lemme guess, five years out? but seriously, fission would be awesome.
sciencehabit writes "As it approaches its fifth birthday, the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a troubled laser fusion facility in California, has finally produced some results that fusion scientists can get enthusiastic about. In a series of experiments late last year (abstract 1, abstract 2), NIF researchers managed to produce energy yields 10 times greater than produced before and to demonstrate the phenomenon of self-heating that will be crucial if fusion is to reach its ultimate goal of 'ignition'—a self-sustaining burning reaction that produces more energy than it consumes."
don't think I've read a sci-fi book by a soviet... *add to list
Brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky originally published their sci-fi classic Definitely Maybe in 1974. Now, a new translation restores cuts made by Soviet censors to this subversive tale of scientists exploring a reluctant universe. Reviewer Juan Vidal says "you'll laugh, you'll look around suspiciously, you'll throw the text across the room."
I started this, but haven't finished. if you want to read a history of the evangelicals in America, this looks promising: "Yet Worthen, who is not an evangelical herself but takes the intellectual struggles of the community quite seriously as a scholar, depicts the movement in a light that is at once far more nuanced and sympathetic than what passes for serious analysis on the left, while also supplying an intellectual profile of modern evangelical thought that’s at least as damning as the far more visceral secular denunciations of the religious right."
"conservative religious thinkers aren’t a perverse breed of demagogue possessed by crude reveries of cultural power; instead, they are—much like their counterparts in the secular world of intellect—convulsed by waves of doubt, status anxiety and existential drift. And much like their less orthodox academic cousins, these figures have sought to tamp down their personal and intellectual anxieties with institutional remedies: new academic concentrations, seminaries and departments; greater fealty to the rites of credentialed scholarship; and closely monitored modes of internal message discipline."
Anyway, I thought I'd share before finishing so others could have the chance.
The burden of religious intellectuals. Convulsed by doubt, status anxiety, and existential drift, they struggle to put piety on a rigorous footing… more»
i really need to brush up on my refutations of the "just a theory" positions. they drive me nuts.
Toe, The writes "The South Carolina Education Oversight Committee approved new science standards for students except for one clause: the one that involves the use of the phrase 'natural selection.' Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, argued against teaching natural selection as fact, when he believes there are other theories students deserve to learn. Fair argued South Carolina's students are learning the philosophy of natural selection but teachers are not calling it such. He said the best way for students to learn is for the schools to teach the controversy. Hopefully they're going to teach the controversy of gravity and valence bonds too. After all, they're just theories."
'They smell very good and when they're cooked, many patients have described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten.'"
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Discovery News reports that the death cap mushroom is now an invasive species on every continent except Antarctica. It is spreading along the East and West Coasts of the U.S. and appears to be moving south into Mexico. 'When someone eats Amanita phalloides, she typically won't experience symptoms for at least six and sometimes as many as 24 hours,' says Cat Adams. 'Eventually she'll suffer from abdominal cramps, vomiting, and severely dehydrating diarrhea. This delay means her symptoms might not be associated with mushrooms, and she may be diagnosed with a more benign illness like stomach flu. To make matters worse, if the patient is somewhat hydrated, her symptoms may lessen and she will enter the so-called honeymoon phase.' Without proper, prompt treatment, the victim can experience rapid organ failure, coma, and death. But good news is on the way. S. Todd Mitchell of Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, California has treated more than 60 patients with a drug derived from milk thistle. The patients who have started the drug on time (within 96 hours of ingesting the mushroom) and who have still had kidney function intact have all survived. 'When administered intravenously, the compound sits on and blocks the receptors that bring amatoxin into the liver, thus corralling the amatoxins into the blood stream so the kidneys can expel them faster,' says Adams. Still, Mitchell cautions against the 'regular look"'of deadly mushrooms. 'They smell very good and when they're cooked, many patients have described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten.'"
