My mother works as a home-visiting teacher for deaf and hard of hearing children in Ontario. Many hearing parents, who just are simply unfortunate to have a deaf child, want their children to have cochlear implants and lead relatively normal lives. There are, however, a few deaf parents who are stuck in their ways and want to sign with their children, but this is on the decline as the technology has gotten better, cheaper, and the benefits of having (mostly) hearing children have been made plainly obvious.

Not to mention that burning petroleum is such a terrible waste since it's far better used to create things like plastics, fertilizers,and pharmaceuticals.

If the Iranians want to use Molten Salt reactors I doubt the rest of the world would have anything to say about it since such reactors are incapable for producing plutonium or enriching uranium.

Yeah that one's fucking brilliant!

Unless they intend on replacing all their nuclear with renewables (highly unlikely considering nuclear is base-load power generation), or buying lots of energy from other countries, then this is exactly what will happen.

Nuclear technology is already quite safe, and can be made even safer (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor) provided governments invest in the research. Unfortunately, most people's brains shut down when they hear the word "nuclear" since they only associate it with weapons, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima...

The reality of the situation, however, is that nuclear technology could be (and for the most part is) a safe, and environmentally friendly means of base-load power generation surpassed only by hydro; unfortunately, hydro doesn't scale all that well.

What happens when we start running out of oil (we're approaching peak oil production) and we start to rely more and more on electric vehicles for transportation? They'll need to get their energy from somewhere... The candidates for providing this additional energy are: coal (there's still lots of this, but you don't want it all in the atmosphere), natural gas (we'll run out of this eventually), hydro (you can only build so many dams), solar/wind (not suitable for base-load power generation), fusion (still twenty years away), and nuclear (which, if we switched to thorium as a fuel source, could last us for many thousands of years whilst having minimal environmental impacts). Are you absolutely sure you want to abandon nuclear technology?

You've got it all wrong...

College/university is to intellectual endeavors as a dojo is to martial arts. Sure you can do martial arts all alone and maybe you'll get somewhere... You might be able to figure out how to kick, punch, and perform some kata. You might even become quite good at these things, but you'll never learn how to block quite as effectively as you could if you had other people to practice with. You'll never learn more complex techniques like throwing, or locking, and you'll certainly never get to practice them. You also won't have the advice of mentors who have been practicing for way longer than you have (and learned from others as well); and therefore, you probably won't learn much of the theory behind the movements, their history, their proper application, common pitfalls, etc...

You also won't be able to experience the wonderful social atmosphere that accompanies a good dojo (which helps a lot with motivation). So yes, you could go off and be a martial artist all by yourself... but, it gets a whole lot better when you do it with others (assuming you go to a good dojo).

You've got the wrong idea. Here's the right one: College/university is to intellectual endeavors as a dojo is to martial arts. Sure you can do martial arts all alone and maybe you'll get somewhere... You might be able to figure out how to kick, punch, and perform some kata. You might even become quite good at these things, but you'll never learn how to block quite as effectively as you could if you had other people to practice with. You'll never learn more complex techniques like throwing, or locking, and you'll certainly never get to practice them. You also won't have the advice of mentors who have been practicing for way longer than you have (and learned from others as well); and therefore, you probably won't learn much of the theory behind the movements, their history, their proper application, common pitfalls, etc... You also won't be able to experience the wonderful social atmosphere a good dojo provides (which helps a lot with motivation). So yes, you could go off and be a martial artist all by yourself... but, it gets a lot better when you do it with others.

Actually I was wondering if anyone would pick up on that. It's very difficult to pick a specific date where the Flat Earth Model vanished since it did so in different places and at different times, so I just picked the 17th century since that's when China finally abandoned the idea of a flat Earth.

Supposing common sense is correct most of the time, would it still be a good idea to base a scientific theory on it?

Consider the example of he Flat Earth Model. Up until about the 17th century, most people "knew" the Earth was flat. After all, it was common sense! Just go out onto the plains and stare at it: completely flat for as far as the eye can see... Or, how about the Geocentric Model of the relationship between the Earth and Sun? Just look up at the sky! Clearly, we are in the center of the solar system (indeed the entire universe!) because if we look up at the Sun, the Moon, and the planets, they appear to go around the sky in big circles with us at the center - it's common sense!

This is why common sense has to be tested, and is positively dangerous to scientific thinking!

Thank goodness. That is exceptionally good forward thinking on the part of the founders. I almost hope Nokia goes dumps Qt.

We're talking about sub-atomic particles and something needs to interact with them in order for them to be detected. In the case of this experiment they were photons (the article mentioned using a laser). So in a manner of speaking they were "seeing" it. An aside, and what I was getting at, is that technically when we touch something we're feeling the Coulomb force, and touching something is also a perfectly valid way of determining it's shape.

Does finding the ground state of a Hamiltonian mean computing it's spectrum and finding the eigenvector corresponding to the smallest eigenvalue, or is it more complicated than that?

Thank you that was excellent. Any chance you could answer my question?

I was wondering if it had a deeper theoretical meaning, not a religious one...

Can you suggest a better way of measuring the shape of an electron?

It's incredible that the shape of one of the most fundamental particles in the Universe has one of the simplest mathematical descriptions! Is it a coincidence or is there some deeper meaning to this fact?