It can go from NY to London in an hour? Wow, it must have a big fuel tank and be really efficient.

" How will Twitter distinguish between positive Tweets coming from voters or news outlets and those from spam bots designed to drive the conversation surrounding a candidate one way or the other? "

Follow the money.

I didn't notice a definition of intelligence and wonder how they define it. ("Well we know it when we see it.")

I think potential intelligence is the ability to provide high quality genes (in the adaptive sense) to the next generation. Realized intelligence then would mean one has already done so but I suspect that only a much later generation would be able to apply the classification with any accuracy.

If I understand it correctly what the "amateurs only" rule really meant was that only Gentlemen could participate. The working class couldn't afford the time to train and participate nor the expenses and that kept the Gentlemen from having to associate with their inferiors as equals.

CMIIW

One cannot drive at any reasonable speed that will guarantee that all obstacles will be seen in time, but conservative speeds can be chosen to set the risk at a low level. For instance at night a pedestrian dressed all in black can suddenly appear too at a distance too close for the driver to be able to stop. If the system is detecting problems before they are seen a prudent driver might decide to slow down to slow down.

Some drivers will probably think that the system (like anti skid brakes) will provide protection and drive faster than they should, somewhat analogous to teens becoming sexually promiscuous after taking courses which inform them of the details of contraception.

"He's dead, Jim."

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html, has apparently been down all day; wonder if this is the cause.

Anyone heard from the Space Lab today?

It's 1020 now; I wonder if Amazon can deliver by 1600 today?

Well said!

What's next, VOIPOXP (Voice Over IP over xyloPhone? Latency will make satellite and lunar communication look really good. :-)

No one's going to get that one, my appendix is still in my thorax, I'm going into hiding, and I'm armed.

I didn't know that! Thanks.

They were aircraft used for research "sounding" of the upper atmosphere and had supplementary rocket propulsion.

If an X-1 were found boxed up in some government storehouse would it be labeled as a failed experiment? After all no nation has deployed any rocket propelled aircraft since the X-1, AFAIK.

It may be a little more complicated. Many years ago in a wildland area in southern California I came on half a dozen or so ground squirrels who had discovered a rattlesnake and were driving it from their feeding area. The snake would attempt to move away and then two or three of the smaller squirrels would dash up and nip it (counting coup, I guess). The snake would then whip around and attempt a short strike that would miss, coil, wait a bit and then attempt to flee again. This repeated itself for some time. I quit watching when the snake moved into cover. This was in full daylight, the squirrels were wild but they didn't pay much attention to me. So I'd guess that there is a social aspect, the squirrels probably vocalized the discovery of the snake and the tail twitching could be doing double duty signaling that the snake was still around. Since this was daylight the snake could see the squirrels with its eyes, too, and the total appearance might have suggested that the squirrels were larger and thus more dangerous or less suited for a meal than they actually were. So I would say that ground squirrels in southern California do a third thing: alert their nearby kin and neighbors.

The behavior reminded me of hummingbirds mobbing mocking birds, mocking birds mobbing crows, and crows mobbing hawks.

If a hawk had been around it would have had to make an agonizing decision of what to have for lunch - snake or squirrel.

I assume that the winds are "surface" winds. It would be interesting to see the wind field at higher altitudes, too. AFAIK a surface low pressure area will have winds blowing into it and above it will be a high altitude high pressure with winds blowing out of it. At least that's how it's been explained to me.