Sure, but can we assume that the other researchers didn't receive grant money from *their* governments?
What difference does that make? Why should we care what kind of research the government of Japan wants to fund?
for every stupid project they come up with
Do you have any examples for this?
A few gems, sorted by year.
That actually disproves the point more than it proves it. If you look at the author affiliations on that page, there is exactly one American researcher on there, and he is named with a large number of international researchers for the same work. On top of that, he is not solely an American, suggesting his funding contribution (which we cannot ascertain from this, other than to say it was almost certainly less than 100%) was likely not all from US funding.
The obvious solution is to return to traditional methods: establish an independent income, then take up scientific research as a hobby.
The problem though is that a lot of the big scientific problems require more capital than any ordinary person would ever be able to amass on their own. My PhD project consumed supplies at the rate of tens of thousands of dollars per year, and that is ignoring the cost of time, utilities, physical space, and standard lab supplies that our lab kept around for general consumption. That also is ignoring the cost of the instrumentation that we used to do the work.
If someone did fund something like it independently, then they would run in to the cost of publishing the results; the main paper from my graduate work cost somewhere around $1,500 to publish in an open access journal. Without budgets set up for that purpose, why would someone do this on their own?
Sure, there are interesting projects that can be self-funded, but not many of them. And the two people described in the NPR story were both working on projects that were way beyond that level of resource requirements.
CFL? Why would they charge off of the Canadian Football League?
Are you forgetting who you're talking to, here? If anyone knows the true power of the Canadian Football League it would be me, after all I played for them for 12 seasons. If that isn't enough, just ponder who cured my death in 2003.
There are few better sources of power.
Yeah, because Toyota never built a Lexus
By sales volume Lexus cars are contenders for the least interesting on the road. The ES and RX are the top selling lines by a long shot and neither have more personality than a box of generic wheaties.
They also never built the LFA
The LFA might as well not exist, it is not only extraordinarily low in volume to the point where >>99% of the world's population will never see one in person, but it also shares no parts with any other car made by Toyota. It is an exercise in what they can do when they commit enough engineers to a case.
They aren't currently building the RC-F
Again, who cares.
Or the IS350.
The IS350 is a cold and dull attempt to compete with the BMW 3 series.
Shoulder pads with big batteries and solar panels?
Solar panels? What for? I thought Apple junkies never went outside anyways. Unless the solar panels can charge off of CFL they might as well not be there.
While what you say is true, you fail to consider the number of protons in a baseball.
Sure, but if you don't live in a country where baseball is commonly played then it is hard to have a frame of reference for how large a baseball is. Conversely if you do live in a country where baseball is commonly played then you likely don't use the metric system in daily life.
To put that in context, that's a single proton with the same energy as a baseball flying at 100 kilometers per hour
Isn't particularly valuable as baseball is mostly played the US, and in international competition we still tend to use the imperial units of measurement. This is important here as 10d0 km ~= 62 miles. While a 62mph pitch would certainly hurt if it hit you, that is considered to be a rather pedestrian speed for major league baseball.
Any given program will expand to fill available memory.
