Big bang an exploding white hole, opposite of a black hole? (paper) This sounds interesting and somehow satisfying.

LED light bulbs coming, but incandescents being phased out by mandate in January, 2012? What?! Time to stockpile bulbs. I like my black-body radiation.

Speaking of black-body radiation, suppose I have an enclosed system with a single aperture for light and only light to pass through. Do I now have a system for converting heat to light, and therefore to electricity via bandgaps? Doesn’t that violate some law of thermodynamics?
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Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 limits discrimination in the private sector. At first glance it seems like a reasonable blanket law with no problems, but consider Hollywood. How does it get around the fact that it must discriminate in hiring actors to fit certain roles? Then consider a more subtle case of an ethnic restaurant looking for a chef or a front-desk worker.

The second issue is, if you want, you can always structure your hiring criteria to select the group you want statistically and not violate the letter of the law. In other words, you can find proxies: language ability for national origin perhaps, experience for age, so on and so forth. Unless all forms of discrimination are banned (including things like height, weight, image, etc. — and why not?), there are always correlated variables.

It seems like without genuine bottom-up cooperation, laws won’t amount to much without becoming unreasonably draconian.

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