The second planet now known to be wasted by humans.

So fire all the cops, firemen, garbage men, and teachers in your community if you think it will just improve your tax return, and still keep you just as safe from criminals, fires, cholera, and idiocy.

"Better than a lynch mob!" is hardly the standard the American legal system once aspired to. Although I guess people with darker hued skins might disagree.

There are innocent people being held in Guantanamo Bay without access to the rights that the American legal system was supposed to protect.

Shrugging and saying, "Well, at least we aren't burning anyone at the stake! I don't see what you're making such a big deal over!" is not a civilized response to this situation, and making out like the procedural snafus were the biggest issue kind of misses the point.

It may have been the way one of them was planted underneath a Russian flag at an international event that did it.

My gun only provides you transportation to heaven and hell.

Yeah, maybe just indications of one or two more pressure cookers embedded among dozens of people.

The point of that rambling was just that these psychotics may have been Chechens, but not all Chechens are psychotics. The uncle is clearly Chechen but not psychotic. I should add no Czechs are Chechen.

and that right there discredits your rambling post.

Why?

Psychopaths like the Tsarnaev brothers, the Columbine killers, the 9/11 terrorists, the Koch brothers, etc. are either total predators like Tamerlan or Eric, with a bizarre interest in family hierarchy, a fascination with determining who is and isn't related to you, a desire for stirring religious hatred, and no altruism, empathy, or moral center to be found; they can also have only one allele like Dzhohar ("Johar", whatever), who was maybe an asshole with a superiority complex, but was also quiet about it. He was easygoing enough to form relationships with individuals in both allelic subpopulations, normal and psycho. They'll hang out with you and your other unsuspecting friends, smoke weed with you once a week just like normal Americans, etc. etc., but they'll also carry pressure cookers full of nails into dense crowds of strangers for you if they feel strongly related to you somehow.

The uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, looks like he's carrying normal alleles at this locus. He announced to a mob of reporters that he thought his older nephew was up to no good. He said that his nephew Jahar was a loser for doing what he did, announced he should turn himself in, and ask for forgiveness from the wider population of Boston. He said the brothers "brought shame on their family and upon the entire Chechen ethnicity." It might run in his family, but I don't think the uncle is as interested in seeing people run into trouble just for not being related to him.

Hopefully we decide not to waste another decade. This is not the time to go off fuming about how everyone in Chechnya is carrying this psychotic gene. Everybody there would be dead. Comfort with inhibiting the reproduction of people unrelated to you runs in families all around the world. It occurs in legislatures everywhere. It preserves itself by making you cause problems for people who don't have it. But it has to self-regulate in any wider human population, Chechnya or Boston or wherever, or it goes extinct along with the rest of the genome in the region.

Hopefully we won't see this as an excuse to waste another decade with more political 9/11-style bullshit against one particular religion or another. This was in the end a story of two bungling religious-minded psychotics, with a "mastermind", a "pushover with no conscience", and a shared comfort with mass-murdering a dense unrelated-looking crowd in a city far from home.

There's only one thing all terrorists have in common, and in light of recent events I thought it important to point it out. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? It's the one thing that unites terrorists all over the world, from the United States to Russia, India, the United Kingdom, Japan, Spain, Italy, Germany and even Canada?

In every case you find one and only one thing that is exactly the same amongst all of them. Every single one. You know what it is, don't you? It should be obvious now after decades of senseless attacks on innocent people. The thing that unites them all is only too clear.

It is the ONLY thing that they all have in common.

You've figured it out, haven't you?

That's right.

Every single one of those terrorist attacks was carried out by a human being.

Not only is the Moore's Law reference in TFA, it is also in TFPreprint are arXiv.org.

Apparently, some /. readers can't understand that the editors of /. are not the originators of every stupid idea we see here, like the idea that the /. editors are the originators of every stupid idea we see here.

Another factor is that specifically human intelligence of the kind that proves theorems and builds spaceships is almost certainly an accident of sexual selection. There is absolutely no utility in being able to prove theorems or build spaceships in the stone age, so there couldn't have been any selective pressure in favour of that type of specifically human intelligence.

This is likely why specifically human intelligence is so rare, despite all the apparent building-blocks being common. Rudimentary tool use isn't especially rare, nor are basic communication skills that appear to be the basis for language. But since the selection for these things is an accident of sexual selection and not a predictable product of natural selection there are a lot of co-incidences that have to happen to make beings like us.

It is quite likely from what we know of abiogensis and evolution that life will prove to be quite common in the universe, and intelligence extremely rare.

The problem with "philosophical literacy" is that it makes you say things like "mathematically pre-existing" as if it meant something other than "non-existent".

You seem to want to reify the mathematical language we use to describe reality, as if the tool we use to describe the world and which we have invented and adapted to describe the world ever more deeply, somehow "predates" the world that language was invented to describe.

I see no reason to privilege math over English in this regard. Both are just languages we use to describe, understand and communicate our understanding. Neither has any ontology apart from us, the beings who invented them, and to impute otherwise is both unwarranted and uninteresting. There is no explanatory need to do so, nor any operational test we can apply to test the validity of the hypothesis (although it would be damned interesting if you could come up with one.)

There are certainly many cases where our mathematical description has to be "fixed up" by hand to actually describe the world, the most obvious one being the excess of solutions to almost all the basic differential equations we use in physics, particularly the things like the backward-in-time solutions to any given wave equation. (That the time-reversed solutions of the Dirac equation can be given meaning does not change this, it merely emphasizes what a poor tool mathematics is for describing the universe in all the other cases where the advanced wave has no apparent physical meaning.)

Given what a lousy tool math is to describe the world, it would be very, very weird if the world were somehow "following" math. The hypothesis that we invented math to describe the world in much the same way we invented to stone ax for changing the world looks a lot more plausible.

I was an FRC mentor for several years and it was both incredibly demanding and incredibly rewarding. You'll see high-school students go from clueless newbies in their first year with the team to competent, confident and capable young men and women by the time they're done.

A lot of it is the unplanned activities. One of my favouite memories is teaching a couple of students some vacuum technique for ensuring the pneumatic system was sealed properly. The students are motivated, interested and eager to learn, and you get to see their competencies undergo these sudden upward steps where they are frustrated and confused one minute and doing the job properly five or ten minutes later.

It's really worthwhile for everyone, and if anyone had told me how much fun it would be to work with teenagers I would have laughed my head off. But it turns out it is.