Not only that, I got an error trying to create a login id first. That error went away when I reloaded, and then when I tried to log in, it produced the error above. Ah IBM, so old-school.

"Cities require authoritarian social structures to survive" is wrong both normatively and empirically, and Newitz shouldn't give it the time of day.

The best one happened only a few hours ago. We were leaving home to visit the in-laws, and found ourselves in rapidly glassifying traffic. When Google started to estimate the 90 minute trip would take four hours and we were motionless for minutes at a time, we said fuck this, pulled off, and discovered that we were…

It's a free country. I'm free to ignore or block their ads, they're free to block my browser if they detect ad blocking or to go behind a paywall. They don't give me content out of charity, and I don't give them ad views out of charity.

I don't mean to get into a hermeneutic quibble here, but based on my own reading and the responses in hundreds of the comments here, the original article was making a much more bold speculation than blandly claiming that "today, many cities are deeply divided along class lines" or that "cities do seem to lend…

I have to agree with Fatlawyer here. This theory reads like a right-wing just-so story, with about as much empirical evidence as evolutionary just-so stories about how women evolved to be caretakers and men risktakers. Yes, it's interesting to think about the effects of belief systems on techno-cultural…

I updated my 2009 MPB straight from Snow Leopard to Yosemite. Not only did the email update totally fail (unable to import any of my mailboxes after the reboot, requiring an unsurprised high-level support guy to walk me through importing each mailbox one at a time), but all the system-level print looked blurrier. …

Agreed — it was stale even back when it was a criticism being lobbed at Jane Eyre.

Amazing they were also able to get the robot to do the voice-over for the second video. So realistic!

Actually, a "Blood Music" (Greg Bear) kind of story set in the Star Wars world — particularly post-episode-6 — would be pretty cool. Miticlorians or whatever is a dumb name, but the idea of these bioengineered or nanotech organelles gaining collective sentience and having their own opinions about the Light and Dark…

For those wondering how the scale works, it basically just looks at who gives money to the various candidates. If the people who give money to person X also give money to Obama and other left-wing candidates, then the system assumes person X is liberal; and vice versa for conservative. So the results may be wrong,…

FYI, the press release, like the research, is from Stanford, not Harvard.

The brain learns by wiring — that's how neural networks are programmed. fMRI results are repeatedly misinterpreted by people who think that because they discover a physiological basis for some mental correlate, it is therefore "hard-wired." But that's not what it means at all. Both hard-wired (innate) and…

What a relief. It's hard work asking people whether they're on drugs and other such things. Keep up the good fight! One of these days the entire scientific community will come round. Just a few more internet posts should do the job.

Hey Sea Bear — what are your thoughts on climate change? All a hoax? Or it exists but it's not caused by people and/or a little extra warmth will actually help civilization?

La Guardia is the bus station of airports.

I never understand point #3. Is the assumption that there will never again be stupid policies or errors in running a nuclear plant? No one is arguing about power under perfect scenarios. The issue is what the downsides of these power sources are in the real world. In the real world, people seem to screw up with…

I'm very much looking forward to the further politicization of solar power. All right-thinking conservatives should stay away — it's just more government subsidy! And it's all part of the left-wing global-warming conspiracy of course.

Ugh. Takes two lovely people and turns them into a tank and a woman to be protected. No thanks.

Re: aec007, Weiner, etc: All you centrists and undecided libertarians reading — this is what the Republican party has become. Join them if you dare.