Thanks for the correction and clarification.

Your choice of words paint a misleading picture. The herbicide glyphosate (of which one brand is Roundup) is used relatively sparingly, where 600 mL (a Gatorade bottle), or ~0.6 kg, is distributed over an acre (0.4 hectares) of soil, before the crop is planted. The crops themselves generally aren't sprayed with it because they'd be in the way of the soil, which herbicides act on by making it unsuitable for weeds.

This is in comparison to EU-approved organic pesticides (pages 36-37), where a copper-chemical fungicide can be used to reach 6 kg copper per hectare (~14.8 kg per acre) over a 5 year average, and up to 30 kg for a single year.

But of course, the dose makes the poison, as even water is lethal in high-enough doses. Fortunately, glyphosate is relatively safe as well. Carcinogenic effects are often claimed, but the best studies sum up the evidence as contradictory to unlikely.

There's no observed glyphosate mammal toxicity at 200 mg/kg/day, and the vast majority of observed residue on food in the EU, US, and Canada were below the maximum residue limit of 0.01 to 0.05 mg/kg.

Approved organic pesticide chemicals such as copper sulfate are much more toxic per body weight, and there's seemingly no clear guidance on safe food residue limits. So pick your poison.

Converting lightning's speed to a data transfer rate is tricky enough to begin with. It's unclear whether one should count the speed of a lightning strike's leader at 61 km/s, the return stroke at 100,000 km/s, or average both. These are of course slower than light's vacuum speed at 300,000 km/s, but without any idea of lightning's bandwidth one can't make a reasonable estimate of the data transfer rate.

A more reasonable comparison might be the proprietary Lightning connector, which can be said to have a data transfer rate, but it's only 60 MBps. The PCIe 5.0 data transfer is advertised as four orders of magnitude greater, so that comparison is not adding up.

What? The term "geostationary" doesn't make sense for comparison, as galaxies have no equivalent surface for 'Oumuamua to remain facing against, aside from maybe the surface of our galaxy's central black hole Sagittarius A*. But that is spinning incredibly fast in comparison, so there's nothing that can be stationary with regards to that.

Maybe you meant that 'Oumuamua has a near-zero orbital speed around the center of the Milky Way, i.e. that it isn't orbiting around the galaxy like the star systems are, but remains fixed in interstellar space? That can't be it, considering it's "only" moving relative to the Sun at a speed of 26.33 km/s, while the orbital speed of the Sun around the center of the Milky Way is 220 km/s. So 'Oumuamua rotates around the galaxy at no less than ~90% of the Sun's speed.

The authors seem to base their calculations on an earlier published estimate of 'Oumuamua having a 450 million year lifetime and being ejected by a young star.

If I interpreted their paper correctly, the first thing to account for is that the nitrogen fragment production rate back then would need to have been 2 orders of magnitude greater than expected in order to explain the rate at which these objects are detected. The second thing is that the estimated sublimation and cosmic ray erosion over that time would imply an initial iceberg size with a radius 6 orders of magnitude larger than what was observed.

Then it delves into probability distributions and equations, where I lose interest.

I personally don't think intergalactic sources are relevant over the relatively short 450 million year estimated lifespan of 'Oumuamua. Neither would objects ejected from the innermost Milky Way systems (where star-formation is greatest) be able to reliably acquire the galactic orbital energy necessary to reach our Sun at the galactic outskirts.

As per this article, a ship's brand-new radar detected unidentified aircraft performing maneuvers, though the published video shows no discernible maneuvering. If true, I would presume that the ship's new radar was tweaked following the incident, or the crew became more familiar with how to use it correctly.

I wouldn't say the explanation is simple, as it involves optics and trigonometry. The military reviewers might be experts on aeronautics and identifying foreign fighter jets, but have little familiarity with what jet engine glare should look like through an IR camera, 100 km away.

I guess Big Foot is actually blurry too?

If I may be pedantic (and I will be), the quote from Carl Sagan is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

The important distinction is that evidence is observable phenomena, e.g. instruments recording color video, infra-red video, measured radar distance, airspeed and angle-of-attack sensor readings. These evidence sources should be of high fidelity and corroborate each other to be classed as "extraordinary."

On the other hand, proof is a logical construct typically reserved for philosophy and mathematics, and is generally only given the properties of validity and truth, e.g.:
* 2 + 2 = 4 is a true and valid proof
* All humans are mortal; you are a human; therefore you are mortal is a true and valid proof, because the premises entail the conclusion.
* All humans are mortal; you are a human; therefore you are posting on Slashdot is a true and invalid proof, because the conclusion does not follow from the premises.
* All humans are mortal; you are a immortal; therefore you are not human is a false but valid proof, because one of the premises is flawed.

It is very difficult to get meaningful proofs out of something so abstract as UFO videos, because there's so far never been any unambiguously "extraordinary evidence" that can be used as its premises.

So you're going with an anecdote over any possible interpretation of the available evidence, even if the pilot is contradicted by the airplane's instruments?

I don't know what purported debunkings you've seen of this, but I would recommend Mick West's videos on this event, as he's polite and explains his analysis well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (5 min) why he thinks the evidence best fits a jetliner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (5 min) further explanation why the object's purported sudden movements are disproved by several on-board instruments

These are very elaborate interpretations of the published evidence and the pilot's anecdote, with no rationale provided.

There's likely a form of publication bias going on, where high-quality recordings are less likely to show something ambiguous. So the remaining videos that end up as purported alien footage is either low-resolution, unfocused, or shaky.

On the contrary, primary sources are explicitly allowed for statements of fact, such as birthdays. The actual issue is that your primary source needs to be published and accessible, otherwise anyone could claim to be your wife and make the edit.

Hmm... a clarification to hopefully avoid a comment about it, the linked map also shows the longitudinally optimal time zone. I was making the point that countries would want to fall in the middle of their longitudinally optimal time zone.

I don't think time zones work the way you think they do.

As per this map showing the legal winter time's (as dictated by each country's adherence to its time zones) discrepancy from local time (as dictated by the sun at its highest point), your argument could just as well be made for France, Spain, Italy, UK, or Poland, as they're also southerly countries just as much "in the middle" of their time zone.

No. I try to stick with Wikipedia's definition of verifiability, to which I linked.

In your case of a scientific paper, emphasis is placed on attribution of reliable secondary sources (meta-analyses, systematic reviews), summarizing them, and using primary (an original scientific paper) and tertiary sources where appropriate. News articles should be avoided for academic topics when academic secondary sources exist.

You as the editor should not interpret primary sources or "correct" secondary sources yourself. Leave that job to other reliable sources.

As an occasional Wikipedia contributor, my corroborating citations from reliable sources outweigh your expertise because they can be verified.