it. My last monthly bill, with voice, text, and data, totaled $34.97. I'm not a heavy data user (only 79 megabytes), but still. You think AT&T or Verizon can beat that? I don't.

This is a real groaner to a physicist. Is there any solid matter near you right now? Matter does seem to be real, doesn't it? In the classical regime, accelerating electrons radiate energy. According to Newton, matter should collapse into itself. The electrons should spiral in until they hit the nucleus.

Electrons in atomic orbits move without losing energy. The orbits are stable. Negatively charged electrons are attracted to the positive nucleus, yet they don't combine. Matter does not collapse on itself. It's not Newton, it's quantum mechanics, in particular, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Heisenberg uncertainty explains the solidity of matter.

What is different here is the size and mass scale has been upped by orders of magnitude from electron orbits in atoms and molecules in this supercooled atom trap. It remains to be seen if the experiment will produce results. The scientific jury is out.

for two-factor authentication on twitter.

Nonsense. You got that backwards. Ever heard of an atomic clock, the most accurate timepiece? It is quantum mechanical. Chemistry is quantum mechanics. How does chemistry work without atoms and electrons, which are quantum objects? I think you confuse Heisenberg uncertainty with measurement accuracy.

The most accurate measured quantities are quantum mechanical, e.g. the spin-flip transition of the 1s ground state of hydrogen, "hyperfine" frequencies, or maser frequencies. You think you can specify ballistic results to a part in 10^12 or better? Using an atomic fountain, measurements accurate to a few parts in 10^15 have been performed. This extends the results of Norman Ramsey, who won the Nobel Prize for his research.

Are you joking? What if they don't read English? The most open-server dense netblock is .tw. Pakistan is also high on the list of offender IPs.

Michelson Morley was a negative outcome, wasn't it? This is one of the classic modern physics experiments. In general, tests of Lorentz Invariance are experiments with a "negative outcome." Many have tried to find a violation of Lorentz' dictum, all have failed.

The BBC is reporting that it was windows computers that were compromised. They quote Graham Cluley, a tech consultant at Sophos. All compromised computers were "thrown out and replaced." All passwords were changed. Another article reports that the hackers would begin working at 0800 Beijing time..

The article makes no mention of the operating system of the compromised computers. This would be like an article on safety faults in automobiles that did not mention the make and model. Can't we have better security reporting from the grey lady? There is mention of a "domain controller" that was compromised to obtain password hashes and that a rainbow table must have been used to crack passwords. Is there anyone who does not think that it was windows computers that were compromised? I can't help wondering if M$ and the NYT have some sort of agreement about how they report on computer security.

Perhaps they want to run the machine and observe its operation.

Sorry, but your claim about warlike human societies is controversial, as has been amply documented by Ryan and Jetha in "Sex at Dawn." I don't have my copy at hand, but this ancient warlike humans meme is a myth they dissected and disposed of in the book. See Ch. 13, "The Never-Ending Battle over Prehistoric War." For one thing, the earth was sparsely populated in antiquity. Most human communities simply did not interact with humans from other communities. Hard to start a war without an enemy. A large part of the book ("The Way We Weren't") concerns itself with showing some accepted anthropological wisdom is just plain wrong.

Get a job on Wall Street and steal money from old retirees. You'll have enough for your dream house in no time.

Hmm. With tongue planted in cheek, what did you use for the length of a day, which is slowly increasing, due to tidal acceleration? If I make the simplistic assumption of a linear increase of +1.70 ± 0.05 ms/cy over a time span of 2^64 seconds, the total increase in the length of a day is given by 0.0017*2^64/(100*365.2425*24*3600) 9937419 years (100*365.2425*24*3600 is the number of seconds in a century with accounting for leap years). This obviously cannot be the case. We have no idea what the date will be 2^64 seconds from now, never mind that no humans will be around to record it.