Firefox on Android is really quite good. I use it all the time.

That might be true where you are, where I live and in the sort of circles I move, atheism is more or less a default, and it's always a bit odd when you discover someone actually goes to church under the age of 50. Given that, it's rarely discussed, because, well, it's hard to discuss. "Still no god?" "Yep. Still no god." "How about that rugby game then?" That's just a bit awkward and unnecessary.

The genes they identified were all proteins.

I'm not that much of an expert on microarrays, but I'm pretty sure most or all of the arrays they used predate the Encode project's results that made people re-evaluate the question of how much of the genome is really important. Here is a list of the arrays they used:

Illumina: HumanHap550, 318K, 350K, 610K, 660W Quad, HumanOmniExpressExome-8 v1.0, Human610 Quadv1, 370, 317, HumanOmniExpress-12v1 A

Affymetrix: GeneChip 6.0, 250K

This study was the keystone project of a consortium founded in early 2011. I think, given the size, it simply took this long to get the results. That, too, was a time before Encode publications had really started impacting the world. Whatever RNA genes they would have had at the time would be pathetic and paltry by comparison to what we consider worth studying now.

We know that the most important distinctions between humans and other animals are in RNA genes, that most of the genome is transcribed as RNA genes and that the brain modifies itself using them and that malfunctions in them cause disease. This study ignored RNA genes entirely, AFAICT. Its mindset is about ten years out of date and simply reaffirms what everyone already assumed: proteins aren't everything. Intelligence probably still has a significant genetic component, this study just looks in the wrong place. (Psst: SNP studies are snake oil in almost all unsolved diseases.)

My smartwatch doesn't have to be charged every day like my Nexus 4 does, it lasts for a week on a single charge. So +1 for the smartwatch.

But this is typical for Microsoft; they never cooperate with the government if they don't have to; cf. the antitrust case. I do like the idea of "embrace, extend, extinguish" applied to the NSA, though...

Only slightly less unpopular than "On Not Writing Unwell."

And then he created the arXiv, to guarantee that crackpots and armchair-surfing physicists would have a safe bunker from which to lob garbage at other scientific disciplines without ever having to step out from under the shade of their brethren. Until it's peer-reviewed, it's not newsworthy. For shame, Medium.

I use my smartwatch as a sleep tracker, it'd be really annoying if I had to charge it every night. Fortunately it gets days of battery life, so I just top it up every so often and it's fine.

My pebble does this, it'll vibrate to tell me that the link to the phone has broken. It also does other useful things, that's just one of them.

That's really more of a federal government thing than an Ontario one.

Ontario would just require subtitles.

It's okay, though; as a Torontonian, I forgive you for not being able to make the distinction. It is the centre of the universe, after all.

Pass the wrong type of object to a javascript library. The library happily accepts your crud, passing it through 14 levels of function calls and then says something useful like "a is not a function".

Aww, jeez, thanks for the spoiler alert! They just started talking about that cruiser. :(

I should be safe in Eastern Aus. We could get a new inland sea out of it.

Consider this scenario. I am merging right to make a right turn.

1. Indicate right
2. Wait for a car to give way
3. Merge one lane to the right

This doesn't work with automatic cars because they don't understand hand signals. Instead I just have to merge and hope the overtaking cars are going to give way. If this behaviour becomes common, people will start merging without indicating in the expectation that automatic systems will take care of the resulting conflict.