hugh_

Nukes.

If I were the US, I'd simply make it an official matter of policy that any attack from a nuclear power would result in an immediate nuclear response, the logic being that once two nuclear powers are at war it's probably going to turn nuclear eventually, so you might as well make the first strike.

1. China torpedoes a US aircraft carrier for no particularly good reason

2. China claims that the US aircraft carrier exploded all on its own, and nobody can prove otherwise

3. The US doesn't bother to retaliate

4. The US has thus "lost the Naval War of 2015".

Does this scenario strike anyone as especially plausible?

Two dark-matter particles in the void will be attracted to each other (slightly) by gravity, but when they meet they'll just sail straight on through one another without colliding. This prevents the formation of small-scale (ie sub-galactic scale) dark matter clumps.

If you're spending 100% of your income then you're not good at planning ahead.

If you can't find things to cut in your personal budget, you'll suck at managing the company's budget.

And if you can't talk your wife into making do with less, you're not persuasive enough to handle employees.

"My GPA was [low/medium/high], therefore I think that most smart, well-adjusted people get [low/medium/high] GPAs."

edit: However, in the interests of contributing more than snark, I shall say the following: I think the US GPA system is screwed up, due to insufficient resolution and grade inflation.

Where I went to uni, you got a mark for each course out of one hundred. Any mark above 85 was considered very good, and only the top few percent of students in each class would get above 90. (A 100 was unheard of, or more accurately, I only heard of one once).

Anyway, this meant that a lousy mark in one class could be cancelled out by a great effort in another class -- since even the top students only averaged in the very low 90s there was always room to recover. In the US, though, at most places an "A" is too damn easy to get, meaning most of the top students will be running 4.0s, and staying at the top simply requires you to not screw up and get (gasp) a B.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/12/17/...

2:50: Bottom line: “The results cannot be interpreted as significant evidence for WIMP interactions, but we cannot reject the possibility that either event is signal.” –Risa

To which I reply "Hang on, so you made a big deal out of this for what? Wake me when you have something which _can_ be interpreted as significant evidence for something"

What I didn't understand until just now was this: if WIMPs interact by gravity why don't they fall into stars and planets, or even form stars and planets of their own? The answer is that they do fall into stars and planets, but just keep going through the middle (since they are not subject to any ordinary interactions) and out the other side. And they can't form dark-matter planets of their own since they don't interact strongly with each other either, so they won't stick together. Neato!

The best way to be an extremely boring person is to have only one interest and obsess over it non-stop. I once worked next to a guy who only ever talked about rock climbing; no matter what you tried to talk to him about he'd find a way to bring the conversation back to his rock climbing hobby. To a fellow climber he might have been at least slightly interesting, but to me he was so memorably dull that here I am, five years later, using him as an example of dullness.

If you put up a bust of Spock in your office, you're basically saying to the world "Hey world! You know that TV show which maybe you used to like a bit when you were a kid? I think that's one of the most interesting things in the world!" This is generally a pretty good indicator of a fairly narrow range of interests which will make you pretty boring to others.

Anyone who really thinks that a long-defunct TV show is interesting enough to make it a significant part of their identity really needs to start developing a few new interests.

Those who say "who cares if non-geeks are repelled" seem to be assuming geekiness and programming ability are strongly correlated, but in my experience they seem to be pretty orthogonal, at least for the type of geekiness which leads to putting up Star Trek posters.

Plenty of fields have cultural barriers to entry. Frinstance, I wouldn't want to be a car mechanic, cuz all they talk about is sport. I wouldn't want to be a secretary, cuz all they talk about is American Idol. And I wouldn't want to be a Wall St trader cuz all they talk about is... I dunno, golf and hookers. Of course I'm exaggerating, but the point remains that these are three fields where I'd be turned off by the culture even if I were interested in the actual work.

As an SFX demo reel, Panico is more impressive than the District 9 short. However the District 9 short is far better as a piece of directing and storytelling. I'd certainly hire the Uruguayan guy to do special effects on someone else's movie, but I'm not sure on the basis of this whether he has the skills to actually write and direct an interesting full-length movie.

In this particular case the problem is that the virtual valet would, unlike a real valet, be funded primarily by kickbacks from whatever services he winds up booking for me, so I've got no reason to believe he's making decisions in my best interests instead of his own.

Basically if I'm going to trust someone else to make my decisions for me, I want a real flesh-and-blood person that I can shout at if things go wrong.

Oh come now, you can't think of any examples where left-wing parties have used slander against right-wing folks? I do seem to recall some negative, and frequently untrue, things being said about George W Bush, or Sarah Palin.

Attacking the opposition is a common tactic among all political parties in all countries. If it goes too far it can turn off some moderate voters, but at reasonable levels it seems to work reasonably well. It's far less common when marketing products -- I'm not quite sure why this is, but possibly because it's easier to come up with positive things to say about your own product ("It has shiny new features X, Y and Z!") than to come up with positive things to say about a politician ("... uhhhh.... hope!")

Ahh, I miss the naivety of the ancient days of late 2008. In fact the market dropped from ~9000 at inauguration day to ~6500 by March. Obama's approval rating dropped from around 80 at inauguration to less than 50 now. And bad news and fear, as it turns out, still exist.

"It will be a big year for applications that can play on big screens... video games, movies, etc." -- as a prediction, shrugworthy.

"Similarly, the big news in the mobile world won’t be a slicker, newer cellphone -- it will be smart phone applications" -- this prediction wasn't too bad.

"China’s GDP is likely to plummet in 2009" -- nope, it grew by something like 8%

"This year we’ll see the first computer with no moving parts" -- trueish, though I thought that netbooks sans moving parts were already on the market in 2008.

Wall computing: somebody has already mentioned this. "Carry-along computers will be hot" -- reasonably true. "Led by Europe, LTE (Long Term Evolution) will be the preferred technology for 4G." -- I don't even know what this means.

"Not to be left behind, the less developed world will finally see widespread availability of broadband" -- y'see, as a prediction this one is hard to fault in that it's a long term trend and I'm sure there's some places in the third world that have acquired broadband over the last year. Still, I wouldn't say the last year has seen enormous progress on that front.

"The Internet Assistant will be born" -- hmm, not really. And if a product which could book me a flight, a car, a hotel, and make dinner reservations automatically did exist, I wouldn't use it, since I wouldn't trust it to get me the best prices.

"he was optimistic that having a new, competent, team in Washington, that valued science, technology, and innovation, would improve the country’s overall mood" -- a giggle seems like the appropriate response here.

In conclusion, there's a few accurate predictions here, but they're just identifications of trends which should have been reasonably obvious in 2008. And then there's the impossibly naive political predictions which, the less said about the better.

Mostly, the problem is that the US still lacks a system for transferring money freely between bank accounts. If you want to send someone some money electronically you wind up paying fees at both ends.

(Also, some people use cheques just to be annoying, like the old women who write cheques to pay for their groceries at supermarkets.)

This is why I like skill-based yet luck-dependent games like Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit. Even if you're 150 points behind in Scrabble, there's always the chance you're going to get two great racks in a row. And even if you're six pie-slices behind in Trivial Pursuit there's always the chance that you'll get a long run of questions you happen to know the answers to.

It's the redshift/blueshift of the actual star that you need to measure.

a) The assumption that the proportion of miles walked drunk is the same as the proportion of miles driven drunk is completely unjustified,

b) They don't distinguish between different levels of "drunk"

Whether these arguments are ignored through ignorance or deliberate disingenuousness, though, I'm not sure.