So does that make the new name the undead name, and therefore like a zombie name?

Huh; I don’t believe that it is really him.

If this is the real Slim Shady, would you please stand up?

Every one had already been launched.

All of these options are still better than spending full price for a pair of jeans that were lovingly crafted to start with holes in them!

Easy: recognizing bird calls on my phone.

The difference is that aether unraveled pretty quickly when we started seriously looking for it because experiments kept being outright inconsistent with what it was predicted we would see if it were there, whereas there are lots of independent lines of evidence that all point to the dark matter existing in the same page, so it really is not the same situation at all. The only problem with dark matter is that it doesn’t show up in our particle detectors (so far, at least), but there is no law of the universe that says that everything that exists has to.

It helps to realize that mass is just a bookkeeping label that we assign to the “internal” energy of a system, where the choice of what counts as being “internal” is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the level we are studying.

For example, if you measure the mass of the nucleus of some atom, and then compare your measurement to the sums of the masses of the protons and neutrons inside of it, then you will see that the numbers do not agree. The reason for this is that much of the mass of a nucleus is actually the energy of the strong force bonds holding the nucleons together.

But you can actually drop down another level. It turns out that the vast (~ 99%) majority of the mass in the proton in turn does not come from the quarks but from the energy of the gluon field holding them together.

And if you drop down yet another level, the quarks get their mass through their interactions with the Highs field.

So in short, it is energy all the way down.

Because some of us are bitter at the trees for generating so much pollen at this time of year and want revenge.

Spotted the INTERCAL programmer.

I see a lot of enthusiasm here, and there is nothing wrong with that, but… am I the only one who actually found the movie to be kind of disappointing?

No, it will be too busy making paperclips to even notice us, except as a nuisance getting in the way of it making paperclips that needs to be eliminated.

Yeah, I miss living in Australia where you didn’t have your own waiter but on the other hand that meant that it wasn’t rude to flag down any of the wait staff if you need anything rather than being restricted to having to go through a single person.

Ah, yes, the good old git off --my lawn command.

Yes. My rule of thumb is that generally rebasing is the better approach, in part because if your commit history is relatively clean then it is easier to merge in changes one commit at a time than all at once. However, sometimes so much has changed that replaying your commits puts you in the position of having to solve so many problems that it is more trouble than it is worth, in which case you should feel no qualms about aborting the rebase (git rebase --abort) and using a merge instead.

The way I structure my commits, it is usually (but not always) easier and more reliable for me to replay my commits one at a time on top of the main branch and see how each relatively small change needs to be adapted in isolation–running the full test suite at each step to verify that my changes were correct–than to be presented with a slew of changes all at once that result from marrying all of my changes with all of the changes made to the main branch at once. So I generally start by attempting a rebase and fall back to a merge if that ends up creating more problems than it solves.

Wow! How does anyone not get swept off the ship under these conditions?

If by “constant” you mean “3D distribution that explains not just one equation but lots of separate observations”, then sure, it’s just like that.

Dark matter does interact with matter, though: it interacts gravitationally. It just does not interact in other ways (that we know of yet). All you would have to do to disprove the existence of dark matter is to show that some things interact with it gravitationally but others don’t. However, this is not what we see; what we actually see is a whole bunch of separate things that all experience the effect of the existence of dark matter in the same way. It’s effectiveness as an explanation in this regard is exactly what makes it so difficult to dethrone.

Just to be clear, there are lots and lots of different observations that are all explained by dark matter; it’s not just a single term in “the math”. Furthermore, the hypothesis presented in this article is not “better math” because it does not do as good a job as dark matter in explaining all of these observations.

Couldn’t the same be said for the proof of dark matter?

No, dark matter is actually a great explanation for lots and lots of observations; the only problem with it is that we don’t know anything about it other than that it is such a good explanation for these observations.