splat

I'm not in any way a Trump supporter or on the right more generally, but I can see why people on the right might be skeptical. The tech community did, after all, run Brendan Eich out on a rail when they discovered that he donated $1000 in favor of Prop. 8. I think they know that, while they may be in the majority nation-wide, in the tech community they are a small, reviled minority. And if they work for political campaigns they support, there will be social, and potentially business, repercussions.

It seems a little to me like get-out-the-vote campaigns. They're dressed up as some totally non-partisan, civic-duty enterprise. But if you're targeting your efforts towards demographics that you know are generally going to vote a certain way, can you really claim with a straight face that you're not helping a particular political party? Here you know a priori that you'll be encouraging people to get involved in politics with a certain bent. I'll point out that none of this is bad, per se, but I think it's why you can expect conservatives to react defensively.

I think your point here is a little disingenuous. (For reference I'm a longtime LP party member and have recently been getting very involved in the LP at the local level.) While it's true that the recent presidential nominees have all been former Republicans, the reason for this is that the Party has been wanting to put up respectable candidates who have experience. In its early years, the LP was effectively just an outreach organization aimed at spreading the libertarian message. But these days the LP has been wanting to become a real political party that gets candidates elected. And in order to get candidates elected, we need to have respectable candidates.

In local races it's fine to put up someone with no or little experience in government, as long as they are a respected member of the community. But you can't just put up "some dude" for president. So in practice this means we have to take defectors. But heaven knows there has been a lot of consternation in the LP over this. My guess is that the LP is getting tired enough of taking former Republicans that whoever they nominate in 2020 will be homegrown. (Maybe a former Democrat.)

But while the presidential race gets the most press, we've been working hard to get Libertarians elected at lower levels of government. It's just really, really hard to break past the two party mindset (and ballot access laws), and we haven't had a lot of success to date. The difficulties we have getting people elected to the lower levels of translate directly to us nominating former Republicans for president.

> That unelected, life-tenured judges exercise this much authority over us, that they routinely subvert our collective democratic will as expressed through elections and referendums, that people even defend their votes for President on the basis of what kind of Supreme Court nominations they will likely make, does not suggest a healthy democracy.

Nor should it! The judiciary is at its best when it is overturning the will of the majority in order to defend the rights of minorities.

The Court did precisely that in its most celebrated cases (e.g., Brown v. Board, Lawrence v. Texas), and upheld the will of the majority in its most infamous cases (e.g., Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. United States).

> In the U.S., despite what officers tell you, you do not have to identify yourself when asked.

This varies state to state. In many states you must identify yourself at the level of providing your name and address, but you are not required to produce any documentation.

For a body that's nearly spherical like the Earth you do a multipole expansion. Most of the gravity comes from a monopole (just a point mass at the center of gravity). Then you calculate (or measure) the contribution to the gravitational field from a quadrupole moment, and then an octupole moment and so on.

The graviton is expected to be massless, but I don't think there's any information about the particle's rest mass.

There's a fair amount of activity here in central Ohio, as well. The most reliable source of discussion is that every few weeks the police department posts a notice about the locations where they will be having DUI checkpoints. Like clockwork this sets off a 50+ comment discussion where some people are dumbfounded that the police actually post where they will be ahead of time, followed by other people replying that in order for DUI checkpoints to be constitutional the police have to announce them ahead of time, followed by replies that it doesn't seem unconstitutional to have random police stops and drunk drivers should be stopped at all costs, etc. Every single time.

But it was useful to get information when people were getting upset that the city was trying to replace the green space in a park with a bunch of little league baseball parks.

No, it would be the longitude. The average of sunrise and sunset will be local noon, and from that you get the longitude. To get the latitude you would need to see where the Sun rises and sets or see the stars, neither of which you could do very accurately under heavy cloud cover.