Ob. Cyanide and Happiness

http://explosm.net/comics/3557...

I've time travelled from the 1970s to 2014, and I'm not dead ...

Are you feeling bad because your gender was ignored? That's ... adorable.

Coming in late, but you might like http://www.pepysdiary.com/

Technically you're correct, but of course, these companies are actually doing something useful

Me. Indeed, it's one of my favourite genres. See Hugh Cook's novels for a great example of this sort of thing.

Cosmic rays include many kinds of charged particles -- protons, electrons, alpha particles etc -- streaming out from the sun (and arriving from other places). Electromagnetic radiation is also known as sunlight, and is, as you said, not deflected by magnetic fields.

You have five weeks of vacation "built up." Here in Socialist Europe, we get five weeks of vacation every year. Yes, you're doing it wrong.

for lo hi action = mapM_ action [lo .. hi]

for 1 4 print
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I don't see how this relates to correctness though. The nice thing about for in most languages is its termination guarantee; you don't get that in the C++ version.

Luckily, GC has advanced since the 1960s.

My understanding is that Aryabhata also used epicycles to model planetary movement (and by the way, even if they're not literally there, they can be incredibly accurate, which only adds to my annoyance at the way they get ridiculed). I've heard about the ellipse thing, but never seen any evidence (which, naturally, doesn't mean it's not true!)

This is another of those "dumb science" metaphors that are flung around with no regard for history. The heliocentric model of the solar system did nothing to solve the problem of epicycles, and given what was known at the time, would you have come up with ellipses?

In fact, paradigm shift was a useful expression long before it was hijacked by business consultants. I suppose this is the destiny of any phrase that describes, shall we say, a great leap forward -- to be misused and misapplied until people end up forgetting what it once actually meant.

How would you prefer the search for a unification theory to proceed? And why are you so angry? It's not for you to decide how people who are smarter than either of us should spend their time.

The idea of a luminiferous aether followed naturally from the observation that light acted like a wave, and one of the fundamental things about waves is that they travelled in a medium.

This lead to experiments designed to detect the medium of light (like the famous Michelson-Morley one), to the Lorentz transformations and the Theory of Relativity. The aether conjecture is science at its best: hypothesis, experiment, falsification, paradigm shift. Why it's used as a metaphor for stupidity has always been a mystery to me.

The lack of specificity in your invitation to a dick-swinging contest is ... illuminating.