I've seen a presentation by a perceptual scientist who was doing a study for the TSA on false alarm rates (both false positive where they detect something that shouldn't have been detected, and false negatives where they miss something that should have been seen). It turns out that boredom in agents watching the scanner monitors is a serious problem and that if there aren't enough items to detect, the agents become complacent and the false negative rate goes up. False negatives result in serious security breaches, like guns getting on planes. Say what you like about the TSA, false negatives are a problem. So, according to this presentation, x-ray scanners have a mechanism to insert fictitious objects into the images to keep the agents sharp. That's why you get asked to go through your hand luggage every now and then even though there's absolutely nothing that could be considered suspicious: the false positive rate is raised so that the false negative rate can be reduced to near zero.

And, to bring this back to the quote above, this is, essentially, a "beep anyway" button, only it isn't under direct TSA staff control.

As pointed out, a 1% increase is not keeping pace with inflation, and is therefore a decrease in real dollars. The baked-in numbers for a typical grant allow approximately 3% year-to-year inflation, so 1% more money means every funded grant will see a reduction of 2% in buying power, on average (how would you feel about taking a 2% pay cut next year?). Also, since government agencies have already encumbered budgets for the most part (that is, most of their budget goes toward funding existing grants) a decrease in real dollars means it will become even HARDER to get a new grant in the future. It's already hit insane levels of difficulty to get an award: a given project can go from being evaluated near the top of the heap to don't-even-bother-us levels from one year to the next through the random, capricious nature of the review process (and I speak from hard experience on this). When only a few percent of grant applications are being funded, each selection is no longer purely a meritocratic decision. That is neither good for the US, nor for Science.

The idea of appearance creep happened when the US car manufacturers figured out that they could make boatloads of money by taking the same old mechanicals and putting a new body on top each year (back before unibody designs, when it was a trivial amount of engineering and manufacturing adjustments to create new body panels compared with making a completely new car design; nowadays with the body being an integral part of the structural scaffold, changing the appearance is not quite as easy). It happened in the 1950s, the age of prosperity and upward mobility, when the US middle class was created and the need to keep up with Jones firmly established in the national psyche. We, Americans, were told that we needed to buy, buy, buy and having the latest and greatest was always best.

I've talked to a number of people about this, as parts of my family are against same-sex marriage. Me, I don't care. But the people who do claim that allowing same-sex marriage dilutes the meaning of marriage, something that was heretofore only allowed between heterosexual couples. While I understand the argument in a strict technical sense, given that a far greater threat to the meaning of marriage comes from the rampant divorce rate, I don't see the reason to get all huffed about it. Especially since, ultimately, the blessing by some large institution, be it the state or a religious order, has no real bearing on whether the two members of couple are committed to each other or not.

So, to re-iterate, people who are against gay marriage (at least some of them) think that expanding the definition of marriage is not maintaining the status quo because it changes the idea.

If you want to get your head all twisted, though, have a look at Sharia marriage law. Nothing like the Western stuff we're talking about here, and a much deeper challenge to the status quo.

Exactly. Consider the thermostat to be collateral damage.

(Now why the thermostat was running Windows and not a stripped-down application-specific program without even an OS is undoubtedly due to sloth on the part of the thermostat manufacturer. It's a frelling thermostat after all, even if it is remotely controllable over an ethernet connection.)

Lectures are marvelous, if you, the student, has put in enough effort to be able to actually concentrate for a full hour. I've taught a lot. I've won awards for my teaching. I often brag that if I was able to teach my non-mathematically inclined cousin enough algebra to get a B in his college course (we were the same age at the time, so perhaps tutoring is a better term), I can teach just about anyone just about anything. The key is that the student must be motivated.

So, why are lectures good for that? If you can watch a video of a lecture at any point, most students aren't going to bother, or are going to put off watching until the last possible second. When they watch the video, they can be easily distracted by phone calls, tweets, pulling out their phone to surf something else that came into their head, their roommates coming home, their dogs needing to go for a walk, whatever. When you're in lecture (at least one of my lectures), such distractions do not happen. Distractions make learning impossible. Having a live lecture that happens at a given time and at no other, means students must arrange their schedules to be there. A few will make even more effort and will be awake and prepared. I make it clear in my lectures that everyone is expected to be that way: awake and prepared. I call on people, even in the big lecture halls. I'm tough. I expect a lot, I assign a ton of work, and I grade hard. But students learn, and learn a tremendous amount.

Although I can teach, such lectures aren't for everyone, clearly. I don't hand-hold, unless the student absolutely requires it, and then only in a one-on-one session ... and usually that brief hand-holding jumpstarts the students out of their overwhelmed haze and they do pretty well.

Contents of Address Register
Contents of Data Register

And exactly how are you going to play that tape to digitize it?

The point in having a player for a given format is that there is minimal effort involved in playing content. Converting content to a new format always seems to be problematic. I bought a big box full of classic movies on VHS for next to nothing at a yard sale -- the cost (in time and money) to convert isn't worth the $20 VHS player I have hooked up in my system.

Bear in mind that unlike CDs and DVDs that can be ripped in faster-than-real-time, VHS players don't allow for 10x or 12x (or whatever multiplier DVD drives are up to these days) playback with clean results. Thus, ripping a movie on VHS tape takes a long time. While that doesn't have to be necessarily when you view the content, if it's a tape that will be viewed only once or twice, what's the point of going through that labor when, again, a cheapo VHS player will do the trick just fine.

Or, just as short-sighted (and more common) is the idea that somehow that bit of matter got stuck in time and has remained impervious to the forces of random genetic mutation and evolution through the intervening years. Same idea comes across when we land on some asteroid, or explore some new bit of Mars, and loudly declare that it is a sample of matter left over from the birth of the solar system, or some such huey, as if it popped through a portal in time. The forces of nature still act on such things, even if they've been isolated from more large-scale interactions.

Lake Vostok might (we think) have been sealed off for a very long time, but that doesn't mean it's a glimpse into the past, but, rather, a glimpse into a different version of the present.

If you read the linked article, it all sounds very interesting, and reasonable plausible, and even perhaps worth serious investigation. That is, until you hit first the part that sounds like a crank complaining about being ignored by mainstream science, and then the absurd notion that the fusion reaction in stars can only ignite from a running fission core (where did that fissile material come from then?), or the equally absurd notion that thermonuclear bombs are proof that stars can ignite in that way.

That said, I'm glad that someone took the idea of a sustaining nuclear reactor seriously enough to test it.