I have a dim vision of a one true UI, where mouse clicks are only used as a substitute for typing things with long names. But it is always possible to do it with just the keyboard, and that is how the programmer designs the interface.
Everything works uniformly the same.
Inspired by command-line shell.
You can always define your own functions to extend.
For maps "permanently printed" on a flat sheet of paper, it's never obvious what map projection to use. What regions should have high distortion versus what other regions have low distortion?
However, for electronic interactive maps, the answer is more clear. The center of the map, corresponding to the address the user has looked up, and consequently the center of attention, should have the least distortion. Often, the user is interested in distances from the center, so choose the projection (Azimuthal Equidistant) so that straight lines from the center are geodesics and distances are true. If the user wants less distortion in a different area of the map, he or she may recenter the map, or the UI may provide a way to specify a different center of projection.
For maps which are directions (a path) between two points, display the Two-Point Equidistant Projection.
Unfortunately, the popular technique (e.g., Google Maps) of precalculated map tiles will not work, as every region looks different depending on how far it is from the center of projection. We need some powerful magic possibly involving SVG and image transformations.
How frequently do two galactic black holes merge somewhere in the Observable Universe? We can measure their gravity waves. Spherical distribution?
It would be interesting if the frequency were of a human timescale, and if we lived in a universe where gravity were relatively stronger and gravitational waves from distant black hole mergers caused macroscopic effects visible on earth. Once every few years, say, spacetime will unpredictably distort because of an event in a distant galaxy billions of light years away.
Take a topographic map, and negate each point's elevation. (Positive becomes negative and vice versa.) Choose a certain elevation to be the new sea level. Where will the "inverse" watersheds be?
In general, watersheds (drainage basins) and prominence are fascinating ways of dividing (some of) the world into regions hierarchically.
What would the world be like if all people accepted these physical topographical boundaries as the God-given political boundaries and did not fight over them?
It's interesting how continuous wind and continuous water produce discretized ocean waves. Something breaks the continuity.
"Don't trust Western science and medicine" is a fundamental tenet of Western science and medicine. By the scientific method, beliefs must stand up to challenges.
Ironically, it's a shared common belief with many skeptics of Western science and medicine.
Vancouver is not on Vancouver Island.
Victoria is not on Victoria Island.
Victoria is on Vancouver Island.
What would baseball be like if a swing and a miss on a pitch outside the strike zone is counted as a ball, not a strike? This rewards good hitters who can get a hit on pitches outside the standard strike zone. Can Questec correctly extrapolate whether a pitch would have passed the strike zone?
What to do with fouls out of play, or caught in foul territory? Is there still a potential penalty for swinging at a ball?
Deletions of verified facts from Wikipedia based on a judgment call, for example "importance", "relevance", or "reputability" of the source, are potentially especially bad.
Create a tool that will search through a page history for such deletions. This will require natural language processing and artificial intelligence. And a separate library to actually verify a source.
Architect Wikipedia so that discovering such behavior is easier. Separate verifiability (a straightforward question of fact) from judgment calls of reputability.
We need a way of discretizing an article into discrete facts, and associating each fact with a source.
On the other hand, the population of African elephants has tripled in the last six months, which may be verified from multiple (disreputable) sources, including a major cable television news show.
The Julian calendar was found defective and the Gregorian calendar replaced it. One would think, with modern technology, we can measure the year more accurately than astronomers in Pope Gregory's time (1582) to replace the Gregorian calendar.
Turns out we can't, surprisingly because of chaos theory. The length of the year, i.e., Earth's orbit around the Sun, is a 3 body (or more) problem (Sun, Jupiter, Earth), and by chaos theory, inherently unpredictable over the long term. Furthermore, the length of a day, changes due to tides, earthquakes, etc.
That which will replace the Gregorian calendar will be an observational one: every few thousand years, probably skip (because the day is definitely getting longer) a Gregorian leap day. It'll be Y2k all over again. This is similar in spirit to observational lunar calendars used today.
How many microseconds long was last year, from say vernal equinox to vernal equinox? How does it compare to previous years?
