C is not that uncommon, particularly among engineers.

I'm an academic working in optics. This is holographic, not OCT. The difference is small - mainly the coherence length of the laser, but essentially the holographic microscope has slightly better resolution at the cost of much worse rejection of out of focus light. So this device is probably better for examining a biopsy or some water for contamination or something rather than looking at a hunk of tissue, which is where OCT shines. The holographic approach is better in one other way - it grabs an image in one shot, where as most other 3D techniques require scanning. That could be an advantage in in-vivo imaging of cells.

I'd mod the parent insightful if I had the points. Most of the PhDs I've worked with have been very conscious of their limitations. Maybe it's a cultural thing, or maybe the OP is bringing his own biases to the table.

Come with me if you want to shop!

All the more so as the modern publishing industry is often rather lax in proof-reading standards, making the one lasting use for them rather less important than it might otherwise be.

My understanding is that the lights overheat. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/966/can-some-people-extinguish-streetlamps-by-means-of-their-bodily-emanations

Yes, there are, but SMS uses a reduced character set and so seven bits per character. It's 140 bytes to represent 160 characters. That's my understanding at least, backed up by a cursory google. I could of course be wrong.

From here,

The total cost of the Voyager mission from May 1972 through the Neptune encounter (including launch vehicles, radioactive power source (RTGs), and DSN tracking support) is 865 million dollars.

and

A total of five trillion bits of scientific data had been returned to Earth by both Voyager spacecraft at the completion of the Neptune encounter.

That's $0.001384 per bit. There are 1120 bits in an SMS message. That's about $1.55 per SMS. Not exactly cheap, but then Vodafone don't have coverage beyond Pluto.

That's not what I'm talking about. I am a club player of moderate ability - I would have no hope against a modern chess programme like Fritz on a basic PC (even on that hardware, it's at least comparable to a top-50 player). However, I can look at a position and decide that to win, I need to, say, get my knight to a particular outpost, and drive home a passed pawn and promote it. A computer doesn't think like this.

I was talking about brute force computation, which has been measured. I forget the precise result, but I think you're talking something like 3 or 5 positions a second. Those players, and even I derive most of our ability from pattern recognition, while the computer is powerful because it performs an (optimised) search on a tree of possible continuations. There's a fundamental difference in how humans and computers play chess.

Swap chess, a minor variant of chess, has a similar concept. Two pairs of players face off. On each team is one player with white pieces, and one with black pieces. Any piece they capture, they hand to their team mate, who can place it on the board at any time in lieu of a move.

Draughts has only been solved on the 8x8 board, and the best programmes for the 10x10 version caught up with the top humans a few years back.

It's interesting to speculate about how the advancement of playing software might hint at how tactics and strategy are balanced for the various board games. I mean, a chess computer has no concept of a plan, and even Kasparov or Topalov or whoever can only calculate a handful of positions a second. Of course, the most interesting part of that problem is how to pose the question.

To be honest, I'm not clear on how it scales. I've only seen presentations on this sort of thing for, say, two mikes and maybe five speakers. The thing about background noise is that it has to be filtered out somehow, or what you get is essentially white noise. Maybe localizing the sound helps in that regard. I don't really know.

Beamforming is only possible where you have as many microphones as sources. This is more probably some sort of blind source separation algorithm - calculating the pseudo-inverse of a mixing matrix based on assumptions about speech.

Except in American airports.

That's right. Sadly, it's already severely limited his ability to type, so he now prefers to dictate. However, he remains lucid for the moment. Long may that last.