You work out how much of your genome would be identical to the relation to calculate the Relationship Coefficient. As the relative is direct-line, then it's simply how much of your genome is contributed by that ancestor and this simplifies much of the math.

It'd be 6.25% for a great great grandparent.

In terms of centiMorgans, it'd be around 200. Full first cousins share the same as great grandparents (around 850 cM), first cousins once removed would be the same as great great grandparents.

To avoid inbreeding related malady, you usually want shared DNA to be below 10%, ideally below 5%.

Energetically, hoisting half of Enceladus out of the second largest planetary gravity well in the solar system is an extremely bad idea.

Pelting Mars with comets is a much easier way of doing it.

The bigger TIL here is that the US has several orders of magnitude higher incidence of food-borne illness than any other developed nation. It isn't even close.

At the time, the world viewed a happy, prosperous, content Persia, a model for autocratic rule.

The Iranians were somewhat less happy than the world was shown!

Iran got a change of leadership, it did not get democracy.

In my mind.

Nobody ever "wants" democracy when in an autocratic state. What they want is what democracy promises, a change of leadership.

Khomeini was popular, but how do people learn that their opinion is positive about him? They don't know him. They've never met him. They were Muslims and knew that he was a religious leader, and that's all they needed.

Until the mid-1970s, Pahlavi had been Western-aligned. The West had destroyed Iranian democracy to install him as autocrat, and everyone was happy. Well, except the Iranians, but who cared about them?

Pahlavi was becoming extremely unpopular after the White Revolution, but while-ever Iran was prosperous and liberal, the people would be happy. Well, they weren't. Pahlavi was seen as a Western lackey, a stooge, he lacked authority of his own, was a Washington puppet and not a Persian leader. They questioned whether Westernisation was really progress.

They saw lots of impoverished Persians, yet Tehran was teeming with extremely rich foreigners. This was Pahlavi's public face in Iran by around 1977.

The USSR saw an opportunity to remove one of America's allies (this was a strategic victory for the USSR) and channelled a lot of support to left-leaning Islamic guerrilla forces, such as the People's Mujahideen. They rejected far-right conservative Islam, seeing religion as a tool to empower the people, not oppress them. They still exist today, as Khomeini turned on them the moment he had power.

René Goscinny is on record several times praising the English translators, at least once saying he'd wished he'd have thought of a pun they used.

For example, he preferred Dogmatix to Idéfix. They both mean "fixed idea", the dog is in every book, but Dogmatix works better.

Nothing says "I'm not anything like a cowardly and degenerate gangster" like screaming abuse and threats at someone in a restaurant who you think implied you were.

That's a big asteroid: It's had to dump more than the gravitational binding energy into the moon.

So, the result is 100 km sized chunks of rock flying in all directions. Over time, some will reform a smaller moon, orbiting around a sterile, dead, cratered Earth.

That's because some of the others will hit Earth. Hard. It'll be (briefly) a more intensive period of crater forming since Late Heavy Bombardment. It won't quite boil the oceans and yet it'll wipe out anything more complex than bacteria.

Lemmy's ethic was absolutely and completely something else.

He'd say "I'm a public figure. If I'm in public, I'm at work." and never refuse an autograph or a photo.

Show the doubters this when they say aromatherapy doesn't do anything.

It is only suspected that Charles C. Ebbets took that particular photo.

The RCA Building Company had another two prominent photographers on site for the PR campaign of that day, Thomas Kelley (who took the photo of Ebbets here) and William Leftwich.

Back then it wasn't important who took the photo, the photographs were property of RCA, who'd later go through them and select the right ones for publication.

The one thing we do know about Lunch Atop a Skyscraper is that it was not taken by Lewis Hine, as sometimes thought. He was not there that day.

Don't leave out the second season genocide he does!

ARM, for low power and performance efficiency, is better, and that is why. It gets more ILP, and ILP is more efficient than TLP (which is more efficient than PLP, but yeah).

AMD64 is entrenched. It's what Windows works on. It's what the entire PC ecosystem works on. The PlayStation and Xbox runs on AMD64. Whether we like it or not, it is here to stay.

I deliberately didn't discuss any switch to ARM, as it's almost certainly not going to happen and I was responding to someone who was saying that making more efficient CPUs was a better idea than better fans.

It is, of course, but it isn't going to happen to the level ARM allows it to.

It's not going to happen, and why is a fundamental aspect of why AMD64 (x86) is different to ARMv7/v8/v9.

