Go read "What Colour are your bits?".

This is, of course, why XCB has taken the Linux universe by storm and everyone has abandoned toolkits like GTK in favor of the unicorns and puppies that XCB brings us. Everyone loves atoms, pixmaps, and server-side bitmap fonts.

What's holding up the plane in the first place, giving the chair the potential energy to shatter on the ground below? Oh, right, the electrostatic repulsion of the electrons in the air pushing against the electrons in the plane's wing.

Seriously, though: gravity is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times weaker than the electromagnetic force.

Both decay 1/d^2, but the chair is electrically neutral (or very close to it), while the Earth is pulling against you with the full might of 10^24 kg of gravitational charge. Because the chair is neutral, it can only hold you up with the residual electromagnetic force, i.e. the fact that electrons and protons aren't evenly smeared throughout the atom's interior, and that's an incredibly weak effect compared to the actual electromagnetic force.

(This, by the way, is why the Electric Universe cranks inhabiting Slashdot are so off-base. Do they really think nobody would notice the un-subtle effects of a force 10^37 times more powerful than gravity?)

I was simplifying things for the audience, and wasn't even remotely about to bring up frame dragging. That said, I'm an interested layman who's never taken a physics class touching GR so correct me if I'm totally off-base, but I'm pretty sure that Hawking's conclusion was initially solved for Schwarzschild black holes, and if so the ergosphere around Kerr black holes clearly doesn't come into it. The region between the photon sphere and the event horizon has no stable orbits, but wouldn't there still be some trajectories that would send a particle out past the photon sphere? (On a more circuitous path than a straight line, I mean.) And the Wikipedia article for the photon sphere says that "[a]ny orbit that crosses [the photon sphere] from the inside escapes to infinity".

I will admit to never having plugged numbers into a tensor equation in my life, so I could be totally bullshitting here.

Both the particle and the antiparticle are affected equally by gravity, but gravity is the weakest force in nature. Think about it: a simple chair, held together by the electromagnetic force, supports you above the ground by counteracting the gravitational attraction of the entire Earth pulling you down.

Since virtual particle pairs start from vacuum, they are always created with equal but opposite momentum. This momentum can't be very big because the attraction between the pair (usually electromagnetic) has to be strong enough to quickly counteract that initial momentum (and bring the particles back together fast enough for them to still count as "virtual"). But just because the momentum can't be very big doesn't mean it can't be big enough for one particle to escape a black hole, if the particles happen to pop into existence with one of them pointing in just the right direction to escape. Hawking predicts that the odds are 50/50 on whether it's the matter particle or the antimatter particle that does the escaping; it has nothing to do with the particles responding differently to gravity.

(Keep in mind that the escaping particle doesn't have to rocket out in a straight line at escape velocity. Instead, it can take a few swings around the black hole in a rapidly decaying orbit, until it slingshots out on a hyperbolic path. The smaller the black hole gets, the more definite the position is for every matter/antimatter particle pair, and by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applied to position-momentum, this makes it easier for one of the two particles to escape. A smaller black hole also has the bonus that, looking out from just above the event horizon, more directions point away from the black hole, giving more chances to escape.)

You could actually make a black hole that radiates away Hawking radiation with a bias toward antimatter over matter, or vice versa. It's easy: black holes can have an electric charge, so just electrically charge the black hole! Like charges repel, so if the black hole is positively charged, it will preferentially eject positrons instead of electrons. However, the absorbed electrons neutralize the black hole's electric charge, bringing it back to neutral and making the Hawking radiation return to a 50/50 ratio between matter and antimatter.

(We suspect that the universe has a small preference for matter over antimatter, and this is why the universe is made of matter. But this mostly happens for some heavy uncharged mesons, not for lightweight simple particles like electrons. Here, "heavy" means "high energy" means "unlikely to appear in Hawking radiation". So the radiation may not strictly be 50/50, but it should be very close.)