OakDragon writes "A sinkhole about 40 feet wide — and 30 feet deep — opened up inside the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY early Thursday morning, swallowing eight vehicles that were sitting inside. At least one of these cars is one of a kind, and due to its location the fire department allowed its removal. The sinkhole is remarkable in that it has left the surrounding ground which supports the circular structure intact, although that assessment may change up on investigation. Security footage from inside the museum shows the collapse as it happened."
symbolset writes "Ball lightning has been reported for hundreds of years, and experimentally produced, but for the first time a natural will 'o wisp has been captured on video and amazingly, spectrograph, accidentally by researchers studying ordinary lightning."
Among the dozens of reporters, editors, and commentators who have worked on articles sourced to Edward Snowden, just one, Glenn Greenwald, has been subject to a sustained campaign that seeks to define him as something other than a journalist. NBC's David Gregory asked him why he shouldn't be prosecuted for aiding and abetting a felon. Representative Peter King declared that "legal action should be taken against him." Representative Mike Rogers charges that he is a thief who sells stolen material. The New Republic published a piece alleging that he has a nefarious, secret agenda. Why this unique effort to discredit him in particular?
Countless American journalists have published classified documents in the modern era. All were paid for their work, and in a world with Bob Woodward, it's unlikely that Greenwald has been paid the most for revelations of classified material. Greenwald isn't even unique in writing about secrets stolen by Snowden, or in being paid as a freelancer for his work upon the publication of those articles. Nor has Greenwald authored the Snowden articles denounced most bitterly by the national-security establishment. That distinction goes to the talented Barton Gellman.
So what is different about Greenwald?
The news organizations he works with are different. Rather than publishing in the Washington Post or the New York Times, institutions that have particular, unique, and often cozy relationships with America's ruling class, he started out with a personal blog, later moved to Salon.com, started publishing stories sourced to Snowden at The Guardian's U.S. edition, and has worked with the foreign press.
His approach to journalism is different. Rather than trying (or purporting) to be objective, he is transparent about his opinions and explicitly argues for their validity. He criticizes fellow journalists for being insufficiently adversarial. Unlike most mainstream-media reporters, he voices contempt for certain American officials. And when he believes that they have broken the law, he doesn't shy away from urging that they be prosecuted and imprisoned for their crimes. It is no accident that there is no love lost for him in the national-security state.
Because he doesn't write for the outlets that the government considers most legitimate, because he is outspoken with highly polarizing opinions, because he can be abrasive, and frankly, because he's a gay man who lives in a foreign country, U.S. officials and some journalists correctly sense that they can get away with trying to delegitimize Greenwald in a way that would spark a backlash if they attempted it on Gellman or Woodward or any New York Times reporter.
That is unjust and dangerous. And journalists had better get wise to its most serious implications.
One reason to stand up for Greenwald is that there is no evidence suggesting that he's acted as anything other than a journalist on the Snowden story. Another reason to defend Greenwald is that whatever one thinks of him personally, or his politics, or his attacks on various mainstream-media figures over the years, prosecuting him as a criminal would set a precedent affecting all journalists.
The U.S. officials smearing Greenwald are well aware that a precedent would be set. They sense that, among the journalists reporting on the Snowden leaks, prosecuting Greenwald would cause the least backlash; they know that many journalists at the New York Times and the Washington Post would be reluctant to publicly state that, for all relevant purposes, what they do and what Greenwald does are the same; they know that Greenwald has made lots of enemies in the press, that he has no movement of loyal ideological hacks to rally around him, and that enough Americans think living abroad and being gay are suspicious to make a difference on the margins. So they chose Greenwald as their target in what may be a trial balloon for an effort to delegitimize national-security journalism.
There are precedents for smear campaigns of this sort.
The First Amendment and its guarantee of press freedom was created precisely to protect outspoken criticism of government officials, revelations of official lawbreaking, and material that changes the political debate by informing the public. There is no way to criminalize the work Greenwald has done on the NSA surveillance story without significantly undermining this core constitutional protection. And so, on this narrow question, every American has an interest in defending him.
