I admit, I was an inveterate Pythonite in my high school and college years, when it was still a cliquey-cool thing that not everyone knew about. I can - with too little prompting - recite great swathes of any Python film or most of the TV episodes, I watched them so many times.

So I was delighted when I had the opportunity and the cash to go see their live show in Minneapolis, I think it was in the later 80s.

Hm. Sad might be too strong a word. Poignant?

Here were some men and women who'd really pushed the boundaries of comedy and done some amazing things - sure, some were misses (and I dare you to watch through the Monty Python complete ouevre without recognizing that a few really sucked), but many were hits and some were downright brilliant. And now? nearly 20 years later? Rehashing the SAME tired old bits again and again like cymbal-clapping monkeys, hoping to be thrown some small change.

I'm current in the midst of Palin's first diaries, and already by the mid 1970s, Michael is complaining that their traveling show is nothing but a re-hash of their brightest moments. How prescient is that?

And now for something completely...the same?

Watching people endlessly ape Rocky Horror is one thing; it's frozen forever in celluloid. Every replay of it HAS to be the same. But with humans, that's kind of sad. Like the tired old uncle at Thanksgiving dinner that had a funny joke once, but he tells the same one every year. People grant him a perfunctory laugh, but nobody really means it. One wonders if even he believes it's genuine or is this all some sort of comedy - if not actually comical - ritual?

Uncle, PLEASE tell some other story to make us laugh. At least try.

If you don't have one, or dare no longer risk not getting a chuckle, maybe let someone else tell theirs?

The goal of a lottery (as in any gambling, really) is to make money for the person running the lottery.

So let's say in a given game 49% of the funds go to "the winner", and 51% go to "the house".

The likelihood of deviating from this average result is the MOST at the first ticket, reducing asymptotically toward zero the more tickets you buy. The more times you play, the closer your final return will be to this average (up to the point where you are the only one playing, buying ALL the tickets).

Thus the biggest chance to randomly come out 'ahead' of the average while still playing at least once is with a single ticket.

I'm sure the waves of nerd-statisticians will come out of the woodwork to prove I'm completely wrong.

Why not just a SETI lottery?

I'm absolutely serious - I've bought precisely ONE lottery ticket my whole life (knowing statistically that my likelihood of winning is the maximum at that point*). So I'm not really a "lottery player".

But I'd cheerfully buy SETI lottery tickets - one-third of the gross goes to a the pot-winner, 2/3 goes to SETI funding. Hell, it's better return-odds than many Kickstarters.

*I didn't win.

"Political violence doesn't work to actually implement social change."

Gavril Princip begs to differ.

"No, no, really.

This time I'm SURE we're right on."

-Scientists*

*ie activists posing as scientists. Real science is a matter of hypothesis and testing, not public proclamations and "demands for action".

I mean, I don't really understand why SourceForge is behind this, but hey, I definitely support the effort:

Pauly Shore
Keanu Reeves
Sarah Jessica Parker
Stallone and Schwarzeneggar, of course, but they're almost too old to be worth the effort. Same for Madonna....

Aside from that off-the-cuff list, there's a host of really bad female and male actors that are hot, so I'd say give them a pass.

Well, it's true that if you smoke Mary Jane you will eventually die. Absolutely certain.

It's not dark Friday, it's black Friday you politically correct wander. It has NOTHING to do with race.
In fact in the context "dark" Friday didn't even make euphemistic sense.

"In the United States, the federal government has sovereign immunity and may not be sued unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit. The United States has waived sovereign immunity to a limited extent, mainly through the Federal Tort Claims Act, which waives the immunity if a tortious act of a federal employee causes damage, and the Tucker Act, which waives the immunity over claims arising out of contracts to which the federal government is a party."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity#United_States)\

Did you REALLY think there would be another answer?

Point taken, but as far as I can tell, nobody has any plausible theories for the cyclic "surges" in CO2/temp that have been happening at periodic intervals, either.

Lacking that, and noting that the next "pulse" is overdue, it could plausibly be noted that increased (particulates, human dung, soot, whatever) as a result of human activity actually HELD OFF cyclic change until the 'pressure' (whatever that means in this context) finally is forcing it now.

SARS - 8000 people dead!

The latest 'possible' pandemic - 150 people dead!

I think more people are probably killed by frisbees.

I find it interesting that while scientists insist that we continue to pursue "pure research", there was a subtle shift in the 19th and early 20th centuries: before that, scientists were, functionally, hobbyists. That is, they pursued their interests either with the support of a wealthy friend (who generally had a vague interest in the subject, and/or found it socially advantageous to be seen to be a 'supporter' of scientist X) or at their own expense.

Because some governments saw a direct value into things like atomic research - and be absolutely clear, THAT was their motivation for funding such projects, not some high-minded devotion to 'pure research' - now it seems that scientists almost INSIST that research "should" be done on the public largesse.

I find that mind-shift curious and not entirely satisfactory.

Yes, to pry more secrets out of subatomic particles, we'll need to have bigger and bigger colliders. And to have the ability to drive from the US to Europe, we'd have to make a really expensive big bridge. Both could bring some sort of undefined benefit, but I'm not sure either is any more intrinsically justifiable (or silly) than the other.

Certainly in an era where governments are having trouble paying the bills, one would have to look carefully at such a project and say "well yeah, we *can* build it but not today". That, or accept that some of their spending priorities are out of whack and fix them FIRST, arguably a harder task than prying out deeper subatomic secrets.

I note that global climate seems to be going through a startlingly fast, almost uniquely fast change. (Well, ok, there are similar almost-vertical pulses of warming about every 120-140kY.)

The sun seems to be going through a startling, unobserved mixture of activity.

Generally, when one startling random happenstance occurs in close proximity to another, it's not unreasonable to wonder if they're connected.

One might point out that our understanding of solar cycles comes from direct observation of approximately only 250-some years.

Observation of a system can only observe periodicity of 0.5N, and suggest confirmation 0.33N; that is you only get a HINT that something is periodic after you see it twice, and really only a strong suggestion of periodicity after the third observation. Turning that around, then, the longest periodic cycles within our 4.5-billion-old Sun that we could have directly observed is not much more than 80 years. (Granted, one can make some inferred solar observations on a longer scale based on tree ring data, etc.)

That's an amazingly short time, given the scale of our sun's span. We don't really know all that much about it.

Agreed. As a farmer by descent (family's occupation, not mine) that number seems unreasonably high.

Even if that yield is accurate, my next concern would be the sustainability - the amount of nitrogen you'd have to add to the soil to sustain that would be incredible but I guess runoff's not an issue if everything's being held in a closed system.

Just seems very "something for nothing" to me.