You have to accept the fundamental conflict that most PhDs won't get an academic research job, yet the curriculum must be geared to those that will. That is its purpose, to promote the best science possible. Most of them will get some other job, not exactly the job they trained for, maybe as a government regulator, maybe as a lower-level educator. But many top scientists came from (relatively) humble beginnings in PhD programs at state universities, and to eliminate the bottom half of all programs or transform them into training programs for nonacademic jobs would blunt scientific inquiry. In my experience, faculty don't give students false hopes. It seems all I (and many of my colleagues) do is complain about how difficult it is to compete and survive in science, yet the students by and large still want to try to stay in research, knowing full well what the chances are. It really is remarkable. In the arts, of course, it's much worse. It's taken for granted that only a tiny fraction of aspiring actors or concert musicians will get "the jobs they trained for", but no one gripes about how dysfunctional that system is. As far as specialization, I think that is complete nonsense. At least in the biological sciences, Departments have become almost meaningless except as administrative units. Cross-department collaboration is the norm and most faculty could fit just as well into any of half-dozen departments. If anything, the fact that fields are more interconnected has made specialized work less significant. Journals are increasingly categorized not by field of study but by pecking order. Journal articles are accepted or rejected on the basis of what their perceived impact is, not whether they really fall within the realm of the journal's title. For advancing scientific knowledge, the entrepreneurial American system, where each investigator competes for grants through peer review, is unsurpassed. For solving society's problems, though, it might be that a more top-down approach, with true visionaries directing larger groups of scientists, might work better. But if so, we have been moving in the opposite direction. The National Laboratories, for example, have been basically defunded and converted into research institutes where faculty compete for outside grants just like everyone else.

We used Feynman's intro physics book back when I was in college, and though I got an A in every physics course I ever took, I found that book completely baffling. Instead of being logical and straightforward, it was full of mathematical sleight-of-hand, bringing new variables from nowhere, because "we can call this anything we want!", and magically proceeding the final equation. Entertaining, maybe, but as far as understanding the material it was completely useless. He's just one more celeb I can do without.

The article hardly says anything about how it was done. This morning on France 24 news they claimed it was a DNS shutdown by all the major ISPs in the country by order of the government. Does that mean you could get access to all the major sites like Twitter if you just knew their numerical IP address?

Really? Seems to me if anything it has gotten worse. Often several of the first 10 hits are aggregators like bizrate or nextag. And often they don't even have anything resembling the item you were looking for but they somehow have created a bogus content phrase to make it look like they do.

Early electronic EV controllers operated at ~800-1500 Hz and emitted a quite audible electronic buzz or hum. Bay area folks may remember that same sound in the early BART trains. When 15-20 kHz controllers came out, a major selling point was their silence. I vote that we bring back the 1000 Hz hum, even if artificially, as the official EV sound.

I have never subscribed to either cable or satellite, but when I go on business trips and see what I am missing, I am just astonished that anyone (except perhaps a few hard-core sports addicts) actually pays for that stuff. About a third of the channels are nonstop infomercials and another third are old movies and TV shows. The so-called "news" channels are particularly pathetic, just continuously rerunning the same tired stories you see on network news hour after hour, with even most of the same inbred clan of talking heads giving commentary. You might catch a good cooking or home improvement installment once in awhile, or a decent documentary on History or Discovery channels, but surely any reasonable person can get their fill of that stuff from PBS.

The major advantage of Flash is that you can choose NOT to install it. With HTML5 decoding built into the browsers, are we all doomed to watch whirlygigs everywhere, all day long?

At seminars, I found taking notes by hand much more distracting than typing on computer; I had to look away from the speaker and would lose the train of thought. With a computer I am much more engaged; I find myself putting the ideas into my own words. I'm not a great typist, so afterward I would go over the text and correct the errors, which helped to fix the ideas in my brain. I used to do this at scientific meetings but what ended it was that I would have to turn the power-save settings to max and I would wear out hard drives with the constant on-and-off.

It would be difficult to imagine a more equitable and rational revenue source than the fuel tax. It is cheap and simple to collect, and provides all the right incentives. The only problem with the fuel tax is that politicians are too cowardly to increase it even enough to keep up with inflation, much less compensate for more efficient cars. The implicit assumption seems to be that the public would somehow find an increase in a road tax less objectionable, but none of the cited articles ever explains why these experts believe this is true. Not only will a road tax be much more visible and onerous to drivers, but when you factor in all the costs of the infrastructure and bureaucracy needed to monitor all the vehicles and enforce tax collections, owners of small cars, in particular, will have to be paying triple or quadruple what they are paying now in gas tax. And what will have been gained? Surely there will still be the same mini-revolt every time someone proposes raising the road tax. And their estimate of 1-2 cents per mile has to be a ludicrous underestimate. If that's the case, why do tolls (which after all are just another way of paying a road tax) typically run more like 10-15 cents a mile?

At this point they are so far behind, it's hard to imagine GM or any American company will ever make money on electrics. To be viable, the cars have got to be small, and Detroit (especially GM) has pretty much ceded production of even their own small car lines to foreign companies. Plus, half the cost of those cars is the batteries, which will almost certainly be produced in China. Though not given much attention by the media, the big breakthrough, LiFePO4 cells, has already been made and further improvements, at GM or elsewhere, will likely be only incremental. China already has multiple companies in brutal competition mass-producing LiFePO4 cells. Unlike the old lead-acids, they are light, stable and easily transported, so there's no reason not to make them in China where labor is cheap and technical know-how will soon surpass the US if it hasn't already. In five years, a lot of electrics will be sold here, maybe even by GM, but they won't be made here.

A typical NIH grant is $200,000 per year and if you expect to get your grant renewed, you better be publishing 3 papera a year. Open access fees are now ~$3000 per paper even at nonprofit journals (and they still claim to be losing money on it), so that's $9,000 a year, about 5% of your grant, just to publish your results.

I'm about as pro-environment as anyone, I think gasoline and SUVs should both be taxed to kingdom come, that public transit should be just about free, etc. etc. I drive one of those old 80's eat-your-peas electric cars that only go 40 miles and take a good half-minute to get up to 50 mph. And technically, I admire Toyota for what they've done with the Prius. But honestly, it really is just about the most profoundly UGLY car ever introduced. I know that the design, with the high back and the tiny wheels is for aerodynamics, but aesthetically it is, like no other car I've ever seen, just plain painful to behold. It's the proportions that are all wrong, not the putative smiley face.