You know what would suck? If people started hosting web sites from their home that were down half of the time. That would be worse for the internet then if an ISP just said "Please go else where to host a server".

This is a new service. Google has no idea what problems they are going to run in to and are taking it slow. How stupid would they have sounded if they came out and said "Hey guys we are starting a new ISP division. Who wants to sign up their mission critical servers to be hosted by us?". It's fine for the internet if a home goes down but not if a business's servers go down. That is why that phrase is perfectly reasonable. You CAN host servers out of your home but you SHOULD not since Google can't guarantee any reasonable QOS yet.

Here is something in my Optimum Online terms of service

So yes they can. At lest Google did not say I can't they only said I should not. If you want server support you need to get a business class internet connection, Google is not selling that yet.

IANAL but I don't think that the usage of the word 'permitting' would undo the ambiguity of the word 'should' in any court of law. Historically Google does not care much one way or the other what people do with their services as long as they do not cause trouble. Since they clearly have the power to throttle connection speeds I don't think the high usage of having a sever would be causing them any trouble. I'm leaning to they are just recommending you don't do it, not that it is forbidden. However neither of us will have the information to prove who is right until we see the actual contracts.

"should not" is not "can not". They may only be pointing out that since they make little guarantees about up time of your connection hosting anything on it is a bad idea. Has anyone seen any clarification from them on this?

non-vocal music

This is key. The human brain only has one language processing section. Music with lyrics will cause it to compute words rather then letting you read or write what ever you are working on. The article points this out but basically ignores how well people can concentrate when listening to music with-out lyrics. Have any studies actually looked at non-lyric music working?

This blog does a great job a ripping Campbell's "The China Study" apart. http://rawfoodsos.com/the-china-study/. The short story is he warped his representation of the numbers to make meat look worse then it is to reach conclusions that not even his academic papers support. I agree that the problem is the western diet, but not because the western diet contains large amounts of meat. I've tried my best to read about this topic with an open mind and I've come to the conclusion that we have two major problems in our western diets that is killing us. 1) Too much sugar. See "Sugar: the bitter truth" and 2) Too much Omega-6 compared to Omega-3. This can be partly tied to meat consumption as corn feed beef is much lower in Omega-3 then grass feed beef is. Cut out the soda and eat good quality meat and you will avoid most of the modern health issues

60/2 = 30
60/3 = 20
60/4 = 15
60/5 = 12
60/6 = 10
That's why.

This is covered in the Tao Manifesto. tau*r^2/2 is more consistent with other formulas that are the result of integration. For example Distance fallen is g*t^2/2, Spring energy k*x^2/2, and Kinetic energy m*v^2/2. Think of it this way 1/2 was there but got canceled out by the 2 in 2*pi.

Quadratic Forms

I have been day dreaming about a sinus rinse or nasal spray that does this for at least over a year. I will throw gobs of money at any company that is making a product like this. Do you hear me internet? Please take my money

I know this story is a bit old but I just have to comment. I get frequent sinus infections and have not taken antibiotics in years. Further more I've only taken 1 sick day in the past 2 years. I'm not a doctor but this is how I think this all works. Antibiotics are delivered by the blood, under normal conditions your blood does not empty in to your sinuses. This is why at the START of an infection they do nothing. But once an infection gets bad; like I have a fever, headache, and I might pass out bad, that is when the infection has broken down the wall of your sinus and is getting in to your blood. At that point they can quickly work as you have noted. You may have noticed that a day or two before your feel better you see some blood in some very very colorful mucous. The green/yellow/white mucus is the infection, the blood is where it connected to the wall of your sinuses.

So what I do is as soon as I feel my nose get stuffy(not blocked just a little hard to breathe) and my mind not working at 100% (this is NOT easy to notice. It's taken me years to get close to right on this) I start to take long (Typically an hour) hot (as hot as I can with out it hurting) showers and use sinus rinses to try and push out the gunk. This is all to loosen the infection so i can get it out before it grows big enough to get me really sick.