_0x783czar writes "Google today announced that they will be selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for the sum of $2.91 billion USD. Google says the move should allow the company to receive the attention and focus it deserves in order to thrive. From the announcement: '[T]he smartphone market is super competitive, and to thrive it helps to be all-in when it comes to making mobile devices. It's why we believe that Motorola will be better served by Lenovo — which has a rapidly growing smartphone business and is the largest (and fastest-growing) PC manufacturer in the world. This move will enable Google to devote our energy to driving innovation across the Android ecosystem, for the benefit of smartphone users everywhere.' Google was quick to add that this does not signal a move away from their other hardware projects. Additionally Google will 'retain the vast majority of Motorola's patents,' which they hope to continue using to stabilize the Android ecosystem. The deal has yet to be approved by either the U.S. or China."
New submitter SpankiMonki writes "Natalie Wolchover at Quanta Magazine has written an article about how Jeremy England, a MIT professor, may have found a theory of the origin of life grounded in physics. In a paper published last August by The Journal of Chemical Physics, England describes his theory, the 'Statistical physics of self-replication.' Wolchover writes, 'England['s]...formula...indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.' England says his ideas pose no threat to Darwinian evolution: 'On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.'"
To operate Panono, you simply throw it in the air. The ball has a sensor inside that recognizes when it has reached the apex of its airborne journey. At this point, it automatically fires all the shutters at once, capturing a 108-megapixel, 360-degree panoramic photograph.
more 'curiosity journalism'? http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-rise-of-curiosity-journalism/283184/ I suspect cynically that people clicked on the dialect story for the same narcissistic reason they used to click on surveys at Spark.com- because it is going to tell me about myself... ooh what will it say? Note that I clicked on and shared that post, so I'm not throwing stones here.
Japanese beverage giant Suntory is acquiring Beam, which makes Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark bourbons, among other spirits, for $16 billion. The two companies control nearly 10% of the global whiskey market, according to International Wine and Spirit Research. Combined, they will obviously be going after a larger share.
A quick gander at global whiskey consumption helps show where the promise lies. India is far and away the world’s biggest guzzler, owing in part to its large population. Roughly half of the world’s whiskey is drunk by the sub-continent, according to Euromonitor. Most of it is made by UB India, the world’s largest whiskey company by volume.
But when those numbers are broken down per capita, India falls well outside of the picture. France, Uruguay, and the United States soar to the top.
Beam, based in Deerfield, Illinois, is responsible for over 40% of US bourbon sales by volume, and bourbon accounts for roughly half of the overall US whiskey market.Outside the country, Germany, Australia, and the UK are big consumers of US whiskey.
When I was six years old, my parents enrolled me in a two month sex-ed class at our Unitarian Universalist church. The class was fairly basic; on the first day, I recall sketching a crude outline of a man and a woman and then labeling their body parts. I felt vaguely subversive when I got to the male and female figures’ respective groins (I have the nagging suspicion that my drawing did not include breasts, because at six, I had not yet even begun to consider that my chest could ever change shape). Our teacher sang a song about Josh and Jenny, fraternal twins with two eyes and ten toes each, and then—gasp!—mentioned Josh’s two testes and Jenny’s one vulva, presumably in an attempt to normalize dry, scientific discussion of the human body.
Some weeks later, the topic shifted to what makes a family, and we dull suburban children learned about the fictional Serena’s rather unconventional family reunion (“This is Serena’s gay cousin and his 20-year partner. They are standing next to Serena’s divorced grandfather, who is talking to Serena’s bisexual hermaphroditic polygamist aunt, who was born a man.”) The class also supplied my first lesson in “no means no,” a novel concept simply because, blessed with a loving family and a safe school and neighborhood, I had never before been exposed to the idea of sexual abuse.
Seven years later, about two weeks after my 13th birthday, I attended the first session of another UU sex-ed class, this one a year long. As eighth graders, we were deemed mature enough to handle the more emotional aspects of sex, and discussions ranged from basic reviews of anatomy, safe sex, and the various forms of sex to what we would do if we found out a partner had an STD, whether we would have sex before a relationship became serious, and whether the word “slut” was inherently offensive to women. We also spoke to a group of LBGTQ people about topics like coming out and experiencing often-pervasive homophobia and transphobia (among other attitudes), and we debated the importance or lack thereof of remaining a virgin.