I grew up in the Wichita, Kansas area with Tibicen pruinosa. Here's a YouTube video of one singing.

One year (summer of '98?) the cicadas emerged in such numbers that they refused to stop singing at night. A wall of sound, blaring like a siren 24 hours a day, so loud you couldn't escape it indoors. After the first 50 kills on the front porch, my cats didn't know what to do with themselves. Tibicen is an annual genus, so I can only assume that the previous year's generation had simply been... busy.

What does "genetically male" mean? 46,XY? Congratulations, you just excluded men with 47,XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) and 47,XYY (XYY syndrome) as "not male". Presence of a Y chromosome? Congratulations, women with 46,XY who lack the SRY gene (Swyer syndrome) are now "male". Presence of the SRY gene? Congratulations, 46,XY women with SRY but non-functional testosterone receptors (CAIS, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome) are now "male". And those are merely some of the conditions that are diagnosed by hormones and genitalia, without even looking at the giant ball of complexity that is the brain.

Self-identification of gender isn't bullshit 70's pop psychology. It's a practical consideration: science doesn't currently know what triggers male versus female identity in the brain. We know there's a surge of prenatal testosterone in the male fetus, followed by another testosterone surge a few weeks after birth, and that these two surges seem to trigger changes in the brain, but beyond that... hell if we know. We don't even know to what degree male identity is controlled by those testosterone surges versus direct action of SRY, or how many specific biological components there are in the brain that need to be affected. We don't know which circuits in the brain control self-identity ("I am a man/woman") versus proprioception ("my mental body map expects to receive sense data from male/female genitals") versus presentation ("other people see my behavior as feminine/masculine") versus orientation ("I am attracted to women/men"), if there are other categories than the ones I listed, where the lines are between these categories, or how blurry those lines are. Given how stable they are, we can infer that they're hardwired, which means that they must be phenotypes set during development; yet, the easiest way for a doctor to find out how genotype became phenotype in any particular patient is for the doctor to ask that patient to say their own gender identity.

Is it really "privacy" I'm guarding if I try to keep secrets from (a) a non-sentient computer program that (b) will never pass those secrets along to another human being (or even another non-sentient computer program at another company)?

False and false. Relativity matters when you care about nanosecond timing.

I suppose it's up to the manufacturer, but I'd be very surprised if anyone did. The ChromeOS firmware is designed so that, if you flip the switch back out of developer mode, it prompts you to confirm that it's going to wipe the disk and that you need to provide it with a signed OS image to install. The whole idea of the dev-mode switch is that, no matter what you've done to a ChromeOS device software-wise, you can always get it back to a pristine state. (AIUI, the firmware itself cannot be overwritten by the OS or the user, even in developer mode.)

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on ChromeOS, Chrome, or anything remotely related to that, so I have no particular insider knowledge of it. I am the owner of an Acer AC700 Chromebook, however, purchased of my own free will. (I did boot the thing into developer mode once, out of curiosity, then I put it back.)

I suppose a manufacturer could go by different rules, but ChromeOS is specced to the manufacturers such that there's no way to brick it so bad you can't reimage back to the pristine signed-boot OS. (Unlike the OS, the bootloader isn't user-replaceable AIUI.) And the hardware is really not that different from a PC. It would be roughly equivalent to a PC maker refusing to honor your hardware warranty because you booted a Linux LiveCD once. Stranger things have happened, I suppose, but I would expect such a manufacturer to lose in court.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on ChromeOS, Chrome, or anything remotely related to that, so I have no particular insider knowledge of it. I am the owner of an Acer AC700 Chromebook, however, purchased of my own free will. (Principal complaint: the AC700 was sloooow. But it ran Netflix... so long as you weren't hoping to go fullscreen without stutter. Oh, and the built-in SSH terminal blew chunks; the new Secure Shell app is still rough but far better.)

