Joe

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• Commented on Advisor: What will happen if I clone my dog?
  Clones are often quite different from the original, because even though the genes are the same, they aren't expressed in the same way because they weren't produced by the original process. It's not just the environmental differences after birth; the...
• Commented on Humans are domesticating themselves with smaller brains as a result
  Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel made a similar point: he spent many years in Papua New Guinea with the indigenous people, and found them to be a lot more intelligent than the average Westerner, quickly grasping ideas that...
• Commented on College students arrested for not tipping
  Make sure that you read the linked-to article. In this case, the menu said in writing that for a large party the tip was mandatory. That means they owed the money. Now, a decent restaurant will usually make some accommodation,...
• Commented on Tiny "Flores Man" of Indonesia declared a new human species
  Of course things can change as more evidence is discovered, but evidently they now have fossils from nine distinct individuals, plus lots of tools sized for miniature humans. Claims that one specimen is diseased look less credible when you have...
• Commented on Jacques Vallee: Waterboarding's curious corollaries
  Hawley, my father, like most who served with him in WW2, enlisted voluntarily. He was lucky; he was supposed to land on the beach on D-Day, but the boat he was on was defective (I think it sank in the...
• Commented on Jacques Vallee: Waterboarding's curious corollaries
  There's an implicit assumption here that the purpose of the torture was to find the truth. However, the history of torture shows that the purpose was to extract confessions: this is what the Spanish Inquisition, Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, and...
• Commented on USB grenade flash drive
  Not just the TSA. If you bring that thing to work, and someone spots it and calls security, you might be looking for a new job....
• Commented on Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
  Anonymous #1: Russell's work led to Gödel's work; Gödel built on Russell. The comic illustrates Russell's paradox about the set of all sets not containing themselves. The Principia Mathematica was an attempt to eliminate this problem by eliminating self-reference, and...
• Commented on Subversive anti-cancer cross-stitch kits
  Anonymous, I'm not so sure about that. I'm confident that the studies you refer to were conducted correctly, but a controlled study controls for everything, and if someone with a positive attitude behaves differently, or seeks different treatment options, from...
• Commented on Y2K ten years later
  The Y2K crisis extended the dot-com boom, by pumping in a bunch of money into software at about the time that it was becoming clear that the emperor had no clothes. So the tech stock bubble burst in spring 2000...
• Commented on "Malcolm X was bisexual. Get over it."
  The word "black" is used differently in the UK than it is in the US, for example to describe South Asians, or anyone with non-European ancestry....
• Commented on Bicycle defense kit fits in Altoids tin
  I bike to work once in a while in the sunnier times of the year, though not that often because 13 miles each way is a bit much for my middle-aged body. This kind of crap is a disaster for...
• Commented on Thieves who stole from child get a public shaming
  If only we could impose this kind of punishment on corporate executives. Instead, when they mess up, they have to be paid millions of dollars to go away, and we pretend that a corporation, rather than its officers, has committed...
• Commented on History of the IMG tag
  The article gets an important detail wrong: Mosaic was owned by the NCSA; when Andreessen and gang started Netscape, they didn't have the rights to that code, which they wrote for grad student "wages" (meaning less than a janitor gets),...
• Commented on 20-year old Iraqi woman dies; father ran her over for being too Westernized
  And if a Christian man kills his daughter because she violates his values (which isn't that rare), should we then ban Christians from North America?...
• Commented on Newspaper circulation over last 20 years: the great swandive
  The chart should have zero at the bottom, not 400,000. Doing it the way they did it exaggerates the apparent decline by a factor of two....
• Commented on What physicists want to know
  If we accept the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the universe doesn't know it's being watched; it's just that when you make a measurement, you find out more about which branch of the universe you are in. When you measure...
• Commented on Forensic Art: Finding missing kids with Photoshop
  "NCMEC has a 97% recovery rate of all missing children reported to it, with over 900 safely returned children whose age progressed photos were advertised on TV and on milk cartons." But I'd heard that the vast majority of these...
• Commented on Map shows US marriage and divorce rates
  Manooshi: the divorce rate is lower on the coasts, and highest in the deep south (Mass. has the lowest divorce rate). The total currently divorced isn't that different, but in places like Arkansas and Mississippi, a lot of folks have...
• Commented on Map shows US marriage and divorce rates
  Notice that the Bible Belt is the land of "married three or more times". They believe in marriage so much down there that they do it again and again....
• Commented on Honduran coup in webcomic form
  coaxial, your view simply isn't an informed one, and it has no support from any nation in the world (no nation recognizes the validity of the coup). Zelaya proposed to hold a non-binding referendum. Even if such a move was...
• Commented on Sabotage on the Large Hadron Collider?
  String theorists are wrecking physics. They are anti-scientific in their bent: if nature doesn't follow their beautiful mathematics, it must be nature, not their mathematics, that is wrong. They produce theories with so many free parameters that they can fit...
• Commented on Tiny nuclear battery
  AirPillo, you're confusing beta with alpha. Alpha particles can't penetrate a piece of paper, though you can still get lung cancer if you inhale an alpha emitter. But a beta particle (high energy electron) can penetrate a few inches of...
• Commented on Ada Lovelace biopic needs letters of support
  I'm puzzled as to why this kind of campaign would be needed. The US DoD named their programming language Ada in her honor; she was evidently the first person to think clearly about the non-numerical aspects of computing; in Alan...
• Commented on Trailer for movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road
  I read the book. It was well-written, but it was a deeply depressing experience, utterly grim, unrelieved hopelessness that will stomp on your heart. Almost every hope that is raised is crushed, to the point where I wasn't convinced by...
• Commented on Katie Couric's salary exceeds combined budgets of NPR's top news shows
  You'll see vastly more criticism in the press of salaries paid to star performers (in the media or sports) than you will see of the compensation of corporate officers. Couric's salary is huge, but her impact can be measured: how...
• Commented on Navigation system uses crowdsourcing for route guidance
  The OpenStreetMap folks had better watch out for patent attacks from this company (no matter that OSM was doing crowdsource map-building first)....
• Commented on Internet dumbing-down hysteria compared against previous waves of anti-tech backlash
  If I recall correctly, Plato wrote it down, but he was attributing the critique of writing to Socrates, so Plato wasn't being a hypocrite....
• Commented on How Islamist gangs use chat rooms to lure, torture and kill Iraqi gays
  I'm with ACB. Someone who spends six hours a day trying to destroy gays is very likely trying to destroy his own gayness. Mere prejudice isn't going to explain such a level of obsession....
• Commented on If lotto tickets told the truth
  "It's a simple way to buy an evening's worth of hope." Which means it's a tax on the hopeless. State lotteries are a way to shift the tax burden from the well-off to the poor....