You can imagine the awkward shuffling and bashful mumbles that ensue when a group of barely-acquainted 13-year-olds are introduced to such topics. We employed the ever-popular “anonymous questions box” that I assume is still omnipresent in sex- ed classrooms up and down the country, and the teachers always had a list of backup discussion questions to raise in case one went down poorly. My classmates and I could hardly bear to look at each other during the class each week.
But now, at 16, I consider those sex-ed classes incredibly valuable. I am aware that I still have a lifetime of learning ahead of me, but I am also aware that my knowledge of sex and sexuality far outstrips that of many of my peers. I feel confident in my ability to make responsible sexual decisions for myself, and I left the class with nuanced views on issues like gender equality and relationships (romantic and platonic alike). What many more-conservative parents need to consider is that the dissemination of information is not inherently dangerous. It is highly preferable, in fact, for children and teenagers to receive accurate, complete information from a reliable source than to spread the gossip and half-truths of their friends or the Internet.
I am aware, of course, that many parents do not believe their children are prepared for the more emotional, subjective parts of a class like the one I took, and that their children may truly not be ready. But it is crucial to protect the right of purely scientific knowledge to remain in the classroom, which must remain a bastion of learning what is true and not what is comfortable. With restrictions on the information considered acceptable for school, students leave the class with curious gaps in their knowledge: my school system, for instance, has established abstinence-only education until high school, with the result that a sex-ed teacher was once allowed to inform my class that condoms prevent the transmission of STIs but could not answer a question about whether they also prevent pregnancy.
I do not believe that the federal government is in any way within its rights to dictate a curriculum to a public or private school, and if states, localities, and school administrators choose to censor or neuter (literally) their sex-ed curricula, so be it. However, I think that making such a decision would be doing a monumental disservice to their students. Even if they feel uncomfortable facilitating frank, sometimes emotionally charged discussions on more subjective topics, schools should provide to their students as much objective information as possible.
Parents who disagree are free to opt their children out of the class or move them to a different school, but it is important never to lose sight of the purpose of schools: to educate children. Education and censorship should not and cannot coexist.
Last spring, a Seattle woman reported that some guy was flying a drone over her yard.
It was, she wrote, a "warm spring day," and she at first believed that the buzzing sound she was hearing was someone doing yardwork. But soon she looked out her third-story window, and saw "a drone hovering a few feet away."
The drone's operator was outside on the sidewalk. The woman's husband went outside to ask him to quit and he refused, arguing that "it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows."
Whether he was right about that is unclear. What kind of drone was it? Who was the operator? Was he taking pictures of the inside of her home or of the public street?
These are questions for law enforcement and courts to sort out, I said in a piece about the incident. In the meantime, though, many people wrote to me to say: To heck with that. I wouldn't wait for any cops. I'd shoot that thing right out of the sky myself.
Well, Phil Steel of Deer Trail, Colorado, thinks that is a great idea.
Steel has proposed that his town adopt an ordinance that would allow residents to take up to three shots at drones flying over the town at fewer than 1,000 feet (more if your life is in danger). The measure, which has divided the town of 550, will be voted on at the ballot box in April. Until then, Steel is selling his own licenses, for $25 each, to anyone who wants, though they "have no legal value," Matt Pearce reports in the Los Angeles Times.
I checked in with John Villasenor, an expert on the laws governing domestic drone use, to see what he thinks of the idea. In a word: "terrible."
"The most obvious concern is that the person doing the shooting could end up accidentally hurting or killing someone on the ground," he wrote to me. And that's not the only type of tragic mistake people could make: "What happens if there's a very small manned aircraft at 950 feet and someone mistakes it for a drone?"
Villasenor says that drones are going to bring us into uncharted legal territory concerning the lower airspace. "A property owner clearly ought to have control over the air at shoelace level. On the other hand, a property owner doesn't have a reasonable claim of control over the airspace 1000 feet above the ground. So where does the control start?" Just because a drone passes over someone's private property (without taking any pictures), "that doesn't give the property owner a right to impede its flight."
