All the same, science is science and facts are facts and when a movie purports to traffic in both, it’s only fair to point out the blunders—none of which were howlers in this case, but at least some of which could (and should) have been avoided.

It's funny that he and the Time guy seem to think these are "blunders" or mistakes. I very much doubt that after 4 years, tens of millions of dollars, and hundreds of consultants, the director was unaware that satellites and stations orbit at different heights and inclinations. The changes were obviously made on…

People should upload some pornographic gifs to this thread so we can get the whole thread deleted. That gif is disgusting and has no place on a general-public website.

Given that childbearing rates plummet as wealth increases, then assuming the usual extrapolation of increasing wealth, the question is less a matter of the effects of longevity, and more specifically a question of what women will do with extremely long-lasting fertility. Assuming that comes along with increased life,…

The only thing Bacigalupi seems to have gotten wrong is that the environmental apocalypse ushering in the sailing cargo ships will apparently be slow and gradual, rather than a sudden collapse. The seas rise, gas runs short, prices adapt, and eventually we'll all be burning driftwood and scavenging jetsam without…

Could ubiquitous surveillance even prevent trollbait articles before they happen? Then I might get behind it!

Yeah, since I imagine mostly what you'd be doing is syncing a fairly rhythmic motion, the main thing is just figuring out the frequency, which should be fairly straightforward with even noisy and unoriented accelerometer data. I suppose getting the amplitude of the bounce right is also a challenge, though that might…

Thanks, Obama.

What proportion of cost-conscious buyers would prefer a 5 to a 5c? My guess is, quite a few, perhaps even the majority. For all of these people, replacing the 5 with the 5c actually amounts to a price increase, as well as being frustrating to all of them.

I waggled it around a bit, but didn't actually try it on a treadmill. The response seemed a little erratic and/or delayed, but I know coding that stuff is tricky. It's worth turning it into an App if you can get it to work moderately well though I think.

Cool! Now if you can just make the web box a frame around any web page, and get the bouncing to actually sync without latency, it will be useful and not just neat. Keep at it!

Civilians aren't Nazis. This seems like one of the easiest imaginable distinctions to understand.

$40 deal is already gone, alas.

If you have an optical drive, you're much better off replacing that with an SSD — the 500 GB Samsung 840 is now $320 on Amazon, so you could also just replace your main drive if you want. SSDs are super-fast, whereas in my experience the SD card route feels much slower (even slower than the specs suggests).

So if I write a computer program that has, as one of the inputs affecting what it does next, a representation of (some of) its current internal state, is it conscious?

The only one that leaps out as being mis-done is Russia. It has about half the US's population, but the way they drew it makes it look like much less. Better to drop that yellow line for siberia and just lump it all in a concentrated mass; less geographically accurate, but a more perceptually accurate representation…

For a related case, see here — http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundo… — for an example on the other side of things, where various groups of older folks are using the village model in order to be able to stay in their own homes. (Though I guess even a nursing home is a village of sorts, albeit a dystopian one where…

I like that the author of this piece repeatedly implies that things like communal living, communal cooking, and communal child-rearing with women paid for the time they put in, are all utopian, despite (apart from the last element) being the dominant form of living for most of human history. The only unusual thing is…

What sort of sound pollution would an active tube system produce for those near it?

Well, it doesn't really require infinities, just a lot of time.