Seriously - you've just described money. Money is just tokens people exchange for things they do, have or want. Ultimately it's a way of keeping track of barter. There's nothing special about national currencies except scale.

(Or not. Shame about the energy levels involved, and all that... But then again - that's an engineering problem...)

...which "caring" company it was that pursued a deliberate strategy of "Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish" towards competing standards and products for most of the back end of the 20th century?

My memory is a getting little unreliable these days - but I'm almost sure that it started with an M.

Got it in one. Anyone whose ego, sense of entitlement or personal insecurity makes them view user input as a personal affront, let alone a snipe at their gender, should go get a different career. The input may be valid; it may not. But if you're not prepared to consider it and either take it on board, quietly ignore it or politely reject it, the sooner you're out the door the better.

Background: I worked as a tester for two decades for a well-known computer multinational computer, in an environment with a near-equal gender balance (I happen to be male - so what?). Prior to that I also had considerable "previous" giving me a user's perspective. I worked with some great, very talented people of both genders, who were always open to considered input from another perspective. Sadly I also had the more dubious "pleasure" of working with a few people of both genders who were technically competent, but frankly either arrogant or insecure, and either way not prepared to admit of any viewpoint but their own - and it is a seriously unhelpful way to behave, because technical ability isn't enough. You have to deliver what the user wants. With only one exception the result was always an unmitigated disaster that either had to be thrown away completely after multiple person-years of investment, or cleaned up later at considerably more expense than getting it right the first time would have cost. I never let the fact of their mere technical competence stop me attempting to explain my viewpoint and argue my corner at length, nor did I let their gender make any difference either. I only once experienced an overt case of "my job, not yours"; customer feedback after the event made my point for me far better than any "Told you so" would have. And, frankly, if someone had accused me of "mansplaining" simply because I happened to be spelling something out in detail to someone who happened to be female, I would have given them extremely short shrift indeed. Professionals need to be professional, or get out.

As the saying goes - "A little learning is a dangerous thing".

What these people always miss, is what most grammars ARE - namely static models of a language. A model is NOT the thing itself, and anyone who forgets that fact has left the path of wisdom. A real language such as English is both more complex than the model and is continuously evolving. And, definitively, when normal, accepted language usage takes a form that doesn't match the grammar, the discrepancy is a shortcoming of the grammar - it is not the fault of the language for being "ungrammatical".

In other words - you can choose to follow a grammar if you wish - and for some purposes that's a useful thing to do - but that is a CHOICE. And the correct response to being criticised for "bad grammar" is, "So what?"

I have no basic problem with the Doctor being female; it was always on the cards, and I personally don't even care if it's canon or not; it's a TV show, for goodness sake, and if it's fun to watch, I'll watch it. If I have DO any concern with it, it's that I wait with some trepidation to see what sort of Doctor, Jodie Whittaker is actually allowed to be by the writers/director(s) (will she always, not to put too fine a point on it, be a female Doctor - which would be disastrous - or can everyone forget that she's a woman and let her become, simply, The Doctor?). I also. more to the point, wait to see whether a female lead actually WORKS within the format (it could; it probably ought to; but it's possible that it simply won't gel). Either way - I certainly think one of the biggest mistakes the team could make, would be to keep rubbing our faces in the fact that Whittaker is a woman, in the way that, as others have said, they kept so clumsily reminding us that Bill was gay. (Yes, we got that, way back in her first episode. Very PC of you, have a sweetie. But frankly it added precisely zilch to the story lines or to her character; it felt like it was basically only there so that the team could feel smug about it. Yawn, nothing to see here, move on.)

Oh, and on the evidence, I'd say the money is probably odds-on for an "ethnic" casting of some sort for her successor, too. My only surprise is that they didn't go for that this time as well as a woman, and kill two birds (so to speak) with one stone.

After a few years you'll get boringly familiar with journalists misreporting familiar things in lurid terms. Media hacks usually know next to nothing about science - and a good headline is much more desirable than strict accuracy even when they do. Put in perspective: this was an undergraduate research project, such as just about every student who takes a degree will undertake at one point or another. Such things are about getting the students to practice and demonstrate their abilities to investigate a problem, draw useful conclusions and present the results. They MAY break new ground, but that's certainly not a requirement - that's what PhDs are for.