How much does it cost to train a Space Shuttle crew of astronauts? How much does it cost to rebuild a satellite (given you still have the designs for the first one)? Callously, in the event of a Space Shuttle emergency immediately after launch, which should be ejected and parachuted? (Why not both?)
Just how much does the nation benefit from having a "great" Supreme Court justice rather than a merely (or barely) competent one? A merely competent one narrowly applies the Constitution.
When a case pits one Constitutional right or clause against another, the great justice makes the decision that is best for the country in the long term. Congress does a bad job of long-term.
Star Trek: Deep Space 9. "Equilibrium"
Are we expending less calories? Do we have measurements of the average number of calories a person expended a generation or two ago?
Or is the obesity epidemic these days purely caused by consuming more calories? (Probably a result of technology decreasing the cost per calorie, as well as improving taste)
The problem with reviews is you don't know whether you can trust it: is the writer being compensated to promote the product? More trustable are reviews from friends. It's probabilistically unlikely your friend is a secret promoter (though with the analysis of "hubs" in social networks, it may be possible for advertisers to bribe just a small number of people to dishonestly give false reviews to their friends), and there is a the social trust network in which the friend is embedded for which a dishonest review will disrupt the trust.
Simply out of laziness, it is difficult to get people to unilaterally write a review about a product or service they have purchased. Solution: Use a social networking infrastructure to allow people to signal that they seek a review of a potential purchase to their friends. While people don't spontaneously write reviews, they might if it is to help out a friend.
With more complicated mechanisms, you could get reviews from friends of friends, with the middle friend choosing to pass along the review request signal.
With trusted third parties, you could process anonymized reviews from the signaler or reviewer.
Let it be possible to put a law on trial, independent of whether there is a person accused of breaking the law. A petition begins the process. Then, a jury is selected from the population, with jury selection. The State, having passed the law, is the defense, and the petitioners are the plaintiffs.
Unclear on what to do about spending laws, if the money has already been spent.
This serves as a check and balance against a corrupt legislature.
Inspired by the 2008 Somerville Ballot, Crackpot Question 5: “Shall the state representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor amending the state Constitution to replace the state Legislature with 100 randomly selected adult residents of Massachusetts, each serving one year terms on a rotating basis to be named the Commonwealth Jury and to have all powers of the current Legislature.”
I believe message-passing is the right way to do parallel programming. Compiler magic, with program annotations, should increase performance, perhaps implementing on shared memory.
Inspired by Bluespec FIFOs and their implicit not-full and not-empty behavior.
Count the number of days you have lived and celebrate if it is a prime number.
If the number of days you have lived is divisible by N, then your life at that point may be divided into N equal chapters, and today you are merely beginning chapter N+1. (You can calculate when all the previous chapters were.) But if you have lived a prime number of days, today must be the first day of chapter 2.
This beats (or supplements) celebrating just your birthday, which only occurs once a year. Interestingly, it is possible for your birthday to land on a prime day because of leap years. The number of days you have lived on your birthday might not be a multiple of 365.
Create a program to emit individualized calendars.
How do desert plants avoid concretion of dust which would prevent photosynthesis?
This is probably not how desert plants do it, but the idea is cute: Do a little bit of actual (but artificial) photosynthesis in your solar cell. Sunlight + water (from dew) + carbon dioxide creates sugar. The sugar is somehow deposited on individual dust grains covering the array, or transported and "excreted" under areas of the array which are thickly covered in dust. Next ants, or some other sugar-loving animal, do the heavy lifting: either carrying away each grain of dust with sugar adhered to it a food for the colony, or being forced to move or dislodge the dust in order to get at the sugar underneath. Thus, the solar cell is cleared of dust.
The AMA came out against health care reform (Robert Pear, "Doctors' Group Opposes Public Insurance Plan", New York Times, June 10, 2009), and one can cynically look upon it as, if health care reform results in healthier people, then that's less revenue for the health care industry, so it makes sense that the AMA, a trade organization whose first priority is to represent doctors and their paychecks, is against healthier people. Health care reform also seeks to cut waste in the health care industry, which would also result in less overall revenue for the industry.
