>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

The dominant paradigm since the Apollo Missions was that the Moon was as dry as a bone.

However, a paper was put out recently (before the discovery of water a month ago) proposing a model for water and other volatiles venting out of the interior of the Moon. One of the predictions of this model is that there should be significant subsurface water primarily near the poles. The results from Chandrayaan-1 and LCROSS today confirms that this is true--there is significant subsurface water near the poles. The claims that the water is solely on the surface and due to cometary deposition or solar wind interactions are now blown "out of the water".

This model predicts a lot more water under the surface for potential use in human exploration. w00t!

Check out the paper here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0909.3832

The water found in these missions is not *necessarily* in small quantities. The research shows that it is present at the near surface, but no one has any clue as to the depth to which it extends. The assumption is being made that the water accumulated there from comet deposition, but there are other mechanisms for water delivery to the surface. A paper posted to the pre-prints server recently shows that there is evidence for water vapor in the interior of the moon that is slowing leaking out along with other volatiles. As the gases reach the upper layers of the regolith, the water freezes out and gets stuck there. Over the course of a few billion years, even a small gas leakage rate could produce large slabs of ice below the surface, exactly the kind of thing that these results confirm. Anyway, it's an interesting idea...

Here is the paper:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0909.3832

This is good advice, and gives me an opportunity to speak to the community at large: some of us who go to cons and are in a position to shake tons of hands politely decline. It's not because we're being dicks, it's because we know it's a good way to substantially decrease our chances of catching and spreading any germs.

I played the PAX Pandemic game, where the Enforcers handed out stickers to attendees that read [Carrier] [Infected] or [Immune] (There was also a [Patient Zero].

I got the [Immune] sticker, and by the time I got home on Monday, it was clear that I had the flu. I've had a fever between 100 and 104 all week that finally broke last night, but I'm going to the doctor today because I think whatever I had settled into my lungs. I'll tell him about the H1N1 outbreak and get tested if he wants to run the test, but at this point I think it's safe to assume that I was [Immune] to the Pig Plague, but definitely [Infected] with the damn PAX pox.

Even though it's been a week of misery, it was entirely worth it, and I don't regret going to PAX for a single second.

Sorry, but I think you and many of the others here need to go back and read his question. He didn't say he wanted ideas for labs, he said he wanted his students to contribute to real science, as in, do things that lead to publications by professional physicists. While I did many of the experiments that you did and found them interesting and learned a lot from them, none of those produced publishable results. You made fun of Galaxy Zoo, but the work that the thousands of people did who participated in that experiment led to real publications in the astronomical literature. Astronomy in particular is a science where amateurs can contribute and I think he cited Galaxy Zoo not because he thought it was better than building a Foucault Pendulum, but because it has a different goal -- it is getting his students to put in their time as essentially free labor on science projects much larger than they could do in class. Although, maybe you know of a high school building a 3.5 meter telescope with a drift scan camera and multi-object spectrograph that is recording images and spectra for a million galaxies. Because at that school, kids could get the same experience the ones in his class got by participating in Galaxy Zoo.

This is why my motto (and fundamental rule for life) is Don't be a dick: it's simple to understand, and reasonable people can agree on what it means.

John Scalzi wrote a hilarious exchange on his blog the sums up perfectly why this idea is made of fail:

Sony BMG spokesperson: We're pleased to announce we are the final major music corporation to release electronic tracks without that pesky DRM! All you have to do is leave your house, go to a selected retail outlet, buy a special card there, go back to your house, scratch off the back of the card to find a code, go to our special MusicPass Web site, enter said code, and download one the 37 titles we have available, from Celine Dion to the Backstreet Boys!

Kid #1: Or, in the time it takes me to jump through all those hoops, I could just download all 37 of those albums off of Pirate Bay.

Kid #2: Or, I could just scratch off the back at the store, record the pin number, go home and download the album through a Tor connection, so you can't trace my IP number.

Kid #1: Also, what's with this first slate of artists? Celine Dion? Backstreet Boys? Kenny Chesney? Barry Manilow? Are you high?

There's much more, but I didn't want to jack his entire post.