There's a robotic scientist called ADAM that investigates yeast genetics (http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dcswww/Research/bio/robotsci/). There was a pretty cool paper in Computer a few months ago. The robot actively tried to devise new theories and produce experiments (it's hooked up to a bunch of yeast-genetics-investigatory stuff) to investigate those theories. As I remember, most of the theories turned out to be true and were pretty novel (function of various genes). The researchers double checked several (or all?) of them.

Secondly, many appliances can *really* do with 220V (actually, it's even 230V). For example: tumble dryer, oven (electrical), washing machine, dish washer, electrical stoves and basically anything that needs to heat water. Nearly all of those are manufactured to draw about 2000-2500W maximum, which makes for a current of about 10A (at 230V). Ovens and stoves may even draw much more - induction stoves can often draw about 7000W. Good luck doing that at 110V...

There are separate 220V circuits for these in U.S. homes. In my apartment, I know that my dryer is on a 220V circuit, and I presume the same of my electric oven and dishwasher. I don't know if these share at all. I'm pretty sure I've had the oven on while drying clothes and running the dishwasher at some point in my life (maybe just once or something...).

I would agree that this is pretty close to the truth: innocent rich people can provide a much better defense than innocent poor people who typically cut deals. Due to the volume pressures (mostly due to incredibly minor drug offenses clogging up the courts), judges typically apply a "trial tax" where if you don't plead out, you get hit with a stiffer sentence (for taking up more of his time and lowering his "clearance rate"). Poor people who have to rely on overworked public defenders (who are also part of the court system more than private lawyers and also feel the volume pressures) are less likely to want to chance it.

I would encourage you to read Courtroom 302 which is a look at a year in a Chicago Superior court. It's pretty disheartening. :(

Why don't we just buy a television transmitter and have it broadcast this kind of video 24 hours a day? I dunno how well sheepfucking plays with the locals, but if there's any kind of personally identifiable info, maybe we can ridicule some of these guys to death. Uhm, if there're TVs. Otherwise we could distribute leaflets with choice video stills on them.

Or not. Mostly I just thought the title of "Afghanistan's Funniest Home Sheepfucking Videos" was really catchy.

Wow, who will provide my quantum-mechanically-accurate-universe-in-which-quantum-mechanically-accurate-porn-stars-work porn if we can have processors that are only 10,000,000,000,000,000 faster (per gram?) than currently (taking the 10^16 at face value). The children of the future will live impoverished lives of grievous destitution and horror!

I did a little work on MRM, which has an infrared seeker in it, and peak gee-loads were in the 8k-gee range (call it 75,000 m/s^2) as I remember.

Just think: when it does break like this, it might go off like a bomb and spray fragments all over the place. How many toys can you buy that provide for friendly fire mass casualties?

Yeah, I think that needs to go in the sales pitch. "Bowgo: so awesome it kills your friends!"

Hrm. Problems of a similar nature have been solved by the United States military in missiles. For example, look online for videos of the Evolved Sea Sparrow (oh nevermind: here ESSM). It pulls on the order of 80g when it comes hard over out of the launcher (using thrust vectoring). That video isn't the best but I don't think the better ones are public. I can't guess what the angle of attack is: call it 90 degrees... And you can still shoot this in some serious sea states and wind.

That's a quite specific situation and I think there is a specialized at-launch autopilot, but I know that our autopilot guy for a different missile that I worked on while in defense was concerned with tail winds and head winds and these things rapidly changing (gusting). We ended up having to add static pressure ports and a pitot tube to the missile to get accurate MACH readings in the face of this: when combined with the IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and GPS, it was sufficient.

So, I don't know how transferrable any of this is to commercial aviation, but it was all handled by one (very, very sharp) guy for us and a veritable shitload of Matlab and Monte Carlo simulations. Too, I think the military accepts higher failure rates than commercial aviation: like a couple of missiles in every 1000 launches in the most severe conditions. I dunno what the rates are for the commercial guys but I'd think they would be lower :).

Well, that's not quite true. If we could replace overseas oil with this product, then we would reduce carbon emissions by however much foreign oil this new fuel supplants. It would also render us safer in the sense that we have assloads of coal here in the United States. It is true that it would not be as nice as using some other source of CO2 and at the same time closing down coal powerplants. But note that the two are not mutually exclusive: if we have some other source of carbon dioxide (as apparently this pilot project does), then the coal plants could still go.

I agree that this process could never be a net carbon sink. Maybe we could convince/engineer the algae to grow little carbon skeletons, and then we could bury them in tiny coffins when they die.

Listen, Clark isn't making any judgements about the goodness of any of these levels of achievement: he is simply contrasting the lifespan of the planet against humanity's exponential growth in capability. Regardless of other cultures thoughts on the basic wholesomeness of progress, it is fact that the technological progress that has been made has given us amazing powers in a short period of time, and I don't think that anyone envisions that this growth in capability will be trailing off anytime soon. So when Clark says "Apes or Angels" he isn't "placing aliens in the Great Chain of Being", he is simply stating that the TECHNOLOGICAL CAPABILITIES of aliens that are at all similar to us will either be very primitive (apelike) because they are in the pre-exponential-growth phase, or in the angel phase (far up the exponential growth curve).

The verbiage about balance or cycles or homeostatis doesn't represent humanity in any form that I understand. Yes, there are people that support the idea of statis, but that is such a tiny fraction of humanity that it's not worth worrying about right now: everybody else wants medicine and electricity and light and food and tentacle porn. The nature of most people is to strive for more and/or better, and I don't foresee that changing. Nor do I see us backsliding anytime soon -- I suppose some kind of frightful war could put a damper on things for awhile, but I'm reasonably hopeful that this won't happen. I've seen some articles that "starting over", if required, would now be impossible because the easily-accessible forms of resources are no longer available, e.g. if all the world's oil derricks were destroyed and 18th century man came along, there'd be no way to have an oil-based economy. Seems unlikely.

Anyway, your goofy philosophical ramblings seemed so off-point that I felt I had to respond. You must've had some really shitty experience with Christians, I guess.

This is only "kinda true". I worked on a program that started with a variable thrust solid rocket motor. It was eventually discarded: I don't know all the details, but I think the overall thrust was too low to give us the range we required. However, ditching it did require substantial navigation changes for shorter range flights so as to keep terminal velocity within the required limits, i.e. without being able to throttle down we had to pull wacky manuevers to bleed velocity. I don't know how much is public, so I'll just stop there and state: yes, variable thrust solid rocket motors at least tentatively exist.

But you're right, I find it unlikely that they'd be suitable for the given application.

Vernor Vinge has a short story about this: I *think* it's "The Ungoverned". It's set in the not tremendously distant future where there are basically certain kinds of people ("Armadillos" in the story, I believe) that just don't want to be bothered, and are very serious about it.

I did it: I had a 2nd permanent tooth coming up under the first (around tooth 26 or 27, I think: lower right part of my jaw): had to have oral surgery to have it removed. Happened when I was around 13, I think: made a few shark jokes.

My guess would be: this isn't yet the common case. The common case is instead people who want a single, small LED. And thus the easiest way to get more light is not to design a new, bigger LED and a new fab, etc., but to simply group the commonly available, cheap LEDs. Seems like a side benefit is you never have to worry about things being the wrong size: you just use fewer or more, or whatever. And you can make fun shapes for car brake lights and so forth by physical arrangement rather than design changes.

What's sad is that, while I have an EE degree, I don't know if there are any physical limitations that would prevent making huge LEDs. Those semiconductor classes were a awhile ago.