No one wants to talk seriously online to total strangers.

You're kidding, right? I rarely talk to people I know...because I know them. I learn from and share with people I don't know.

Exactly. Every time I adjust my gunpowder recipe, I have to go to Google to look up how Mr. Noble's name is spelled.

Universities teach dead stuff. For example, Latin.

Yelp automagically pulls (hides behind the curtain) reviews it deems are not representative. Supposedly the extremes like "5 star" and "1 star" reviews. But not for the cases I've looked at.

And Yelp doesn't allow you to down-mod reviews. Just 3 versions of "I got high reading that review".

Odds that Yelp goes under in 2014? 2015?

there *are* experiments that are non-replicable, but still valuable.

I missed your examples. Could you repeat them?

The new F1 regs are about a lot more than "slowing things down". They have gone from a 750 hp engine to a 600 hp one PLUS "Energy Recovery System". This is exactly the kind of innovation that makes sense.

The latest high-end sports cars use exactly this sort of hybrid setup, so it is completely logical that the traditional racetrack-consumer synergy be continued with this change.

In this sense, F1 is adapting and remaining meaningful (to high end cars), where the electric plywood-on-wheels cars are increasingly meaningless.

Then change the design yearly. Each year have a useful new goal -- motors can only weigh so much, vehicle must be able to seat 4 upright, bonus points for gizmos.

These solar cars have been "a piece of wood with 4 tiny wheels" for a decade or more.

Have them tow a trailer one year, or hill climb, or drive through mud (run the race through the south). Speaking of hill climb -- have a Pike's Peak race.

As cool as these cars are, they are starting to all look alike.

How about this? Add a rule that they have to have, say, 50 cubic feet of storage inside the car (in addition to the driver).

a simple "Try and keep a constant distance from my neighbors" algorithm

Probably the same algorithm birds use when they fly into a tree -- "try to keep away from branches". They just do it ten or one hundred times faster than we can, so it be black magic to us. A tight loop, run with highly priority, and featuring a few key bits of inline code.

Soccer superstars are sick

(1) the math doesn't break down, the theory does. If the math broke down as well, we wouldn't know the theory had broken down.

(2) an analogous discontinuity of the Earth would be "falling off the edge of the Earth", as some used to believe. That broken theory got changed centuries ago.

(3) I know of no one that thinks of subatomic particles as points but I do know of theories whose flaw comes from them being based on point particles.

Disclaimer: Mr. Thornley and I have a history

Sooner or later my mom was going to get on slashdot.

I could. But then safety goggles don't work well on top of glasses -- fog up, push glasses into face, etc.

I feel old when it comes to worrying about wearing safety glasses vs regular glasses -- as in, I'm not worried about it. Just as I rode my bike(s) for years before I had to wear a helmet.

Today we are super worried about, for example, bike helmets, safety goggles & hard hats. But then we buy ourselves seasons tickets to NFL football and lose our hearing instead. Has anyone ever seen anyone wearing ear protection at a sporting event?

By the way, still no helmet required when one goes to a public ice skating session. That ice is like concrete and, last I checked, falling is an every minute thing for some people.

Then there's tennis. I ruined my knees playing tennis. Chasing after every ball stretched everything in my knees. Decades later I met others who had the same experience. But how many people wear knee supports playing tennis? Only those injured already.

Safety regulations cause us to become fanatical...about some things. While remaining blissfully ignorant of other potential threats.