Humodour

It's the stereotypically hilariously bad song that people like to reference. I mean it's obviously good when done by other people (see Colbert doing it on the Fallon show) but Rebecca Black's performance just ruins it. Um, mate, the song is absolutely ****ing junk even when pros sing it. These are the only two acceptably funny versions of it (and they ARE funny):

Let me tell you the secret about cucumbers: some are Spanish.

Indeed.

Japan has also mandated that all new buildings have solar panels on their roofs. Meanwhile, China now spends more than any other country on Earth on renewable energy manufacture, research, and development. And Britain's conservative government recently unveiled a massive new initiative to support a homegrown clean tech industry and cut carbon emissions 50% (on 1990 levels I believe) by 2025. And India's minister for the environment is an environmentalist, which has been framing his governments actions lately, for the better. Oh, and America under Obama is investing heavily in renewables, too. They're building some really promising solar thermal tower projects. Interesting, the US military supports action to prevent climate change. It might be a conservative institution, but obviously they can see the writing on the wall. And, finally, Australia is starting to act too - by 2012 people and industry will have to pay money if they want to pollute (a.k.a price on carbon). And while support for this isn't fully bipartisan, quite a few members of the local conservative party (Liberals), including all the ex-leaders of the party (Hewson, Howard, Turnbull, Fraser), support the move.

Please clearly detail in what ways the Greens are 'lunatic'. It doesn't just become so because you say it.

No. If I meant that, I would have said that, now wouldn't I? I did say some other things though. You mysteriously didn't quote them.

euclideanalgorithm

**** like this isn't even remotely interesting. Really actually irks me how we obsess over ****ed up things like this and relentlessly fixate on them in the media. It sure as hell isn't a healthy thing to do from the perspective of encouraging other idiots.

Yeah, it's quite an amazing breakthrough. Although it should be qualified that she only discovered SOME of the universe's missing matter. Specifically hot matter located in the filaments between galaxies. So there's still a bunch of matter 'missing'. The majority of dark matter remains... dark. Also, this discovery is distinct from the earlier Australian discovery of the physical existence of dark energy.

Game demos really make me horny! YEAH!

Me gusta la playa.

**** Xbox.

Ranch dressing? I was going for the fact that they're all important things to have with you on a desert island.

The EU is building a super laser soon. Not for sending data but for doing everything else. Cutting stuff, looking at sub-sub-atomic particles, etc. "to build a laser of intensity sufficient to rip photons into electron-positron pairs." Interestingly, the second upgrade of this planned super laser will be the last possible upgrade humans can ever do to improve laser power, as it will hit the thermodynamic limit. That's a weird thought. "But all projects will lead to the construction of the fourth super laser, which will have double the power of the three lasers. This fourth super laser will yield up to 200 petawatts per hour, which experts say is the theoretical limit for lasers." http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-super-lasers-europe.html

Brutal.

The artificial heart (pacemaker), penicillin, the bionic ear, WiFi, the black box flight recorder, the electric drill, vegemite, and my favourite... atomic absorption spectroscopy. What do all these things have in common?

Cheers, don't know much about QFT. Also, I should probably stop calling it string theory since that's a bit of an antiquated term. All the important string theories were reconciled into a single theory called M-theory a while back. I believe they were all mathematically proven to be special cases of a larger theory (M-theory). BTW, M-theory, as a theory of quantum gravity, is testable at (at least) high energies. Those energies are physically attainable by humans, they're just a while off yet (maybe in 20, 50 years time we'll build an atom smasher good enough). So I'd prefer M-theory didn't get confused with those far more metaphysical theories which currently are, for all intents and purposes, untestable. Also, it is worth pointing out that M-theory contains both GR and QM. If we ever falsify QM, that automatically also falsifies M-theory. GR is a limit of M-theory (a low energy limit I believe).

I DO NOT WANT A REMAKE. I want a spiritual successor. No, wait. I want a spiritual predecessor! I want something so good that it inspired PS:T.

I'm boycotting the other thread. But that's OK: in a free market economy, the thread which is most entertaining will win out in the end. I saw um... recently I saw... a documentary about space! Not strictly a movie, but I thought it was cool.

Well, it's good to know the cheap marketing gimmicks of Hollywood have suckered someone in. I think.

I think this is really cool, btw.

Another thing: Aussies have built the bionic ear and bionic eye. Other teams have built bionic legs and bionic hands (see the two links directly above). The bionic heart (pacemaker) has been around for a while, and artificial lungs are progressing rapidly We also having working brain implants for a variety of things: some cure depression, some allow movement of a mouse cursor around the screen with your mind, some stop epilepsy, others counteract Parkinson's disease. One implant is put in the spinal cord to turn off chronic pain in those with extreme back pain. Artificial bladders exist but they're grown in a lab so they're not electromechanical. Researchers are currently working on doing the same thing for the liver and pancreas. Heck, it might sound gross, but apparently they've even created working parts for the **** for men with extreme impotence. And replacement ovaries for women. Finally, an Aussie doctor recently saved some Mormon chick with artificially created blood... because she was too stupid to comprehend that she would die without a blood transfer and wouldn't accept human blood. Many of these things are still prototypes, but the key thing is that they've been demonstrated to work. We're getting close to a stage where we can fix pretty much any part of the body that fails. I don't think it will be a stretch to expect that in the future, bionic body parts become far more common-place.

I want people to comprehend the full magnitude of this breakthrough, so to that end it is more worthwhile reading this more technically accurate summary of the breakthrough: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-impl...oluntarily.html The amazing thing is that the researchers discovered that the neural nets in the spinal cord could still control the legs (make them walk, take steps, etc) even without direction from the brain! So you've got a situation where the spinal cord is autonomously controlling bipedal movement. It's kind of similar to how the brain inside the gut (called the enteric nervous system) is its own neural net which acts independently of the brain, with many of the same functions, neurotransmitters, of the brain (even a blood-brain barrier). In fact the enteric nervous system has almost as many neurons as the brain (about 10% as many, which believe me is huge). This is because during the early stages of life, the neural cells split into two groups and some went to the brain and some went to the stomach. Anyway, I find it fascinating that even the spinal cord has some of its own independent neural nets. Strongly reinforces the concept that the human machine is not controlled by a single processing centre, but many different distributed neural nets which work together redundantly and in parallel (this applies even to the brain, which is comprised of many dozens of different processing centres, including the evolutionarily newer executive functions and the older emotional processing centre). Even more curiously, the brain's own magnetic field resulting from all the electrical activity from neurons has been shown to feed back into itself to become ANOTHER part of the collective neural net. It is not merely a side product of the brain's function, it is an actual part of that function.

This is pretty significant. I mean, most physicists have come to accept that dark energy probably exists, but now an Aussie-led research team has proved it. Einstein originally considered that dark energy would need to exist or general relativity would be wrong. He tried to add it, but said it felt incorrect and ditched it, calling it a great blunder. Turns out Einstein was right yet again. I have to admit, that guy was a true genius of modern times. Kind of humbling. So this means a) dark energy makes up about 75% of 'things' in the universe b) Einsteinian relativity is reinforced (because it predicted/implied dark energy) c) alternate theories which predict no dark energy (i.e. GR is wrong on certain scales) can be ruled out - this includes some variants of string theory... well they're not variants of string theory any more Couple this with the recent confirmation by Gravity Probe B that Earth's spacetime experiences frame-dragging and the geodetic effect, which confirm relativity, and the past year has made relativity pretty impregnable. The implication is that if a theory disagrees with relativity, it's probably not relativity at fault. Interestingly, though, a few confirmations of the predictions of quantum mechanics have also popped up. So quantum mechanics and general relativity are both core pillars of modern physics, are consistently reaffirmed by data from reality as time goes by, and yet they rather violently disagree with eachother. Apparently that's where string theory and/or quantum field theory come in - to tie them together. The article: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-wiggle...y-einstein.html NASA explains dark energy for those curious: http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus...is-dark-energy/