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An Open Letter to Nancy Mace: Go to Hell—or Propose Single-Stall Bathrooms. Sarah McBride show some backbone.

Let’s get something straight: your obsession with trans people using bathrooms is a distraction...

We Need A Million Person March

Nearly 30 years ago, Minister Louis Farrakhan called for the Million Man March—a gathering of...

Does Chat GPT Think, Is AI Research Physics, And Are We In A Universe Based On Voxels?

The answers to the title questions are, No, Yes, and why not.  What I have been doing instead...

A New Theory of Everything That Sets Scalars Equal To Tensors Looks Like Nonsense.

If your theory of everything has tensors set equal to scalars then it is wrong. Simply put...

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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived in Bellwood, IL since 1984 and attended public schools here... Read More »

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Recently two Transgender women were shot to death because they made a wrong turn and did not listen to or possibly did not understand the commands of the guards at the gate of the NSA.*  That was unfortunate.  The tragedy is in a day and age where the non PC complain that people are too PC and the PC proclaim that they are sensitive major media continue to identify those two as "men dressed as women".  With the notable exception of Reuters, all other media did not even mention the chance they were trans. 
During the launch of the latest Soyuz to the space station Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko calmly looked at an iPad.  Other than the cramped confines of the Soyuz capsule, and their space suits, they looked like business men discussing their presentation while flying economy class.  



Windows 10 build 9926 has been with us for 53 days, or almost two months.  While faster releases would be nice for those of us who don't mind bugs, it gives us an idea that Microsoft is going to release something that looks 99.9% like this build in the end.   My opinion after looking at this OS and using it as a daily driver on my Surface Pro 3 while teaching and researching is that it is the OS of the future in many ways.  In the future we will not interact with our computers by mouse and keyboard.  That future is finally becoming technically possible.  If other OS's don't evolve to deal with this shift then they will be left in the dust. 
Apparently, PLANCK says that BICEP2 did not detect gravitational waves.  The signal was mostly intergalactic dust.   That is my reading of a Google translate translation of an official Planck website.   This is even more tentative and un-reviewed than the arXiv postings that often set off a big story.  However, if this holds true it seems that BICEP2 did not indeed detect gravitational waves.  This may have officially finally settled the matter of BICEP2.  
To put it briefly, the habitability of a planet depends on it's distance from its star, the composition of its atmosphere, and the type of star its orbiting.  If our own solar system is at all typical then planets like those known around Kepler 444 and reported in the paper  arXiv:1501.06227 do not have atmosphere or have a Venus like atmosphere. 
If there is another Earth size planet to be found, father out, where it's a bit cooler it could be a home for life.    If it did have life that life could, due to the age of the planet, have been in existence long before life on Earth. 
Here is a list of Windows 10 Hits and Misses, points which I consider a good point or a area still in need of work.   Right now it is mostly hits.  Over time I will find and post the misses. 
Hits:

The start menu/screen transition is now a smooth and sensible continuum from a mouse friendly start menu to a finger friendly start screen.  If one has a convertible tablet PC like the Surface Pro this matters. 

If you have the Surface Pro 3 you have the pen.  When one clicks the button on top in Windows 8.1 it launches one note.  Click twice you get a screen shot.    That behavior is mostly back in Windows 10's latest build.