Well, the interest of mainstream contemporary art in a cyber-punk novel may be deemed of interest to /.ers. But I agree with you that this publication is too close to "Drop William Gibson's name and I'll slashdot you".

Surely sometimes it is not quite stupid to, but instead one has to, ignore a certain market area? An extreme example being gas-chamber manufacturers and Nazi Germany?

Them Nazis. Always so helpul when trying to drive our points home.

Apparently, this is what happened with the Nicaraguan Sign Language, one of the latest natural languages to have appeared (on Earth).

Deaf people in Nicaragua used to communicate with hearing relatives using ad-hoc signing. Once the Sandinist revolution increased the schooling of deaf kids in the late 70s, all of these signing schemes surfaced at Nicaraguan schools, and little deaf kids, well, fixed them, and in the process created a real language.

Witty or not, I only needed one post to make it. I meant I deserve Trepidity's retort.

I deserve it :)

It's a pity that they cannot smuggle SETI into the pack. Anyway, if I was a SETI researcher I'd save some of my radiotelescope time to look into the region of space occupied by exoplanets deemed suitable for life by research such as this.

It's a pity that they cannot smuggle SETI into the pack. Anyway, if I were a SETI researcher, I'd save some of my radiotelescope time to look into those exoplanets deemed as suitable for life by research such as this.

If Slashdot it to be trusted, there will soon be a sizeable number of cat brains living in our computers. Does anybody know why cats and not dogs or hamsters?

It doesn't need to be all driven by dishonesty. There may be also the sheer intellectual interest in knowing what follows from a body of doctrine once you add an extra ingredient. It's surely idle -for non-believers, I mean- but it may be an honest piece of harmless fun.

Well, I teach an undergraduate course and avoid using presentation software -which, anyway, would have been Lyx plus Beamer for me-, for largely the kind of reasons advanced in TFA. Most of my colleagues use PowerPoint or something similar this days.

And I'm starting to notice that many students actually prefer the PP-teachers. They want to have the information delivered in formulaic pills, "Concept A stands for blah; Concept B stands for bleh", and this is more easily achieved if the formulae in question are neatly projected on the screen. I could achieve the same effect by dictating, of course, but that's even more boring and less empowering for students that PowerPoint.

Hey, individual orbitals are several orders of magnitude smaller than pentacene molecules.

It is one thing to establish that some statement is true -i. e., getting to know it-; it is another thing to prove it true, if proving involves something like perfect certainty. Knowledge does not entail certainty, thinking otherwise is simply bad epistemology.

So you may be right that science cannot prove statements right (I do not wish to advance judgement about this), but this is still compatible with science being in the business of securing truths, attaining knowledge about the world.

Well, there has been some philosophy of science since, and much of it has been realist.
This is an option that, if workable, is preferable. Many philosophers of science believe it is workable -although admittedly, some don't.

> The worst, that could happen for a physicist, would be that the observations could be explained with GR.

This kind of (extremely common) remarks strike me as frivolous. It is one thing to say that physicists enjoy being disproved, because this shows the length of the road ahead; it is another thing to say that physicists would hate to attain knowledge in one particular area or other. Science is in the business of securing truths, not in the business of idly advancing ever-refutable theories.

Not that I wish to start a heady argument, but I doubt the result of replacing your brain with a chip would still be you.