So is this 30x higher than the 100x higher that was reported here on Slashdot a few months ago? http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1641232/Universe-Has-100x-More-Entropy-Than-We-Thought

You need vitamin D, sunlight, and working kidneys in order to render it useful. You can get all the vitamin D you want in your diet, but without sunlight, it cannot be converted into a usable form by the kidneys. This is why they put northern Swedish and Norwegian kids under sun lamps for a few minutes every day. Thankfully, you really only need a few minutes of direct sunlight to covert enough vitamin D to last a while.

For such an interesting result, its a bit surprising that they went for "The Journal of Neural Engineering". Impact factor = 2.7. Only been around since 2004. I don't want to denigrate science that gets published in lower-impact journals (because lots of good stuff ends up there), but the impact here is not congruous with the potential scientific and social ramifications of the results. I think some of the issues raised above might have something to do with it.

I can only hope that this heavy-lift launch system will support a public option with early buy-in and that none of this NASA budget will be appropriated to state-supported abortions. Otherwise, it will apparently have a hard time getting through the senate.

LIDAR; bred for its skills and magic.

So basically this is not permanent at all, just subject to the whims of yet another overlord.

Of note, this is single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping, and NOT sequencing. Only 700K common variants will be genotyped. While individuals could certainly be identified in the database by their SNPs (as few as 24), this project does not employ high-throughput sequencing. The title of the summary is misleading.

So I can tell my wife that I cannot cook dinner tonight because the result would be so abhorrent that nature might send an agent back in time to destroy me before I can create it. Ergo, any movement toward making dinner could very well result in my demise...so let that be on her conscience.

I agree with this. While it sounds like mere rationalization to sell more ads, the reality is that ads are everywhere, and if you want realism, you need to replicate everything in the environment, including those pesky advertisements. I notice the fake ads in some games all the time, and it is a little jarring and detracts from the immersive experience.

Mod this guy up. As someone from a field who tries to separate signal from noise and develop predictive models on a daily basis (in supposedly well-controlled conditions) I can say that they have their work cut out for them. I mean, I use proven methodologies in clear-cut and well-designed experiments and end up with data that is extremely difficult to manipulate (genome wide association studies). These guys/gals are trying to observe millions of humans interacting in indiosyncratic and complex ways with millions of input-points, and they think they can use that data? Talk about multiple-testing correction. Bonferroni is the tip of the iceberg in such a data-set. The scary thing is, if you set something like this up, you will get "answers". It might be the result of a random walk, but who in the "jury of your peers" is going to understand that defense? "But your honor, they didn't even define an acceptable false discovery rate!"

I, for one, welcome our new web-crawling pan-european overlords.

So a bunch of people who don't like the way the police department is being run post anonymously what they don't like (i.e. "The Chief blows goats"). While this may not be particularly constructive, what kind of message do you send by "out-ing" these posters publicly? You basically give the dissenters a Streisand effect, and prove that you actually do, in fact, blow goats -- thereby increasing the pool of dissenters.

Did I step on your dog or something? Previous posters have suggested that there should be a separate systems for EMR software and everything else. I said that wouldn't work very well in the current system, one in which I spend over 100 hours per week. As the primary target end-user for the EMR system, I think I am qualified to at least render an opinion on it. Nowhere in my post did I presume to tell you how to do your job, whatever that happens to be. Perhaps "news for nerds" should be amended to "news for sysadmins and software designers, who may or may not be nerds at all, but who certainly have disinclination towards anyone who makes a comment even tangentially related to their profession." Then at least I'll know to take my comments elsewhere.

Green = "Go ahead, let your guard down, see what happens" Yellow = "There is a new budget up for vote, and if you don't give DHS more money the terrorists win" Red = "Imminent threat, only direct intervention by Steven Segal can prevent global disaster" Black = "We told you this would happen if you didn't give DHS more money"

This is all happening at such a horrible confluence of bad timing for NASA. Stimulus package + healthcare overhaul + war + recession = bad time to convince taxpayers to fund moon trips. I support most of the above initiatives, but at the end of the day, there really is only so much money to go around.