That's so funny. You're a funny guy. In my language, a cattle trader is a synonym for a crook ("un maquignon").

I really wonder what would happen if you kept a kid in the dark and only taught him about quantum mechanics... Would the understanding be more innate ? Or would the fact that we still need to explain it in everyday words and usual reality-based maths lead to the same interpretations ? Yeah, I'd make a terrible father.

You are talking about the magnetic pole (which wanders a lot, and may or may not shift in the coming millenia, not decades as you state) while the article is about the geographic pole which is the axis of rotation of the mound of dirt and water we call Earth. And it's also different from the precession of the equinoxes which also cycles in about 26000 years (changing the polar star to something different than the current Polaris).

...or I WILL punch you in the mouth. It's impossible to clean it up completely. Nor do I want to.

One of the most interesting project I've seen in crop research is about a group which tries to transform seasonal plants into multi-year ones. Instead of planting barley/corn/... every year, you just cut it off (or just take the fruits) and it regrows the next year. The advantages are many: deeper roots (needs less water, holds the soil better), no need to turn the soil over every year (less 'dust bowl'), allows local biodiversity (nests), more resistance to various pests, etc...

They are trying to achieve this by crossing with similar plants which have this property and not, IIRC, by using GMO.

There's no such thing as 'passing' when everybody is going 55 and going 56 will net you an automated fine.

Yes, same technique in Italy. During a trip I counted something like 10 different areas with restricted lanes (or lane changing side) and traffic cones on the highway, some as long as 15km, and not a single worker to be seen. One such area has been like that for over 15 years.

In France it depends. I like the technique they use on the Paris beltway: they shut it down at 10pm, move all the equipment at once under floodlights, work on only 10 to 50 meters, clean up everything and reopen by 6am. Repeat the next night on the next 10 to 50 meters. But it's expensive and the planning must be held tight no matter what otherwise the city can shut down the next day!

I have a 13 year old laptop running Kubuntu fine. Sure, you don't get animated cubes or shit like that, but most videos play fine and the web is no slower.

Err, must be very recent then. I use Fedora on many of my work systems for lib compatibility, but every update is a nightmare of .rpm dependencies. I've never seen that happen with .deb

Good, finally someone thanking them.

It's amazing how much Linux tastes can vary. I like Kubuntu, I have another colleague who likes Unity Ubuntu. Another one goes for Mint, another some version of Linux I can't remember, some go for plain Fedora, etc...

"scp -C" will compress as it transfer, no need to gzip.

I like the following definition of intelligence which is short and goes way beyond 'the ability to do maths': "the ability to reach a correct solution given incomplete information".

I laughed out loud at the 'beef tensors' !

I haven't used Matlab in 10 years, but I was under the impression that some kind of matrix computations were offloaded to the GPU starting at about that time. Was I wrong?