Sadly, it's actually the most visited online news site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16746785

It's not surprising it gets a lot of press - a lot of people "read" it.

I write my CV in LaTeX. It's incredibly easy and spits out a good looking PDF. I'd wager I'm far from unique amongst people in my field (physics) in doing this - we write all our papers that way, most presentations too, so it seems a logical step.

A figure-8 is quite hard to find, since the symmetries involved would require almost perfectly equal masses between the stars and perfectly circular orbits of the stars. (This is from memory running simulations a long while back). However it is certainly possible to have a planet be orbiting one star for a few loops and then be captured by the other, orbit it a few times and keep getting passed back and forth.

The basic condition you need for this is for the planet to have enough energy to get over the maximum between the two gravity wells of the stars. If you think of kinetic and potential energy being like those of a ball rolling on a set of hills, you'd say that the ball is either trapped between two peaks or not. However with this case it would appear that the hills themselves are moving, so the "hump" between them will grow and shrink with time, sometimes letting the ball pass between valleys, sometimes trapping it in a single valley for a few cycles.

What's really remarkable is that this is all do-able without too much technical knowledge. You'd need:

About a second year undergrad level of physics - You could do it with Newtonian mechanics, but Lagrangians make it a LOT easier);

A bit of programming technique (two days or so with MATLAB and you'll get the basics of ODE solvers).

A LOT of patience :)

As an aside, you could just grab the game "Osmos" which has a lovely set of orbital levels that basically implement this :) I strongly suspect whoever was involved with it was well educated in physics, as finding the stable orbits they have requires an understanding of conservation laws and use of a symplectic integrator (eg Verlet's algorithm) to implement time updates, instead of just using Newton's method.

It's rather the same way the moon orbits the earth. If you have a binary system, a planet can quite happily orbit very close to one of the two stars so long as the distance between the planet and the star it orbits is smaller than the distance between stars. The pair of stars will orbit their mutual center of mass, and the planet will orbit a single star.

Of course, the three body problem is an open question in physics, but if you make the assumption that one of the masses is much smaller than the other two it (which is the case for planets orbiting stars) it becomes quite solvable, especially if you're happy with numerical simulations of orbits.

A similar situation is possible if the planet is a long way from the pair of stars, and would then orbit their center of mass. That isn't the case here, but is certainly a feasible solution to the problem. You only really get orbits that are highly erratic when the planets orbital radius is over a quarter of the distance between the stars.

Throughout this I've assumed equal mass stars. Feel free to put a factor of M1/M2 in front of every distance I gave for non-equal mass stars.

Well played, Gaben, well played.

Well, some games have different gun spreads when you run as opposed to walk, so perhaps the spread could be scaled by movement speed, ie radius of spray pattern proportional to movement speed. And/or you could implement radius of footstep sound carrying proportional to speed. That way there would be a tactical decision about how fast to run somewhere.

Standardization. Getting 30-40 (or in some cases 200-300) students to have the same version of a textbook basically requires that you set the current edition, as you can't guarantee that older editions will be available. This has to be done well in advance and normally agreed first with the department (who may have already forced their choice of textbook on you) then the university bookstore, who are also usually in it for their cut.

Your professor gets nothing (except headaches) out of their choice of textbook. The administrators won't let you pick anything that isn't a current edition. It's a pain for us too - I don't like having all my sections moved around, set standard questions shifting etc. It makes more work for me to go through and test-run exercises to see which are good or bad etc.

Croteam did this with the HD versions of Serious Sam, they're actually quite nice.

"Tomorrow", for one.

Anti-joke-chicken-mode:
OP was using hyperbole, all day names end in "y", hence he's implying that the lady at work forgets her password every day.

I think Entropic Gravity is looking very promising.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity

Verlinde claims that it is starting to make some sense of the Dark Matter and Dark Energy problem.
http://www.scilogs.eu/en/blog/the-dark-matter-crisis/2012-06-28/discussing-gravity-with-eric-verlinde

This theory could change a whole lot of things in physics. And might provide a way to finally bring Quantum Theory and Relativity together.

General Relativity actually adopted equations that would be consistent with Newtonian Gravity without deriving it from first principles.
And probably that is the problem with its current formulation. The Entropic Gravity might provide the deriviation and mechanism for it.

You know, I was trying to be polite - there's no need to be rude in response. You generalized to all social sciences, I showed that you were wrong with this generalization - that indeed some of the social sciences (namely sociology, with which I have quite some familiarity now) are sciences. Then you respond by saying things related to the outcome of wars. I then tell you that your statement isn't relevant as it doesn't address the point that indeed sociology is a science. Therefore the statement you initially made "Social Science isn't science" is false, by my counterexample. You simply tried to move the goalposts to mean "this set of things (most of which wouldn't qualify as social science) aren't science".

Of course, I agree that history isn't a science. But I don't think many people would put it in a "social sciences" category, for myself it falls squarely in humanities.

I think you're confused about what sociologists do. They are not concerned with the outcome of wars, but more with the impact of social policy or phenomena. People as individuals may not obey immutable laws, but en mass they can be modeled quite effectively, just like gasses of particles can be modeled without knowing the motion of any individual particle. It is impossible to model the individual particles accurately due to their number, but given extensive properties (Temperature, Density, Volume etc) I can tell you how the gas as a whole will behave. Based on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, I can never tell you exactly how any one particle will behave, only give you probabilities of certain behaviors, just like people. They aren't "rational".

You absolutely can say within social science that certain things will happen at certain rates within tolerances - this is exactly what my partner did in her PhD. She performed statistical tests to show (at a 99% level of confidence) differing care-giving levels (measured by hours worked for family members) based on variables such as fertility of the individuals concerned.

She can certainly tell you, with 99% accuracy, based on the number of children a woman in Togo has and her desired levels of fertility, what the probability of her getting AIDS in the next year is. She can compare this with Benin, which has a different social support structure, and show that, for instance, the more localized family networks reduce this fertility desire and in turn reduce instances of people developing AIDS. And she can absolutely tell you, ahead of time, what the impact of building a new road to a remote village will be in terms of fertility desires, migration and infection prevalence. With measurable, repeatable numbers, statistical significance, etc. If you changed "fertility preference" for "quark mass" and connectivity of a village for "phi^4 coupling" what she and I do end up looking almost identical, so I can't claim to be doing science if she isn't.

I've got a PhD in physics, my partner a PhD in Sociology. Her dissertation consisted of obtaining qualitative data regarding a social phenomenon, building a model, collecting quantitative survey data and statistically analyzing that data to test hypotheses drawn from the qualitative data.

So: Model building from a theoretical basis, hypothesis testing from observed data and analysis. That, my friend, is science. The only difference between her work and that of my colleagues who are experimentalists is that her instrument was a survey instead of an atomic clock.

I, on the other hand, did a bunch of maths, and was an exception in my field by being able to test my work against observations. A master's in Polisci might not have got you close to science, but don't presume that science isn't being done in the social sciences - it is, and done right it can be of vital importance to the society we live in.

You need to convince just over 50% of the _voting_ population, and sometimes not even that. This tends to be much less than half of the population for most countries. Turnouts rarely break 80% in most countries, in US presidential elections it doesn't exceed 60% these days - http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html - so really it's about 30% of people you actually need to convince strongly enough to actually vote for you.

In some systems it can seem fairly ridiculous: The UK 2005 General Election was won comprehensively (in terms of seats, and hence power) by the Labour party. They had 56% of the seats with just 35% of the vote. The turnout was around 61%, meaning that just 20% of the electorate voted for them. http://www.ukpolitical.info/2005.htm