An aside: Be careful what you wish for (lower cancer rates), treating cancer as a terminal condition might be cheaper than treating it as a disease then turning around and also paying for heart failure as the terminal condition. By the way, Total Cost of Ownership type analyses are really frowned on in a society that has disconnected health care costs from the health care consumers. So go ahead and pick from the menu 'cause the kids'll pick up the bill (a switch on the usual parents-as-ATMs, no?).

New regs are all about making it harder to fly, so we can reduce our carbon footprints, so we can delay the end of the current ice age by another 100 years (it's coming whether we all start walking yesterday).

Hey, remember 1945? Don't make me open up another can o' whoop-ass on you.

I'll bet if you do the regression analysis to predict success you would find the coefficient on "ethnicity" large and statistically significant while the coefficient on "race" was small and statistically insignificant, which is to say that "ethnicity" (culture, nurture and life style) is important and "race" (genes and biology) is not. But then, I am just a mathematician working in medical research and am not a political scientist working in the surreal world.

But correlation is not causation, and "personal testimonials (n=1)" are not "evidence-based analysis (n>>1)". Try looking at a few GOOD clinical trials and see what you think then.

Now that MN is a political monoculture (the Governor and both House and Senate (state level) are Democratic) I am going to propose to my fellow Libertarians and the estimated 20-30% of the rational Republicans that we " New Hampshire " the MN Democratic party, so that when we discuss (for example) how bad defined benefits state pension plans are when compared with defined contribution plans, that debate is carried on within the ruling class rather than between the two competing ruling classes. Only this way can we shed the religious conservatives, with their big-government social agenda, who have hijacked the Republican party. We will carry our sustainable is important thinking along as we attempt to teach economics to the Democrats (who deny economic science the way the Republicans deny evolutionary science).

Freedom first, then peace, then justice. You can't have justice without peace because for that is mob tyranny.. You cannot have peace without freedom for that is slavery. And you have to deliver them to yourself in the only order that can sustain itself during the transitions. Freedom first. Then peace. Then justice.

This is such a fun topic, but it makes me glad that most of my programming is math and stats and I can leave the GUI and interfaces programming to better and more tightly wound coders than I. All I ask is that the mouse cursor not make me curse, the touchpad interface not make me touchy and the help files all be accessible through Google.

As a mathematician and a Republican low-level activist I am constantly muttering that HFT is antithetical to the free market. If you give me a white board I can show you why, but then I look like Ross Perot.

I tell you, this IS the Zombie Apocalypse ... these mind-less nutjobs are going to take over the world based on the simple math that says they kill us for any excuse and we only kill them if we have to. [conspiracy alert] I wonder if the West's strategy is as simple as (1) insult some 1800-year old belief structre, (2) wait for the nut jobs to stick up their heads, (3) shoot them, (4) repeat 1-3 till silence prevails.[/conspiracy alert]

Watching the news feeds from the Middle Eastern street in reaction to "Innocence of Mohammed" makes me think the Zombie Apocalypse is already here ...

As part of my professional life I have coded and used the genetic algorithm, have read extensively on it, and I am constantly amazed by the cognitive dissonance that must make it nearly impossible for the social-liberal-economic-liberals (aka, the "left") to think clearly. The genetic algorithm is arguably the single most powerful algorithm we know of because of its ability to solve problems that are not even stated to be problems. Yet believing in the genetic algorithm is essentially to believe in evolution, while believing in free-markets is essentially to believe in the genetic algorithm. Both are driven by the mathematics that use "success" as a predictor of future existence, whether we are discussing a genetic line (e.g., rats) or an economic line (fast food corporations). Still, one extreme of our political world embraces evolution and rejects free-markets while the other extreme embraces free-markets yet rejects evolution (remember, these ARE the extremes). Unfortunately, correlation is not causation, as this article appears forget in its haste to point out once again that people they don't like are idiots (a classic ad hominum attack).

Please, have none of us seen the Kevin Slavin TEDTALK on this? I had my whole analytical team sitting in my office to watch this one (I'm the mathematician in the group). As a Republican activist I argue that HFT distorts the free-market purpose of the stock markets in a way that violates basic assumptions about the market, and as such can then push to tax short term capital gains at a punishingly high level without "raising taxes" because supporting free-market principles trumps (sorry) supporting lower taxes.

Children's book my aching proboscis. But, like Brave New World, for some collectivists this is a utopia, not a dystopia. Only in a free world can both exist as micro-climes.

Exactly. If at all possible, build a test suite of data that exercises the old program, then make sure the newer versions give identical answers and if possible, generate random data as well to find logic that does not exist except by chance. Don't know how you could do this if your are talking about a GUI program, I am thinking of engineering type problems.