Personally, I suspect exclusive parenthood by biological progenitors might do more harm then good. We're herd animals, and it's best if there's a whole tribe that takes care of our young. That there's a male and female in privileged position is just an artifact of how reproduction used to work, and science has fixed that.

Of course there's a theoretical solution and you can give it as a power series. The three-body problem just can't be solved via first integrals, and the power series is pretty much useless for practical purposes as it converges too slowly.

Keep in mind that while Heinlein did not use the term 'space marine' in Starship Troopers, he used it in some of his other stories, among them Misfit.

And a hypothetical Perl5++ would be developed in parallel to Perl6. Just because C++ was officially relased first did not stop adoption of Objective-C.

D is not meant as a successor of C++, but a replacement. The relationship between Perl5++ and Perl5, Perl6 and Perl5, Perl5++ and Perl6 would be pretty close to the relationship between C++ and C (mostly compatible superset), D and C (new language with cleaner semantics, more comprehensise featureset but still close in spirit), C++ and D (siblings with shared heritage) except for the fact that Perl6 would predate Perl5++.

A C#-inspired language leveraging the GObject object system that compiles to C.

ES3:ES4:ES5 == Perl5:Perl6:Perl5++, except that Perl5++ is a pipe dream right now and Perl6 not dead.

That's a pretty bold claim

And you can't make an object-oriented successor to C because there's already C++, right? Look at Objective-C, D, Vala, just to name the more popular ones: Language evolution is not linear. Also, ECMAScript 4.

There are two efforts under way right now to do just that.

That should have read "I imagine the rationale goes something like this"

(I was hit by a 503/Guru Meditation while previewing and accidentally submitted)

I image the rational goes something like this:

The quality of the software you use for work affects your livelihood. You should be allowed to hire the programmer of your choice to improve it.

Because vendor lock-in is a form of monopoly and interferes with free market economy. In general, it's not possible to hire the programmer of your choice to enhance the software you own, and RMS considers this unethical.

My point is that science advances by trial and error, and you'll only know after the fact that it was a bad idea.

Radioactivity? Totally safe, have some glowing toothpaste. Lobotomy? Revolutionary treatment, have a Nobel prize. Asbestos? We know it's deadly, but it's big money and we need those warships, so let's not tell anyone.

Look at what happened to Biosphere 2, the gene flow from engineered crops into the wild and the suspected contribution of MON810 to the demise of polish bees. Even if you accept that the big corporations act in good faith (and given the evidence, that's a pretty big assumption) the fact remains that science cannot really answer the question of innocuousness beforehand, so don't begrudge me my feelings of unease about global-scale bioengineering projects in the name of progress and capitalism.

Personally, I believe we should be very careful with the use of genetically modified crops, especially considering historical evidence of what can go wrong with new discoveries, scientific consensus can change drastically, the impact of greed and backroom politics.

This is by no means a quantum perversion, just a natural consequence of the definition of temperature as 1/T = dS/dE. There's nothing mysterious about negative temperatures from a thermodynamical point of view, it just happens that calssical systems don't exhibit this property because they do not come with an upper limit on energy, whereas there are quantum ones that do.

The common interpretation of temperature as average energy per degree of freedom comes in via the equipartition theorem, but breaks down in various edge cases, eg when the energy levels cannot be approximated by continuity (eg heat capacity of diatomic gases) or for non-ergodic systems (some plasmas, I believe).

As to the problem of infinite temperature: In a sense, thermodynamic \beta = 1/kT is the more natural measure of hotness and coldness and has a pole at T = 0. Coming from T > 0, this corresponds to infinite coldness, whereas coming from T < 0, this corresponds to infinite hotness.

Actually, I can imagine such a system working quite well. Just like gradians, the day would be divided in 400 units (let's call them grad for now as well).

A centigrad would end up being 2.16 seconds, the grad is 3 minutes 36 seconds, ten grad or one decagrad is 36 minutes and a day 40 decagrad. I believe this would cover the various use cases reasonably well.

Considering the amount of propaganda and descriptions of atrocities committed in the name of God, I find the Bible (as well as many other historical scripture) mostly disturbing and sometimes amusing (the penalty for having sex with livestock, ridiculous claims of old age probably due to mistranslation, ...).

Also, taking into account the number of past and present religious belief systems as well as the amount of modern fiction, I don't consider these stories particularly extraordinary, but I agree that this deep-seated need for meaning you mention is fundamental to human nature:

- Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Science of Discworld II

As an aside, I find it quite surprising that a lot of people self-identifying as Christian (as in: follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ) aren't as disturbed by the Bible as I am. Frankly, I don't cosider such people Christian at all, as they have made the Bible their golden calf instead of heeding the word of their living god.

While not considering himself an atheist, Einstein's views on the Judeo-Christian religion are pretty explicit:

It isn't (or shouldn't be) about background radiation levels, but concentration and type of radioactive isotopes: The problem is continued direct exposure through bioaccumulation.