I am in a similar situation, but only 12 years. The people above me are getting near retirement age, but lots of folks stick around until their seventies around here. I have a side business and work part-time, to keep the interest level up and reduce unreasonable demands on my time. And do volunteer work with high school kids, doing robotics. That's fun.

This article is so right! He has found a way to express something that's been bugging me for a long time. I love his comparison of a policeman to a song writer.

The other thing about copyright is that it's not the creative people who make money forever off of their own work, it's the corporations that manufacture the plastic discs who make the money forever off of the songwriters' work.

I have a real account, and I manage a couple groups. One (a local bike ride) receives a steady stream of requests for new members to join the group. Half of these are fake Chinese or Indian accounts - it's obvious from their profiles. The rest are real local folks. I have no idea how that maps into the total number of fake IDs.

We only use one receiver at a time, so it's not a problem. A poster written by one of our grad students that gives an idea of the telescope's capabilities is here.

The temperature scale on the graphs (temperature = signal strength) gives you an idea of the absurdly high sensitivity of the system. Some of those graphs are in milliKelvin!

The beam size (it's a Gaussian beam, so it's fuzzy) is about 20-50 arc seconds, narrower at higher frequency. Basic pointing accuracy is about 5 arc seconds, but we improve that with pointing observations that measure the Gaussian beam dropoff on the sides of a bright object, so we can optimize pointing to within an arc second or two. More black magic.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson got his interest in astronomy after going to a kid's camp in Pennsylvania, and seeing stars for the first time in his Bronx life. Get out of town now and then!

Thanks! We aim to please.

It should be. We work halfway between radio and light. The signal passes through Teflon lenses, is mixed by a superconducting mixer diode in a receiver cooled to 4K with a helium refrigerator, down-converted to an intermediate frequency range of 4-8 GHz, then into a spectrometer. Many types of black magic involved.

I work on the Submillimeter Telescope on Mt Graham in Arizona. It's a 10 meter dish with several receivers in the ridiculously high frequency range of 200-800 GHz. We mostly do molecular spectroscopy, finding interesting molecules in faraway places. The 'images' that come out of my spectrometer are spectrum graphs, not photos.

My wife has a high-tech wooden leg, so I'm familiar with how long they last, about five years. I also have a 3D printer, but I've never considered printing a leg socket. I'd expect the fingers in this hand to eventually break, as the wearer tests the limits. Fortunately, printing a single component is not expensive at all.

The idea of using the 3D printer to make the fiddly bits is excellent. It's also possible to use regular materials to make limb pieces. PVC pipe has been used in India.

In the long run, a local prosthetics cottage industry that relies on commonly available components and supplies should be self-sustaining, if the cost of materials is borne by humanitarian agencies.

If time started less than 10,000 years ago, then sure, we've existed since the beginning of time. Time periods longer than that are very difficult for people to wrap their heads around.

Tee hee. I have a fine counterexample.
About 15 years ago, my company (a producer of VMEbus and CompactPCI boards) designed a video module. We used a Trident mobile graphics chip. Unfortunately, we were attempting to use it with a PowerPC, not an x86 CPU. We had the big user manual for the chip, but when we programmed all the registers according to the published configuration info, it refused to initialize.
We then were given the BIOS object code from the factory (they wouldn't share the x86 assembly source code). We disassembled the code. It was such a tangled web of spaghetti that we never did figure out how to get the part initialized, and the factory app engineering team was unable to tell us how to do so either.
We eventually dumped the part and used an Intel part with C source code available. It worked just fine.

The other trick was that they always left the filaments burning. The filaments are most likely to fail during warm-up. The failures due to reduced emission were preventable by replacing tubes after x thousand hours.

We didn't even have to *get* anything - the pole, the base and the topper were already in the living room! Thanks, robotics club.
The pole is an old shade structure pole that we had in the living room for testing our FRC robot's hanging mechanism, the base is a barbell weight from our trebuchet, which was used to weigh down some Vex field elements when practicing for Toss Up, and the topper is a ceramic Hello Kitty statue.

The last time I went there, last week, the credit card reader machine was new. I don't know when it went in, as I hadn't been there for a month or two before that.

This must mean something, or not.