I'd like to see some public questioning of these ”other methods” but I don't suppose that will happen until they fail.

True. I was replying to the comment that the 9/11 type attack couldn't be done today. That simply isn't true; perhaps the security theater has done something after all, if it has given people that much of a false sense of security.

The fortified cockpit door doesn't help if the pilot or copilot employed by the airline is the terrorist. He kills the other occupant of the cockpit, if necessary, and flies the plane into the target. The passengers, even if they realize what's going on, can't do anything about it because they're locked out of the cockpit.

The changes make it more difficult. They don't make it impossible.

The British Medical Journals do a spoofy article around Christmas every year, in which they pick an absurd subject and whomp up serious-looking studies on them. They do it at Christmas I guess because April 1st is just so obvious.

Examples include

"Longevity of screenwriters who win an academy award: longitudinal study" BMJ 2001;323:1491,

"Ice cream evoked headaches (ICE-H) study: randomised trial of accelerated versus cautious ice cream eating regimen" BMJ 2002;325:1445,

"How long did their hearts go on? A Titanic study" BMJ 2003;327:1457,

"The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute" BMJ 2005;331:1498.

This article would fit right in to that tradition.

Binary is the way to go; it is the only irreducible base system.

This is useful for looking at close up stuff if you're nearsighted (it's equivalent to magnifying the image from what it would be), and also for conveying disbelief that someone made a dumb comment or asked a question whose answer should be obvious. This withering facial expression is only available to the bespectacled.

It doesn't matter whether I have personally done any particular experiment; science is not the sum of the results obtained, it is a way of finding things out; gather data, test hypotheses, form a falsifiable theory, design and perform experiments to either support the theory or require its modification or outright dismissal.

Religions, on the other hand, rely upon dogma. They posit a particular set of assumptions, but do not allow for their falsification, and frequently do not even allow followers to ask the question. If evidence arises that contradicts the assumptions, where science would toss out or modify the theory religions either flatly deny the facts, or they dodge and squirm and move goalposts to try and fudge the contradiction.

Science can be applied to religious beliefs. It can be tested, for example, whether being prayed for improves the outcomes of patients undergoing medical procedures. The true difference between science and religion is that when this is done, as it has been, and the results come in, if the scientists get an unexpected result (the prayed-for do significantly better, or indeed worse) they say "Huh, we should make sure this is right, and if it is we will have to adjust our theories."

Conversely, if the religious get an answer they weren't expecting (prayer makes no significant difference at all) they will cast about for excuses and insist that their original idea still holds true, as in "It seems like.prayer didn't make a difference, but that's because it's God's way of testing us, and He held back on the miracles because we weren't showing enough faith."

As long as you're referring to a Boston and a London on the same land mass (there are several cities of each name) you could indeed walk from one to the other. It would take you a while, but it's perfectly possible to walk from London, Ontario to Boston, Massachusetts.

If your point is that you can't *walk* from London, England to Boston, Massachusetts, as distinguished from travelling via other transportation or walking an equivalent distance, that's because there's an ocean in the way which will interfere with the process of walking.

Unless there's an equivalent interference with the processes of "micro-evolution" that prevents it from happening over long periods of time (i.e. prevents the genetic differences from accumulating) then it will become "macro-evolution" once enough genetic differences accumulate to make two populations mutually infertile and thereby fully speciated.

That's a positive claim, and just as you would have to demonstrate an ocean or something else that interferes with walking to say "it's impossible to walk from Boston to London" you would have to demonstrate that something prevents the "micro-evolutionary" changes from accumulating to that extent to say that "macro-evolution" is impossible, or distinct from "micro-evolution" in its process.

Well, you have to admit that the hereditary aristocracies of his time would never dream of using their positions of wealth and power just to crassly get more for themselves like those damn commoners. Oh, wait...

Yes, multimedia smartphone is what I meant. There were many PDA type phones about that were billed as smartphones (in fact I had one); I should have been more specific. Point taken!

She always reminds me that you can't say 4G without orgy.

Even back when iPhones were the only real smartphone in town, I held off because I didn't ever want to to business with AT&T again. The reason I resisted the Apple siren song was because AT&T service sucks, and they have no respect whatsoever for customers.

I was glad I had when the Nexus One came along, because I think it's better than an iPhone anyway, of course. I've also been very happy with T-Mobile's service. Now I see the Death Star approaching, and I know my happy little world is probably doomed.

It happens, and it's difficult to notice if the typo is also a valid word. My two comments are in complete agreement though, so you're misreading as well as mistyping.

Or he just doesn't care, because it's only a tiny minority who doubt his citizenship, and they wouldn't be convinced by anything; they'd just claim whatever document he supplied was faked. The word you want is "unredacted" not "underacted" BTW.

He's just not spending the inordinate amount of time it would take to personally convince every birther out there that what he says is true - especially since there's probably simply no possible evidence that would satisfy some of them, they'd just say he has the resources to fake it now. There's already been plenty of evidence produced that the man was born in Hawaii, more than enough to establish it beyond a reasonable doubt to anyone but a conspiracy theorist, and he has more important stuff to get on with.