Difficult to get rid of the abstract part since a name is by definition an abstract identifier. Not sure what a non-abstract name would look like. Wacky just a qualitative opinion but it is true that some names are more easily remembered than others, which names are more easily remembered varies depending on the persons life experience, all people remember lyrical names and phrases much more easily than tongue twisters and phone numbers. However once mastered, a tongue twister is hard to forget.

Yahoo - In pre-internet Australia the word "yahoo" was slang for a hyperactive idiot. The lead role in the movie Young Einstein was played by an Aussie comedy actor who stage name is "Yahoo Serious" (a contradiction in terms).

Whatsapp - is a play on "What's up?".

Tumblr - I will give you that one, it's missing an 'e'.

nerds give the things [snip] unuseful names - That's because many nerds understand a name doesn't tell you anything about the widget you're looking at.

We've never had it better here in fact, than since that monstrosity of a union disappeared, and Russians could have had it just as good, were it not for Putin.

And yet when either old age or an "accident" does Putin in, the next leader will be about the same or worse. Putin might make a passable impression of a supervillain, but he's just a man; he didn't beat people into submission with his superpowers, he rose to power because he's the kind of person who gets power in a country like Russia.

So no, Russians couldn't have had it just as good were it not for Putin. Some details would be different, but the country would still be just as authoritarian and obsessed with domination. Lenin did away with the outer trappings but not the inner essence of Czarism, and added a cartful of "ends justify the means" to the mix, which then made Stalin the best available match for the resulting muderous abomination. The later leaders then renounced Stalin but not the essence of the system, and the ball simply kept rolling until the empire collapsed. But even then only the symbols and forms of Russian institutions changed, while the heart of the system went to live on. Which then led to Putin's being the next behind to keep the throne of Czars warm.

Until something is done to its national psychosis, Russia will always be a country where a leader like Putin is the best people can hope for, since he's the least nasty embodiment of Russian national spirit (which still makes him pretty damn nasty). Did I say leader? Because all decisions of importance are made by the nature of the Russian system, and Putin simply handles the logistics of implementing them, getting his share of the loot as payment.

Every country has the government it deserves, and Russia is no exception.

We don't want to be separated with friends by national borders just because some moron wants a toy state to play with.

National borders don't need to separate people any more than, say, city limits do. In a free country, crossing the border is a formality, and many neighbour states have dispensed with even those. It's empires who make a huge deal of borders; normal nations treat them as legislation handover points.

Shunning might work. Unvaccinated kids don't pose a medical danger to vaccinated kids, but they are a potential emotional liability since they may die for a tragically preventable reason. If we say we don't want our vaccinated kids to get close to unvaccinated kids to avoid a possible emotional wound, then that places a lot of social pressure on the issue. Shunning is one of the cruelest things to do, so we ought to be sure the problem is really worth taking such steps. It's been working for smoking though.

I'm not smart enough for some of the XKCD strips...

Hell, I'm not smart enough for Garfield.

I don't know what you understand under socialist and dictatorship, but these 2 terms are mutually exclusive. USSR was fascist.

USSR was a secular theocracy. It treated Marxism - or "Dialectic Materialism" - as revealed truth, and as theocrats usually do, made more shit up as it went along. If and when reality disagreed with revelation, it got ignored or violently suppressed. And it never really changed: people got tired and disappointed with their prophet, just like they'd gotten tired and disappointed with the Czar earlier, and abandoned him. But the spirit of autocracy - the myth of divine leader - lived on, thus Putin is now enthroned as the new Czar, just like Stalin before him. Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.

And no, USSR was not fascist. Fascism and Stalinism are both manifestations of something far older and nastier, a sickness that to some extent pervades all human societies. All who try to build a utopia reach the point where it seems the goal is just within range if they only sacrifice a few people to reach it. If they don't, the paradise remains flawed, and if they do, it turns into a nightmare - just like Soviet Union and various fascist regimes did.

Of course, the US also did exactly that to win the Cold War, and it seems the bill is now coming due. Time will tell how far the "land of the free" will fall before what it's unleashed is done with it.

I hope you encrypt everything on those drives, just in case your bag is lost or stolen.

I didn't say I carry the bag around. I keep it locked in a massive safe buried underground.

