The source is so widely replicated it would be difficult to truly retract, for example it's here for those who are interested in looking at it to look for potentially infringing pieces.

See Taking Cosmic Rays for a Spin (2006). Also a very informative section in Spencer Weart's Discovery of Global Warming.

But the thing is you still need a store of special matter for those ion thrusters to eject, even though they're ejecting it at high velocity. And it's probably harder to store that matter than a 10T chunk of whatever you can commandeer in space, even though you might be solar powering the drive itself. What you're suggesting would be a good "first stage", useful for moving a relatively small object (perhaps there are some at the La Grange spots) into an orbit slightly different to that of the impact asteroid, so you don't have to launch that mass into space. At which point, I'd suspect there are some tricks you can use to deflect the energy of the impact asteroid into a slightly different orbit, effectively using the large weight as a "ballast" and the interception weight as a "sail", with the gravity between the objects the "mast".

ie, you might get a lot more total delta-V of the combined objects compared to the delta-V you expend with thrusters to adjust the interception vessel occasionally, due to the profile of the combined shape through the space-time slope at that point.

http://twitter.com/samv/status/3654963074

Well, straight from the IO::All man page but still. It supports CGI! (easily ownable of course)

The recent eclipse in Asia was being used to investigate strange gravity effects aka the "Allias effect". A NASA page on it seems to have bitrot.

Does anyone have any more details on this Gravitational Effect?

It seems tempting to define "male" as "testosterone enhanced" and female as "not testosterone enhanced". Of course the long-lasting effects of testosterone lasting some time, those thinking to have a sex change to get into the easier category would be excluded right there. It would also mean that women like this would get to compete against men, and given they are not disadvantaged by hormones, possibly win. Now that would be interesting.

I unsubscribed from WattsUpWithThat, after I realised that the skeptics basically have no case and generally are ignorant of the history of climate change, yet I'm still getting sensationalist posts implying some kind of grand conspiracy led by climate scientists in my RSS feed.

Which seems to me to be the first easy retort to this ... as there are geoengineering solutions which are all about taking limestone, baking it using "stranded" energy to slaked lime, then dumping it into the ocean. See Cquestrate.com. Fixing acidification is the mechanism for those geotech solutions - how can they not help with it? Very strange.

Heh, you obviously didn't find any of the actual code used for the pre-historic import, the hostile import, the Raw Perforce Importer or the scarier SQL queries used to manipulate the data. Your program is far easier to understand :-).

Linus likes to name his projects after himself. Hence, "Linux" and "git" - the British slang meaning of the term being the one implied. I like the Oxford definition; "an arrogant or contemptible person". "bastard" has another meaning, though its slang use approximates the same :-).

They're online services. If you're on the edge of the internet, with lots of local bandwidth but little international, that's not terribly useful.

Douglas Adams famously wrote that a Computer Programmer is a Scientist who could never find their field. For me, it was certainly like that - science didn't seem to hold any new and exciting treasures.

If healing might be their thing, then I'd suggest a career in Acupuncture - the field needs bright minds so that there can be more decent scientific papers like this one. It's a lot different to your average Scientific field - it's very inter-personal, and there is a large degree of "knack" to be learned first while the mechanism continues to be elusive (I give it about 5 years myself before one or two of the key puzzles are unraveled histologically, then the fun will really start). Historically, the most renowned researchers have been accomplished physicians, and there is huge scope for learning complementing skills such as taiji, qigong, tuina massage, herbs... several of which are often combined for a patient.

Of course you need to find a good school ... preferably offering degrees, in-depth Western Medical training and research opportunities. Please feel free to write to me for recommendations.

I highly recommend Apocalypse 2012: An Optimist Investigates The End of Civilization. The author, a science journalist, goes through a number of end-of-times scenarios. The difference between this book and many others is that he actually visits Scientists in the field, and travels to the relevant spots - from Guatemala to Russia. The prose is very interesting, and even though he rants far off the rails later in the book in the section on Armageddon (which is, as he writes, the most disappointing of all possible end-of-times scenarios, because it would be entirely of our making), it's still a very good read.

Fuel: anything liquid and combustible (Th!nk City); anything liquid, combustible, with a flash point equal to or greater than the equivalent of a mix of 89% octane (Aptera)