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It's wrong, the molecules are many orders of magnitude smaller than is possible to see.

The main black widow venom is alpha-Latrotoxin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latrotoxin), which is a 130 kDa protein according to wikipedia. That's large for a protein but there are bigger. Eukaryotic ribosomes are around 2500 kDa, but even they are completely invisible at 20 nm wide, and there are a thousands-millions of them per cell.

It is my understanding that rodents run a lot while foraging. I've heard, for example, that wild hamsters run 4-10 miles at night while foraging.

Such a creature is called a "musimones", as I recently learned from reading "Natural Magicks" by Porta, an endearingly incorrect popular science book from 1584. I quote his discussion of these creatures below. The rest of the book is quite amusing.

http://www.mindserpent.com/American_History/books/Porta/jpor...

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There is a beast called "Musimones", gendered of a Goat and a Ram. Pliny says, that in Spain, but especially in Corsica, there are beasts called Musimones not much unlike to Sheep, which have Goats hair, but in other parts, Sheep; the young ones which are gendered of them, coupling with Sheep, are called by the Ancients, Umbri. Strabo calls them Musimones. But Albertus calls them Musini or Musimones, which are gendered of a Goat and a Ram. I have heard that in Rhetia, in Helvetian confines, there are generated certain beasts, which are Goats in the hinder parts, but in the former parts, Sheep or Rams; but they cannot live long, but commonly they die, as soon as they are born. And that there the Rams being grown in years, are very strong and lustful, and so often times meet with Goats, do run over them, and that the young ones which wild Rams beget of tame Sheep, are color like the sire, and so is their breed after them; and the wool of the first breed is shaggy, but in their after-breed soft and tender.

Bohmian Mechanics is an interpretation of Quantum mechanics which does not have any "true" randomness.

It is effectively a hidden variable theory consistent with quantum mechanics.

So at least some physicists do not believe in true randomness.

I signed up before they had ID verification about two years ago, and deposited a little money. Then a few months later I'd had my fun and I wanted to take my money back, but discovered they wouldn't let me withdraw unless I provided ID.

After some back and forth with them I somehat angrily provided ID and got my money returned. It later turned out that they had either been dishonest or incompetent in their argument for providing ID, and I got them to promise me that they had deleted any and all ID docs I sent them, specifically because of scenarios like this one.

Well, I hope they were telling the truth.

That may be impossible - it depends how far back the problem goes: If someone stole some money three weeks ago and spent it, then any transaction descending from that original bad transaction would have to be invalidated too. This could conceivably be a large fraction of all bitcoin transactions since then because of the way bitcoins get 'mixed'.

In other words, most likely we would have to reset everything to the way it was before any of the bad transactions, and they might have started years ago (my impression is it was a small but long-term drain). This would be insupportable to anyone who has sold any goods since then.

Also, you don't need to persuade the miners, so much as the sellers (of goods): The miners will mine whichever blockchain on which bitcoins have value, and bitcoins have value only because people accept payment using them. In other words, your main challenge is to convince anyone selling goods in bitoin to update to the new client - the very people who would likely get screwed by reversing transactions.

I'd argue it's not the miners with the power - it's the people selling goods. A seller has to decide whether to accept a payment, and the seller's choice of blockchain (for verification) is what matters - even if only a few miners mine that chain.

Even if 99% of miners are on one of the chains, if sellers does not accept payment through that chain then bitcoin on it are worthless.

There are 3 main proofs (I know of) that the Earth orbits the Sun:

1. Stellar parallax: Stars will appear at slightly different positions in the sky due to the changing position of the Earth during its orbit. Many astronomers from the 1500s to 1800s hoped to measure parallax, and it was finally measured by Friedrich Bessel in 1838. This is the work that first made Bessel famous.

2. Stellar Aberration: Stars appear at slightly different positions during the course of the year due to the finite speed of light relative to the (changing) velocity of the Earth. This was first explained and carefully measured by James Bradley in 1729, making him the most famous scientist of the 18th century according to scientists of the time, including Laplace.

3. The Foucault pendulum: Pendulums on Earth precess. This is not so much proof that the Earth orbits the Sun, but that the Earth rotates in place. The fact that the sun appears to rise/fall/go around us is an illusion due to this rotation. First demonstrated by Foucault in 1851.