It's not as convenient, but it sure is secure. Except from flooding, but that's a different story. I can't actually get to the data, but it's there. Secure. But not from floods. I'm going to have to think about sealing it in impenetrable waterproof material, but I can't afford that because the password to my online banking is on one of those SD cards, in the bag, in the safe, 20 feet underground.

You see how complicated my life is.

I picked tomatoes and various other commercial vegetable crops in the early 80's (Australia), even back then they had mechanical harvesters. Hand picked tomatoes were the "cream of the crop", you pick them for about 2-4 weeks when the crop starts ripening, they are early to market and good quality so the farmer gets top dollar. However once the contract date* comes up for the entire crop to be harvested they were
mechanically harvested and ended up in cans and/or sauce bottles. Same with peas, a 1980's era pea harvester could pick the peas, pod them, wash, snap freeze, and bag them. Again "shop peas" were picked by hand and sold with their pods intact before the crop was at the optimum point for mechanical harvesting.

* - Large commercial vegetable crops are often sold on contract before they are even planted. The thing about tomatoes (other than copper coloured hands from the chemicals on them), is that a heavy summer downpour will cause a ripe tomato to swell to the point it's skin bursts. When such a scenario occurs all the mechanical harvesters are in full demand since everyone wants their tomato crop picked before it turns into tomato sauce and simply drips onto the ground. The farmer doesn't wait days/weeks for a harvester turns up. While it is raining he will be recruiting as many pickers as he can at a higher dollar rate per bin. From my experience the extra dollars did not make up for the futility of trying to fill a half ton wooden vegetable bin with tomato jelly.

As to TFA, unless they set up the whole plot as a hydroponic farm there's no way it's going to significantly reduce the food bill for ~1500 people. However I think that's the wrong way to look at the project, TFA compares the farm to a public park, pool or golf course in conventional towns, it's nice if such amenities can pay for their own upkeep but profit (in dollar terms) is not the goal. If nothing else the people in the community who use it will gain a much greater appreciation of where their food comes from and just how much planning, hard work and patience is involved in growing something edible and eating it before some other critter does.

I see you bought a nice bunch of cherries from Anthony Watts.
Sadly the only thing it proves is your (and Judith Curry's) lack of education on the subject of statistics. Note I am actually being generous here by assuming that Curry doesn't understand her mistakes.

Weather forcasts are NOT based on trends found in any data set, they are based on the laws of physics and chemistry, they use the same "finite element analysis" techniques found in numerical wind tunnels and other engineering models that are used to build everything from bridges to aircraft. Archival data is used to test the "skill" of the model by making "hindcasts" and comparing them to the instrumental record.

Climate is basically the long term statistics of weather - meaning a hundered year trend in temprature is a climate statistic, not a weather trend. Climate models and weather models are more or less the same thing using different spacial and temporal parameters, climate statistics such as temprature trends are a completely seperate line of evidence to climate modelling.

But the fact that electric car advocate geeks will take issue with the above scenario and will make endless excuses for their technology and will dismiss very legitimate practical concerns with electric says a lot about how detached from reality the electric car movement really is right now.

Poe's law strikes again.

Once you can replace an 18 wheeler's diesel engine with an electric drive system, then you've changed the world and made a real impact on emissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_locomotive

It's a pity Tesla's wireless transmission of electricity didn't work, otherwise all vehicles would be electric.

The NSA hasn't been cancelled, or even had a major budget cut. Ergo clearly bad government programs and agencies continue. Has even one person responsible for that mess been fired?

Why would they be? The NSA "gets the job done". The job it's doing is dirty, but the fault for that lies on the feet of the people who gave it its mandate - ultimately American people.

Besides, even if the NSA was destroyed, the problem that gave it birth would still exist: taking national security to be a concern overriding all other considerations, including rights of individuals. As long as America is more important than Americans, something like the NSA will always exist.

My city (Melbourne, Oz) is on the upper edge of the southern ocean's "roaring forties", there are a few windmills dotted around the state but for some reason we are still fully reliant on brown coal for electricity, a mine that feeds the coal plants recently caught fire and burnt for a month resulting in the town of Morwell being partially evacuated due to the toxic cloud from the fire. Looking at it from a purely logical POV, it's fucking insane!

The US is a paradox. From the very beginning of talks in the late 80's US foreign policy has sought to derail any coordinated global effort to curb GHG emissions, often being the sole roadblock to progress, yet at the same time they have (on a per capita basis) built more wind power capacity than anyone else?