Universal, no, but physicists agree, and, really, who else matters? X-rays are emitted by electrons (atomic transitions or bremsstrahlung); gamma rays by nuclear transitions. Those definitions have been pretty well agreed upon by physicists for at least the last 15 years.

Astronomers, however, seem to characterize photons only by energy, which kind of makes sense if you realize that they frequently don't know the origin of the observed photons and build instruments for energy ranges instead.

But nonetheless it is still incorrect to characterize these photons as "x-rays."

Unfortunately, in this case the observed photons were actually low-energy gamma rays. I guess they are called "x-rays" in the article because they fall into the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that is usually associated with x-rays. Ti-44 undergoes electron capture to Sc-44, which emits the two gamma rays at 78 and 68 keV, and then the Sc-44 decays (again by electron capture) to Ca-44.

But they are not true x-rays.

But the entire purpose of mass transit is social engineering. It has nothing to do with getting people from one place to another safely and efficiently. That's just the bait they use to get voters to approve the systems.

The statement to which I responded was not wrong in some minor detail, but completely wrong.

How are scientists ever going to convince a doubting public when we endorse complete nonsense like this just because it doesn't contradict our favored position?

You may not like it, but science is (at least partly) about facts, and facts matter.

Which of course begs the question of why if its not getting warmer all the world's glaciers are simultaneously receding a a record pace not previously observed in human history.

Really? All of them? Wow! Who knew?

At a pace never previously seen in human history? Including the end of the last Ice Age? Amazing!

With facts like yours, who could possibly doubt?

So in your mind Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes have no correlation. OK. Go here:

http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php

Global data. Western Pacific ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) is still slightly below average for the year, and worldwide ACE is only about 75% of normal. Does that help?

Um, not exactly.

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/11/us-hurricane-intensity-1900-2012.html

Um, no. Ever hear of Bell's inequality?

Wow. In the words of Pauli, that is not even wrong.

First off, the wavefunction is not a statistical function. And "wavefunction" includes that "wave" word for a very good reason. You are, I suspect, perfectly capable of reading an introductory quantum mechanics text. You just have chosen not to and yet feel the need to spout nonsense as if you were an expert.

Neither the two-slit experiment nor the three-polarizing filters experiment show anything particularly quantum mechanical. Both would work just fine if light were a pure wave.

Umm.... isn't that what quantum mechanics is about? That everything can be described by a wavefunction (i.e. as a "pure wave?") Even if it weren't so, the three-polarizer experiment is an excellent demonstration of the counterintuitive properties of projections, which is key to understanding QM.

The crime here is our news outlets have such blatant bias, and very little dedication to journalism and conveying the facts to the masses.

That has always been the case, the various news outlets' claims to the contrary notwithstanding. It doesn't bother me as much as the obvious willingness of people to abandon the First Amendment protections for a news source they don't agree with.

You'd think Slashdotters would be intelligent enough to separate the principle from the actors. Oh, wait. This is Slashdot. My bad.

Of course the answer is that this isn't really about the quality of teaching, it's about xenophobia.

Your mind-reading ability is astonishing! Somehow you are able to get into the minds of the people involved and you know their motivation! Have you ever considered running for office?

Actually, there is a very good psychological term for what you are doing here. It's called projection. Since you would do this from some xenophobic motivation, you assume that everyone else must, as well, since it's impossible to imagine people who think differently than you do.

It's worth pointing out that the mass of neutrinos has never been directly measured. The "mass" to which we refer is the mass required for a mixing matrix between the neutrino flavors. A more exotic definition of "mass" would be required if the current experimental result were to hold, in such a way that neutrinos wouldn't have "mass" in the sense to which we refer today.

That's all speculative, of course, but the important point is, again, that the neutrino mass has never been directly measured. I know. I tried.

Been a long time since I looked into it. He may have a novel implementation of the Vicenty formulae. A computational geometry paper may publish it, but probably it is easier (and less burocratic) to do so on a smaller conference.

The Vincenty formula is just a truncated series expansion. it's fast and pretty stable except near antipodal points. It has plenty of accuracy for real-world applications. Any improvement would need to be in speed or in stability for antipodal points.