That said, we're not starting from a blank slate. We have laws to protect privacy, and just because drones are a new technology doesn't mean that the laws are going to be ineffective. "If a drone is hovering right outside someone's second floor window without permission and taking pictures into the interior, that would almost certainly be a Fourth Amendment violation (in the case of a government drone) or provide grounds for an invasion of privacy claim (in the case of a private drone)," Villasenor writes.
It's unlikely that will be of much comfort to Steel and his supporters. "I have declared the sovereignty and the supremacy of the airspace of my town," he told the LA Times. "This is an act of sedition, and I proudly state that."
Earlier this month, Buzzfeed published a piece called "Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500." The story ended up getting more than a million pageviews, which is notable because it is also more than 6,000 words long. The other notable thing: 47 percent of those views came from people accessing the story on mobile devices. And while people who read the piece on tablets spent an average of more than 12 minutes with the story, those doing so on phones spent more than 25 minutes—a small eternity, in Internet time.
Those stats are, if not counterintuitive, then counter-conventional: The working assumption, among media executives and most of the public who cares about such things, has long been that phones are best suited for quick-hit stories and tweets rather than immersive, longform reads. And while content producers have attempted to take advantage of the "lean-back" capabilities of the tablet (see, for example, tablet-optimized products like The Atavist), phone use has generally been seen as flitting and fleeting—the stuff of grocery store lines and bus rides. "The average mobile reader tends to skim through headlines and snackable content as opposed to diving into long-form articles," Mobile Marketer put it in late October.
Things are shifting, though, and not just when it comes to text articles. A survey of 50,000 people published late last year found 65 percent of mobile video viewers saying they preferred watching full movies and TV episodes to briefer stuff (music videos, movie clips) on their phones. In another survey, 8 in 10 people said they would watch TV shows on their phones, were the shows available. And even more (88 percent) said they would watch full-length movies.
The second screen, in other words, is quickly gaining primacy in our lives—and for immersive content as well as quick-hit stuff. Think Buzzfeed is primarily useful for distracting yourself at work, on your PC? Not necessarily. Overall, a Buzzfeed rep told me, the site now gets more than 50 percent of its traffic from mobile.
"I have this experience of people telling me, 'You know, I actually like reading on my phone now,'" Jonah Peretti, Buzzfeed's founder and CEO, says. "More and more people are coming around to it."
So what's the appeal? Part of it, Peretti thinks, is the constant companionship phones provide. "You're in bed, and your laptop is in the other room, or your iPad, and the phone is right there," he told me. Part of it, too, is the way phones in particular are structured: That single, tab-less screen—the screen that scrolls with the flick of a finger—fits the way we most like to read.
"The immersive scroll is the oldest of mediums," Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, points out. He's joking, but he's also sort of not: There's something intuitive about the scroll as an interface. Individual pages—the stuff of books and magazines and newspapers, the stuff that had been transferred, skeuomorphically, to the web—offer reading experiences that are relatively contrived. One of Buzzfeed's most significant contributions to The Way We Web Now will likely prove to be the selection of a scroll framework over a paginated one. "I actually think that long, immersive scroll is a kind of lovely way to read a piece," Smith says.
Phones are also coming to prominence at the same time that news organizations are (re-)realizing how powerful—and alluring—lengthy, highly produced stories can be. The popularity of longform stories—of magazine stories—is telling as, among other things, a data point. "People's intuitions about longform were wrong," Peretti puts it. "They thought, 'Oh, the Internet is about the shortest possible clips, and no one has attention spans.'" But it's hard to impugn attention spans, he says, when "we see people spending 25 minutes on their phone, reading the story."
Smith agrees. That whole "the kids these days have no attention span" thing? "That's never been our experience at all," he says. Even the site's lists, he points out, are long (as lists go): Rarely will you see a "5 Things" or even a "10 Things" production; "27 Things" or "39 Things" is much more standard. Buzzfeed's time-on-page average, its rep tells me, is more than 5 minutes. And the average time spent on a longform story is double that: 10 minutes and 23 seconds.
