Exactly. And tools and organization are the two most useful skills... for efficiently killing things.

Paying somebody else to do it turns out to be a very efficient strategy for killing.

Nevertheless, this is silly.

Humans are the most deadly predators that the planet has ever had. Killing stuff is what we're really really good at. Making weapons is something we're really really good at.

Zombies... their weapons are teeth and fingernails. Their tactics are go straight in and attack regardless of tactical situation.

They wouldn't have a chance.

Dimpled spinning ball

ice in bottoms of craters

glints bright in sunlight.

The ethics violation isn't that he was paid by a corporation.
The ethics violation is in not disclosing it.

Wow- that's cool. Thanks for the graphs!

I never would have guessed that for the rotating coordinate system the trajectory would be so very close to a straight line, although once you graph it, it makes sense.

Cool!

That doesn't seem right. You are doing the calculation in the rotating coordinate system of the Earth?

Equatorial rotational velocity of the Earth is 465 m/s. The center of the Earth is stationary in the rotating coordinate system, so over a 22 minute drop, the lateral displacement should be 614 kilometers. That's not the distance by which you miss the center, since as you deviate from the initial radial line the gravity vector changes direction, but the effect of that will be small until you get to distances that start to be comparable to 10% of the Earth's radius, so it should be close to the miss distance.

It's a non-Keplerian orbit (even in the non-rotating frame), so you don't come back to the same place you started.

No, it can't; it's not a Keplerian problem. You could calculate the period using Kepler's laws if the Earth were a point mass. But it's not. You could calculate the period using the Brachistochrone calculation if the Earth were a uniform sphere. But it's not. The Earth is layered, with the density changing as you go closer to the center. Only way to solve the problem correctly is numerical integration.

(I'd actually be interested in seeing the calculation done in the article.)

Actually, I should modify my comment. The headline does say a different thing from the summary, but the actual article does in fact go on to give some reasonable evidence that connecting the group to the NSA. So, "tied to NSA" is an accurate summary, although with the caveat "tied to" is words that "stop short" of saying that it actually is the NSA.

The headlne says different things than the text and the original article.

The headline says that they "were found"... but they weren't.

The headline that they are "tied to NSA"... but TFA says that "researchers stopped short of saying Equation Group was the handiwork of the NSA."

The inaccuracy in the prediction seems to be not about the magnitude of the storm, but about how far south it would hit (and, in particular, whether it would hit New York City).

Nice discussion of the various models' predictions here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/dat...

To the contrary, his "objections" consisted of pointed out consequences of quantum mechanics that seemed paradoxical, but, as experiment showed much later, were completely real. Einstein is the "E" in "EPR", and the implications of the EPR paper pretty much is the foundation of quantum computing.

"A classical computer would have to run for thousands of years to compute the quantum equations of motion for just 100 atoms. A quantum simulator could do it in less than a second."

...and a hundred atoms can do it in real time!

That's a strawman argument.

Killing people was not suggested. Are you insane?

The easiest way to reduce population "in few hundred years" is to reduce the birth rate slightly.

The difficulty is that once you decide that you can selectively ignore facts because of a huge conspiracy to falsify data, it becomes impossible for any amount of information to ever change your mind. So, the NASA data is falsified? And, the NOAA data, that's falsified too. And the University of East Anglia, of course. And the Berkeley data-- that was done specifically to address the problems people had with the NASA and NOAA data-- http://berkeleyearth.org/ That's faked too.? How about the Japanese data? http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/t... Also faked? The Australians-- fake too?

Once you conclude everything that disagrees with you is fake, your opinion is incontrovertible-- since nobody can confront it.

Right; there are both positive and negative feedbacks.

If you really want to know about the various climate feedbacks, try the summary in section 8.6 ("Climate sensitivity and feedbacks") of the the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: https://www.ipcc-wg1.unibe.ch/... (the section starts on page 629)