As it turns out, due to gravitational anomalies (remnants of old impacts under the surface, not any woo-woo with gravity), it's essentially impossible to maintain a stable, low orbit around the moon. In order to do the mapping at that resolution, the probes had to fly below the safe limit. So there was no way of…

The biggest reason: underground testing. Not only were the vast majority of tests conducted underground, they were also the later tests for higher-yield devices. 3,000 tests may also be a little over-generous (Wikipedia claims ~2,000). Then, the vast majority of non-underground explosions were in very remote areas…

I know you guys said you were going to branch out into non-tech topics over the winter break. And on the surface, perhaps that seems like a fine idea. Maybe articles like this should give you occasion to reconsider?

Wow, really? You had months to respond to that, but didn't look to see that either a) 50+ other people had said the same thing, or b) when I wrote the comment, the word stateside wasn't in the article. In fact, there's a reply from the author to my comment, acknowledging his mistake and noting that he would correct it.

We should be sending amphibious rovers here, not somewhere that already has plenty of wheels on the ground like Mars.

4 of the last 5 xkcd comics? At what point are you guys going to start paying Randal like for the recurring feature he's apparently writing for Giz?

Holy sequential title-colons, Batman!

Very cool article, but wasn't the entire thing pointing out that your first sentence was a complete and total lie?

The fact that Gizmodo (and half the rest of the internet) breathlessly reported it as a real thing may have something to do with it. But yes, it was never anything more than a website and a joke.

That is a pretty freaking huge difference. Given that science is based in the use of observational data to generate theories, claiming that its presence or absence doesn't make a huge difference is a rejection of the last 400 years of rational thought.

While it's certainly cute to say the Einstein correctly predicted the existence of something like dark energy, it doesn't really have any backing. He put the cosmological constant in for aesthetic reasons, without any valid scientific evidence it needed to be there. The fact that, at some later point in time a…

As you yourself note, it's not covered by "public domain" (which is very different than first amendment "free speech"). Moreover, because of the rather obvious ads floating right next to the comic, Giz profits any time someone clicks on the article, not Randal. That throws any "non-commercial" clause for a pretty…

You could argue that while Gawker Media calls them blogs, (complete with lack of editing/standards), they much more closely resemble magazines/newspapers, and GM is a for-profit corporation, which he does say need to ask for permission.

Given that Randal explicitly states that newspapers that want to run the comics need his permission to do so, I'd say it's not that clear.

Haven't you heard? Giz writes in a "post-truth" environment, where factual accuracy doesn't matter.

It's a non-commercial licence. Giz is pretty clearly commercial. You know, what with the ads floating right next to the comic.

Seriously guys, unless you have permission from Randal this is getting into copyright infringement territory. You've been reposting more than 1 a week for the last two months.

Software shouldn't take up any space, it's just stored as positioning of various bits of memory and interactions between transistors. We can make some approximations for everything on a motherboard, though. It gets a little tricky, because it uses a different architecture, but whatever.

Huh. I just a miniature version of this for sale called "wish paper". A small ball of what looked like a cross between tissue and origami paper. Crumple it up, then unfold and roll into a tube. Stand the tube on end and light the top. Does much the same thing, just in a smaller form factor. Plus commercially available…

It's not a single (discrete) strand of DNA, which would be obvious by noting that its almost 20nm thick: way, way thicker than an individual element of ds A-DNA. Their best theory is that it's actually 7 double-stranded pieces, all running parallel. The notched pattern on the outer edges might thus be a single helix,…