That just looks like a hodgepodge of cheap consumer crap he picked up at Home Depot and literally taped to the walls and ceiling of the dorm room. He even runs free apps on his Apple products to control that stuff.

The X10 stuff is cheap (at least one ebay) but I wouldn't call it exactly crap. It is what it is and it works well, at least when I used it. It isn't as elegant as other remote control systems, but it doesn't have the price either. ;)

But using the phone to control things looks like a pain. When I did a project to control the lights and music in an old apartment, I built myself an infrared transceiver, then configured software so that the same universal remote control I was already using would work to control the lights and music server as well.

Therefore, the combination of business as usual for medical radiation AND increased man made exposure from reactor leaks, bombs, spills and other detritus of the nuclear power industry would be additive above baseline. You might have what is thought to be a 'small' spill that turns out to have larger medical consequences than previously thought.

Presumably, coal power would have a few more deaths to add to its thousands and thousands of calculated deaths then, since a coal power plant is a greater source of radiation than a nuclear power plant.

There is no threshold below which radiation is 'safe'. There is a threshold below which is become statistically indistinguishable from random events, but that is not the same thing.

If "the effect of a substance is indistinguishable from random events" is not a definition of "safe", then what definition are you going to use?

There are many things in our environment that, in a large enough dose, will end up killing us. Take food. A lot of food will have trace amounts of chemicals that, if concentrated and taken in a large enough dose would kill us. Heck, overdoses of water or salt will kill a person. But that doesn't mean small doses of either are harmful.

From bacteria in the gut that process ingested animal protein.

In humans, as opposed to some other animals, its unlikely we produce enough B12 from intestinal bacteria to meet our needs, vegan or not, due to our digestive system. When we eat an omnivorous diet, we are absorbing B12 from the food directly.

Also, B12 production does not necessarily require animal protein. If that was the case, herbivores would be screwed.

Not when it comes to B12. This is a scientific fact proven in numerous studies, hence the universal recommendation that vegans take supplements. Ever heard of Veg-1? This is a suplement created by vegans for vegans.

Soymilk, at least Silk, tends to be fortified with B12. Same with breakfast serials. So no problems there. Just make sure your diet has some fortified foods (get some vitamin D as well to be on the safe side) and you're done.

There's a long list of reasons why veganism is stupid, but chief among them is that throughout time, nobody ever lived that way.

For most of the history of the human species, people didn't live with climate controlled HVAC systems. But I'm not going to give up central heat anytime soon. ;)

As for inefficient, it tends to take about 10 plant calories to make 1 calorie of meat. That's not bad when your meat is consuming plants you can't consume directly (such as grass, especially in areas too arid to support farming). But when meat is consuming grains that humans can eat, it's pretty inefficient. It also may not be sustainable - we're drawing more water from some aquifers than is naturally replaced, and a lot of that water goes to grow feedstock for animals.

So the diet is appropriate so long as you take supplements to make up for its inappropriateness. Ok, got it.

You may want to check the original source of B12. It's not animals (although animal products tends to contain B12) nor plants (although plants can contain trace amounts). It's from bacteria. Which tends to be veg-friendly.

Really though, a veg*n diet can be bad or good.. An omni diet can be bad or good. It just depends on what you're eating. It's not hard to find omnis in America with horrible diets. And its not hard to find junk-food veg*ns either.

Everyone, regardless of whatever dietary philosophy they choose, should take the time to examine their diet and make sure it's healthy. Oh, and go get some exercise as well. It's good for you. ;)

The people who make things happen already have enough wealth to secure a high standard of living for the next 20 generations of their descendants. They have wealth in effectively limitless quantities.

Assume 2 children per generation (rather conservative). The number of descendants in the 20th generation is over a million (2^20). The total number of people over those 20 generations is over 2 million. If we give $1 million per person (a hair over $27k/year from 18 to 55), that's $2 trillion dollars needed now to keep everyone at a mediocre standard of living (this both ignores inflation and investment).

Investment would probably change that figure, but for 20 generations, you're looking at about six centuries of investing, and I'm not aware that we have good data for the return rate, inflation, or investment risk over six centuries.

If you consider the US only, and only the past 100 years of the stock market, there's an average of about 6% inflation-adjusted returns. Which means, if I'm doing the math right, only a few million dollars invested should provide enough average returns that one could draw off an income of $50k (pre-tax) and still have a quick enough doubling time to provide each of their two children enough to live off the interest as well. Admittedly, using 100 years worth of data to plan for 500 years is pretty bad. Especially considering the US's avoidance of any major war fought on its own soil and its continuous government. Looking at European nations such as France or Germany may give a slightly more realistic level of risk.

... which is why "too cheap to meter" nuclear power is so bloody expensive. By the time you've built your defenses, detection, prevention, and redundancy (and gone through the 10-year planning process, paid off or muscled out the NIMBYs, settled the lawsuits, weathered the protests, and hired the highly trained nuclear technicians and emergency response personnel you'll need on hand at all times) you've spent so much money that it would have been cheaper to just build a different type of power plant and avoid the whole mess.

Yep. Especially since if you're building a coal plant, the harmful (and slightly radioactive) byproducts goes up the flu, or is collected into fly ash that can be buried in landfills.

