My favorite news story of all time comes from the Manchester Evening News [http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/cool-cash-card-confusion-1009701].

People think I'm making stuff up when I repeat this immortal quote from the story...

"..they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it."

Yes, but surely the point is that the stuff that Cameron's been doing is in a whole different league to Galileo slapping together a couple of lenses and discovering that the moons of Jupiter go around in circles or just sitting down and thinking about a cage of insects buzzing about in a box on board a ship.

In physics it's pretty much the case that all the low hanging fruit has been picked. The experimental stuff takes large amounts of money. The purely theoretical stuff gets picked over by an army of professional thinkers every day. If there were any obvious flaws in relativity or quantum mechanics then it's almost certain that someone would have spotted them by now. I'm not saying that there's never going to be another paradigm shift - but it isn't going to happen by way of some amateur demonstrating that, say, GR is invalid by watching a pendulum swinging in the back yard.. In fact, any serious advance in physics will probably be driven by experimental results - and these are expensive to produce.

The moral panic that broken out in the news lately would be funny if it wasn't so fucking frightening. But mainly though it pisses me off that all of this 'think of the children' bullshit or vague allusions to stopping terrorists passes unchallenged most of the time.

Behold this master plan by the Andrea Leadsom and the Mothers Union to stop teenagers looking at porn http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17826515 Good luck with that! But while it's not going to work, it's a great excuse to get some extra control of the internet.

And yesterday, no less a person than the Deputy Childrens Commissioner for England was making the case for mobile interet censorship on the grounds that... and I'm not making this up... children in London routinely expect to be gang raped for hours in public parks by teenagers who've been watching porn on their phones. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18422204

Yep. I could almost mod it +1 funny. Almost.

I heard that it was going to be transparent... and shoot laser beams.

Right on. I set traps for all sorts of rodents and pests around my garden. I even used chemicals to kill an ant nest once. For no other reason than they were annoying me. If I could have got some better shampoo out of it then that would have just been a bonus.

But that isn't the claim. The claim is that the thermal insulation was displaced by the aircraft impact. This allowed the temperature of the steel to rise to the point where it was no longer able to support the loads. Who exactly called it 'half baked'? Can you provide that quote in context?

http://www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication-search.cfm?pub_id=909017 That is all.

My friend, you included your own citation in your signature!

Have you considered that the reason that most people don't share your thoughts is not because they can't think for themselves, but is in fact due to the fact that you are delusional and the rest of us are sane?

Everything that you have written is noise. Does it annoy you that I won't buy into the crazy? Oooh, a quote from Einstein. You must be soooo profound. I notice that you just assume that I haven't investigated anything for myself because I haven't come to the same batshit insane conclusions that you have. Do you listen to yourself when you speak. Nanothermite? Riiiight! Of course. No aircraft impact? Just how god damned determined to find hidden truths do you have to be to deny the eye witness accounts of.... You know what, just forget it. It's not the factual inaccuracies that bother me, its the fucking condecending attitude that you mentalists have towards anyone who disagrees with you. You make all these snide remarks that the truth "might ruin my day" and make out like you're privy to some mystical truth about the world that the rest of us idiots couldn't handle. Fuck you, sir.

Because it's supposed to be an encyclopedia - not a forum for debating conspiracy theories. Although, the 9/11 stuff does get a mention under False Flag opperations in the List of Conspiracy Theories page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories#False_flag_operations

Isn't that one of the key characterisrics of the middle class? Deferred gratification leading to inter generational wealth transfer is the reason why some of my friends have had houses bought for them by their parents. I don't think this story has anything to do with technology - just the different attitudes to money that exist at various levels of society. On the other hand, this is a huge generalisation. I also have friends who are far less well off than I am who are carrying a fraction of what I am in unsecured debt due to their traditional working class aversion to borrowing money.

Yeah, but I'd guess it's pretty smooth when you consider the radius of the sun is of the order 10^9 m.