But under a certain set of rather depressing theoretical assumptions, the above short-sighted analysis could be wrong. Healthier people might ultimately spend more on health care simply because they have more money to spend. We assume that healthier people have more money to spend because of lack of lost wages due to illness and working more years by not dying earlier. Now, the depressing assumptions: People inevitably get sick as they get old. Living a healthier life only postpones the onset of sickness in old age. These sicknesses of old age become more severe and frequent and thus more expensive to treat as you get older. No matter how much money you start with, there will eventually be a medical treatment that will drain you, assuming you don't die suddenly. Having more money simply means being able to afford more treatments before you die bankrupt. And people will generally always be willing to spend money not to die because self-preservation is the strongest instinct.
Therefore, all your lifetime savings are inevitably going to go to health care regardless of how healthy of a life you live, or how much money you make. Thus, to maximize health care revenues over the long term, the AMA should support healthier people who will make more money, the money which will inevitably be paid to the doctors the AMA represents.
In economics parlance, the "income effect" outweighs the "substitution effect" in this scenario.
Geriatrics
So much of the web is about downloading and formatting rows (records) of a table, the result of a database query. Can the way a user agent (browser) interacts with the server (which queries the database) be re-engineered to give the user agent much more power over the query and formatting?
This would allow websites to work with a variety of different devices and screen sizes. The simplest example is how many rows the query should return at a time. Small devices want fewer. Small devices want to format the columns differently, so it would be nice to know what the columns were, instead of a monolithic device-oblivious block of HTML and CSS. Navigation could be made easier if queries could be modified by the user agent to request sorting by an arbitrary column on the server side.
Columns can have tagged alternative data types, and it's all done. It doesn't need to solve everyone's problems.
Network file systems are finicky and fickle. We need a mechanism such that writes to the filesystem, which if unsuccessful, are "cached" or journaled in memory until the network filesystem is available again, at which point the journal is played recording the writes. FUSE might be a good way to implement this overlay filesystem.
Optionally do in-memory compression of the journal to conserve memory.
This is inspired by zephyr loggers being the principal consumers of memory on Linerva: simply write to AFS, but your tokens may have expired, or it might be the Sunday morning restart.
We can't do anything about reads in the event of network filesystem unavailability, unless it's in cache, which is already done.
I have often wanted a minimal installation of a Linux distribution and been disappointed that the installer didn't provide it. There are many different "minimals". Here is a list.
Truly minimal, providing little more than a kernel and filesystem. No interactive shell or console support. Getting additional things on the OS is probably done by booting a different operating system and mounting the file system.
Same as previous, but also providing shell and console.
Same as previous, but also providing dpkg or rpm so arbitrary additional packages may be installed manually.
Same as previous, but enough configuration so the internet works, and apt or yum is installed.
Minimal, but with a minimal amount of X.
Variations of above except for paraVMs. The kernel is outside so does not need to be installed.
Variations of above except for chroots. The idea of futzing with the contents of a filesystem from outside a chroot makes more sense.
Covert manipulation of society, if it is occurring, may be exposed by overt resistance against the suspected manipulation. In order to respond to the overt resistance, the covert elements will be forced to reveal themselves.
This is a very important reason for freedom of speech, especially "disagreeable" or objectionable speech which challenges the "norms" of society, variously labeled these days obscene or even hate.
Even a statement which is universally reviled, and at first glance society would have been better off had the statement never been spoken, may cast a light via society's response to it, revealing something previously hidden.
It may seem paranoid and conspiracy theorist, but we can argue biologically that it is not. If an institution can gain power and be in a position to remain in place (for example, by remaining covert), then it is highly likely that such an institution will come to exist. If there exists a niche for a biological organism to thrive in, it is highly likely you will find life there.
We must vigilantly guard the freedom of speech so that power remains with the people and not covert institutions.
If the police taser someone, and the victim dies as a result of the electric shock, are the police guilty of a more serious wrongdoing if the victim was wearing clothing clearly labeled "Don't tase me! I have a heart condition." Are you protected by the right to freedom of speech in wearing such a shirt even if you don't know for sure if your heart will survive taser fire?
