Sorry, 2 meters per frame or 6 ft per frame.

Your statements are inconsistent: if it has reached terminal velocity, it is coming down vertically. There is no horizontal accelerating force, only a deceleration by friction, so the horizontal component of the terminal velocity is zero. You can also see that the impact splash is nearly circular. And you can see the object itself 2 frames before the impact, I guess moving about 2 m/s or 6 ft/s or 200 km/h or 120 mph.

You did not read the book. This argument is covered.

All critics of such law should read the book “Life 3.0” by Max Tegmark. It convincingly argues that it is a necessity to think early about designing AI to understand goals that are congruent with humanity, to pursue them, and to keep them. Otherwise the AI may find ways to do what you ask but not what you want. If you want to have any examples of what could go wrong otherwise, watch any movie or read any story where a genie grants a human three wishes.

I remember being a postdoc in Germany, and discovering the WWW while my boss was away on a business trip. I started a web site (at swift.embl-heidelberg.de) for our software in October 1993, and remember discussing stuff about the setup with the builders of imdb. Still have some of the conversations in my mailbox, I think. Our software had a function for making nice publication quality plots of molecules. The chapter in the manual was called “molecular pornography” and it quickly became the most viewed page of all.

The author of this piece has no idea about what is going on in the movement towards open science. First it is surprising that anyone thinks an unpaid scavenger can do the research on published data faster than the researcher who got the grant and preparation to make the analysis. Further this is denying the value of data for other observations and short-sighted to think that other people will do the same analysis when getting the same data. This damage is coming from the fact that science is not being valued by good science work, which is taking time to evaluate, but being valued by H factor (a measure of citation rate), which is a dumb number that does not say much and should not be valued, but since it is used to judge scientists, a high H factor is becoming the prime goal to achieve in a scientific career. For the benefit of future science and for scientists, this system needs to be changed as fast as we can, many people working on the processes surrounding scientific data are working on this (e,g, in the “research data alliance”) and having some astronomers fighting against this is not helpful.

Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics are really harsh, so it may be a “breakthrough” but it is not going to save us from global warming. Thermodynamics tell us that extracting CO2 from the air can never be better than not putting it there in the first place. You can not gain more usable energy by producing CO2 in a process and then capturing it, than by doing it in one process. Furthermore, the step of diluting CO2 in the atmosphere “spoils” energy: undoing that dilution necessarily makes any concentration step use even more energy. Or produce even more waste. Or both.

Where do I find this 180 word version of Twitter?

Wasn’t this the SDK that Zoom took out of their iOS app because privacy experts told us that it sent details to facebook even if people are not using the facebook login? So now you know: all those apps affected by this bug send your device info to facebook every time you open them. Even without a facebook account. Check the privacy policy,...

Nice thing about paper record players is that they last a long time. I have one that is 32 years old, and still works.... That means of course that the idea is not really new..... See http://bit.ly/happy1979 for a recording I made today of this old masterpiece: an audio "Happy New Year" card in 4 languages.

Can some physicist explain the relation of this story with Einstein's relativity theory? AFAICS, Einstein tells us that time difference, and even the order in which events take place is not a universal property, but are all tied to an observer. How can we speak about beetlejuice blowing up in 1411 in that light? Would there not be a possible viewpoint in the universe where the nova event would take place much closer to our time? Or even, "after" we see it?

In my opinion, the sad truth is that Linux is not more difficult to use than Windows, but that the difficulty is accepted for Windows because it has market domination (your neighbour can help, and otherwise you buy that book "Windows for dummies", or "100000 tips to make your XP experience more effective", or "EYEWTK about Windows"). Since everybody seems to be able to use Windows, people just try a bit harder themselves.

Users are willing to go through a complete overhaul and relearning phase every time there is a new version of Windows. That is considered to be "worth it". But when these same people try Linux, they expect it to be exactly like what they have experience with, and otherwise it is too difficult.

Heck, even the API changes all the time in Windows. And every time a new version of visual studio comes out, programs break. And programmers accept that. Unix programs written in 1985 still run on Linux without change....