Actually the odds of you being alive for an extinction level event, while low, are far higher that. The odds of winning the UK national lottery are about one in 14 million. The average life expectancy of a human is ~80 years in the western world so if the rate of extinction-level events only has to be one every ~1.1 billion years for the annual probability of one to mean that there is a higher chance of you being alive when one happens than there is of you winning the lottery.

If you look at the frequency of all mass extinction events given here then you can see that the rate is far higher than that. Unfortunately we don't really know for certain how many, if any, of these were caused by asteroid impacts or massive volcanic eruptions but the rate of these natural extinction events is clearly far higher than one every billion years. Hence the data suggest that you are probably many times more likely to be alive when a natural mass extinction event happens than you are to win the lottery even once, let alone twice.

...and what about squarks? These are strongly coupled and there are some arguments to suggest that the stop squark is most likely to have the lowest mass.

The centre of mass energy is actually going from 8 to 13 TeV so it is not a doubling of the energy. However we are increasing the luminosity (number of protons in the beam) too so we will probably have at least twice the reach in energy that we did before. While the article makes it sound like something new looking for Supersymmetry (SUSY) is something we have been searching for since the start of the LHC.

SUSY is the leading candidate theory to explain why the higgs is so much lower in energy that the energy scale at which gravity becomes important: the Planck scale. While there are good arguments to suppose that SUSY is within range of the LHC energy I would put about as much store in a prediction of which SUSY particle will be discovered first as I would in a 14 day weather forecast: there is some science that goes into it but there are so many unknowns that the prediction is likely to be junk. Worse, while we can be pretty certain that there will be some sort of weather in 14 days there is no guarantee that there is a lightest SUSY particle: SUSY might not exist in nature although this itself would raise some interesting questions.

One year vaper, previously 20 year smoker. I've had the medical labs done to show how much damage was undone in just one year.

At 41, I can run farther and faster, keep up with young folk better than most of my non-smoker friends of the same age. 3 years ago this was not the case.

Why do we have to choose between capitalism and socialism? Both have their benefits and both have their problems but they are NOT mutually exclusive. Most countries used to have a progressive tax system with high rates of tax on high earners. CEOs and the like still made more money than the rest of us and did well for themselves but the higher taxes these people paid helped provide common services that we all used e.g. healthcare, transport infrastructure, free university education etc.

This system put both socialism and capitalism in balance. You have the freedom to use your (free) education to go an make money and will directly benefit yourself from doing that but society also benefits and uses the higher taxes you pay to educate the workers you employ, provide the infrastructure to transport the goods you make etc. The trick is to make sure that the high tax payers also benefit from how the taxes are spent even if they don't necessarily benefit as much.

Yes, but engineering research is not scientific research. Figuring out how to build a vertical take-off jet fighter is engineering research: the science behind it is already understood. The same applies to rail guns: it's engineering problems they are trying to solve, not a scientific ones.

No - we have ample evidence in the geological record: mass extinctions where a huge fraction of species die off e.g. the Permian mass extinction which makes the end of the dinosaurs seem positively tame. More than that we have plausible mechanisms to cause such events: meteorite impact, massive volcanic eruptions and catastrophic (but natural) climate change and there is evidence to support the fact that all of these have occurred in Earth's past. Indeed I'm surprised that you believe in evolution if you have trouble believing in these mass extinction events.

No, fundamental science does not show this. We do not need magic to reach e.g. Mars and indeed we have already sent probes there: no magic needed. Yes space is hard, far harder than boats, but so is flying: many people predicted we would never do that as well. It took us thousands of years to develop boats capable of traversing oceans. We already have mass transit systems - aeroplanes - which transport us for short periods through a medium where life is not possible.

It was not an error: appealing to reason was not working for you so authority was another route to try. Indeed if you actually stopped trolling for a second and read the article you linked you'll notice that the author, a physicist like myself, does not dismiss space as 'dead' and 'finished' only that it will be hard, a lot harder than most of the public think and not a solution to our immediate problems but that eventually we'll probably be out there although perhaps in thousands, rather than hundreds, of years. I'd agree.

You seriously think much military money goes into scientific research rather than engineering and building bigger/faster/better guns, bombs, planes etc.