FYI: Be careful when doing the rinses, if the water is not boiled or distilled you could get something worse from it. I also stay clear of decongestants, they seem to dry my nose out. This will only keep things there longer since dry mucous is sticky mucous.

That's true but kinda misleading. As I remember it that's not quite how it went down. It's been a while since I read the book but it was something like this. It started during a redesign of the planetarium. They decided to organize all the planets into obvious groups. Balls of rock, asteroids, gas giants, Kuiper belt objects and comets where the obvious groups. They compared Pluto to those groups and decided it should not be with the planets since it's not a ball of rock or gas giant. The choice was not simple or easy but they ignored pluto because it would have been very expensive to change the layout of the Planetarium later. He did not demote Pluto he was just right in predicting it would be demoted to prevent the sudden addition of many other Kuiper belt 'planets'. His wiki page tells the same basic story.

It's dumb to blame Tyson for correctly predicting it, and it's just as dumb to blame Mike Brown for finding a KBO larger then Pluto that caused it to be demoted. If you want to blame anything for this blame science for it's unstoppable desire to revise it self in order to make more sense. Stupid progress always mess up our childhoods, how many times do they expect me to go back and correct my finger paint drawings?

While I still disagree with you on the area of a circle you make a good point. I still feel that there is a fundamental rule that is clearly visible in that group of formulas I and the author have not put together a good representation of it. Since I am an engineer and not a mathematician I don't think I will be able to correctly represent it by continuing so I will not bother to go in to it further.

I honestly can not remember many places were Pi was on it's own. If you can please do mention them.

A major part of the point of what I guess you could call the 'Tau movement' is that it is not at all incompatible. That's why (and again the Tao manifesto covers this) they are suggesting using Tau and not changing the value of Pi. You would simply be introducing a new constant that everyone could recognize as 2 Pi. Books could also have the two different versions of the formulas on the same page of their text books and they should be able to function just fine.

To be honest I actually do have one problem with the idea, Tau is already heavily used in other areas (it looks to much like a T to be ignored), another less used Greek letter should be chosen instead.

The general formula for a circle does not favor Pi or Tau but the general formula for finding an area for simple shapes does favor Tao. The formulas shown are compared not because they are all for the same area of study but because they are all derived the same way mathematically. In a very real sense, they are all the same formula just with different variables. Looked at this way the 1/2 belongs there, the math says so, it's Pi that messed it all up and got it canceled out. The area formula is a false positive in favor of Pi.

Personally I don't treat this as a profound insight because Pi felt wrong for a long time. It kept coming up as 2Pi in formulas and only very rarely did it stand on it's own. You can't show a person 2Pi a million times and expect them to still think that Pi with out the 2 is worth much. I can't speak for others but I'm guessing lots of other people felt the same and once they saw "The Tau Manifesto" they had that uneasy feeling finally justified. The math is much cleaner with Tau. That does not mean much if you want to just get work done but if you enjoy the beauty of math it's a big deal.

Actually that question does much better in talks of math. I am far more interested in being shown cases where I am clearly wrong by the numbers then cases where I am wrong because of some old book said so. I learn and improve by actively seeking out things I think are true that are actually wrong. So if you can give me a case where I am wrong in this I would be happy to see it.

By that logic nothing should ever be simplified or improved because "If you can't do it the way I did it you should not be doing it!"

I find that example very compelling. It was something that bothered me for awhile when I was learning math. It is a major formula created by doing an integral that looks different for no immediately clear reason. The reason, I eventually noticed on my own years ago, was Pi was a bad choice for a constant and this has been adjusted for by just using 2 Pi 90% of the time.

The article was written like that for the authors own amusement. See the FAQ section

Are you serious?
Of course. I mean, I’m having fun with this, and the tone is occasionally lighthearted, but there is a serious purpose.

As an engineer I am aware of how over loaded Tau is at the moment. I agree that Tau is not the best choice here but that does not change that 2 Pi is not as elegant as using another symbol and is something we should consider replacing. Math would be clearer and simpler for future generations if Pi was replaced.