Synthesize a realistic artificial image of a planet with Earth-like weather patterns and features. The Blue Marble and other imagery of Earth may be used as training examples.
Reporters, for example at a presidential press conference, ask stupid questions, either because the reporter is genuinely stupid or in an attempt to trick the speaker ("Have you stopped beating your wife?") This does not help the public.
What if, in the questions portion of a press conference, the Socratic Method were used? The speaker asks the questions, and the reporters answer them, possibly based on the information given by the speaker before the questions portion. As is the true Socratic Method, wrong answers yield further questions whose answers make clear the wrongness of the first answer.
The speaker can keep score on which reporters answer correctly, and invite back to future press conferences those who do. The goal is to keep the reporters capable of intelligent conversation, and weed out those who aren't. An intelligent conversation maximizes the quality of information dissemination to the public, which is the ultimate goal.
Perhaps only the high scoring reporters are permitted to ask questions following the Socratic Method portion, reverting to the traditional format where the reporters ask questions.
Testifying before Congress has a similar silly feel to it, with the senators and representatives often talking more than the person being questioned. Perhaps the Socratic Method should be deployed there, too.
It becomes an opportunity for we constituents can see whether we elected an idiot.
There needs to be a moderator to keep the questions relevant.
It is possible to be atheist (violently rejecting the existence of a god) yet still be deeply religious in any given religion. One participates in the religion as a purely human institution (despite its telling you that it is super-human), taking part in all its mantras, activities, and even mass- and self-delusions. Or, just going through the motions without actually believing. In return one gains what religion has to give, acceptance into a community, clarity of mind, etc.
One can "deeply" believe in a human institution as much as a metaphysical god or religion. For example, we see it all the time in people's enthusiasm for political and social causes ("Barack Obama is the Savior") or their favorite sports team ("Believe" Red Sox), or family.
This was inspired by an inside story of people who are simultaneously Scientologists and Jewish who are populous in Hollywood. Scientology for them (or perhaps Judaism) is a purely human institution, almost a trade organization, helpful for meeting other people in the industry. Its outrageous mythical mysticism means nothing spiritually.
I have often heard that wet cotton is an extremely poor insulator of body heat, variously compared against wool and being naked. I would like to see this tested, for I am skeptical.
Start with cotton and wool swatches of identical dry insulation rating. Moisten the swatches with identical amounts of water, or in a separate experiment, moisten them to saturation.
Heat transfer may occur through three mechanisms: diffusion and convection(?), and evaporation.
In diffusion, vibrating molecules induce neighboring vibrating molecules to vibrate. The heat transfer of diffusion of the wet fabric is probably a linear combination of the heat transfer of diffusion of the dry fabric, defined to be the same by initial choice of fabric, and of the water. With identical amounts of water, this factor will also be the same. Moistened to saturation, it will depend on the maximum amount of water the fabric can absorb.
Convection (that's probably not the right word) will occur if the water moves, transporting heat with itself. The fibers in fabric will probably slow water motion a lot to the point where convection is negligible. Convection does occur if you are being rained upon and you are naked, the rain rolls off your skin, carrying heat away. This is why I am skeptical of the statement that wearing cotton is a worse insulator than being naked when being actively rained upon.
Upon further consideration, convection does occur by capillary action from wet to dry. However if you are being rained upon, the water would be traveling in the wrong direction to carry heat away from your body. (It is good if you are sweating. )
I don't have a good feel for capillary action. It probably depends on the gradient of moistness between the outer and inner surfaces of the fabric, so is not relevant if the fabric is fully saturated with water. It also probably depends on fiber thickness, and density.
Evaporation can carry away heat. But in a situation in which you have just been rained on, or are currently being rained on, and you are trying to stay warm, the humidity is probably very high and the temperature low, so very little evaporation should occur.
The evaporation rate of a fabric depends on fiber surface area.
My reasoning can be refuted by experiment. I am curious where my reasoning is wrong. The experiment has probably already been carried out: if wet cotton's poor insulation were a myth perpetuated by the wool and synthetic fabric industries, the big cotton industry would probably not stand idly by losing profits to such a myth.