No we don't - we actually have recorded documentation written by humans that evolution is still occurring. The geological record is not accurate at anything close to that resolution. However the process is slow enough that I strongly suspect that we will still be 'humans' no matter how different we end up from what we are now and that our species will be the one renamed as "primitive human".

Yes, it is because of that too. The medical industry could certainly be more efficient. However the cost to develop and test a new drug is huge and increasing (and not just because of inefficient bureaucracy). If you strip away the bureaucracy you will still have an underlying problem of increasing costs.

We are putting far more money into applying existing technology to medicine (and other fields) than we are in the fundamental science which drives the whole machinery. This means that each new development is a more complex, hard to achieve application of technology we those we already have. You can solve the bureaucracy problem but you cannot solve the underlying problem it obscures without investing in fundamental science.

600 years ago you would also have been saying that it was a waste of time to build ocean going vessels and that clearly people who thought it was a good idea had "left the continent already"? I hope even you can see that this was not a waste of time. We clearly do not have the technology yet to go into space in any meaningful fashion but the resources out there mean that we should certainly aim to develop it. As for the need to spread to another planet to maintain our species I'm not the only one with that view but you may have a harder time dismissing his opinion as clearly nonsense.

Actually it does make sense to live on some other planet, and eventually other solar system. If an extinction level event occurs on the Earth (and our geological record contains several of these) humans will survive and then there is the longer term problem of the death of the sun but we have quite a while before we need to worry about that.

I would also dispute that we have the technology to provide basic income and healthcare for all. Healthcare costs are spiralling out of control everywhere...partly because of the huge money going into medical research at the expense of other science. As for a basic, living income for all that requires some of us to work to support others who may just choose not to work. I don't think you will get many people signing up for that. The only way I see that changing is that we develop automated technology to provide the resources people need to live comfortably and have healthcare with minimal effort by others. If you want a vision of that then there are the Culture novels by Iain Banks.

It depends on the program. When I was a kid the BBC used to use it to inform your mind through your eyes: historical dramas to reinforce the history we were learning at school (but in a far more entertaining way), David Attenborough's natural history series, Johnny Ball's Think Again series that got be interested in science etc. etc. While the BBC is a shadow of its former self it still puts out some decent content.

When I lived in the US for a few years I was shocked at the state of TV there. While they had far more than the original 4 UK channels the number of decent programs was the same: you just had to hunt through 100 channels to find them and, when you did find one, the advertizing breaks were so frequent it was insane and even when the program started they cluttered up the screen with advertizing for some other program. My television viewing dropped off enormously - even the news was unbearable.

So yes it can suck your mind out through your eyes but it doesn't have to.

Why is the government deciding the requirements for entering degree programs not the respective university?

Nice theory. I'm talking about practice.

I did not say that the parent would deny the child the choice - I was very careful to ask whether the parent have a subtle influence on the child's choices e.g. by not being knowledgeable and/or keen about certain subjects.

Sorry but I regularly look at the educational output of companies at the university level in the form of text books. They often have typos, inaccuracies, errors and/or examples of author bias and this problem gets worse for newer and smaller market materials. If you are blindly trusting the educational materials from a company you are in dangerous territory.

If there are that many studies where are the papers? You keep going on about 'studies' and have not backed this up. I would agree with you may see a spin against homeschooling...just as you may also see a spin for it. Hence my point that I prefer to look at the studies directly and draw my own conclusions rather than trust what someone trying to push their own opinion has to say.

..from someone who may also be desperately trying to figure out what you need to know at the same time. This seems to be a spectacularly good example of the blind leading the blind. It is remarkably easy to think that you understand something until you meet someone who actually does understand it: I've seen this countless times with grad students.

You've just described learning in general. The skill that you need to learn is how to go about understanding and learning something by yourself without having it spoon fed to you. Having someone provide 1:1 teaching does not seem like a particularly good way to go about that.

I take it you've not heard of Fox News then? Although sometimes they do switch it around and fight stupidity with ignorance. Best watched in very small doses though.

If you are going to make that daft argument then all babies only have one parent since each parent normally only contributes 50% of the DNA. Please let's not start fighting ignorance with stupidity.