Why do you not see this as being a problem? The sequence of events Sam sketched out is pretty logical. It hinges on machines being able to optimize for "survive and reproduce", which feels very plausible to me.
Forbes has a number of such 30 under 30 lists - each one linked in the blog post (Consumer Tech, Enterprise Tech, Food & Drink, etc) is a separate list of 30. So the number of people named to Forbes 30 under 30 this year is greater than 30 total.
Fair point. Perhaps some labels on the images, at least, would make it clear what they were trying to point out. The Times Square picture in particular was confusing because I saw the pedestrian mall, but thought that the point was about bike lanes which a pedestrian mall isn't.
New York Times has been killing it with their visualizations. It would have been nice to have 2013 pictures overlaid on the 2003 pictures though, to really understand what the changes were. In some pictures, like Times Square, I had to flip back and forth a couple of times and still wasn't sure what exactly the changes were (can't see any obvious bike lane in that image, which is supposedly what it's representing).
What exactly is the intended use case? On my home computer, it's faster for me to right click, save and my Dropbox opens up.
On other computers, I have to remember to go to your website (and thus remember your URL) and sign into Dropbox. I might as well download it to a Downloads folder and then upload it to dropbox.com.
It would be pretty interesting to see what the funding progress chart was for other large crowdfunded projects (Pebble, Double Fine, etc) for comparison. If we assume that the rate of funding will not increase beyond the current rate, the project will not meet the goal. I don't know how valid that assumption is, though -- intuitively it makes sense, but it is possible that other projects have challenged that assumption. Especially possible if they managed to get a further round of press midway through the campaign.
Nate Silver's background is in sports - that's really where his statistics-magic got started. I imagine sports is one of his passions, and he's now gotten to a point where he can combine that with his skill in statistics at the same scale as he was with politics.