Bluespec
Proving rule mutual exclusion. Hints by indicator variables which never get synthesized.
A language for better expressing multi-cycle protocols. Locks.
GSSAPIDelegateCredentials yes GSSAPIAuthentication yes GSSAPIKeyExchange yes TCPKeepAlive yes
You can make your password or passphrase longer and or more complex. You would think that the longer it is, the more secure it would be, but after a certain point, about 70 bits of real entropy, no practical amount of brute force attack can possibly discover it. After this point it's no longer useful to make your password longer or more complicated. An adversary seeking to discover your password will employ a keystroke logger (keylogger) which will be equally effective no matter how long your password is.
Create a photo uploading and sharing site for which the catch is, if you upload an image, you are releasing it into the public domain. You can upload as many images as you want, for free.
Actually, it need not be limited to images.
The service pays for itself in principle because images released to public domain are good for the public. To actually pay for it will require government support.
Launching from government support, the initial deployment may be a central store and distribution for government-produced images which are already public domain. Later it may be opened up for everybody to upload.
There will be an escalating war between abusers who try to upload, for example, steganographic encrypted data, turning a public image store into a private data store, but the terms of use of the site should be they may delete anything they want to as crap at any point.
Peer-to-peer can reduce the bandwidth costs.
I dislike how sites such as Youtube are censored by a variety of reasons and methods, all highly non-transparent. They include the site's own terms of service, questionable copyright claims on copyright law passed by corrupt politicians bribed by copyright owners (e.g., DMCA), government laws regarding obscenity based on "community standards" and literary, artistic, political or scientific "merit".
Imagine a site which simplifies the censorship so that no entity, not the site nor a copyright claimant nor the government has special power or privilege above someone else to censor someone else. Freenet has implemented one extreme, where no one can censor anyone (deletion is not possible).
Consider the other extreme, where anyone can censor. It's clean and "transparent" in the sense that there is nothing special to see. If a copyright claimant or a private vigilante against obscenity or anyone at all wants to censor an item, simply go to the item's page, click on "Censor This!", and complete a CAPTCHA (only humans are allowed to censor, preventing automated trolls).
Here is how a site like this could work: after uploading, the site responds with an unique new address with which you can go back to the uploaded object. By default, the site publishes the address no where else. It is up to the uploader to disseminate the address if he or she wants other people to see it.
No doubt there will be alternating upload and censorship battles over certain items. To "accelerate" such a battle, along with a "Censor This!" button, another button is provided: "Request duplicate address" which after completing a CAPTCHA, a different address is generated for the same content. This saves bandwidth from the uploader uploading the object again after it's been censored to get a new address. Someone may share an object with trusted friends without fear of the object being censored, but if there is a snitch or traitor among the friends, it will get deleted. But the ability to get multiple addresses for the same object (with the effort of solving multiple CAPTCHAs) allows the uploader to distribute different addresses to different friends, see which gets censored to uncover the snitch. Using clever binary search, it is possible to discover a single traitor among 2n friends while needing to generate only O(n) addresses.
Somewhat tangentially, I think the server may store the uploaded objects encrypted so that it does not itself know the contents of the uploaded objects. (Plausible deniability in case of a government raid on the server hardware.) The encryption key is encoded into part of the address that is given to the uploader. Some cryptographic magic (indirection?) is required to be able to generate multiple address for the same content while conserving storage.
Other sites can build on top of this site, perhaps for address dissemination, tagging and categorizing, playlists, etc. Interface with social networking to disseminate among friends and discover traitors.
Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Is it true? Is it a bad thing?
If it is true, why? Is it a result of the result of "the system", like Malthus hypothesized?
What causes which men or women to become or not become part of that "mass"? Is it a result of your controllable decisions? Is it luck, or fixed circumstances beyond your control? Is it predictable for a given person? If so, by what age is your fate set?
These questions might be able to be investigated empirically.
If you have to plead "The Yuppie Nuremberg Defense", you are leading a life of quiet desperation.