(Darrell Huff).

Essential reading for anyone who values critical thinking; ought to be required school reading at age 12 or so.

During WWII, the US Army engaged a magician and ex-cardsharp, John Scarne, to educate the farm-boys being drafted on the many ways of cheating in crooked games of "chance", and how to spot them. This is something akin to the civilian equivalent: an utterly readable look at the ways that raw numbers can be misused or presented by someone with an agenda, whilst not actually (or deliberately) lying. Arguably more relevant today than ever.

It's easy to get to "good numbers" by just shutting down all the bad stuff. Unfortunately, that basically leaves us with 50% of Not Enough.

I don't have specific experience as a contractor, but - with a different spin - it seems eminently plausible. I was a permanent employee for decades, and IBM was always keen to encourage people to develop potential patents, in any area and on any topic whatsoever (and reward them for doing so - a few people made serious money in the process). The attitude was basically that a patent you owned was of value, whatever it might be and whether it had any relevance to your direct business or not, even if it only meant that a competitor agreed more readily to mutual access to THEIR patents (which is why I always smile wryly whenever I see another, outraged "IBM has patented xxxxxx!" post). Ideas that were good, but not quite up to true patent quality, were disclosed, to put them in the public domain and render them useless to other potential filers. I have no doubt that they would have attempted to get contractors involved as well. I guess that if you see yourself as a body for hire, only there in the short term, you might see the process as an attempt at "strip-mining", but seen from another angle I knew plenty of people who had multiple patents to their names (and on their CVs), who would never have brought them to publication without the program in question.

Can't help thinking that water is the better option (where it's an option at all). Whether or not this method is, as claimed, more efficient - which caim, frankly, strikes me as more of an issue of politics and engineering than of physics - it's still going to take one heck of a lot of trains to store the same amount of mass (and therefore potential energy) as one decent-sized reservoir.

Elevated CO2 levels might, up to a point, have at least some useful, maybe even vaguely beneficial, effects (I'm no expert - I'll defer to those who are). But even if that's true, like everything in the whole climate discussion, it's wise not to forget that changes aren't likely to just stop at some convenient point - they're not only likely to keep going, but in a worst case to snowball utterly beyond our ability to do anything but hang on and watch (in a worst-case scenario, that may already be the case).

To draw a vague (but possibly familiar) parallel...

Anyone who's done any home brewing, or who simply understands roughly how brewing works, knows that it takes yeast. And yeast feeds on sugars. Add a little bit more sugar to your brew, you'll increase yeast productivity. Unfortunately, that's only part of the story - because the effect doesn't scale indefinitely. Add TOO much sugar, and the yeast won't grow at all. (It's also worth pointing out that things don't normally exactly end well for the yeast. which eventually dies from its own waste products - roughly what we're in danger of doing, in fact. But that's a slightly different point.)

Sadly true. I worked inside a big, household name corporation for years, and my reaction was exactly the same as yours - if you want to change your culture fast, the only way you'll do it is to rip people out, root and branch, all the way up the corporate tree. You CAN turn the culture of a company around less dramatically, but it usually takes years to decades, because mostly the culture is the people, and just telling everyone to work, let alone think, differently, simply isn't enough to make it happen - even if they want it to. They simply come with too much personal (and interpersonal) baggage. From observation, I used to reckon that you could manage just about ONE big process or methods change a year (out of maybe a dozen or more that most people were involved in). Anything beyond that, and it didn't happen - sure, people would say that they were doing the new stuff, but in practice they were simply too overloaded with the need to actually get a job done to focus on doing everything the "new" way - and whenever the chips were down, they'd pay lip-service to the new stuff, but fall back on the old, tried-and-tested ways under the covers.

..."prove" and "probably".

Please - next time you get pulled up for speeding, trying arguing that the law allows you to accelerate, so you weren't doing anything illegal. Then come back and tell us how you got on - I'm sure we could all do with a good laugh.