sevenless

> Also, the Romans died out because they fell into decadence

No historian on earth believes this. That's a myth from Gibbon.

Today I learned that planes carry nitroglycerin.

The ISS itself, is the same kind of boondoggle as the Shuttle.

Imagine a US space program that put unmanned probes front and center. We could've had video feeds crawling over every moon of Jupiter and Saturn, and inside the Martian caves. We might've settled the Mars and Europa life question. And two Shuttle crews would not have died.

Humans don't belong in space. Robots do.

But the only way to justify such a statement would be to point to... current trends. As the OP did.

It is not dismissive to put death rates into perspective. It is noteworthy that homicide is the number one cause of death for US Black males, 15-34 years old, as per 2013 CDC data. The death rate from homicide for age 20-24 is about 86.6 per 100,000 per year, worse than the Honduras average. This is true for no other demographic group surveyed in the United States.

See page 35 of http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr65/nvsr65_02.pdf

For White males, 15-24 years, homicide is the #3 cause of death while suicide is #2.

Almost certainly, homicide would also be the leading cause of death for young Honduras males, though I don't have that data.

There's no point in responding seriously to this inflammatory post. Sex-selective childbirth (which is legal in the US) and genocide are a false equivalence.

> Thus a society of full of women is no solution to fixing the wiles of humanity as their female denizens are still capable of violence.

As ever the perfect is the enemy of the good. A male-free society would be expected to have a much lower violence rate.

> Since both men and women are capable of violence, why not get rid of all humanity?

A robot assigned with the task of setting the harm to humanity to zero would probably recommend this (and so would an anti-natalist philosopher like David Benatar). We have "humanity has to continue to exist" as a boundary condition.

> This strange advice of yours depends on the fervent belief--a sexist one, I might add--that women are incapable of the wiles of humanity.

Are facts sexist? Men tend to be much more violent than women. Nearly all rapes and homicides are committed by men, men are much more accident-prone, and men make up nearly all the fighters in wars. With advances in biological technology, humanity may no longer need men to survive. If we were to re-engineer humanity with harm reduction as a priority - and that is one big 'if', but it's your premise, not mine - there is a case for phasing out males.

What I'm saying is that

> If you depend on current trends for you thinking, you'll never predict the future.

is itself an observation about current trends in the efficacy of predicting the future, and therefore, if it's true, must be false.

Sorry to be a smartass, but isn't this post self-refuting?

I don't generally like evolutionary "just so stories", but men are the more expendable sex, when you get down to it. Historically, only half of men ever passed their genes on, whereas nearly all women did. It makes sense that men should tend to be shorter-lived, less squeamish, more violent (to men, women and themselves), and more willing to take life-threatening risks - all of which the homicide, suicide and accident rates bear out, worldwide. If you consider the difference between sexes for the homicide rate, it's surprising the female suicide rate is as much as half of men's.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/09/040920063537.h...

The possibility of a copycat effect does not seem to deter the media from frenzied, hyperbolic reporting on mass shootings or terrorism.

Do you have any demeaning nicknames for those who work in female dominated professions too?

It is true that most Americans are very unlikely to be murdered. This homicide rate varies widely over age, sex and race, and (as per CDC) homicide is not a leading cause of death for most demographics. Young black males are, unfortunately, the exception.

11K deaths from homicide isn't "almost non existent". Now it is true the burden is concentrated in young males, especially black males. This is not to say a death from homicide is intrinsically more important than from suicide, that firearms aren't linked to higher suicide rates, or that gun suicide isn't worth preventing - clearly it is.

As for why the news focuses on homicide, especially spectacular mass murders, "if it bleeds it leads".

For protons, the muon-derived radius is 4% smaller than for the electron-derived radius. But for deuterium, the discrepancy is only 0.8%.

Is there some obvious scaling argument why adding a neutron should reduce the anomalous effect by a factor of 5? Actually, why is it that the deuteron's charge radius is so more than 2x the proton's? It obviously doesn't work like you'd expect something volumetric to work.

Shkreli was almost admirably honest. Let the wealthy accumulate enough and they'll buy the government. Capitalism without a very tight leash, democracy: choose one.

Mostly network effects/inertia. And it didn't help that Google seemed to be quite pushy about getting people to sign up.

Going by center of mass means that for a sufficiently large tumor, you'd be talking about a patient-ectomy.

Reading all those different, excruciatingly difficult surgical steps it sounds like it would be just about easier to give him a robot body, Futurama-Nixon style.

Any idea why it would be slower? I liked the idea of avoiding half the multiplications.

Risky for what? Alien invasion? If interstellar travel were that easy or worthwhile they'd be here already, especially what with terrestrial radio broadcasts.

I always thought optical SETI makes more sense. With relatively inexpensive lasers we can send an extremely bright message, vastly outshining our sun, to every star within a few thousand light years. Surely that's how you'd say 'We're here' to aliens.

http://seti.harvard.edu/oseti/

I'd like to see support for optimized multiplication on symmetric matrices. I don't think BLAS can take advantage of that, certainly scipy/numpy doesn't.

I adore outlandish conspiracy theories and this is an excellent one. Now, are the astronomers and government secretly working with the Nibiru aliens themselves to cover up the impending cataclysm? Could the sinister New World Order really be a Nibiru beach head? And were Erich von Daniken and David Icke right about everything?

Economic growth: it's the altar we're sacrificing the world on.

Courtship isn't quite the word I'd use for Grindr.

But now everyone has his own facts, that they can back up with authoritative sources like Breitbart or @GlobalWarmingLie.

We do not speak of the Before-time here.

I learned about limited slip differentials from Marisa Tomei's great courtroom scene in My Cousin Vinny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFdJza0AbeA