So Buzzfeed has made a play for attention not just on the social web, but also on its own site. It has invested in longer stories, producing months-in-the-making, magazine-style supplements to its lists and quick hits and GIF-fests. It developed a template for its long stories that is devoid of ads and right-rail detritus—a template that presents a single story in the form of a scroll. It hired Steve Kandell, formerly the editor-in-chief of Spin, to be its features editor. ("Steve really hates the word 'longform,'" Smith says; "we've sort of replaced it with 'features' internally.") What Buzzfeed has learned from its work with longform, as Kandell put it recently, is that
this isn’t fundamentally any different than anything else that would be published on the Internet. By and large, the best stories—or our best stories, anyway—strike a chord and inspire people to share them with others on Twitter or Facebook or email or by printing them out and folding them into paper airplanes, and ultimately find their way to audiences broader and more immediate than anything you’d find on a newsstand.
Those stories can also benefit from people's desire to share quality stories along with Imgur pics and cat videos. "Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500" has, so far, more than 132,000 Facebook likes, and more than 4,000 Twitter shares. Wired's long article "How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses" got more than 1 million unique viewers, with an average time-on-page of 5 minutes. The New York Times's "Snowfall" got more than 2.9 million visitors and 3.5 million page views. Magazine-style journalism is an investment, but it's one that can pay off. Particularly when people are happy to lean back, curl up, and read a long story from the comfort of their phones.
A migrant family prepares breakfast in Mumbai, India (Reuters/Danish Siddiqui)
In their foundation’s just-released annual letter, Bill and Melinda Gates attempt to debunk three pervasive myths in development economics:
"Poor countries are doomed to stay poor."
"Foreign aid is a big waste."
"Saving lives leads to overpopulation."
From the letter’s introduction:
We hear these myths raised at international conferences and at social gatherings. We get asked about them by politicians, reporters, students, and CEOs. All three reflect a dim view of the future, one that says the world isn’t improving but staying poor and sick, and getting overcrowded.
We’re going to make the opposite case, that the world is getting better, and that in two decades it will be better still.
When it comes to poor countries' prospects for escaping poverty, Bill Gates, who wrote the section addressing the first myth, is particularly optimistic:
By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer. Countries will learn from their most productive neighbors and benefit from innovations like new vaccines, better seeds, and the digital revolution. Their labor forces, buoyed by expanded education, will attract new investments.
Poor in this case means low-income, by the World Bank’s current definition: any country with a gross national income per capita of $1,035 or less in 2012 dollars. There are 36 such countries in the world today. How much would incomes have to rise over the next two decades for there to be no more low-income countries?
In some cases, it won’t take much additional income at all: In the Kyrgyz Republic, income per capita only needs to rise by 5 percent over the next two decades for it to be a middle-income country.
In Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, however, income per capita will have to increase by a factor of five. But Gates believes that not all low-income countries will make it to middle-income status by 2035:
A few countries will be held back by war, politics (North Korea, barring a big change there), or geography (landlocked nations in central Africa). And inequality will still be a problem: There will be poor people in every region.
But most of them will live in countries that are self-sufficient. Every nation in South America, Asia, and Central America (with the possible exception of Haiti), and most in coastal Africa, will have joined the ranks of today’s middle- income nations. More than 70 percent of countries will have a higher per-person income than China does today. Nearly 90 percent will have a higher income than India does today.
It will be a remarkable achievement. When I was born, most countries in the world were poor. In the next two decades, desperately poor countries will become the exception rather than the rule. Billions of people will have been lifted out of extreme poverty. The idea that this will happen within my lifetime is simply amazing to me.
sciencehabit writes "When you've got the flu, it can't hurt to take an aspirin or an ibuprofen to control the fever and make you feel better, right? Wrong, some scientists say. Lowering your body temperature may make the virus replicate faster and increase the risk that you transmit it to others. A new study claims that there are at least 700 extra influenza deaths in the United States every year because people suppress their fever."
I just ordered a book yesterday at 4 p.m. and got the shipping notice at 9:15 p.m. Seem's fast enough to me... or maybe they are already using anticipatory shipping and they knew I would order it...