I disagree with you on the reference frame/general relativity argument. It is true that, by GR, the actualy picture of spacetime is more complicated. However, there is an intuitive notion of 'orbiting' which is very useful which applies in classical/SR, which applies in inertial reference frames, and in that ase the above observations make clear that the Earth orbits the sun.

Also:

>it's still an open question if bacteria evolve or not

> If the earth ever starts orbiting the sun...as the resulting acceleration would affect magma flow

This is silly.

> as the market for cotton cloth matured in the mid-20th century, further automation no longer generated such increases in demand and new technology slowly eliminated jobs in the textile industry.

This seems to be a counterpoint to his thesis: Technology does indeed create unemployment if all demand has already been satisfied.

His point should thus be stated with a caveat: Technology does not destroy jobs as long as demand increases along with the increased supply. In order to know whether robots will steal our jobs, we have to first determine whether human demands are already being met or not, and it seems plausible to me that they nearly are today (though the inverse also seems plausible).

I wonder how biased it is, and what lengths they took to make it unbiased.

In physics, if you randomly divide a fixed amount of energy among n particles, you will obtain a boltzmann (exponential) distribution of particle energies, such that a small number of particles have very high energy and while many have only a little.

Similarly, if you randomly divide a fixed amount of wealth among n individuals, you end up with a boltzmann distribution of wealth, such that a small number if individuals have a lot of the wealth, while many have only a little.

The boltzmann distribution is the maximum entropy distribution, for fixed total energy or fixed total wealth.

It sounded pretty sincere to me. He's not the type to say things he doesn't mean, nor the type to apologize just because of public pressure.

He was being a bully, and I think better of him now that he recognized it.

On the scale from "totally fictional" to "totally non-fictional", Ivan Denisovich leans pretty far to the non-fiction side since much of it is directly based on the author's real experiences, so much so that it's often referred to as a "semi-autobiography".

As one of "them" who often prefers non-fiction, I enjoyed the book for that reason. Incidentally, I think it's stronger in this fictionalized form than as it would have been as a straight-up autobiography.

I read that book. It left me convinced that I couldn't learn anything at all from those fictional war stories since I couldn't distinguish the truths from the half-truths, and it was a turning point in my literary life as I realized I do indeed prefer to read non-fiction.

(PS I still read and enjoy fiction. I don't get why everyone's so up in arms about Bill Gate's mild preference for non-fiction)

For comparison, here's one of many online tables of "Global Warming potential" (GWP) for different chemicals:

http://unfccc.int/ghg_data/items/3825.php

A 100-year GWP of 7000 seems typical for the type of chemical described in the article. Nevertheless, it's good we are identifying them.

"head" and "worker" is also used in some contexts.

b is ruled out to a "reasonable" person because the Earth is not an inertial reference frame, but is clearly the 'rotating' frame, while the Sun is (approximately) stationary.

This is confirmed through the phenomena of stellar parallax and stellar aberration, which are only visible from Earth because of its motion. Even back in the 1573, Thomas Digges and many successors realized they could prove the Earth was in motion using parallax (though had trouble detecting it), and in 1729 James Bradley gave the first proof of heliocentrism using aberration. Both of these observations were taken as proof by the scientific world that the Earth orbits the Sun, and not the other way around.

Interesting. Only 2 photosynthetic molecules are known so far in all branches of life, chlorophyll and rhodopsin, so the existence of another photosynthetic pathway is pretty surprising! I hope it's not another case of hype followed by debunking like for "arsenic dna" or "antideluvian dna".

The study seems to be done properly though, and hints at a possible mechanism, so maybe. I'd need a couple follow up studies of the mechanism to be convinced!

Re: the last part about etched semiconductors:

Keep in mind that the size of a magnetic grain (which stores 1 bit, roughly) is about 8nm. Compare that to the current cutting edge lithography scale of 14nm, which is the size of the semiconductor 'wires'.

Thus, a bit is smaller than the size even of the wires in any semiconductor circuit we can build, which means a system as you describe would have much lower storage density.

Interesting idea. I though it was going to be more like the 'cooling glove' [1] which actually cools you down, rather than just making you think you're cooler. Hairless skin on the hands and face has blood vessels close to the surface, and cooling those parts is proposed to quickly cool your blood and core temperature.

It looks like the energy and space requirements for such cooling glove are too large to make it portable, however, and it also doesn't work much better than simply holding an ice pack! So, for portable devices, it seems like at most we can only trick ourselves into thinking we're cool.

