Large industries operate with those kind of numbers all the time. How many power plants have been constructed over the years, and what did it cost?

The worldwide auto industry produces roughly 50 million cars a year. That works out to ~1.6 per second. Scary statements like "OMG We have to make one every EIGHT MINUTES" are peanuts to large-scale industrial production: we make cars roughly 750 times faster than you're saying we'd need to build turbines.

Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep

The aesthetic impact of that is the only part of your post that gives me any concern. The rest is perfectly doable.

There's also a worry about losing information about the process of manufacturing the film itself, which is of interest for historical reasons but also possibly for future technological purposes:

        What if someone needs to recreate Kodachrome for an accurate historical reproduction of a photograph?
        What if society ever has to rebuild from a serious collapse? If all our extant documentation is how to make digital cameras, it will take longer to get photography going again.
        What if we need to take pictures during/after a nuclear war, when EMPs have knocked out most electronic technology?

My hope/wish is that companies that mothball old technologies in favor of newer ones would release into the public domain all documentation on the design and process of those technologies. If Kodak isn't making money off it anymore, that's fine, but it would be nice to have the blueprints and chemistry publicly documented for posterity.

Alright, let me come back and defend myself here. Being a scientist myself, I do in fact understand the issues at stake, though parts of my post were poorly worded - and I used bad examples - which led to the wrong impression. The problem of posting at 3am.

The reason that you have these kinds of reports is that the scientists doing the research are not the ones writing the press releases, never mind the actual articles that get published.

Yes, sensationalist publications are a big problem, for the reason you mention.

I am talking about the separate problem that there is often a disconnect between scientific research and industrial product development. Scientists do research - they aren't set up to develop the results of their discoveries into functioning clinical technologies and manufacturing processes.

Thus, there's a disconnect between the basic discovery and the development of a clinical technology: the academic lab (yes, often government-funded) can do the first, but someone else (usually a drug company) needs to do the latter. Plenty of discoveries aren't followed up as a result.

My apologies for using a stereotypical "cured cancer" sounding headline, which made me sound like a conspiracy theorist.

Progesterone is a steroid hormone, and as a result has anti-inflamatory properties.

Okay - that particular one was probably a poor example; I read a mention of it just a couple of days ago and didn't bother to follow it up with further research. Thank you for correcting me.

In general, however, there's a well-established phenomenon that drug companies focus on developing patentable drugs that are marketable to wealthy populations. Which you can hardly blame them for - they are, after all, in business.

This means they will focus on the next treatment for alzheimers, or another anti-inflammatory for arthritis, rather than, say, new drugs for malaria or possible new uses for old drugs that have fallen out of patent. While it is possible to prescribe drugs off-label, relatively few clinical trials are done on the effectiveness of off-label uses of older medications precisely because generic competition would prevent a return on the investment required for that research, if done by the pharmaceutical company.

I'm NOT talking about alternative/holistic pseudoscientific crap or what have you. Rather, the basic situation is that that the profit/ROI goals of a pharmaceutical company (something I do *NOT* blame them for) do not always address the exact same needs as public health.

This is why governments and private philanthrophy have had to step in to fund malaria research, and there are plenty of other cases where research that might not present a maximal ROI opportunity for a pharmaceutical company would be a good idea for a government with public health goals.

I'm not knocking the idea of government funded health research, but I can assure you that they already do that.

The government funds plenty of basic science research - most academic biology labs are largely funded by the NSF or NIH - but comparatively little of the relatively more expensive product development research.

Product development, bulk synthesis, and manufacturing research are all also necessary for medical technologies to reach the clinic, and those are still almost exclusively the domain of private enterprise, where they have to pass the ROI filter.

This leaves additional room for government to step in with a different set of goals.

What practical research do you think the US government should embark upon to get the most return for its citizens and the world?"

This one's really obvious to me: biomedical research, particularly where there is not a profit motive. There are two main classes of potential medicines that never make it to the shelf for stupid reasons.

1) Discoveries made in a lab that are never moved forward into a practical technology, often because there are only so many drug companies who only have so much time, and they have out competed smaller companies that might otherwise do additional research. This effect is why you see so many exciting scientific reports, like "Scientists cure 10 kinds of cancer in mice with white blood cell treatment!" or whatever, that never even go into human studies or trials, much less make it to the drugstore.

2) Potential medicines or treatments that may be extremely useful but cannot be patented and so never get funding for research, because the company who spent 15 million to do the research would immediately get outcompeted by other companies who wouldn't have to recoup the research investment. Hundreds of these exist. For example, scientists discovered decades ago that the hormone progesterone dramatically increases the speed of wound healing (first noticed when it was observed that pregnant mice heal faster than other mice). It has never been studied as a potential treatment for wounds, however, because progesterone can't be patented.

Many examples fit both categories 1 and 2. The easy solution, especially in case #2, is for the government to fund the research for the public good, and let all companies manufacture any successful resulting products it as low-cost generics.

Vulcans are very bad at calculating the velocities caused by supernovae.

Seriously ... given the observation of a supernova going off and a planet some distance away, today's astronomers would have no trouble telling when the shockfront would reach that planet**. Spock -- a certified scientific genius -- is en route when he's surprised that the shock front reaches the planet before he does?

Seriously, guys, if you need to get a bad guy and Spock both back in time, you could have come up with a dozen (or a hundred) more interesting and believable ways to do it. How much sense does it make to send a 200-year-old ambassador as the sole pilot of an emergency rescue mission, anyway?

