bell-cot

+1...though Google's Loon used high-altitude balloons.

The most important statistical idea of the past 50 years is the same as the most important statistical idea of the 50 years before that: "Due to reduced superstition, better education, and genera…

Pretty obvious why "more gently used" sets of lungs are in high demand right now. Or at least they're the obvious headliner for stories about the organ donor shortage. I noticed no …

tl;dr version - Joseph Stalin, who most successful or self-satisfied western bibliophiles probably see as a monster, was an extremely well-read, successful (and likely self-satisfied) bibliophile. Th…

If you use "dictator" so loosely that everyone's parents, boss, etc. qualify - then you're just making a confusing mess with language. There are other, far better, words to descri…

If you aren't going to have the time to pay attention / learn / get decent grades, and you aren't in a field where having the degree is Important (for whatever reasons), then defin…

How large is your legal budget, compared to those of the parties who you wish to coerce, restrict, delay, ...? (No, the Patent Office does not have a good reputation for rejecting prior-art-plus-a-f…

Perhaps those engaged in (or responsible for) such behaviors are more motivated by their own emotional gratification - vs. the competence, efficiency, etc. considerations which are important to you?

The underlying story is that, in a world where Snowden's revelations were nearly 9 years ago, and stories like "$GigaCorp was hacked, umpteen million customers' personal information sto…

Bluntly put, SSL Certificates exist (or at least are widely promoted and used in their current form) to protect the business models of a few very large corporations. Especially against parties like s…

> ...as long as... ...browsers that hide... Sounds like EV is great in theory, nigh-worthless in practice.

IANARS (Not A Rocket Scientist)...but has there ever been a major new model of rocket which has been delivered within the originally predicted time? And without "Moon Race" levels of fund…

From a skim of the story..."abhorrent"ly poor judgment in speaking near a live microphone, certainly. For any lawyer, that seems a legit termination offense. Whether the ex-professor is pre…

+1...but my reaction to folks who worry much about free will in a deterministic universe, "butterfly effect quasi-free will", etc. is that they really should have gotten outside to play mo…

Sounds like an excellent target for supply-chain style attacks...

If you think that your manager could improve...if only he'd read the Evil Overlord list* and really give that some thought, then your "manager" is actually an Evil Overlord (or wanna-be…

> ...how do I get a burner phone that isn’t associated with my identity? What adversary are you worried about? Taking to a divorce lawyer without your spouse knowing? Not having higher-skill cybe…

Princeton has picked a metric, and has gotten so good at optimizing for it that they're now #1 for eleven years and counting: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel…

(It's the Princeton student newspaper, so the target audience pretty much knows that.)

If well-taught, entry-level Philosophy can be one of the most intellectually-expanding courses you could take. OTOH, there are quite a few topics in entry-level Philosophy which are likely to be polit…

In scientific terms - some chemical (used in the production) was supposed to be 99.999999% pure...but was not , and the offending impurity(ies) was (in terms of consequences for the uber-delicate p…

Reminds me of old stories about Intel - how, when they were taking a (chip fabrication) process which worked at plant X to (new or re-tooled) plant Y, they would duplicate EVERYTHING from X at Y. R…

GTFOASAP

Special "Help $Gender enter $Field_Where_Gender_Is_Rare" stuff makes sense, if (for whatever reason) it seems that having some fields highly gender-skewed is undesirable. And whatever the P…

Plausibly true...but on large social media platforms, you could at least get slightly sane about how much scale matters. If I share videos / photos / captions of my great-grandsons enjoyi…

tl;dr version - Naive "tow all the trucks away" ideas are ~useless in the real world, because towing just one heavy truck out of a tight spot, when the driver is friendly, is very difficul…

For this sort of math (theoretical), "practically straight" is never straight enough. And your approach is close enough to calculus that "totally naive..." seems a tad too modest.…

If person A goes to bed with person B...because A had had enough drinks (alcoholic, served by bartender C) to think that B was a very attractive single, while B was pretending to be single as part of …

An un-mentioned advantage for battery-electric locomotives, especially for yard duty - trains are already composed of many heavy modules (locomotives and freight cars) which are pretty quick & eas…

> ... When it came to depression, two bacteria [...], Morganella and Kiebdiella , seemed to play a causal role, [...] Morganella has already been implicated in depression. As far back as 2008…