The most crucial to happy gambling generally (apart from being prepared for losing, since you create a losing copy of yourself with certainty) is your Happy-Enough-Ceiling, where if you reach it, you leave with your winnings. The trivial example is entering the casino with three dollars and playing Martingale roulette, leaving as soon as four dollars are won – the Many Worlds/Minds (MW/M) tree then looks like this:

 

In the United States, we just had another Supermoon, and at the end of this month we will have a Blue Moon (the second full moon in a month) with a lunar eclipse, which is pretty special. Though doomsday prophets like to make a lot out of those natural phenomena, the rest of us want to plan our vacations around them - the solar eclipse in the summer of 2017 caused the largest mass migration in America's history because everyone wanted the best view.

Mental Health Warning: Many World/Mind (MW/M) descriptions may aggravate mental conditions; suicidal ideation has been recognized as a pitfall along the path of Zen-like wisdoms by a wide range of authors as diverse as to include Carlos Castaneda. (Suggesting potential public health benefits of MW/M ethics, I suggest careful adoption in select high school trials and long term monitoring of suicide rates and depression [unpublished].)

I was born and have lived in Venice for over 51 years now (omitting to mention some 2 years of interruption when I worked for Harvard University, 18 years ago), but this has come to an end on December 31st, when I concluded a rather complex move to Padova, 35 kilometers west. 
Venice is a wonderful city and quite a special place, if you ask me. A city with a millenary history, crammed with magnificent palaces and churches. A place where one could write a book about every stone. Walking through the maze of narrow streets or making one's way through a tight network of canals is an unforgettable experience, but living there for decades is something else - it makes you a part of it. I feel I own the place, in some way. So why did I leave it?

A new "raw" trend has made its way into the paper of record for anti-science woo and miracle vegetable fads - the New York Times.

Along with articles about astrology and acupuncture, they have now given us a look at the "raw water" craze, which is to say they have basically created the craze by giving it free publicity, which they can then write about it for their audience which, let's be honest, loves anything alternative, especially if it's against evil corporate or government science water.

They even endorse wacky charlatan Doug Evans, who rewarded shareholders stung by the failure of his Juicero juicing company by indulging in a 10-day cleanse, drinking nothing but "Live Water". 

With tax cuts in 2018, the federal government is going to either increase the deficit or cut spending. And conservatives argue spending should be cut.

Will that impact science? It certainly will, but science was also not helped by the Obama administration, which focused on solar panels and healthcare but not science. After the heady days of the George W. Bush era, when NIH funding practically doubled, academics likely felt that increased on top of that could be realized, but it was not the case.

Since science is both corporate and political in the modern era (the private sector and government each fund about half of basic research in the U.S.), if you defend science you are implicitly defending corporations and engaging in politics. Whether you think one or the other is superior or more ethical is likely based more on how you vote than anything impartial.

Life is a gamble, every day, all day, in a most greedy casino with unwritten rules and players rewriting the rules, re-interpreting them if you accidentally won too much without having the right friends, putting you back in your place. How do people of different smarts gamble?

 

This is awful. A science writer and video producer who decided Christmas Eve is just the right time to publish a video claiming FALSELY that a small nuclear exchange of 100 nuclear weapons would destroy all world agriculture for decades. This is based on an old paper from 1983 which was treated with skepticism at the time and now is known to be incorrect, combined with more recent research from 2014 that is disputed because of it preloads the model with high levels of soot in the stratosphere, levels which most modern studies do not support.

He claims that 2 months after the exchange, the average global surface temperature would be -25°C.