Chrome uses a passphrase to encrypt sync data. By default it will use your Google account password, but you can change it to use any passphrase. If the Chrome devs are doing it right, they should be running the passphrase through PBKDF2 to derive an AES symmetric key. It's worth noting, though, that the Dashboard for "Chrome sync" shows counts for the number of synced items of each type. Assuming they're doing the crypto correctly, I see only two ways the Dashboard could know those numbers: (a) if Chome sends the counts in plaintext as part of the sync, or (b) if the items are individually encrypted (which is generally a bad idea due to known plaintext).

I do know from personal experience that you're SOL if you lose the Chrome sync passphrase (or if you simply want to change it). You have to click the "Stop sync and delete data from Google" link in the Dashboard, wait 5 or 10 minutes for the delete to finish, then set up sync again for all your Chrome instances. Oh, and Chrome sync still doesn't support OAuth login, so setting up sync is a pain if you have 2-factor auth set up on your account (as you should).

Disclaimer: I happen to work at Google, but I don't interact with Chrome except as a user. I'm using knowledge gleaned only from using Chrome sync with my personal account.

No, that's actually not bad. Online cost of living calculators don't grok SF. When I moved to SF 5 years ago for a tech job I started out on $75k/year, and I did fine for myself living solo. Sure, you're probably going to drop an extra $15k-$20k/year on rent -- I moved into a ~650ft 1BR apartment for $2100/month, a bit of a premium for a good neighborhood -- but Craigslist is booming with roommate offers, and most other living expenses are about the same as other cities. Utilities are less (milder weather), eating out is more (higher wages, trendier places), groceries are the same. Entertainment is less (lots of free/cheap shows) but there's more of it, so you may wind up spending more.

Beyond rent, the only other thing that's noticeably more expensive than elsewhere is car ownership; parking garage fees of $300/month aren't uncommon if you work downtown and expect to park there every day, and there's the perennial delight of California gas prices if you're moving from out of state. But even before costing out the parking surprise, a $65/month Muni "M" pass is hella cheaper than gas + insurance + maintenance for owning your own car anyway. Throw in a ~$4/month ZipCar annual membership (partially or fully subsidized by some employers) and you can still have access to a car when transit won't cut it; the rental itself runs about $12/hour, which includes the cost of gas, insurance, and all the maintenance headaches. Even without an employer subsidy, that annual ZipCar fee is 1/3 the price of a WoW subscription, i.e. totally worth it at $75k/year.

Not quite. You've never had the experience of remembering having done something, then having someone contradict you, then asking around and finding out that your memory is faulty? If you were certain of your memory, no finite amount of evidence would ever convince you that you were mistaken. Your example instead demonstrates that we pick the most probable (most "familiar") explanation without conscious consideration of alternatives, and we only backtrack to alternatives when the first explanation is sufficiently falsified to demote it from the best explanation.

That's not to say that this has any bearing on Judea Pearl's research into causal networks. Causal networks complement a probabilistic approach, as each causal node operates on purely Bayesian principles; the only difference is the added operation of graph surgery to represent counterfactuals. It's certainly true that the naïve extension of Bayesian probability to a decision theory (Evidential Decision Theory) is silly -- it results in "Speeding on the way to work is correlated with being late to work, therefore if I don't speed I can't be late!", and it's also true that causal graphs naïvely extend to a decision theory (Causal Decision Theory) that fixes the most egregious silliness. But Bayesian probability is still a key piece of CDT, and even CDT doesn't fix everything (look up Newcomb's paradox).

Uh, no. MaCHOs were supposed to be Jupiter-size to brown dwarf-size lumps of mass, careening through galaxies without being associated with stars or other luminous matter. A black hole *can* count as a MaCHO *if* it has no accretion disk, but we think most black holes have accretion disks and therefore emit X-rays (and thus don't count as dark matter). This black hole is firmly in the not-a-MaCHO category; for that matter, what we today know about Big Bang baryogenesis pretty strongly rules out MaCHOs being the dominant type of dark matter, so they've mostly fallen by the wayside in modern cosmological thinking.