An anonymous reader writes "The WSJ is reporting that Amazon has obtained a patent for 'anticipatory shipping,'' and claims it knows its customers so well it can start shipping even before orders are placed. The technique could cut delivery time and discourage consumers from visiting physical stores. In the patent document, Amazon says delays between ordering and receiving purchases 'may dissuade customers from buying items from online merchants.' Of course, Amazon's algorithms might sometimes err, prompting costly returns. To minimize those costs, Amazon said it might consider giving customers discounts, or convert the unwanted delivery into a gift. 'Delivering the package to the given customer as a promotional gift may be used to build goodwill,' the patent said. Considering the problems that can arise when shipping something a customer did not order anticipatory shipping has the potential to backfire faster than an Amazon drone can deliver."
To all those concerned about America's productivity collapse during March Madness: Be more concerned.
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and Quicken Loans have agreed to pay $1 billion to whomever fills out a perfect Men's NCAA Tournament bracket this year, in 40 annual installments of $25 million.
Why offer $1 billion for sheer dumb luck? I've called and emailed Quicken Loans for a response. When I get it, I will tell you. But I have a pretty good guess: They are offering to pay $1 billion, because they know they will never have to pay $1 billion.
You might consider the odds of filling out a perfect March Madness bracket to be, well, small. You would be wrong. Flipping a coin and getting 10 straight heads; predicting the Super Bowl MVP before the NFL season begins; finding exact change in your pocket—the odds of these marvels occurring are, indeed, small. But the chances of correctly guessing all 63 games in the NCAA tournament are so vanishingly minuscule, they exist in the realm of Bigfoot, the Lockness Monster, and "President Alec Baldwin"
Those odds are 1 in 128 billion, according to DePaul math professor Jay Bergen. (Some outlets are quoting 1 in 9.2 quintillion, but that assumes that all 63 games are 50-50 toss-ups, which they're not. For example, Number 1 seeds just about always advance to the second round.) If everyone in the United States filled out a bracket, Chris Chase calculated, we'd get a $1 billion winner every 400 years.
So Buffett and Quicken Loans are "offering" $1 billion for the perfect bracket the way I'm now (officially) "offering" $1 billion to anybody who, in the next week, guesses the names of every sitting member of the House of Representatives in 2020. Please email your losing guesses to ihaveliterallynothingtodothisafternoon@theatlantic.com.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Jason Major reports that after nearly a decade of soaring through the inner solar system, flying past Mars and Earth several times and even briefly visiting a couple of asteroids for a gravity assist, the European Space Agency's comet-chasing spacecraft, Rosetta, is due to 'wake up' on January 20 after 957 days of hibernation. The probe is awakening to prepare for its upcoming and highly-anticipated rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August. The spacecraft was designed to be put in hibernation for the coldest part of the journey that took it close to the orbit of Jupiter, because even with massive solar panels the size of a basketball court, Rosetta would not have enough power to complete its mission without this energy-saving strategy. Once Rosetta enters orbit around the comet — the first time a spacecraft has ever done so — it will map its surface and, three months later in November, deploy the 220-lb (100-kg) Philae lander that will intimately investigate the surface of the nucleus using a suite of advanced science instruments. 'It's the first time we've made a rendezvous with a comet — that's never been done before — and it's going to be the first time we've escorted a comet past its closest approach to the Sun,' says ESA project scientist Matt Taylor."
An anonymous reader writes "Slate reports on new anti-science education coming out of Texas. The state has a charter school system called Responsive Education Solutions, which is publicly funded. Unfortunately, 'it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.' The biology workbook used in these schools actually reads, "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth." It also brings up social Darwinism as if it's an aspect of evolutionary theory and introduces doubt that the Earth is billions of years old. The article continues, 'To get around court rulings, Responsive Ed and other creationists resort to rhetoric about teaching "all sides" of "competing theories" and claiming that this approach promotes "critical thinking." In response to a question about whether Responsive Ed teaches creationism, its vice president of academic affairs, Rosalinda Gonzalez, told me that the curriculum "teaches evolution, noting, but not exploring, the existence of competing theories."' Other so-called education texts being used by the Responsive Ed program teach Western superiority and how feminism forced women to 'turn to the state as a surrogate husband.'"