Economically speaking, its a lot cheaper for electricity generators when someone else has to pay for the cost of pollution.

Maybe a 2 child/couple policy would meet less resistance.

Er, have you looked at the numbers? US fertility rate among native-born US citizens tends to be at below the replacement rate of 2.1. Immigration tends to drive US population growth rates.

Europe is already below replacement rates in their fertility levels. 1.59.

Numbers and sources can be found at Wikipedia.

If you want to downsize the US or EU's population, you could do it through preventing immigration, and the population would drop naturally. But there are some pretty severe downsides to closing off immigration, and it only pushes the problem to somewhere else.

p

Their accuracy isn't much to brag about, though. I discovered through a search engine that someone in the LDS church had done a baptism "for" my departed father. And got most of his details wrong, including his birth year and family relations. But now it's "official" as far as they're concerned.

I've done a fair bit of genealogy. It's a decent geek hobby, it doesn't cost too much, takes a large amount of time, and requires good problem solving skills and the ability to judge and verify information. Plus it tends to tie in with a lot of history and geography, which I'm interested in. I'd recommend it.

I'm not a professional genealogist, but I have found situations which may explain the conflicting information for your father. It could be due to two people with similar names, or misinformation on public records, etc.

Someone I'm probably descended from lived about 50 miles away from someone else with the same name in colonial times. They were about the same age. They both married, and some of their children share the same name as well. Its common to see details from both individuals in other family trees.

A similar situation exists with myself - when I went to school, there was someone in the same school with my name. Different birthdate, but roughly the same age. Anyone who attempts a family tree with me in it will probably run into the same problem.

Public records are not immune to this either. Some of them show interesting errors. The state and the federal government disagree on the date my grandmother died - the state thinks she died a day earlier than the feds. Anyone who hasn't seen the records would consider any genealogical research with the wrong date to be "sloppy". Nowadays, with the Internet, its pretty easy to get both records. But even 15 years ago, having retrieved just one record wouldn't be unusual. Another case would be a great-grandmother of mine, who had the amazing ability to age only 8 or 9 years between each census - she kept lying about her age on every census in order to be younger than she actually was. (In addition, her children could never agree on her father's name either - marriage records and the death certificate give conflicting information.)

Of course, a large problem with genealogy today, especially Internet genealogy, is the severe amount of copying that goes on among amateur genealogists, especially with the lack of verification and citation for the source of information. Citations are very important when it comes to research - there are going to be mistakes in records, and you always want to know the sources when it comes to conflicting information in order to verify which one is correct. Someone may be listed as a son or daughter on the census, but instead turn out to be a stepson or stepdaughter or other relative. Or perhaps a person's name was recorded incorrectly. Blindly following this information results in flawed family trees. But some people are not patient enough to do this, and instead tend to add people without verification or hunting down the source. These are the same people who tend to copy from other individuals family trees, which compounds the problem.

This is one reason why I won't publish my family tree, in its current form, online - I have links and information in my family tree that are, quite frankly, a "best guess". As long as the notes and citations are included, it's clear that the information requires further verification, but if put on-line, the information would most likely be copied into countless other family trees and stripped of citations and notes. I'd rather not do that. ;)

As for the LDS's obsession with genealogy, I tend to really appreciate it. The amount of preservation of old records the LDS has done is amazing, regardless of the reasoning behind that. And really, post-death baptism shouldn't be too upsetting. If you're religion or lack of religion is so weak that a religious ceremony once you're long dead will put you in jeopardy, I think you're belief is misplaced.

Sue the birds for using copyrighted content all the time.
Damn pirates.

Sure, that's easy for you to say, but I've been putting out bird food all this time. I've created a safe haven for copyright pirates!

And all this time I thought the squirrels getting into the bird feeders were just being pests. Little did I know that they are secret agents of the RIAA, doing a DOS attack on birdseed!

Regardless of the outcome, there is a good side effect of all this. All the equipment will be checked like crazy. Everything is going to be blueprinted to perfection. We might even advance the whole science of measurement. We might come up with better procedures for QA that could be transferred to other experiments.

In teaching engineering, I'm told, part of the experience is learning how engineering projects failed.

Perhaps science needs to include the same. Perhaps we should be teaching why experiments got the wrong result, or why an effect was not detected when it should have been. It could be anything from equipment malfunctions to sampling and interpretation bias.

Let me tell you how it ends

A bunch of sniffing. About 50 pages of clothing description. Oh and a bunch of moronic idiots blathering about instead of talking with each other.

But does it have neeps?

Millennia of co-evolution is why all those soft-headed hippies are so keen on "whoa, man, natural". It's extremely thorough testing of interoperability. Not only that, it's continued refinement, of both plants and humans, so that the co-evolved plants approach ideal foods for the co-evolved humans. Ironically, rather a sophisticated scientific concept that these hippies grokked out intuitively.

That's why I smoke cigarettes. After all, humans have been using fire for a long time. And humans domesticated tobacco. So I don't see what the fuss is about.

Then again, if I wasn't a hippy, I might release that the agricultural revolution happened 10,000 years ago, and that due to the Columbian exchange, many of the foods I eat today, most of my ancestors won't even exposed to until about five centuries ago.

I guess I shouldn't rely on co-evolution after all.