May. 27th, 2013

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(which I have not read; I have no opinion about the story)

What currently public domain works would benefit from a rebooting that updated them for modern sensibilities in a copyrighted form?
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At what point exactly did Toronto become a setting in a Coen Brothers film?

Toronto Police investigating link between alleged Rob Ford crack tape and homicide, Globe and Mail reports
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Rob Ford's press secretary and deputy press secretary have suddenly quit, sources tell CBC News, the latest development in the ongoing controversy surrounding the Toronto mayor.


The Star's take on it:

In summary: Rob Ford currently has no communications staff, no spokesperson.

And now for no reason, some Piano Guys music:

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From the 2300 AD group on Facebook (facebook warning) Constantine Thomas reports some interesting results from applying the math in his thesis to hypothetical worlds around other stars:

Just ran over all my tidelocking equations again, and by making reasonable assumptions about the planets' internal properties, I'm finding that any habitable planet (earth-sized or greater) in the habitable zone of a star of 0.7 solar masses or less (which is anything from a K4 V to M9 V) will be tidelocked within about 250 million years of formation.


From the Dragon's Tales,

It has been shown that F, G, and early K dwarf hosts of Neptune-sized planets are not preferentially metal-rich. However, it is less clear whether the same holds for late K and M dwarf planet hosts. We report metallicities of Kepler targets and candidate transiting planet hosts with effective temperatures below 4500 K. We use new metallicity calibrations to determine [Fe/H] from visible and near-infrared spectra. We find that the metallicity distribution of late K and M dwarfs monitored by Kepler is consistent with that of the solar neighborhood. Further, we show that hosts of Earth- to Neptune-sized planets have metallicities consistent with those lacking detected planets and rule out a previously claimed 0.2 dex offset between the two distributions at 6σ confidence. We also demonstrate that the metallicities of late K and M dwarfs hosting multiple detected planets are consistent with those lacking detected planets. Our results indicate that multiple terrestrial and Neptune-sized planets can form around late K and M dwarfs with metallicities as low as 0.25 solar. The presence of Neptune-sized planets orbiting such low-metallicity M dwarfs suggests that accreting planets collect most or all of the solids from the disk and that the potential cores of giant planets can readily form around M dwarfs. The paucity of giant planets around M dwarfs compared to solar-type stars must be due to relatively rapid disk evaporation or a slower rate of planet accretion, rather than insufficient solids to form a core.

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