I agree, but the problem with arguing against conspiracy theory is that "a vast conspiracy is hiding all the truth so no one can find it" is inherently unfalsifiable, which makes scientific argument (i.e. presenting evidence that falsifies the proposition) pretty useless.

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You beat me to this comment... Rocky's Boots was awesome, and a great intro to programming for a kid.

Based on the summary, I'm forced to conclude that it is safe to tampering from male hackers, but that female hackers can safely modify the results!

Yeah, we have 2 of these in our family, and they're fine. I do find that mine loses connectivity faster than other phones at low signal, but I mainly use it as an emergency phone (I still don't get the point of cell phone culture, never mind smartphone culture) so I don't really mind.

The authors of this work didn't invent the word -- that's been one of the standard descriptions of this process for decades, and I'm not sure who first came up with it. I think it evolved from "suffocation", which does make more sense (it runs out of gas).

This is in contrast to other dramatic ways of making a galaxy "red and dead" like "harassment", "tidal strippping", and "cannibalism", during which the galaxy undergoes "violent relaxation" (the single best technical term in all of astrophysics).

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How about green card? I know that I can't work directly for the federal government, but I'm curious about other constraints.

You might be right, but you might also be the distant outlier. I'm pretty sure I have 2 -- one in my tablet and one in my satnav (not a built in one). My car is 8 years old, I have a very dumb phone that doesn't have one, I don't have a digital camera, my laptop doesn't have one, and I don't have a desktop. I'm not particularly atypical (okay, the fact that I don't have a smartphone is atypical, but if I did have a smartphone I wouldn't have a tablet, so that would balance out).

The academic job market is so tight right now that there's not much danger of hiring unqualified people -- there are many more highly qualified job-seekers than there are jobs available.

The energy density in the universe from light is much less than the energy density from baryonic matter, which is in itself much less than the total matter energy density of the universe (which is why we infer the existence of non-baryonic, or "dark", matter).

The best piece of code I ever wrote in my life was nearly 100x faster than the next best algorithm ever written to do that problem. That took the expected run time down from a few days to an hour.

It was not a particularly well-commented piece of code. If it were, it would have been even better.

It was not a particularly obvious algorithm for solving the problem. If it were more obvious why one would choose to do it this way, it would have been even better.

If the primary concern is runtime (because it normally takes days to run), and you literally make it orders of magnitude faster, that's good code. It could be better if it were also better commented and easier to maintain, but those aren't *always* the primary concern (yes, sometimes they are. That's the point -- criteria differ!)

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That was what was first assumed. There's only one minor problem.

The amount of zero point energy is *120 orders of magnitude* larger than the measured magnitude of dark energy. And dark energy has about 3x the energy density of dark matter.

So, despite the fact that it looks like zero point energy, there's something else going on.

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Yes.

There are actually many proposed extensions to the standard model that predict dark matter particles that would be classified as WIMPs, and there are some others where the interaction is not through the weak force but through a "hidden sector" force. Some of the possible parameter space of some those hidden sector models predict a cross-section that they would have been able to detect in this experiment. So this is indeed a useful result -- it does rule out some possibilities. But they're not necessarily the possibilities that most people would be betting on anyway, so the headline is overhyped.

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"But," you say, "coffee isn't an internal computer part!"

When it is, that's a problem.

Are you worried that creationists will try to subvert BAHFest by pointing to it as "Look, even the evolutionists think it's a joke that they can use to explain anything they want"?

Am I the only person who read "axes" in the headline as "plural of a Cartesian coordinate axis", not "sharp metal wedge on a stick"?

I was expecting the summary to talk about confusing GPS using an esoteric mathematical axis transformation, not hitting it with an ax!