Scientific American still has full articles, without interspersed ads, at a high reading level, on usually interesting topics. They are the only physical magazine I don't mind picking up. I am sad they lost the mathematical recreations section.

Sure thing, as soon as we can make a road that is downhill both ways. Since that is impossible, your idea is impossible. That is completely ignoring all other practical concerns such as 'if gravity can be felt light years away, it would alter the orbit of the sun' and 'if we could create something with measurable gravitational effects spanning light years between stars, then the amount of energy we expend accelerating and decelerating a spaceship is pretty puny (dozens of orders of magnitude puny) in comparison.'

I'd like to point out something few people really think about when it comes to animals: they have as much variation in their intelligence as pets and people. We all know some dogs are for smarter than others... so are some chipmunks, crows, cows, etc. Every population has its geniuses.

Point being that just because one chipmunk figured out what a yellow striped line represented, doesn't mean his siblings, relatives, and neighbors understand. Evolution works by selecting against unviable variations... and that means that variation has to exist.

This is a bit late, but I think you do not understand a simple problem with transit detection: most planetary systems do not orbit in a plane we can detect. To detect planetary transit very close to the star, the range of system planes is pretty high. But the farther out form the star, the fewer and fewer system will EVER occlude from our perspective. Our only way of detecting these systems is by measuring star wobble, and that only detects big planets.

Se we can use this information detecting nearby occlusion as a proxy to estimate how common more distant planets may be, even though they will never occlude in a plane that includes our observation.

I am confused... can someone explain how this report is not selection biased against distant or small planets?

To put it another way, we started by finding huge planets. As we have gotten better methods, we have found successively smaller planets. The three factors that make a planet easy to find are its diameter (occlusion of star), gravitational effect (how much the star wobbles), and distance (how likely that the planet will occlude the star from our perspective, and also factoring into the gravitational effect).

Distant, small planets simply won't be detected from our perspective. So the report is not really saying 'Only 23% of stars have earth sized planets'. It's really saying 'We know that about 23% of stars have rocky planets that are really close. Since we have no reason to believe our solar system is extremely unique, that makes it very likely that an even greater percentage of stars have rocky planets that are farther out'.

This is probably a huge boost to the 'how many stars have possible life sustaining planets' factor in that oft derided formula, the Drake equation.

I use Dropbox, because I have several computers that I want to keep in sync. A couple times a year, I will actually log in to Dropbox... the other 99% of the time, it is just a syncing service between my computers, that has the added benefit of:

• Disaster recovery from the cloud.
• Quick sharing of folders with other DB users.
• Quick sharing with anyone using public DB links.
• Access to files using their website or mobile client.
• Simple versioning support for files I'm not checking into a repository.

Dropbox is different from most cloud services, because if they disappear I still have all my files. They are on MY computer, not just the cloud, and that makes a big difference.

I don't see the synergy here. Maybe they do. But the services seem completely disparate.

Developers develop on NVIDIA because their drivers are better. Flat out better. More compliant, reliable, etc. This has been true for a long time... id Software's Carmack wrote about this years ago, and the situation has not improved since then.

While I agree, mostly, I should point out that Polygamy causes similar harm to society as a whole as selective abortion of female children. It causes an excess of unattached (and frustrated) young males, which increases local violence and society's predilection for violent resolution of disagreement... ie, war.

This is very useful to me; I often have trouble picking my wife out of a crowd. Mom, who has prosopagnosia (unable to identify faces) will also appreciate it. This kind of task, supplementing human failings, is exactly what we need. Many people don't need it; I'm sure most people will be as good or better than Glass at seeing friends in a crowd. But for those of us who are not? Useful!

I don't need a calculator to figure out which package of rice is the best-per-pound at the supermarket (when it is not labeled clearly), while my wife does. Should I say calculators are useless or stupid, just because I don't need them for that use case?

Sorry, but PHP is a better example of a bad language than VB6. Not that VB6 was good... but PHP is far worse.

To be fair, they are orbiting. This means that someone just outside the space station is on a slightly different orbital track than the station. Typically this will result in 90 minute (about the length of one orbit) oscillations in position, meaning that from most locations around the ISS, you will cycle back into contact with the station about 90 minutes later unless you gave yourself a notable push away (and even notable pushes would often result in meeting the station again 45 or 90 minutes later).

Orbital dynamics: only the best non intuitive results for the past 60 years.

Nice and informative, but a bit confusing. LoL, an eSport title, is about four times larger (# of players) than Dota 2. Can you explain why you count Starcraft 2 and Dota 2 as the top two e-Sport titles, yet do not include the 'most notable' Leage of Legends?

(Disclaimer: I play Dota 2, and not LoL; I am not a LoL fanboy, just curious about the appearant contradiction)

I don't understand, actually. TPB proudly displays the anti-copyright symbol (Kopimi), so are they not explicitly granting permission to use their HTML and CSS? While the CIAPC are dicks, it seems hypocritical to grant permission to copy only when they like the person.

Only some people can stomach it as a career (I love it, but I'm Abby Norma), but once you rise above the rank and file of read-the-script jobs, there are a lot of IT assistance jobs that benefit from someone with years of experience working with computers. Generally when you are one of two or three IT Help Desk for a business, you have to be more knowledgeable and flexible than a mere script can cover, and many businesses are smart enough to compensate accordingly.

There is still the need to learn new things and keep up to date on the latest operating systems, but a bit less of the '20 year olds can do it better' stigma, because it is demonstrably false; young people are often poor at the customer support side of the equation, and rarely have the breadth of experience necessary to troubleshoot issues calmly when the user is frustrated or confused. YMMV.