Solar cookers are generally hard to make because the amount of energy required to heat something up until it actually cooks is quite high, consequently requiring a large solar collecting area. But for hot dogs (only) we can cheat, because hot dogs are already cooked; they just need to be reheated. You might even avoid carcinogens from overcooked sodium nitrate.
Create and market a compact solar hot dog and bun warmer.
Summer is relatively hot. Winter is relatively cold. Spring and autumn are the times in between. Thus, our seasons are roughly centered around local extrema and points of inflection in temperature.
Then, by this definition, and if temperature is purely the effect of the angle of the sun (this assumption is wrong), the equator will have 8 seasons, not 4 like above and below the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and not just 1 as popularly believed.
The equatorial region is coldest when the Sun is extremely north or south. This happens twice a year at the solstices. It is warmest when the Sun is directly overhead. This happens twice a year at the equinoxes. So far we have 4 seasons already: 2 winters and 2 summers. There are points of inflection between them (2 springs and 2 autumns) for a total of 8 seasons.
Exactly at the equator, both winters are equal in coldness, but away from the equator, one winter is milder and shorter than the other, although they are both local minima in temperature. Very close to the Tropics of Cancer or Capricorn, it is difficult to distinguish this very short winter from the summers which bracket it.
This model of seasonal temperature sole as a function of the angle of the Sun is known to be incorrect. Perhaps if all the water disappeared, or the tilt of the planet's axis were much more severe like Uranus.
Does wealth cause personality trait X, or does personality trait X cause wealth, or is there a common cause?
Normally it is very difficult to prove causality from correlation, but in this case we have interventional data: the lottery, which holds all things equal except changes wealth.
Original motivation: does wealth cause tolerance?
How do desert plants avoid concretion of dust which would prevent photosynthesis?
solar panels concreted with dust
This is a major problem for man-made solar panels in the desert. Has nature found a way?
The no-fly list bothers me. If someone is suspected of being dangerous to allow to fly, then subject them to the infamous "more intrusive secondary search". If this search finds them clean, they should be permitted to fly. No one should be forbidden from flying just because of their name without evidence.
I fear that the purpose of the no-fly list is to prevent transport of something that no secondary search no matter how intrusive could hope to discover and confiscate, namely the ideas the person carries inside their head. By thwarting transportation, it slows the dissemination of those ideas. Complicated ideas are often better communicated in person rather than over a medium.
I am repulsed by a government that would seek to prevent the spread of ideas under the guise from preventing terrorism.
I saw today at McKinnons two identically sized bottles of black pepper. The bottle of ground pepper was marked 1.5 oz and the bottle of unground peppercorns were 1.75 oz and felt noticeably heavier.
How can this be? You would think that after grinding, the black pepper flakes would be able to pack more densely than the unground spherical peppercorns.
Many possibilities: Due to many sharp edges after grinding, the ground flakes pack worse than peppercorns despite being smaller. The ground pepper is made of a lower density peppercorn than what was in the other bottle. The ground pepper contains some low density filler (lawsuit!).
Rule 34 of the Internet states that "if you can think of it, there exists porn of it on the Internet ".
Is there pornography of pornography? This requires answering the age-old question of exactly what pornography is. Suppose we define pornography along the lines of something which is devoid of any other value than arousing the viewer. Then, "porn of X" is defined as taking X, which does have some "merit" outside of sexual arousal and re-doing it in a way removing that merit. (I personally believe anything, including things that others might call obscene, has value as a historical record of our contemporary culture.)
By this definition, porn of porn cannot exist. It is the removal of "merit" that makes something pornography, and for pornography itself, there is no starting "merit" to remove by definition. Ironically, this makes porn itself a giant exception to Rule 34.
Section 5.7 of ONFI specification 2.1 allows USB Flash devices (USB keys and other solid state drives) to have a unique identifier that may be queried. (This feature is optional.) This makes it possible to track a drive as it is being used on different computers, violating the owner's privacy giving a record of his or her movements from place to place over time. The unique ID remains visible and unchanged even after the owner has completely erased all the data on the drive.