ARM gets parallelism at the instruction level (ILP), it has small instructions, very suited for out of order execution. A single thread can get a lot of parallelism, so the CPU doesn't need a lot of overhead to wrestle the ILP bear. The ease at which ARM (and some other RISC archs, like POWER) gets ILP is part of the reason why mandated parallelism in things like VLIW and EPIC didn't do very well: It just wasn't necessary.

AMD64 is very different, it has all that x86 baggage on it. Instructions have all kinds of modes, dependencies, tags, etc., and this makes them a lot more interdependent than ARM instructions are. So, pulling ILP out of AMD64 is a lot more difficult than ARM, and the CPU has to spend a lot more resource in doing it. Even then, it doesn't get the same degree of ILP ARM can achieve.

AMD64 gets more of its parallelism from TLP: Thread level parallelism. There's a reason all performance AMD64 processors from AMD and Intel support simultaneous multithreading (SMT/HyperThreading^(tm)), this is where most of their parallelism comes from. SMT shows a significant performance improvement in almost all cases, meaning execution slots are going spare when SMT isn't in use, which further means there isn't enough ILP to saturate the processor's capability.

This isn't usually the case on ARM, most ARM cores are designed to "race to sleep" and fill as much execution resource as possible. The CPU's awake and clocked up, it darned well better use that time as productively as possible, there's a power budget to worry about!

So, while-ever we're using AMD64, which will be more or less forever as far as the immediate future is concerned, similar performance on AMD64 will always need more power than it will on ARM.

I wonder if this is related to Ophir. It's mentioned as a thing, not a place, in Paleo-Hebrew, but clearly began as a place where gold was found, and then became a term for any trading port where gold was sold.

Rubin's one of those weird ones. On one hand, she became the second woman ever to win the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal.

On the other hand, she's famous because of something she popularised, not discovered, and anyone saying she "discovered dark matter" is misleading you, or has been misled themselves. It's a weird thing in science where the original discoverer of something is rarely credited with it until much later, and sometimes not at all.

Rubin's paper on galactic rotation curves with Kent Ford in 1980 was re-stating a discovery Horace Babcock had made in 1939, when he published the flat rotation curve of M31. Babcock still wasn't the first astronomer to come across the "visible mass deficit" as it became known, but did probably cause that name to be coined.

Fritz Zwicky, working at Caltech, used virial theorem to estimate the mass of the Coma cluster, and discovered a mass enormously "too high". The idea there is that you can use the velocities of the galaxies on the edge of the cluster to derive a total mass for the entire cluster, and Zwicky got results around five times too high. Zwicky's results are now considered to be accurate for the method he was using.

That the mass to light ratio was not unity was widely understood in the 1960s and onward, and Rubin's work was trying to find out why. She never did find out why, but that's fine, nobody else has yet either!

Look at the shape of the imprint. The bird (probably a pigeon) had seen the window and was slowing down to avoid it. The impact energy isn't concentrated on the head and there's a a much more dense dander trace of the body. This means the muscular body took most of the force, not the head.

I'd say that bird flew away.

Yeah, came to say this. The dust is called dander, and pigeons have a lot of it. Owls not so much, they have some (it's basically the equivalent of human dead skin, tiny fragments of feathers) but not enough to leave this kind of impression.

Finally, that's definitely a pigeon tail, not an owl one.

In good news, it was a bird which saw the window and was trying to stop, so it didn't hit entirely with its head and it was slowing down. It'll probably be okay.

Well that school doesn't teach economics.

This is one of the things which really sets science apart from all other fields of endeavour.

It ensures that, in the end, we do not fool ourselves. Fraud will be exposed, eventually.

UK's got empty houses everywhere.

Except they're not "empty houses" they're "property investments".

Yes, it is. It is bright enough that it would appear as a dot on a tracked image, or as a line on an untracked one.

It is essentially a very reflective (high albedo) NEO (near-earth object) at <1 lunar-distance. A quick back of envelope calculation gives it a magnitude of around 16-18, a touch brighter than Pluto.

We can detect dark (asphalt or even darker) rocks smaller than Orion at a greater distance.

A similarly quick spherical-cow physics back of envelope calculation tells me we could detect the Orion capsule out around the distance of Mars.

It's worth looking up just how powerful Samsung is in South Korea.

Start at "The Korean president must be approved by Samsung before running" and make sure you catch that "A majority of seats in the National Assembly are occupied by candidates endorsed by Samsung".

That's the point. We voted for everything and nothing all at the same time.

I live near Barnsley, where that clown went on Channel 4 news the week after the non-binding referendum saying he'd voted leave to "get the Muslims out".