Author: Leon

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News Programming

Have a PHP question? Have 20-30 minutes? Ask Stack Overflow.

It looks like if you don’t ask a really hard question about PHP or Javascript, you will will get an answer almost immediately.

How long waiting for an answer in StackOverflow – Interrupted

I think it’s amazing the speed an answer is given for any asked question, like freaking fast. If you are using Google Reader to peek new questions filtered by tag, when you see a question, almost for sure it’s already answered.

Fortunately all StackExchange data is open, so we can see exactly how fast is that. I used the online data browser, more than enough for the task.

I decided to consider only the questions having an accepted answer, since questions with many bogus answers should not be treated as having an answer at all.

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Entertainment News

12-year-old uses Dungeons and Dragons to help scientist dad with his research

Only mentioning this because D&D is cool.

12-year-old uses Dungeons and Dragons to help scientist dad with his research | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

Alan Kingstone, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, had a problem: all humans have their eyes in the middle of their faces, and there’s nothing that Kingstone could do about it. His 12-year-old son, Julian Levy, had the solution: monsters. While some monsters are basically humanoid in shape, others have eyes on their hands, tails, tentacles and other unnatural body parts. Perfect. Kingstone would use monsters. And Julian would get his first publication in a journal from the Royal Society, one of the world’s most august scientific institutions.

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News

Research suggests your grandfather’s smoking affects you

This research is showing that a parent who smokes passes on changes in DNA that may manifest two generations later. The study is about asthma, but this link suggests anything you might do to your body prior to conceiving a child might effect on all your progeny.

Conditioning Research: scary epigenetics….you suffer because your grandad smoked?

Germline epigenetic marks imposed by exposure to nicotine during pregnancy can become permanently programmed and transferred through the germline to subsequent generations, a ground-breaking finding that shifts the current asthma paradigm, opening up many new avenues to explore.

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News

Doug Stanhope impersonates John Lydon for Huffington Post interview | Punknews.org

Ha ha! Punk rock! Baba Booey!

Doug Stanhope impersonates John Lydon for Huffington Post interview | Punknews.org

Standup comedian Doug Stanhope impersonated Sex Pistols and Public Image Limited frontman John Lydon after a Huffington Post interviewer erroneously called him twice. Stanhope described the exchange via his official website.

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News

How Evolution Does Rapid Prototypes

There’s a common line of thinking in the paleo lifestyle crowd: milk is for babies. Paleo folks didn’t drink the milk of other animals. Other adult mammals don’t drink milk. So, don’t drink it. Richard Nikoley, fellow mortal enemy of religion in all forms, points out that if you have the right genetics, milk is a a nearly perfect food. Continue the thought with this idea: the ability to drink milk was an spectacular mutation that spread in ancient Europe with unprecedented speed. Oh, also, yogurt gives you big balls.

Why Milk?

Throughout evolutionary history, most adult homo sapiens could not drink milk. Even today, most adults cannot drink milk. Adults who cannot drink milk don’t seem to lose very much, particularly as they can still eat yogurt and cheese. And yet the gene that allowed some adults to drink milk spread incredibly rapidly suggesting massive advantages to milk drinkers. Why? No one knows for sure but it seems to coincide with civilization. Slate has more.

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