I hope someone creates a device for which the unique ID is arbitrarily programmable to anything else: this will provide plausible deniability if someone is accused of being in a certain place at a certain time because the ID of a Flash device they own was surreptitiously logged as having been used there.
How prevalent is this problem generally (beyond Flash)? What devices do people own that have unchangeable unique IDs that can be queried by an adversary? CPU's, hard drives, motherboard chipsets, cards, USB peripherals?
Create an English word list after stemming, formatted in in lines (not columns). Use stemming: only the suffix that changed from the previous word is given. Or include the last common letter. This is ambiguous, but a human can probably figure it out. Putting a fully expanded head word at the beginning of each line is tricky to format: what will fit on a line?
Even trickier: global optimization of choosing short head words at the expense of white space at the end of the previous line.
How many pages does it take to fit the entire English language?
It would be nice to have a font without descenders ( g j p q y ) so that the lines may be packed closer together. Kerning.
Another optimization problem: suffixes may be calculated in runs from the following word as well as the previous. Probably not useful and excessively confusing.
Related problem: Text width
At first glance, homosexuality seems genetically paradoxical: homosexuals are less likely to pass on their genes to the next generation, so you would think if the trait were in any way genetic, then the trait would become bred out of the population.
A model I've heard of recently is that there is not a gene/genes for homosexuality, but separate gene/genes for being attracted to women and being attracted to men, or something along those lines. When a man has the gene for being attracted to women, or when a woman is attracted to men, it results in heterosexuality. When it is the other way, it results in homosexuality.
Like many other traits, these traits could sex-linked resulting in the predominantly heterosexual nature of the population, but homosexuality would never become completely bred out, possibly due to effects such as genetic crossover. Ironically under a certain variation of this model, "strongly heterosexual" parents might be more likely to have homosexual children, no doubt leading to family unhappiness.
There are many knobs and free variables to this model, some of which might help explain things like bisexuality (someone possesses both of the genes), and some sex-linking or dominance/recessive interaction might explain why bisexuality seems to be more common in women than in men.
Another trait that might exist is "having physical features that people who are attracted to women would find attractive". (Or men). And this could be linked, for example, by position on a chromosome, to the "attracted to" gene.
These linked effects could yield very interesting nonlinear behavior in computer simulation of generations. Eigenvalues.
Whether to leave your home wireless access point open or password-protected is precisely a Prisoner's Dilemma.
The main worry people have about leaving their Wi-fi open is that someone else might use it for bad internet activities for which you may be blamed. (There is also the Firewall effect, but that can be solved by other technical means, like network monitoring, firewalls on computers themselves, and VPNs.) (Quality of Service may be used to give packets to the Wifi you're paying for higher priority than a freeloader next door, while still keeping your network open.)
If everyone left their wireless open (everyone "Cooperates"), then everyone would benefit greatly by various network effects. Everything, especially small mobile devices, in urban neighborhoods, would have a high likelihood of being able to access the internet. Cell phone companies' monopolistic practices would be curtailed. It might become possible to improve how credit card transactions work. With overlapping access points, it becomes possible to set up mesh networking to route around internet failures or censorship. (I sometimes wonder whether public information campaigns to get people to secure their wireless access points actually have a hidden agenda to prevent some of these benefits.)
If everyone left their wireless open, the legal defense that some alleged internet activity was not you is much more plausible, especially if there are frequent incidents to other access points.
However, if everyone except you left their wireless open, (you decide to "Defect") then you would still enjoy the benefits listed above of wifi everywhere, but you yourself would enjoy the additional benefit of less worry that someone might do something bad on your internet. But when everyone thinks this way, it leads to everyone closing their network, which we see nowadays and a globally less desirable outcome, just like in Prisoner's Dilemma.
Perihelion a = 147095271 km. Aphelion b = 152091174 km. Energy by inverse square law: ea=(1/a^2), eb=(1/b^2), ea/eb= 1.069080979933795728840190713, so the earth receives 6.9% more energy at perihelion.
Let T = 70 degrees F = 294.26 K, then ea/eb*T = 314.59 K = 106.59 degrees F. That's a large temperature difference. I suspect some of the energy is going elsewhere, like expanding the atmosphere.
