They aren't that common in Japan or China either, actually. They're more common in Japan than in the US, but still rare enough to be noteworthy when you happen to run across one.

In China I think they're probably less common than in the US, if only because labor costs are still pretty low. I travel to various places in China fairly often and off the top of my head can't remember the last time I saw a restaurant with much (customer-visible) automation. Not a very rigorous observation, though; I may just not be frequenting the parts of China where they're concentrated.

This problem has a lot of sides, most of which it's hard to see how to address as a concerned layman. The one thing we non-scientists definitely can affect is funding, both by lobbying our political representatives to support funding for reproducibility and, for those of us with the financial means, by directly funding it ourselves.

The Center for Open Science is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that, among other things, funds the Reproducibility Initiative. The goal of the initiative is pretty simple: to independently validate significant research results. They're focused primarily on biology at the moment, and there is already work underway to replicate results in cancer cell biology. I'm a donor.

This doesn't fix all the systemic problems with science that contribute to the high error rate, but it's at least a concrete step we can take to address one of the problems.

How did you decide to move to Scala / Node.js in particular?

I know the site isn't open-source, but if you guys have published any architecture documentation or other information about what's going on behind the scenes, I'd be curious to see it. I have a professional background in scaling large online services and I'm always interested in seeing how other people solve the problems that inevitably come up.

Thanks! I'm eager to see if it continues.

The week before this past one I decided to finally see a psychiatrist for an evaluation. I'd suspected for a long time that I've had ADHD (the "inattentive" variety) since childhood. I'm old enough that it wasn't something schools or parents knew about when I was a kid, and it was only in the last 10 years or so that I'd read up on it and realized that a lot of the symptoms matched my experience. Still, self-diagnosis based on reading lists of symptoms can be a quick path to hypochondria, so I knew I needed an actual professional opinion.

After a couple hours of evaluation ranging from looking at the teachers' comments on my old elementary-school report cards to talking about my work habits and personal life, the doctor confirmed my suspicions. We talked about treatment options and decided to start off with a combination of a fairly mild medicine (Concerta) and some therapy. To my delight, since I'd expressed an interest in science, she brought out some diagrams of neurons and synapses and explained to me exactly what neuroscientists think may be happening in ADHD and what the medicine would do to address the problem.

I took the medicine for the first time on Saturday morning of last weekend. I wasn't really sure what to expect; the doctor had warned me that people have a range of reactions, from "no effect" to "nearly unbearable irritability and insomnia." A couple hours after downing the pill, I felt a little wired, like I'd had a few cups of coffee, but it passed shortly thereafter. I decided to take a whack at my inbox, which as usual had hundreds of messages I'd read but had put off dealing with.

By Saturday evening, my inbox was empty and my calendar had two long-overdue doctor's appointments and a few get-togethers with friends I hadn't seen in a while.

On Monday, I finished the work task that I'd been diddling with in fits and starts the previous Thursday and Friday.

On Tuesday, I finished the major task the team had put on my plate for the week.

By Friday, I had taken two more fairly substantial tasks off a teammate's plate and finished both of them.

For someone with a nearly half-century-long history of chronic procrastination and distractibility, actually getting done what I intend to do every day for a solid week is a rare experience. Not unprecedented -- I've had weeklong "in the zone" periods in the past, but they've been far between and impossible to predict. The prospect that with proper medical treatment they may become the rule rather than the exception is exciting to me, though of course it's going to take time to see if this past week was just a fluke. It also makes me regret not doing this a couple decades ago.

I really appreciate the accuracy of the technical stuff in the show. It's a lovely change of pace to not have to wince whenever a computer shows up in the story. I'm not sure to what degree I'm on board for yet another "corporations vs. the oppressed oblivious masses" cautionary tale. I liked "Fight Club" as much as the next moviegoer, but I think that premise is fast approaching cliché status. Corporations are the new cinematic Nazis: faceless villains that are safe to caricature without a hint of nuance. The mustache-twirling "Join with me and together we can rule the world!" recruiting speech at the beginning of episode 2 didn't do a lot to inspire confidence in that area.

One thing that keeps me tuning in is the possibility that the show will take another cue from "Fight Club" and pull the rug out from under us in an unexpected way that seems obvious in retrospect. The whole story is an unreliable narrative and from the very first episode, the narrator straight-up tells us that some of the things we're seeing are figments of his imagination. I'm a sucker for a well-executed plot twist, and I'm hoping the fact that they've so blatantly telegraphed the potential for an "Elliot is psychotic and none of this is real" twist means that they have a different one lined up to spring on us.

Torment: Tides of Numenera is the one I'm looking forward to most. My interest in RPGs is much more about living out a compelling story than about leveling up my characters in combat, and this game, like the original Planescape: Torment, seems to be taking an approach of, "Fighting is part of the game but it's not the focus, and you can avoid a lot of it entirely if you like."

There are no downvotes and "sharing" is NOT the same thing as upvoting.

Can I suggest that the dot point to a URL other than "/vote" to emphasize that fact? Until I saw your post, I actually thought it was the same thing as upvoting, purely because I saw "vote" and "dir=up" in my browser's footer when I moused over it.