"shares a report from CNN" if it's from CNN it must be true

I wonder what the stability of this ice will be in the summer when it currently is melting faster due to warming.I assume if it freezes "down' into the sea water the salt segregates into the wafer leaving pure ice. If the sea water is dumped on top of the ice to freeze where does all that salt go?

Now that my poor memory for names has gotten to be a real barrier to social interaction I would love a set of these that just knew my friends and family and could whisper the names in my ear.

I listened to the California AG discuss this. I understand Exxon blew smoke up our collective butt about recyling plastic but what was the actual actionable infraction? Did they make a contract with anyone to recycle a fraction of the plastic, then failed to do so and covered it up with propaganda? Like cancer from cigarettes did they damage people by hiding some aspect of plastic? Sue them for microplastics or something - this is just dumb. I see lots of people who hate plastics being pissed off that these guys brag about stuff they are not doing but, seriously, I just don't see where they have 'harmed' anyone with their lies and exagerations. It did not help that this guy suggested the miniscule amount they recyled into jet fuel was not recycling but creation of evil carbon containing fuels, not accepting that displacing some amout of single use oil with at least one repeat use was a good thing.

This is the kind of stupidity that irritates me. The real way to deal with this is to charge the supposed costs to the users directly but that would kill them politically. So they make up the fiction that the evil oil companies are to blame for supplying fossil fuels on the market as polluters. I hope they are also going to calculate the net benefit to society of having an affordable available energy infrastructure and pay them a share of that benefit. We have to transition but we are able to because the world has advanced so far in the last 100 years. At every turn so many have no sense of history and the fact that our standard of living is not just a happy accident.

When did it become okay to threaten death to anyone you find annoying or a common variety ahole? The righteous are no more entitled to someone else's life than the sinner. Good on the barista and f people who think they don't have comply with a business's rules on behavior in their shop. But kill them - let's not make that a trivial thing. Too much killing everywhere it seems....

Damn, now we have to have an election. Which will be tough because I hate them all and completely distrust the media. Bitter greedy entitled children who can't compromise or apparently give a shit about the country they are supposed to govern. After the great recession I personally find full employment pretty hard to resist even though it is probably a tax cut sugar high. I hope we can look to the states to start/keep moving away from carbon as the independent force our republic was meant to have and use. I would pay real money to have this crap stop and turn the public attention to the democratic primary on the hope there is a viable contest still possible.

I have serious doubt moving in this direction is reducing my bill - it is forcing me into providing free labor to the stores,. In any case a true free market approach would require the stores to offer a discount to self checkout lanes and then let people decide if they want to screw with someones crappy software to buy milk after another day at work. I expect this is another technology young people will embrace and older people will resist because they remember when the idea of service was important. More reason to leap past brick and mortar to internet companies that not only will add up the cost and bill you but assemble what you want and save you the trip. If I go to the store I at least don't want to face another damn piece of crappy technology. I am willing to pay the actual cost to be served like my business matters to the folks asking for it.

toughest problem is they can't tell where it is

your restatement of the essence of the discussion was very helpful to me "truer" is the wrong objective - better positioned to lead to more and better prediction is. This sounds like an argument over whose intuition that the underlying mathematics is on a better path to come out of the roadblocks is right. I'm not sure what the point of the animosity is. In the end if they are right they will prevail and if they aren't better they weren't so obnoxious about it now.... .

This is pretty deep water so I could have missed the point but it seems like there are two sets of discussions talking past each other: what constitutes a valid theory and what constitutes a reason to develop a particular speculative theory where nothing empirically relevant exists. To me a theory is a tool - it predicts outcomes. Any number of theories can be useful but we successively replace less complete with more complete theories based on their ability to predict. Theories are tools not truth. The discussion here seems to be whether string theorists are delusional in working on their 'framework' when there is no usable theory to emerge. What constitutes the proof such work is useful. Maybe the philosophers can help them frame this discussion beyond instinct and notions of beauty. This is a search a truth they hope will point the way someday to a theory.

and yet we don't insist on saying Jupiter isn't a planet but is a gas giant planet or just a big ass planet and we don't insist that earth isn't a planet but a rocky planet. The embarrassing result of the Pluto images is that it is clear the damn thing is a planet with real active geology and not just a dead chunk of leftovers. Better to call it an ice planet or something that refers to that unique reality. And in general call it what it is - a planet.

God I saw this as a kid and I WANTED it to get good but every episode was driven by Dr Smith being an a-hole and the Robinsons forgiving him and taking him to the next episode free as a bird to screw them again. Talk about a lazy writing staff. This could be an interesting idea if they tried to take the original start and create something imaginative with challenges and resourceful responses. If they just reanimate the corpse it would have to stink pretty bad now because it stunk horribly before they buried it.

property rights in space are meaningless - who has the right to grant them? In the end whoever can get to them and enforce their control will have the rights. Of course once the robots enslave us they will have control ....

"we are using both mass and distance from the Sun (more specifically, M^2 / A^1.5, where M is mass and A is distance from the Sun). That combination of mass and orbital radius gives the average time for a body to "clear its orbit". Trying to understand the argument against Pluto a bit more and did the shallow internet search for the "Stern-Levison parameter" . If I understand the equation correctly Pluto would be a planet if it were withing 0.8 AU because it would be whipping around so fast even it's puny scattering ability would have had time to clear smaller bodies over a "long period of time" whatever that is. So if it were in Mercury's orbit it would be a planet (well for about 3 seconds until it evaporated) but way out on the edge it isn't. I'm thinking for the solar system a long time may mean something else than it might to us which apparently means from the formation until now..... Is that really the deal here? Seems dumber than I thought already.