These are the same sort of complaints you hear from older politicians. The quality of the media has absolutely decreased significantly over the last 20 years. That's come with a drastic decrease in how much time they have to work stories, budgets, salaries, etc. It's telling that we're discussing a comedian interviewing Snowden for a subscription-only television channel's fake news program, rather than someone on broadcast network news or something like 60 minutes. Two years ago, 60 minutes did a report on Snowden, but couldn't figure out how to get to Russia to talk with him, so they did a hit-piece.

Why is the media on this "race to the bottom?" Professional media only exists if they can actually make money doing it. Were we better off before the internet allowed us to directly exchange information and ideas (like we're doing now)?

"The media" is going to change with the changes to society that the internet has brought. Just wanting them to stay the same isn't enough.

When you have a team of PhDs working on a project essentially for free (paid for by the government, not CalTech), in a subsidized (nearly free) clean room, on a device where yield doesn't really matter, "cost" tends to not be realistically estimated.

It is not more realistic to estimate the cost by looking at the actual money spent by all sources on the project. That's likely a couple hundred thousand dollars on this one (or so) chip, but most of that is NRE.

When someone tries to fit this into a commercial process and figures out what custom processes are required, we'll find out what the real cost is. It may be $1000/chip, and that may still be very marketable.

I appreciate what you're trying to say here, but it's a bit misplaced.

Feinstein is one of the few people in the country with access to all of the information on the online intelligence gathering done by the federal government. It's part of her job to perform oversight on those programs (not her staff's job, this is one of those things only very specific members of congress can do). If she doesn't understand the internet, that's a serious problem. People have a right to be upset that she hasn't done her job.

Read a bit more about her, and you'll see there are many very good reasons people are upset with her.

I'm helping to make a new diagnostic for Lyme, which is one of these diseases where patients are often very informed, and traditional techniques fail.

Lyme has many "non standard" diagnostic options. If you run a clean lab, you can sell a non-FDA cleared test directly to a patient without really explaining what it is or allowing anyone "under the hood.". However, to get a treatment prescription most doctors require test results they understand, or at least results from a test that has the backing of a large medical oversight organization (CDC, FDA, AMA...). This is a matter of medical ethics and medical economics. The doctor needs to understand why a prescription is necessary and his insurance need to be able to cover that decision if something goes wrong.

When you have a proliferation of tests without oversight, two things happen: 1) you do get a lot of fraudulent tests, and 2) you develop a terrible relationship between patient groups and medical oversight groups. If you want doctors to treat people based on your test results, your test absolutely must go through serious vetting by some "establishment" medical group (i.e. FDA clearance).

On the positive side, developing tests you can sell directly to patients means you can sell the test for less money, at higher volume, for more overall profit and more overall positive patient outcomes. That is a really, really great win-win situation. It is also far easier right now to get investment for development of a direct to patient test than a "traditional" test. The medical community would be wise to use this current funding environment to help drive patient care forward. The difficult part comes in how oversight is done. It's not going to work to put all of the risk on the front-line clinicians.

Foundation was one of my favorite books growing up ; )

This is just another play for increased grant funding with less oversight. Convenient that the program managers won't be able to evaluate anything until well after the money is spent.

I think at this point everyone agrees that the STEM job market in the US is screwed up. Right now we're all pointing fingers at eachother blaming millennials, gen X, baby boomers, immigrants, business owners, politicians, civil servants, the whole government, high schools, colleges, testing services, misogynists, political correctness, investors, people who don't invest, Obama, Bush...

Anyone have any ideas on what to do about it? How about we work on that now.

There are billions poured into STEM, and encouraging early career scientists through programs at NSF, NIH, DARPA, etc. None of that is working (less than 50% of people trained in science stay in science). When I was still training students, the best of them generally ended up working in finance, not physics. An additional $250 million is not going to make a notable difference. We need a cultural and structural change in how we train and retain good scientists and engineers, not a meaningless bandaid.