[1]http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/0...

Isaac Newton - Introduced a world-view which arguably led to the industrial revolution and most modern science.

James Bradley (1693 - 1762)- "The inventor of Modern science", for his development of the modern scientific method. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v400/n6739/full/400027a...

As I understand, the issue is not so much getting the position data, but getting the data quickly (with low latency) to reduce mismatch between the rendered position on screen and the user's actual position. The Rift has special 250 Hz position sensors for this purpose, and even that's not fast enough. Webcams are usually only 30Hz.

http://oculusrift-blog.com/john-carmacks-message-of-latency/...

This result is right in line with the observations of people studying the evolution of lactose tolerance [1].

Lactose-tolerant middle-easterners (who had long been eating lactose-free fermented milk, until they developed lactose tolerance) moved in to Europe and took over, and rarely mixed with the native hunter gatherers. Instead, they simply outcompeted them and largely wiped them out. It is estimated that lactose tolerance gave them "up to 19% more fertile offspring" than the indigenous hunter-gatherers.

That makes me muse: Maybe the two groups didn't mix because the hunter-gatherers couldn't survive on the high-milk (and high starch?) diet of the agricultural people. Lactose intolerance can be quite violent!

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1...

So this means the FBI now owns 600,000 bitcoins (5% of all bitcoins)? Probably more, since they also control the (presumably large number of) bitcoin stored in accounts on Silk road.

Seems like this could lead either to the legitimation or deligitimation of bitcoin as the FBI must assess their worth. It also gives the FBI the ability to mess with bitcoin markets if they choose, by flooding supply.

This explains it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature

In the ferromagnetic phase, the atoms are magnetically aligned and their magnetic fields adds up. If you increase the temperature past a certain point though, the atoms are jiggled enough that they can no longer stay aligned and they 'point' in random directions, and their magnetic fields cancel out.

This is a big problem in hard drives: If you increase the temerature of a hard drive the magnetic regions no longer maintain their magnetization and your data gets erased. A lot of hard drive technology (eg 'perpedicular recording') has been developed to solve this problem.

It may not be strictly necessary, but it's a great educational and exploratory toy.

The main draw for me was unsupervised exploration. The calculator is simple enough that you can figure out how to program yourself (with the manual), and you can know 'everything' there is to know about it. You don't have to ask a teacher for anything, you get to do whatever interests you, and show your friends. That makes it more exciting somehow.

Like the author of the article, I (and my friends) spent a lot of time programming in BASIC on it. I also feel I spent a lot of time simply plotting functions, just to see how they behaved. EG, looking at the 'beats' produced by adding up sine functions. As a scientist today I frequently do that kind of exploratory analysis, but in python or mathematica.

Depression is not "sadness without cause". It is a mental condition thought by some to be best described as a chemical imbalance in the brain, and often does have a very clear cause. Head injuries, drugs, and other physical injuries and stresses commonly cause depression, even if the person was otherwise emotionally well. "More than half of all people who suffer a traumatic brain injury will become depressed in the year after the injury".

In this case, he mentions a debilitating 50 mile run, a bike accident, and an operation, which very well could be the main causes rather than any job or emotional stress.

Fascinating, an analog computer. Reading about it on wikipedia, it seems analog computers have been almost completely forgotten in the digital age. It makes me wonder what kind of analog computer would be possible now with 21st century technology, especially because of discoveries in condensed matter.

For example, could an electrical analog system be a way of carrying out large-time molecular dynamics simulations? With proper tuning of the material, might you be able to create arbitrary potentials between the electrons within it so that they would interact roughly like atoms in an MD simulation? Or, perhaps you could create an analog chip where the electrons would 'naturally' solve various NP-hard problems, effectively by brute force?

I use parallel all the time for embarrasingly parallel scientific computations on a cluster. It is very easy to use and elegant, and it's one of the programs I'm most grateful for.

Recently the developers fixed a major bug for me, that child jobs on other nodes would not be killed when parallel was killed. This was the only thing stopping me from recommending it to my labmates, now there's no reason not to use it!

The more obvious conclusion, to me, is that people prefer energy-rich foods after expending more mental energy. Our brain is a major energy sink, as it consumes about 20% of our body's energy.

I'm pretty sure that after I've been thinking hard, I prefer to eat energy rich foods. Of course, as with anything related to the brain, since we understand it so poorly it's hard to say if either hypothesis is really true.