And I bet that because the costs of running a program were so high -- in time and monetary terms -- that your programs were correct, nearly 100% of the time.

We get intellectually lazy when a debug loop is only a few seconds long.

Feh. So the news article says he's using industrial grit. The presumably more authoritative arXiv paper states

So they aren't exactly industrial grit, but very tiny lenses that look like they were originally intended for the telecommunications industry. The question of how does one get these lenses is answered by, "pick up the phone and call one of the listed suppliers who specialize in micro-spheres of clear, hard stuff."

If you read the article (I know, I know) you'll learn that he uses industrial grit, also known as glass beads, which are tiny bits of glass that are reasonably spherical and ridiculously cheap. The quoted lens cost in the article is $0.17, but unless I'm misunderstanding something, like how special the grit is that he's using, or what kind of secondary selection process is required to pick out beads that will make good lenses, that should be closer to 0.17 cents, not 0.17 dollars.

So because they are no longer new, we should abandon the Mars Rovers, Cassini, the Viking probes, and other projects just because they are beyond their mission lifetime?

We should stop measuring lunar albedo just because it's always the same? We should stop the pitch drop experiment? We shouldn't have measured the cosmic background radiation to look for spatial variations? We shouldn't have measured continental drift because it can't possibly happen and mountains don't move? Just because something appears static (and without comparing against previous measurements, we have no means for verifying that), does not mean it isn't changing over longer time scales that are still very important.

I'll repeat my thesis: we are so data-poor about the solar system that the feed from any single working probe is vital. The cost of receiving data is trivial compared to the cost of construction and launch.

The cost of launching anything is staggering, and it gets more stupendously staggering with the size of the orbit. Each probe is important. We are nowhere near having so much data about our solar system -- forget the universe as a whole -- that any single operating probe should be considered junk.

Depends on the field. Some conferences are very hard to get into, and there is a rigorous peer-review process (I can think of two of the conferences in my field with acceptance rates at or below 30%). Others accept essentially anything and everything (like those semi-scam conferences in China I keep getting invited to). I'd wager, however, that the majority of meetings are somewhere in the middle, accepting most submissions that sound reasonable, as the organizers trust that the cost of attending and presenting is sufficient disincentive to trolls.

My extremely fuzzy understanding from freshman physics is that the universe is thought to have undergone an expansion early on that was, indeed, faster than light. That post-big-bang period was called "inflation", an idea Dr. Alan Guth came up with (and he happened to be my freshman physics lecturer). So it is possible that two systems that became entangled prior to inflation are now outside each other's light cones.

From the description it sounds like a simple substitution cipher (from their examples, /e/ for /f/, and /n/ for /k/). How hard can that be to decode if you have enough of the text? Yes, neato that we can now read certain notes that have been encoded for 900 years, but were they really only undeciphered that long because no one had a proper, scholarly look at them?

It's one thing to do that inside a car (which is what, 6 x 4 x 9 feet ... or maybe a little larger than that?). It's quite another to do it inside a huge room that's 36 x 30 x 54 feet in size. It's also worth noting that car audio competitions use a single frequency. The LEAP facility is broadband, since it needs to simulate the sound of a launching rocket.

You need two digits to write the number 90. You need four to write the number that represents ten years of days, 3650 (modulo leap years). Sounds like two orders of magnitude. And it's a good example of why orders of magnitude are so rough an estimation.

I'm not an insect biologist, but I'd be surprised if 10+ year old bamboo has any remaining viable insect life when kept as a musical instrument (rather than, say, being left outdoors). The photo from the linked article does not look like something that was freshly cut.

Doing even the most cursory of searches on gallium and reading through the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium) would suggest that gallium is not chemically intert, may not be non-toxic to humans, and given that extremities can easily get cold enough to drop below the freezing point of gallium, I'd have to say that it might rather well leave a residue, forget about the stickiness others have reported.

Yea, that'd be great: inject liquid metal, have it thicken and solidify in your feet and fingertips because you step outside on a brisk day, giving you the equivalent of massive frostbite. No thank you.

There are growing numbers of Chinese researchers in my field (neuroscience) and their results always need to be taken with an extra-large grain of salt. It looks like the same is true here.

Did anyone read the Wikipedia entry?

"Hemerythrin and myohemerythrin are essentially colorless when deoxygenated, but turn a violet-pink in the oxygenated state."

Since much of our skin tone (for lighter colored skins) comes from blood, this is going to make for some VERY interesting looking people!!!

If time is an emergent phenomenon, then how does the first event happen? If time does not yet exist, then there is no was to distinguish an event. By the parent's suggestion, time can only be propelled forward when already in motion, by the contribution of each new event. The very ideas of "first" and "new" presuppose the existence of time, and thus despite this likely significant scientific work, we continue to have a tautology until an instantiation somehow starts things off.

We are still, also, a long way away from understanding what causes wavefunction collapse, since the notion of observation is clearly ludicrous: there are no observers in the center of the sun, or on the far side of Jupiter, as two minor examples.

Indeed, especially since the skills of programming a mechanical engine go many eons farther back with, I believe, the invention of the loom. The result was somewhat different (a woven pattern, rather than a scalar value), but the idea of a set of sequentially executed instructions with loops, counting variables, and exceptions, started a long time before Babbage. Knitting and crocheting is rather quite similar, and embodies similarily pre-existing art, as well.