Except, of course, for the countries that make huge sums of money producing land mines, and the countries (and non-country actors) with a grudge against somebody and a disposition to not care who else it blows up.

So according to this site, land mine usage is nearly flat despite the treaty.

It would be great to get the US to give up making land mines, but unfortunately China and Russia would almost certainly ramp up production to fill any shortfall. That's not a good enough reason for us to keep doing it, but it also wouldn't save many lives. (Worse, it deprives us of a negotiating point to try to force reductions from other top producers, but since those negotiations are largely nonexistent anyway that too is a bad reason.)

They're also moving a lot slower. On surface streets they're often not moving much more than 10-12 mph even when they're moving, so they're getting a good view of the whole intersection for quite some time before approaching it. It's even longer when you take into account that they're slowing down.

I have no trouble believing that it's perfectly safe to have cyclists do a rolling stop when they can clearly see a lack of traffic. The pause is so awkward (especially for cyclists wearing clipless cleats) that the acceleration time puts them in more danger in the middle of the intersection than just rolling through when they can.

Well, yes and no. Quantum-mechanically it IS deterministic in the sense that any given quantum state will evolve in a perfectly defined way. There isn't any "random number" in the Schroedinger equation (or its relativistic descendants).

It's really the macro-scale stuff that introduces the randomness. At the quantum scale, things exist perfectly happily in a superposition of two states that we never observe at large scales. The more objects you put together, the harder it is to maintain the superposition, and by the time you get to even microscopic objects it will take one state or the other, but not both. Once it tips slightly in one direction, it cascades, and you end up with something that is entirely X or Y, not (X+Y).

The other half of the wave function is largely a matter of philosophy, not physics. In one sense it's "still there", off in some other utterly inaccessible universe. Or you can say that at some point where you weren't looking the other part just vanished. That's two ways of saying the same thing; the math is the same and the results are the same, regardless.

It's not a question of our inability to measure it. It's simply not there. No advances in physics will make it measurable, not without utterly throwing out everything we know and replacing it with something completely different. Which isn't impossible, but it's purely speculative: physics by "I wanna believe".

Why we end up in "this part" rather than "that part" is, similarly, just idle speculation. I've got my suspicions that if you could, in fact, discuss the wave function of the entire universe you'd say that it could only go one way when you put all of it together, but that's just navel-gazing. It doesn't really matter, since you'll never actually know the wave-function of the universe as a whole. You can only observe a few macro parts of it since you (by definition) are a macro organism, and the total underlying wave function will always be forever shaded from your eyes.

With an oversimplifying assumption that bad, I assumed they were physicists of the "why does your field need a journal anyway" school. Nope, turns out this time it's two computer scientists, somebody in "computation and neural systems", and a business school (!).

News Corp will sell anything they think they can sell. They'll sell science on Fox Broadcasting and paranoia on Fox News. The various properties don't have to get along, so long as they're profitable. Witness this jab at Fox News by The Simpsons, which also appears on Fox Broadcasting:

http://www.thewrap.com/sites/d...

You may be unaware, but the density of solar radiation is only about 6 kWh per meter square per day. That means that each parabolic trench of a square meter is capable of producing only about 10 liters per day. You'd need 100 square meters to provide the water needs of a single ordinary house. And that's assuming 100% efficiency; it's more likely to be at least twice that and quite possibly an order of magnitude, by the time you've shipped it. Then you've got to clean up the gunk, and amortize in the costs of the setup.

I'm all for more solar powered stuff, but it's not the automatic, easy win we'd like it to be, even for something as simple as this. Heating water to the boiling point, only to recondense it a moment later, is expensive. I'm sure that clever design could reuse that heat and reduce the costs, but it's still going to be far from free.

Generally speaking, bars are rather filled with people, so robbing people inside is impractical and a bit silly of an idea even when everyone is supposed to be disarmed.

Robbing them in the parking lot is a possibility -- bars seem to attract crime of all sorts -- but the typical target you want to mug is someone who can't defend themselves. For a bar, that most likely means drunk people, who would be in no condition to defend themselves if they did have a gun; you'd just end up with an escalation of the situation that would most likely work against the armed patron by encouraging the mugger to attack while the patron attempts to draw.

On the other hand, the threat of impulsive, alcohol-fueled murders in a flash of anger is massively increased when you let someone carry a weapon into a bar. 50% of all murders are committed under the influence of alcohol. Allowing guns into bars is a recipe for raising the local homicide rate.

Over 99% of schools will never have a school shooting throughout their lifespan. There were 38 school shootings in 2000-2010 resulting in the deaths of 33 victims (not including the shooter). This number does not include colleges but does include a handful of non-public schools. There are just under 99,000 schools in America, meaning that around 4% of 1% of schools had a shooting, and of those most were single-target attacks or very short opportunistic attacks rather than the slow, deliberate Columbine or Virginia Tech style massacre that people hold up as an example of where a gun might help.

On the other hand, 606 people died of firearms accidents and 19,392 people died of suicide just in 2010 alone. So with that in mind, what exactly do you think would have been solved by bringing guns to a building filled with curious children and emotionally wrought teens other than a lot of opportunities for tragedy.

You have to do a fair threat evaluation. Guns in schools are a far bigger threat than they are a threat neutralizer.

Kind of like avoiding smoking in bars, you may find that the choice simply becomes "don't go to bars." On the other hand, you can tell a smoky bar upon stepping in the door, so those are easy enough to avoid. However, with concealed carry laws, you have no idea if anyone is carrying while drunk until it has become a situation unless the bar has a very clear sign on the door.

Due to a number of court challenges, there is no local governments that are allowed to practice such restrictions anymore, because "there is no 'reasonable' restriction in the eyes of those who wish to [oppose] these laws, save for complete [legalization]." See Heller vs. DC, et al.

Okay, maybe that's a bit too far. Most gun-enthusiasts support restrictions on felons and the mentally ill owning guns, but there are a good number of true gun-nuts that don't, and politics over the last decade has pushed further and further to the fringe on the right. Witness the latest law in right-leaning Georgia to allow concealed carry in bars where people will be intoxicated while armed.

I mean, why did anyone think that was a good idea?

Good choice. I was in Europe recently, and there are a fair number of places that can't handle the chipless cards. (Including, irritatingly, French toll booths, which are fairly frequent and of course far away from any place you could get cash.)