Viewing profile — pierre_M

The linguistics of the term "assassination" here is interesting. In the old days, we'd just bomb whatever place we thought the bad guys were hiding, and anti-war types complained a…

I've noticed that many non-scientists who have read Drexler seem to acquire a level of belief that has more in common with religion than science. Religious characteristics of this …

Is there any way I can get rid of the caption that tells me where I am? I think it would be more fun as a guessing game. Look at the local vegetation, architecture, and kinds of ca…

Actually it was originally considered mysterious why almost all craters don't look like this, at least on airless bodies, since glancing-angle impacts should be, from geometric arg…

I think it's more to do with people being uncomfortable about being in a room with somebody significantly better-dressed, especially if the better-dressed person is in the inferior…

If you think someone's being timid and really does need a break, it's more common to ask if they want to "take a break" rather than asking flat out if they need to go potty. I don'…

You do realize that even people who have incredibly good prediction records, do get things wrong. You can't really point to a specific thing and say, "you suck because you didn't p…

The thing about economics is that there's two diametrically opposed schools of thought on just about any issue you'd like to name. Krugman is a smart dude, and a fierce advocate fo…

If there's one they find "particularly intriguing" I'm guessing it's a rocky planet within the habitable (ie liquid water) zone. It would have to be a relatively cool star, since i…

There is absolutely no way to tell the colour of an exoplanet using Kepler or any other telescope we have.

These guys are mostly product development and marketing guys, and are the experts in the "what people want" side. The startup founders will bring technical backgrounds to the table…

It's also boring, ugly, and at a level of sophistication roughly equivalent to a depressed fourteen-year-old kid's poetry Waaah, life sucks And you're going to die Isn't it horribl…

How is it "borderline scam"? How are they hoping to profit at your expense by offering you $40K and then not letting you spend it?

Isn't the scale of it comparable to YCombinator? YC certainly gets a lot of mentions here (not entirely unrelated to the fact that they run the site, but still...).

At its peak, the company employed a third of the British workforce and was responsible for a huge tranche of global trade. I knew it was big, but a third of the British workforce? …

"Same position in space" isn't well-defined anyway. There's no fixed set of coordinates permeating the entire universe. But it's clear enough what is meant in this case. I wonder, …

OK, that's part of the answer: now why do some other drinks (beer and wine spring to mind) taste worse through a straw?

It's not really nitpicking, "easiest" isn't well-defined. Quickest, lowest effort, or highest probability of working? I know a way to make a million dollars in the next 24 hours, b…

Trite BS. I don't know what the going conversion rate between pain and dollars is, but I'm sure if you go down to your local homeless shelter you can find someone who has suffered …

Why, that's easy. 1. Get a job that pays $50,000 a year. 2. Live off the first $20,000 a year. 3. Put the remaining $30,000 a year into the highest-yielding savings account you can…