Can someone explain the different views of time? If someone were to time travel and make the mistake of doing a google search like that, then after they are caught, couldn't they go back and tell themselves not to do the search?

By "different views of time" do you mean a scientific view, or a philosophical view? If it's the scientific view, the idea regarding time and macroscopic bodies -- general relativity -- specifically what you'd need to describe someone travelling in time, explicitly forbids that, so I don't think there is actually any possible scientific answer to your question.

Philosophically, but something vaguely based on physics, there's the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. But as far as I know the "physical meaning" has no bearing on science. There's a good sci-fi novel about a universe where the MWI is true -- Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

For the sake of nitpicking, it was never clear to me that MWI was true in Anathem. In any case, you need much more than that to reproduce Anathem's plot -- it runs on consensus deciding reality.

This algoritm pragmatically computes how far left/right a senater's polical views are by placing them in the corresponding place on the page

I am not sure this is correct.

1) How are abstentions counted? Does a senator that abstains more get pushed out towards the edge for having less connections in general?

2) If a party member votes 100% along the party line, then they will be towards the center of the blob. If a party member is less partisan in the fashion of voting WITH bipartisan consensus then that person is gets put in the center. If a party member is less partisan in the fashion of voting AGAINST bipartisan consensus then they would be on the edge far from the center.

Thanks for the ignoreCase problem, I fixed it. I actually was using a \b in the link but forgot to update the source accordingly. The reason I use \s\s* over \s+ is because I once saw that it has some performance benefits, although it really doesn't make a difference

Time to find a text version of cspan

> Variadic functions

Doesn't PHP have that already? http://us2.php.net/func_get_args

Edit - Checking out that parent link it seems: Currently variadic functions are implemented by fetching the function arguments using func_get_args(). The following code sample shows an implementation of a variadic function used to prepare and execute a MySQL query (I'll be making use of this example throughout the RFC):

Firstly, by just looking at the function signature public function query($query) you cannot know that this is actually a variadic function. You'd think that the function can only run a normal query and doesn't support bound parameters:

  public function query($query, ...$params) { /*...
  $userData = $db->query('SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = ?', $userID)->fetch();

There's a counterpart unpacking syntax which will likely also get merged in, meaning you can have:

  function query($query, ...$params) {}

and

  $params = [3];
  query('SELECT * FROM table WHERE a = ?;', ...$params);