I'm curious--which do you find good (and bad!)?

I'm in Australia, so my good list is Qantas, Emirates and Singapore Airlines for any flight longer then about 2 hours.

Eschewing religion and promoting "rational thinking" gives us, perhaps, the most dangerous outcome of all: nationalism.

I wonder where's the connection between rational thinking and nationalism? The latter seems like utter manifestation of stupidity, or at least absolute lack of empathy. Ingroup/outgroup thinking is not rationality, it's a heuristic in the mind that doesn't work for us anymore.

Weaver did excellent translations for much of Calvino's work, too.

Which company?

The statistics are always misinterpreted; they can't be considered in the same domain. Terrorists fall in the risk domain that is subject to tail events. Toddlers with guns don't. In plain English, you're not going to see a 10x increase in deaths one year from toddlers playing around with guns, while that's very possible with terrorist activity. In fat-tailed domains like terrorism, single, extreme events make up the entire mean, so just because something bad doesn't happen for a short period of time doesn't mean it's any safer. All it takes is one extreme terrorist event to do some serious damage.

Nope, you can have two equal lines extending from a non-central point. Connecting the points would give you an isosceles triangle.

Why do you say that?

tip: call apple and tell them you have a cord that looks like it's a serious fire hazard. Each time I've said "fire hazard," they've replaced it without question.

Good hint, thank you!

I have the rechargeable variant of the Philips Golite, which looks like the same model that Costco sells. I like it overall, but the big problem I have with it is that the battery doesn't hold a charge if you keep it in its case for any longer than about a week.

Here's a good paper discussing risk w.r.t. GMOs: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf