Richard

The Scots could hold a referendum, but without the agreement of Westminster, it would not be legally binding. This is, in fact, quite similar to the situation in Catalunia, Spain. I agree that if push came to shove, an actual revolution/occupation …

A despicable pack of facts 😉

Things are a little murky regarding partisanship. Both Labour and Tory members are fleeing because of dissatisfaction with their leaders' Brexit positions. In the recent local elections, both parties lost support--but especially the Tories. While …

While I agree that cathedrals have a lot of echo, I'm not sure I would like it if there were less. The reverberation makes it more difficult to understand sermons, but organ and choir music in a flat space could lose their power and ethereal …

Madrid resident and street photographer here. I second the suggestion to wander the back streets if you want to get the real flavor of the city, especially at night. If you are interested in covering the main monuments, you might want to add a loop …

There are several Firefox addons that support whitelists for cookies and for JavaScript. I'm not using any personally, so I can't vouch for their performance, but I've generally had pretty good luck with FF extensions.

Wow, I'm envious. Looks like a fascinating conference: https://www.brain-mind.org/cambridge Looking forward to hearing your impressions.

My primary machine is a Windows laptop, but my phone is Android, my iPad is iOS and my wife's laptop is OS-X. Oh, and my router runs Linux (and so does yours, probably). Each of these machines is quite good at what it does and none could replace …

> I hope they rebuild. I can't imagine it will be quite the same, but it's wonderful to see people from all over rally support for such a beautiful piece of history. A handful of French megarich have already pledged more than 600 million Euros …

It's anybody's guess, I think. I'd be surprised if they made a deal in time to avoid the European Parliamentary elections, though. Maybe those will show some new path forward, but I wouldn't count on it.

I haven't seen any speculation about the cause, but it's horrifying in any event.

The political news these days is so consistently depressing that I think we all feel good about the latest scientific achievements, even if we don't fully grasp their significance. It's perplexing that humans can be so smart and so dumb …

Thanks so much for posting this, @Chris. Ever since the first announcement from IBM I've been looking forward to seeing Project Debater in action. I was struck by several things: the language and speech synthesis were close to flawless--very …

(sorry...)

For real. Or rather, for surreal... http://videos.leparisien.fr/video/l-incroyable-trompe-l-oeil-de-jr-autour-de-la-pyramide-du-louvre-30-03-2019-x7502t6 Even if you don't speak French, the video gives you an idea of the scale of the project. At …

Bias can certainly be an issue. I'm not sure how you can avoid it completely. Is there some institution you trust more than the government? Oxford or Cambridge economists perhaps? Or being academics are they likely to have a pro-Europe bias? …

The UK Government itself projected a 7.7% to 10.7% decline in GDP after 15 years under a no-deal scenario. As Mrs. May just lost again today in Parliament, we may well find out whether the predictions are correct.

> it was ignorance that killed the cat, and curiosity was framed. I loved this. Had we been in a bar, I would have bought you a beer to celebrate your mastery of English. But since I'm just in my living room and on the Internet I was able to find …

This was a milestone, but it's not quite a done deal yet. Now that it has been approved by the European Parliament, it goes to the Council of Europe in April. Assuming it is approved, then EU member states each have two years to implement the …

> With that in mind, I wonder how much of the initial problem of "significance" is really something that should be solved by no longer using the mathematical concept in scientific contexts. Both the Nature commentary and The American Statistician …

Beautiful light and color, @Awais. Always a pleasure to see your work.

Till it becomes illegal, I suppose. I'm sure the Chinese are not going to put up with it, and eventually, others could follow suit in the name of national security. But it might not even matter if the claims that are being made for gait recognition …

> Just what would that look like? Maybe like New Zealand's response to the terrorist shooting. In less than a week, assault weapons were banned. Compare that to thoughts and prayers.

I love these, especially the first. Thanks for sharing, @Denise

I don't know that we need to be worried, but we sure are going to feel stupid if there's a catastrophic event which might have been avoided had we only devoted more attention to contingency planning. It's probably safe to assume that our ability to …