The Koch brothers gave him a grant because they expected him to cast more doubt on the climate models, not affirm them. They, along with most conservatives, were FURIOUS when he reached the opposite conclusion last year. Their money was an upfront grant for the study. I'd be surprised if they gave him more (although stranger things have happened).

You might also be surprised about China. It's not as strong as it is in the US, but there's a growing environmental movement there. As their middle class grows, they've begun to realize that prosperity is useless if you're too sick to enjoy it due to a toxic environment. They're actually investing far more than the US in renewable energy sources. Really, we're playing a global game of the prisoners dilemma, where doing nothing is the equivalent of ratting out your neighbor. It also explains why inaction is the likely outcome.....

While the events, if substantiated, are certainly deplorable, it's extreme hyperbole to suggest that a single bad grade destroys your chances of getting into a good school, or even a particular school. Nor will you be rejected from scholarships for a single bad grade. The only time that could make a difference is if ever other grade were perfect, and someone else ALSO was in that situation, such that it became a tie breaker. For college admissions and scholarships though, that's rarely how you would decide between two strong candidates. Their admissions essays and interviews would play into it far more at that point.

All that aside though, if a single bad grade is causing your child this much distress, you've raised them very poorly. I'm not saying they shouldn't fight for an accurate reflection of his work, but binding someone's identity and self worth so strongly to arbitrary measures like this is a recipe for an unhappy life. You should be upset that you were cheated, yes, but you shouldn't feel your life is falling apart over a single grade. Life is full of bad events and unfair miscarriages of justice. If you can't maintain a positive, hopeful outlook in the face of it, you're gonna have a really hard time.

This isn't the IRS run amok. Most likely, this is some very wealthy people trying to stop themselves from paying estate taxes on basically anything through exploiting as many legal loopholes as possible. And I can tell you from experience talking with trust lawyers there's many scams. It's basically what's fundamentally broken in our tax system. The people with the most wealth can afford all the lawyers needed to construct these tax shelters, people at the bottom have nothing anyways, and the people in the middle get squeezed to support everyone, and don't have the resources to trick their way out of it.

It's a systemic problem, that needs to be fixed, but probably never will because those with the most money have the biggest voice in politics, and only a few are willing to admit they and their actions are part of the problem.

You could do a similar shot without photoshop, but in this particular case it was very likely photoshop. The reason you can tell is by looking at the angle of her forearm relative to the back of her head. While it's possibly an optical illusion, the forearm appears to be lying flat on the back of her head. That means the elbow and upper arm should be projecting away perpendicular to the back of her head, not angling away to be hidden behind her, which would be almost parallel.

The be hidden behind her, the forearm would have to be almost parallel with the side of her head, with the wrist pointed almost directly at the camera. It's very clear that's not happening here, unless some bad photoshopping around the wrist is changing the apparent angle of the forearm (i.e. the photoshop failure may not be the assumed one). My best guess was that the red fabric of the dress obscured the first letters of the magazine title, so the removed it.

I knew someone with that once that trained in martial arts. Very tricky since submission techniques didn't register except by him guessing when it was about to break or pass out. He felt everything else though (heat/cold/etc), just never the pain associated with it. He was smart enough to strengthen his muscles a lot to protect his body in general.

you know, I was a little skeptical when I saw the premise, but that was actually really well done! Awesome work!

I think if you're feeding your children hotdogs so often that this would actually be a time saver over a high quality chef knife, you're giving your kids a pretty bad diet. I've also played with something similar for mushrooms, and once those wires get slightly stretched out from repeated usage, they have a tendency to mush what you're trying to cut as much as cut it because there isn't enough tension in the wires any more.

The information is even less meaningful that you'd think. If mobility is totally random, 50% of people would be better off than their parents (equal chance of moving up or down). However, since this measure _family_ income, the rise of dual income families makes it relatively expected that the average family income would rise. Increased dual incomes also means it's very possible (and true for most people, according to other research) that real wages can be declining while family income rises.

Taken in total, it's probably a bad sign that only 40% of the people that start in the top quintile, stay there. That suggests there's a downward bias. In fact, looking at all the quartiles, there's a downward bias everywhere except the bottom.

The pitcher and hitter are in the same reference plane (i.e. they are both traveling the same speed with the same acceleration), so their perception of the event would be the same.

There's also not a blast wave in the sense you're thinking about. A blast wave in the traditional sense is a wave of more compressed (higher pressure) air. In the scenario described here, the author is claiming the molecules in the air are destroyed rather than accelerated (at least for non-tangental impacts), so no increased energy air molecules exist from its passage that are heading towards the batter. The number of air molecules thus destroyed seems unlikely to generate enough high energy radiation to vaporize the batter due to the low number of molecules that would be struck by the ball. Possibly a dangerous dose of radiation though. I didn't get a chance to read the full article, so I don't know what the other suggested outcomes are.

Unfortunately, sharpness isn't the only thing you care about when you look at material qualities. Harder substances can have sharper edges, but that also means they are more brittle. Metal supplanted hard stone long ago because it made more durable tools. Composite materials offer more interesting alternatives in the modern day as we learn how to layer different materials together to combine properties in ways not previously possible before we gained the ability to control composition on the molecular level.

Collin hit it on the head. Cancer is a disease of probability. Most people have some pre-cancerous masses in their body, whether they know it or not. Historically, most people died before they could become problematic (most cancer's are slow growing and take many years to become problematic). In fact, the recommended "treatment" for some cancer's is still to ignore them, because they progress slowly enough it's highly likely you'll die from something else first (this can often be the course of action for prostate cancer, for example).

You've also probably had cancerous cells in your body before that your immune system managed to handle on it's own. Basically, it's a normal occurrence that has some small probability of not being dealt with by your body on it's own. And the longer you live, the more chances you have for that to happen.

Also, this is not "dense" traffic for the Bay Area. That's about as light as it gets (including 2-3am); there's just a whole lotta people here.

It's also very safe if you think about it. The vehicle is moving with traffic, pulling the barrier to the right. So the lane doesn't exist behind it (no merging or avoiding it required), and it's moving too slowly to over take cars in front of it. Likewise, cars approaching from the other direction can't hit it because its on the opposite side of the barrier, traveling in a lane that doesn't exist for them. The only way you could collide with the vehicle or barrier is to purposefully sideswipe it (or accidentally I suppose if you suddenly lost control of your car).

@ Mr Buddy - Using my average? I didn't give you any average for the probability of being shot while moving, because as I explained it's a meaningless number. The only number I offered was the military's historical average of gun shots wounds which are fatal (roughly 1 in 3). That says nothing about your actual chances of being hit by a bullet, only the consequences of being hit (even that number is meaningless here, because a sample set composed of soldiers in combat is entirely different. It was only to illustrate that even in open warfare where many many more bullets are flying, the odds of death aren't as high as you'd assume).

And the reasoning is far from absurd; its called conditional probability. The author of the article calculated was the probability of Bond being hit if 4662 random shots were fired at him (using a questionable probability as mentioned before). But the question asked is the odds of him surviving those specific 4662 shots. The difference is subtle but important, as the actual question implies a set of conditions. To calculate that correctly, you'd need to calculate the odds for each individual shot (your odds of hitting a target at 10 yards is totally different than your odds at 100 yards, and the accuracy of a machine is different from a pistol).

This is why its so easy to deceive people with statistics. The precision of the question you're asking makes a big difference, as does the randomness of your data set.

Oh, and as for the glib comment about being sure you can hit me in 6 shots or less? I'm guessing that might change if I'm shooting back at you. Fine motor control drastically decreases when your heart rate spikes. Unless you've had extensive training to keep your heart rate low under life threatening conditions, whatever accuracy you might have at the range is going to drop dramatically. As a simple example, if you ever watch Top Shot, you'll see many professional shooters miss shots at static targets because they force them to have elevated heart rates prior to shooting in some of the challenges.

Well, the spears.org article is mostly right. However, I would assume the iPhone practices aggressive power management, which typically includes shutting down DRAM banks that aren't currently needed. So you can potentially save power if you flush enough apps from memory, but that's not quite the same thing as closing them from the task bar (which may include applications that were already flushed from memory).

And it certainly has little to do with them "running" in the background. That was Apple's complaint about giving apps free reign to do whatever they wanted, and why they implemented a rather restrictive model that leads to funny behavior occasionally.

The most important side effect closing apps in the task bar can have is speeding up load times for other applications you may open/reopen later, since you can avoid the flushing phase if there's already free memory available. That's the only reason I tend to manage my task bar; because I want better responsiveness on other apps after I close a memory hog.

That calculation is flawed. He has a supposition (a 5% chance of receiving a fatal gunshot wound on the run) for which he has little basis. The actual odds vary tremendously according to a number of factors, including distance the shot is taken from (very important), skill of the shooter (importance grows with distance), and whether the person moving is actively aware of the incoming shot. While you can't dodge a bullet Matrix-style, if you're aware and experienced, you can decrease the odds that you're hit by adjusting your movements according to what's going on with your attacker. And all of that belays the difference between a hit and a fatal hit. The military gauges the probability of a gunshot wound sustained in battle being fatal as 33%.

Applying a blanket probability only works if you're calculating the odds of a random person surviving that many random gunshots from random people at random distances. The odds of a particular person surviving a specific set of gunshots is totally different, as it constrains the shooter, ranges, and target.