The object you import is even called BlackBoxSolver.

Informative AND funny.

More to the point, in the Seth McFarlane version Neil deGrasse Tyson recalls winning a date in Mexico with Gary Coleman.

Don't thank me, thank the manatees.

Gagh is best eaten live.

FWIW, I don't want to chow down on exoskeleton either. I want my insects prepared properly.

Glyphosphate is fairly safe, but POEA (which is the surfactant component of Roundup) is not, at least if you're a fish.

Besides, Roundup is nearing the end of its useful life thanks to weed resistance.

Even without transgenics, we produce more than enough food to feed the world's population as it is today.

What we don't know is how to distribute it efficiently. In particular, we don't know how to avoid wasting a large proportion of it.

With respect to E.O. Wilson, he is a relic of a bygone era. Back in his day, biology was stamp collecting. Today, it's a predictive science. I've spent too many hours of my life butting heads with biologists who don't understand even first year undergraduate level statistics but still want to design experiments which give meaningful quantitive results.

(Incidentally, the future is bright, because thankfully, the younger generation gets it.)

The ideal employee is someone who can do one thing extremely well, and known enough in a lot of other areas to know that an expert should be consulted should a problem arise in that area.

There is a middle ground, you know.

Nobody would expect an expert chemist to be an expert statistician. They are different jobs requiring different skill sets. But would you hire a chemist who had no understanding of statistics whatsoever?

We are already at the point where pretty much every professional job requires at least some number literacy, and some knowledge of project management, and any number of other things to a not-especially-onerous level of competence. Any artist "worth shit" knows how to create art, but they also know how to manage their time, and how to manage colleagues and clients (and possibly underlings), and how to manage a budget (even if it's only a modest budget). An artist without these ancillary skills, or a lack of willingness to acquire them, is useless.

We are getting to the point where for some professions, code literacy is another one of these required ancillary skills.

Limited to people who are experts in the field and know what they're doing? I'm going to go with a qualified "yes".

For the same reason why the bullet time sequence was in the trailer for The Matrix: it's the best visual effects shot of the whole movie.

BTW, I think you answered your own question with the parenthetical comment.

Perhaps more to the point, it's recently become poignant. In these days of drones, war is becoming like a video game for at least some of those who are fighting it. It's a pretty timely film, from that perspective.

...and the third half is instantaneous DNA assembly.

I just checked, and it looks like BMC is still owned by Springer.

The ideal solution is to bring the issues of governance and liability back into the local geographic arena and to stop worrying about how someone is running their business from thousands of miles away from you.

Local government can be even more corrupt and ineffective than national government. Just look at all those localschool boards trying to promote young-Earth creationism (err... sorry, I mean "intelligent design"). That is a direct result of the curriculum and textbook approval being in the hands of local politicians rather than people with recognised expertise in education.

Yes, that's a good point that's often lost.

Incidentally, I do think that one of the bigger villains in the conflict is the US media. They almost never cover Israeli opposition parties who advocate more rights and autonomy for Palestinians, or Palestinian non-violent resistance movements. The inevitable result of this is that only stupidity and mindless belligerence gets noticed on both sides, and so it becomes self-perpetuating on both sides.

That was precisely my point.