** Answer: if the planet is in the same system as the star going supernova, you have minutes to hours, but it doesn't matter because the planet is f**cked without its star in any case. If the planet is in a different supernova, you have years, so Spock has buckets and buckets of time.

I was okay with the re-imaginings of the characters, destruction of vulcan, etc. I just thought the plot was pathetic. The badguy is a vindictive, bereaved miner, out to destroy an entire civilization because Spock couldn't outrun a supernova? ... really?

Wolfram, a genuine genius

That's far from a unanimous opinion. Especially among academic researchers who actually work in the fields (information theory, complexity) for which Wolfram is so lauded by the lay press.

You are SERIOUSLY overestimating the value of medicine.

Many of the most significant advances in medical science over the past 100 years has to do with a better understanding of nutrition and hygiene.

Oh geez. Yes, our understanding of nutrition and hygiene have added significantly to our lifespan. But overestimating the value of medicine? No, "most sicknesses" are not caused by what we eat. A very few of the classic illnesses - scurvy, for example - were caused by nutrient deficiencies. Most of the rest are caused by infectious migroorganisms or viruses, autoimmune reactions, injury/trauma, genetic abnormality, or aging. Come on, man: the last 150 years have seen the development of:

        Vaccinations - clearly "medicine", they are responsible for saving more lives than anything else in history. Because of them we basically no longer suffer from Diptheria, Measles, Mumps, Pertussis, Polio, Smallpox, and Tetanus. Are you aware of how many people these diseases, in combination, used to kill?

        Antibiotics - Antibiotics have changed hundreds of bacterial diseases from universal death sentences to something generally handled by a single quick trip to the doctor. Among them are a few you might have heard of: Syphilis, Leprosy, Cholera, and the Black Plague. Antibiotics also have reduced the danger of infection from surgery by, oh, 95% or so, making surgery a much more realistic proposition.

        Radiation therapy and chemotherapy - when combined with improved surgery, they have changed cancer from a death sentence to something we can cure over 50% of the time (across all forms of cancer ... there are some we can cure 95% now).

        Diagnostic Imaging - starting with X-rays, and progressing to MRIs and CAT scans, the ability to see inside the body without opening it allows doctors to discover what's going on inside - making the planning of proper intervention (surgical or otherwise) possible, and even more importantly making it more possible to avoid unnecessary or unhelpful intervention.

        Diagnostic Biochemistry - It's pretty cool that now we can actually tell the difference between a virus and a bacterium, for example, and that we can diagnose diabetes, high LDL cholesterol, and a thousand other conditions through simple blood tests.

Nutrition is a great thing. But the rest of medicine has made some pretty damn big contradictions that you are too quick to discount.

I personally have zero problem with gambling being legal, so don't take this as an argument against it.

But there is another key difference between casino gambling and stocks, besides the ones others have mentioned: averaged over time, gambling loses you money and stocks earn you money. Gambling always has a house advantage; wouldn't exist if it didn't. Stocks, on the other hand, have a positive ROI when averaged over several years. Pick any stock index you like - it's nearly impossible to find a 10-year span where it has lost money, and IIRC it *is* impossible to find a 20-year span where it has lost money**.

** Citation needed, but this has been bandied about as fact for so long in the financial industry that I believe it is actually true.

My favorite start point is RailsSpace because it does a better job at introducing the basic concepts of Ruby than the other tutorials out there. I tried "Agile Web Development With Rails" for a while and learned much faster once I switched.

I think the name is poorly chosen - it uses a social networking site as an example app to build, but the concepts are applicable anywhere.
 

They're the lucky ones. The other 50% end in death.

(Not my joke, can't remember whose though)

Really, it's only partially a joke. Our cultural measure of whether or not a relationship is a "success" is whether it lasts until one or both members die.

If we could rent a cow to gestate a baby (or three) we could have more children sooner.

The world does not need "more children sooner".

Dammit, now you're making me agree with the fundigelicals. They may be afraid of the cow womb. I'm afraid of a massively increased birth rate.

How many versions of this will we go through of very very messed up babies/people before we get it right?

Quite a few. But eventually we will get it right. Then after that artificial wombs will be safer & healthier than natural ones.

This may take another century, but it will happen. Technology marches on.

Simiarly, do new OS X users sit down at their shiny new Macbook Pro and try to install a bunch of Windows applications?

I certainly do. One of the first things I put on every new machine (and all my machines are macs) is a copy of parallels so that I can test my websites in IE and all the other windows browsers. These days I run a few games in parallels as well.

That's usually all I need from windows, however, anymore.

There is a great solution to this: Just make it totally deadly radioactive for the next 10,000 years. ^^

This is rather difficult, given that the gravity-fed drive needs to be rewound by lifting the weights, once per year. The goal is to have it RUN, and run accurately, for 10k years, not to do so with zero human input.

You can not move forward by capturing energy being used to push you backwards. To move forward would require more than 100% of the energy that you're capturing. It doesn't work.

This is correct, if you mean sailing *directly* upwind. However, the physics of sailing is not always obvious. Intuitively, it would seem that you can't sail upwind at all, but of course we know that if you do it an an angle, you certainly can sail upwind.

In an even more counterintuitive example, it is possible to use the wind to sail downwind faster than windspeed, though it's dramatically easier on land (with a wheeled sailing vehicle) than on water. Google dwfttw (Down Wind Faster Than The Wind) for discussion of the physics involved, and videos of it in practice.

Some people whose physics is weak still argue that it's impossible, even though the analysis bears it out and it's been demonstrated in practice. The result makes for great flamewars, if you have popcorn available.