Feynman was fantastic at inspiring people and giving them an intuition for physics with simple drawings.

Do you think he understood partial differential equations, functions in a complex space, matrix math, group theory? Sure he did. If he wrote some of that on a blackboard in a 60 minute talk, would the audience struggle to keep up?

I am still not sure I understand using 4x4 matrices to do transforms in three space. I can write the code though (slowly).

My wife (English and Drama) said the biggest party people were the liberal arts students because they did not need as much time to study. And when they were studying they mostly were reading.

A good educator can make learning calculus better than a poor one, but there it is still hard (well for me anyway).

At the coal face programmers are often young, we have a lot of graduates or people with only a few years experience.

I am near retirement (at 65) but my companies wants me to stay on as long as I want to. I manage a small team and focus on documentation.

We do have some designers over 50, and they are brilliant, but most younger coders either need to get very good at architecture and high-level design or extend sideways into other skills.

It should be labeled y of course.

Unless we can have the proper thorn key http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

At least part of the "need" for fast download is to have a website with lots of graphics and images render as soon as you enter the URL. The peak information flow is very fast, then you sit there for 15 seconds thinking about what to click.

this is a very different subjective experience than waiting for 15 seconds for the site to display fully.

Most development in processors seems to be focused at shortening the delay between a key or mouse click and something happening on the display.

If you want a frequency standard, instead of knowing what UTC is "now", you can use the chroma signal from broadcast TV. The big stations use atomic clocks as a reference.

They are in charge you know. Well, them and the porpoises until the new road goes through.

A BBC show on "what makes us human" identified genetic differences between human and chimps that coded for increased brain complexity (connections). When this gene was put into mice, they had more complex neurons. (Not Algernon moment yet however).

Show (for UK only) is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b036mrrj/Horizon_20122013_What_Makes_us_Human/.

DEC StrongArm was released as Intel XScale but was then was sold to Marvel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale)

According to reports, Intel has an architecture licence but does not intend to use it. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/intel-we-have-arm-license-no-plans-to-use-it/5845

Intel also brought Infineon which had an ARM licence (http://www.gomonews.com/intels-1-4-billion-infineon-mobile-chips-purchase-2g-3g-lte-wimax/) but I don't know what the status is of that going forward.

The comment above rather garbles that story.

Remember all the fuss about whether you could change the batteries in phones? The direction of modern manufacturing is towards things that you cannot practically build or repair yourself.

Some of the things done in hacker spaces (or described in Make magazine) do seem very kitsch (as in the finished result is not worth the material and time put into it) but that is not the point.

People are making and repairing things.

What is the point of Raspberry Pi? Not a very good computer. What is the point of writing your own code for a personal project? Probably not going to make much money off it. Why paint a picture? Not going to be in a museum

People learn something and they have satisfaction in what they produced.

there is a difference between federal law and state law. Murder is not generally considered a federal offense (in one of the civil rights murders it was federal only because it occurred on federal land http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ex-federal-prosecutor-who-led-historic-case-dies)

That is why people entering the country have to say they will not commit a crime while they are here. Any crime they commit is probably only a state issue, but lying on your federal entry form ...

Of course using a computer as an electric heater is less efficient than a dedicated electric powered exchange pump which can have effective efficiencies many times 100%

I can't find an image for it now, but I have seen a primitive portable sundial disk. I have a modern version as a novelty.

If you know north, you can find the time and vice versa. Aha you say, how do you know the time? Well in a "primitive" society, people could develop a sense of what time in was. This could be refined by practicing with the sundisk on land.

In an earlier age, railway engineers were said to be able to guess the time to a few minutes and only checked their watches for the minute.

If this crystal made it more reliable to find the sun, that made it easier.

Some other techniques are obvious in retrospect such as changed cloud formations over islands.

You don't think that £90 price might be subsidized by Intel to a very large degree to get a foothold in the market?

Whenever there are any really tough questions about relativity, the world waits for an electrical engineer to comment. Unfortunately their comments are not correct.

The key point is that people who want to talk about something hard should indeed go past the "bridge of asses".

If someone writes a real program, even if it is just extracting data from a database and formatting it based on GUI input, tests it and gets it to a bug-free state then they have a better understanding of data entry programs. It does not mean that have knowledge of AI. Each domain has its own minimum requirement.

It worries me, when I don't find it funny, that people with only the most superficial scientific knowledge talk about the most fundamental aspects of science and dismiss people who spend their lives investigating it.

It is complicated. We all want people to have informed opinions and not just believe authorities, but becoming informed is not trivial.

Perhaps some BASIC is better than no programming knowledge because different roles have different requirements.

On the other side, sometimes people who are very competent technically change dramatically when they move into management because they have different priorities. Programmers should learn a bit of MBA speak as well.