nitid_name

Hence the statistic where 1/3 of your lifetime medical expenses come in the last year of life.

There's always friction between covert and overt operations.

For another elucidating example (and another Hillary situation), look at the CIA vs State Department in Benghazi.

I thought convention in SI units was to drop down a level when at less than 1 of a unit..?

How much of a dose do you actually get from the scans?

The best numbers I can find seem to point to something in the 0.015 μSv to 0.88 μSv range. At cruising altitude, you get 0.04 μSv per minute from cosmic radiation.

I don't think the radiation from these machines should be the biggest concern.

It's not germane to this discussion. The previous poster only brought it up to draw parallels between a straight person being for allowing gay marriage and a non-smoker being for legalization.

E85 is usually cheaper because of the subsidies.

I've found the more rural gas stations stock 100% gasoline. I assume it's because the older engines in farm and sporting equipment don't take kindly to E85 (different valve timing needed, it's rough on old seals, etc).

If we're going to keep the analogy going...

The teacher has had students over before, and unlocks his/her home by grabbing the key out of the fake rock sitting on the doorstep. The student uses that key and wrote something obscene with the fridge magnets.

It's not quite breaking and entering, but it's more than trespassing.

If she had her own mail server, it's probably fair to assume she could have set it up as her outbound mail server and to use TLS of some sort when connecting to it.

Speaking of burning man... I missed the ticket sales because my dumbass didn't check the "register try to buy tickets" option on my burner profile. Anyone have one to spare?

I've heard east coast (US) coal is dirtier than west coast (US) coal, particularly in sulfides. The acid rain fix known as the Clean Air Act of 1990 was heavily lobbied by the east coast coal producers and bears some marks to show for it. Burning so called "Clean Coal" has to do with how much gross weight of sulfur you pull out of the coal, which makes sense for coal heavy in sulfides, but less so for west coast fuel. As it stands, to burn west coast coal in the US requires the addition of sulfides to the coal so it can then be pulled back out.

As for other impurities... there are a lot of radioactive crap in coal that is aerosolized during the combustion process. The most notable of these is uranium, which is carried away with the rest of the fly ash. There's a "shadow" around coal smoke stacks where such fly ash ends up accumulating. If it makes it into the water table or onto arable land that is used to grow crops, BAM, you've irradiated a small chunk of your population.

Depending on the source of the coal, there are various other heavy metals that can end up in your fly ash.

If it's coupled, wouldn't it cross the boundary of the system, and then be included in normal entropy calculations as a flow across the boundary?

Mr. Munroe's comments on competing standards comes to mind. http://xkcd.com/927/

Wouldn't that risk driving up the market price of bitcoins, which leads to a higher competing bid on the bulk coins?

Yep. Look what happens every time a bitcoin bank folds. Everyone who had coins in that bank rather than in their own wallet suddenly loses every coin they have.

I would like to hear his "complicated sixteenth note patterns."

There are some strange regulations on savings accounts in the US. You're only allowed a set number of transactions on them per month. Checking accounts don't have these limits.

I think the complaint against is generally that they're acting more akin to front runners than middle men.

Couldn't that raise the question of if the side effects themselves are a source of benefit?

Can you throw on a screen resolution axis option?

The whole Manifold series is interesting. Each Manifold book stands in its own universe, but uses the same cast of characters with a different set of answers to Fermi.

I got on a Baxter kick after powering through his Long Earth books (ostensibly coauthored with Terry Pratchett, though Pratchett's fingerprints are rather non-existent after first book). As long as you're ok with Baxter's strong dislike of organized religion, he seems to be one of the better modern science fiction writers.

I had a paper published on a model for the GRB that would have caused that event!

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0504158

When the GLAST (now James Webb Telescope) data came in, it pointed to a small (~1%) anisotropy of UHE GRBs toward high metalicity galaxies. Our model was completely isotropic. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to rework the anisotropy into our model's assumptions before our funding fell through.

... and that is the story of my brief experience as a scientist.

Fast forward to the point where we're able to utilize this sleeping brain function to some level of usefulness. I wonder how this sort of sleep-work will affect the quality of one's sleep and their cognitive functioning in the long term.

I know this isn't the case for everyone, but... in my state/county, every car on the road has to have an annual (or semi-annual in some cases) safety check to be properly plated and stickered.

I tend to start pacing for the zipper merge when I'm (reasonably) close to the end of the zipper. This way, I'm showing I am willing to wait while simultaneously giving myself the option of skipping forward past any particular territorial driver. When I slow down the merging lane to a similar speed as the non-merging lane, I can typically see the zipper start to form behind me when I check my mirrors.

In the same way one or two bad drivers can destroy a lane or two of functional traffic flow, a good driver can create a lane (or two) of harmony.

I imagine a language needs a certain rate of adoption to maintain the amount of programmers actively coding in that language. I feel like the term "momentum" accurately encompasses this idea.

Lets talk about Justin Bieber!

I don't understand why you invoked the name of a Canadian popstar. There is no chance of such a comment adding to the discussion.

That happens on the post-apocalyptic time line, I would assume

Volvo did this with the seat belt.

They do have a division limit though. One satoshi is only four orders of magnitude smaller than a penny (US).

EDIT: answered my own question

Do you consider formalizing an action/set-of-actions a valuable contribution?

While English <-> Spanish shares the romance language cognates (generally speaking, higher English comes from French, which shares a common ancestry), English <-> German shares grammar.

I imagine the vocabulary isn't as difficult for machines to process as grammar.