If you've been through California's central valley, you know that it's not a desert. We're talking about some of the most fertile farmland in the world. More than half of the USA's fresh produce comes from California. Just the almond market alone is $2.8 billion a year. Despite that, California's central valley is also one of the poorest, least educated populations in the USA.

Given all that, is "screw the farmers" really the best solution here? Maybe we should make more fresh water? This isn't theoretical. The largest water desalination plant in the western hemisphere is being constructed in San Diego. It "only" took 18 years of regulatory and legal wrangling and $1 billion of financing. We need about another dozen of these plants to make a real impact on the statewide water supply. Now that the regulatory and legal framework is set, increasing the cost of water to construct additional desalination plants and related infrastructure would make more sense than choking agriculture out of the state.

There's a small, very important market for computers usable in biohazard situations. It's not easy making something functional that you can also guarantee can be completely disinfected.

It always seems like these guys are missing something. Bell Labs had this figured out. Arguably, IBM has done a better job of this in recent decades. I get the impression the people at Google just kind of heard about a bunch of failed DARPA projects and decided to try and fix them up. Self driving cars, enhanced reality headsets, balloon based networks, nanoparticle diagnostics, jetpacks, neural network enhanced computer vision... all legacy military development projects... all very cool, but not really lightning strikes of inspiration.

Is it that they don't have the right people? Are their projects too fast? Are they too structured? Maybe they're purposefully trying to only do things others have already tried and failed for some reason. Perhaps it's that they've forgotten the difference between innovation and invention. Innovation builds successful companies, but they'll need a hefty dose of invention if they really want a "moon shot."

I realize from the rest of this discussion that you're in Alaska. Down in San Diego, solar covered parking is fairly common. We tend to have acres of parking lots at big businesses, malls, car dealerships, etc. These have been prime locations for solar parking shades.

You can apply some financial/government subsidy wizardry to mitigating the cost of solar. Down here (for some houses), if you're willing to commit to paying your current average power bill every month for the next X years, someone will come and install solar on your house for free.

Intended for? You mean the motions of the planets in the solar system, the first example of where Newton's laws broke down? Newton's laws don't work where they were first used. Even Newton knew that: he couldn't predict the moon's orbit properly without a fudge factor. Take a deep breath, no one is saying mathematics goes bad. My point is simply that gathering better data, and producing better ideas is how science works.

Scientists try to understand why something happens, not just how it happens. Getting close enough for practical applications and predictions is enough for engineering, but in science you have to get the "why" right.

Don't be absurd. Of course I've heard that F!=ma. That's well covered by the time you finish a Physics PhD.

Newton's laws are perfectly good approximations for most cases, but they're not always valid. Newton was wrong, that was the point of relativity. And yes, we're looking forward to correcting relativity when we do figure out dark matter and energy. Einstein had the intelligence to know he was wrong when he formulated general relativity; no one has figured out how to fix it yet.

There are two answers to this, the first is the easy answer:

Science is often "wrong." This is how science works: you come up with a theory or some measurements, support it as best you can, but expect someone to do it better in a few years. Often "better" means results so different from what was seen before that the prior work is now considered "wrong." As we get better at science, this happens faster.

The second answer is a bit more complicated and acknowledges that there is a real problem.

To me, this is real and it's due to the recent loss in prestige and ability in government/industrial labs combined with the emergence of the internet. This led to the use of journal publication metrics to arbitrate scientific disputes instead of government or industrial validations. (This is different from the problem of sponsored research.) Using publications to "decide" scientific rightness instead of independent validations has also put immense stress on the peer review and publishing systems. Use of fast-but-incorrect techniques, shortcuts, and repetition of boilerplate language is very effective at rapidly generating publications, and thus is more "scientifically correct" in the current system. This is happening while the public has more access to this content that should not be reasonably expected to contain absolute truth.