Exactly. I find him worth listening to precisely because he is identifiable neither strictly as a liberal nor a conservative.

And, indeed, "worth listening to" does not equate to "I agree with him." It means "his analyses are interesting, and often present a viewpoint that gives an unusual insight."

Except it hasn't.

The multi-megaton bombs were a thing of the '50s, when accuracies were terrible, and the solution was "just get the bomb near, and make it big."

The modern thinking on nuclear weapons is to make them small, but extremely accurately targetted. You don't need a 50-megaton Tsar-bomb if you are able to put a smaller yield weapon exactly where you want it.

No, actually they're not. Even if you're looking at the quantum efficiency of an individual photon absorption by a chlorophyll molecule, plant proteins aren't anywhere near as good as a decent solar cell, which will have very close to 100% quantum efficiency

I'm not sure where this myth that plants are extraordinarily efficient in energy conversion came from. They aren't. Energy conversion efficiency is not what they're optimized for. In evolution, "good enough" is good enough.

This statement "Millions of years have evolution has resulted in plants being the most efficient harvesters of solar energy on the planet" is flat out incorrect.

Plants come in at about 2% energy conversion efficiency. The best solar cells are over 35% conversion efficiency.

Now, to be fair, plants aren't optimimized for energy conversion efficiency-- they are basically solar-powered engineering units that synthesize complex organic molecules and make self-replicating macromolecular structures out of little more than carbon dioxide and water, plus a few trace minerals... they are harvesting, mining, concentrating, and structural machines of amazing complexity. But "efficient energy conversion engines"-- no, not even close.

When the very first sentence of an article is factually incorrect, I have no interest in reading any more of it.

Exactly.

Cell phones don't have enough power to cause significant heating.

It turns out that the body is very well adapted for cooling. The circulatory system is a good heat exchanger; it takes a lot of input to overload. Going outside on a 90 degree (F) day, maybe. Lying in the sun and absorbing a kilowatt per square meter, maybe. A one-watt (average transmit power) cell phone, no.

There is one exception to the fact that the cooling system of the body regulates the temperature, actually, the one place the blood vessels don't reach: the lens of the eye. You can't have blood vessels running through the eyeball, since it has to be transparent! If the scaremongers had been saying that cell phones caused glassblower's cataract, they would have had a mechanism. But that isn't the charge. (And, in any case, the power of a cell phone is just way too low to cause this-- you just don't get much heating from the 0.7 to 1 watt average transmit power of a cell phone to cause any damage. Don't stare into a red-hot furnace, though.)

You got it. The effect is not significant.

There are no known adverse effects of cell phones. There is no epidemiological data on adverse effects. There has been no increase in cancer rate with cell phones. The largest study done actually showed a slight correlation of a REDUCED rate of cancer with cell phone usage.

There is no known mechanism for adverse effects.

Sure: health care,

Uh, didn't you actually read the post you are responding to?

You should also check out some of the images on the Cassini mission webpage:
http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/191/The_Red_Rose_Of_Saturn
and some of the animations, like the ones on this page: http://www.ciclops.org/view/7620/North_Polar_Movie

Cool! Google "upgrades" to Morse Code!

Was that an April 1 post?

People should just learn Morse code, only one button. It's the original text message tech.
And good Morse code operators go vastly faster than a mere 9.3 world per minute.

OK, point.

Nevertheless, asteroidal compositions (well, meteoritic compositions, assumed to be indicative of asteroids) have significantly more platinum and palladium than gold, and hydrothermal processes concentrate gold into conveniently mineable veins on Earth, but probably not on asteroids.

Gold?? Who's suggesting getting gold from asteroids?

On Earth, gold veins are produced by aqueous processes. You wouldn't expect that on asteroids.

Platinum, and platinum-group metals, on the other hand-- these are siderophiles, and hence depleted in the Earth's crust. Good elements to look for in asteroids-- in fact, iridium is the very signature of an asteroid impact.

Unless they announce when and on what vehicle they are going to launch, I'm not sure you can say "they announced the plan to launch their first space missions."
It's not a plan to launch if they don't have a plan to launch.

Reddit was a positive feedback loop. Good information may have been amplified-- but bad information was, too.

Quoting from http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/19/17826915-missing-brown-university-students-family-dragged-into-virally-fueled-false-accusation-in-boston "Reddit became overnight 'one of the more ugly and disgusting places that had a lot of traffic ... There were very intense and ugly comments throughout the last 12 hours.'"

Fast... but not always accurate.

From the Atlantic's analysis http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/it-wasnt-sunil-tripathi-the-anatomy-of-a-misinformation-disaster/275155/
" The next step in this information flow is the trickiest one. Here's what I know. At 2:42am, Greg Hughes, who had been following the Tripathi speculation, tweeted, "This is the Internet's test of 'be right, not first' with the reporting of this story. So far, people are doing a great job. #Watertown" Then, at 2:43am, he tweeted, "BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi."
The only problem is that there is no mention of Sunil Tripathi in the audio preceding Hughes' tweet. I've listened to it a dozen times and there's nothing there even remotely resembling Tripathi's name. I've embedded the audio from 2:35 to 2:45 am for your own inspection. Multiple groups of people have been crowdsourcing logs of the police scanner chatter and none of them have found a reference to Tripathi, either. It's just not there."

"Be right, not first" certainly failed big time.

This is pretty much useless. If people start using software filters to detect social-network frauds and spammers, the frauds and spammers will simply reverse-engineer the filter algorithm and adjust their "number of devices from which a user accesses the service, the ratio of followers to people following an account, the average number of tweets to each person, and the number of tweets to an unknown receiver" to whatever values don't trigger the fraud filter.

The spammers evolve just as fast as the filters.