meta user
network profile
| bio | website | knowing.net |
|---|---|---|
| location | Kailua Kona, HI | |
| age | 49 | |
| visits | member for | 2 years, 1 month |
| seen | 12 hours ago | |
| stats | profile views | 141 |
Contributing Editor and Columnist, SD Times. Editor of now-defunct magazines including Software Development, Computer Language, and AI Expert. Founding Editor of Game Developer, which still totally rocks.
On Twitter at @lobrien
Sr. Software Engineer at Gemini Observatories.
Not a bad coder.
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Feb 4 |
comment |
Will tiger farming drive up demand for wild tigers and lead to them being hunted to extinction? The best corollary would seem to be whether a regulated trade in ivory has increased or decreased poaching in elephants. That policy is an absolute disaster. It seems clear that the profits to be made from poaching overwhelm the limited resources available to regulate and manage the trade. The existence of a legal supply chain allows bad actors to paper over possession, thus significantly decreasing their risk and elevating the burden on law enforcement. |
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Jan 29 |
comment |
Does drinking the urine of camels have medical benefits? It gives the camels a much-needed laugh. |
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Jan 25 |
awarded | Enlightened |
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Jan 18 |
comment |
During the decade of the Clinton ban on semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, did crime not go down? There's definitely a lot implied in the claim's phrasing, but fundamentally the claim is the factual "during period X, crime did not go down," which @Tacroy refutes in his answer. |
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Jan 16 |
comment |
Is eating boogers good for you? Surely the amount of mucus that naturally drains from your sinuses dwarfs the volume that can be moved from nose to mouth? |
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Jan 16 |
asked | Do consumer-grade body-fat scales provide consistent results? |
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Jan 15 |
revised |
If comparing white populations, does the U.S. have the same murder rate as Belgium? Switched references to better sources; removed editorial content re. Coulter. |
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Jan 14 |
awarded | Nice Answer |
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Jan 12 |
revised |
Is a short-term fast beneficial for maintaining good health and extending life expectancy? spelling, grammar of question |
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Jan 11 |
comment |
Would we see a doomsday asteroid beforehand? The frequency of cold rocks in interstellar space is highly speculative since they're dark and cold and far away (they recently discovered that the number of brown dwarfs is much bigger than expected and they're huge relative to asteroids). I think it's logical that large numbers exist (albeit in a huge volume) and that they occasionally traverse our SS or get captured but it must be rare. AFAIK there's no evidence that any meteorite is of extrasolar origin and I'm fairly positive that there's never been an asteroid or comet suspected of such. |
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Jan 11 |
comment |
Have we only mined 16 tonnes of platinum in the whole of history? One wonders if the "16 tons" value wasn't a reference, conscious or not, to the lyric "...and deeper in debt." cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/classic-country/… |
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Jan 11 |
answered | Would we see a doomsday asteroid beforehand? |
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Jan 11 |
comment |
Did the Harvard Museum of Natural History put this label on their display? I dunno', but I'd say that's a pangolin tail beside it. Could be an important clue. |
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Jan 9 |
comment |
Were more than a half of all Silicon Valley tech companies founded by immigrants between 1995 and 2005? Having lived in the Bay Area during that time and been part of the whole dot-com thing, I can only say that it wouldn't surprise me if the statistic were true or very close to true. There was a huge mass of smart technical people, money was easy to find, and everyone thought the payoffs would be huge (that turned out to be the hard part). You were at the party -- it didn't matter where you had come from. |
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Jan 9 |
awarded | Nice Answer |
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Jan 8 |
comment |
Did the moon's tidal effect sink the Titanic? At Full and New moons, when the Earth, Moon, and Sun roughly align, you get strong "Spring tides". The Moon's orbit of Earth is elliptical: when closest approach coincides with spring tides you get "perigean spring tides." The Earth's orbit of the sun is elliptical: closest approach to Sun is perihelion. Argument is that combo of all three produced peak tides. (See illustration in my answer below.) |
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Jan 8 |
revised |
Did the moon's tidal effect sink the Titanic? added illustration from the article |
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Jan 8 |
answered | Did the moon's tidal effect sink the Titanic? |
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Jan 7 |
comment |
Is non-ionizing radiation known to cause any health issues? Non-ionizing radiation was responsible for me seeing Honey Boo-Boo. The damage is irreparable. |
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Jan 5 |
comment |
Is Coca-Cola effective at removing blood-stains? I always thought they carried two gallons of Coke to dissolve any nails left on the highway. |
