Caltech the post-doc world (which is portrayed in TBBT) and Caltech the under-grad world (which is portrayed in RG) are actually quite different worlds that exist mostly under the same roofs (except for the UG houses which are apparently a world upon themselves).

I haven't noticed them making many references to Caltech in TBBT, but when they do it's not totally out of line with what I remember about interacting with post-docs at Tech (nobody calls it the Institute), but of course it usually isn't quite right. I'm guessing that is probably due to one of the script writers Eric Kaplan who did not go to Caltech, but Harvard as a grad turkey, not a post-doc...

I used to eat this type of candy when I was a kid. The wrapper was not so delicious, but it was mildly sweet and added a slight "gummy" candy experience when you got saliva over it, so most kids actually WANTED to eat it (not that it was the most sanitary thing to do).

FWIW, it was not unlike the edible rice paper that many folks use to keep macaroons from sticking to a baking sheet or that cake decorators use in conjunction with printers for edible paper...

Of course rice paper isn't remotely water proof, but now days industrial food chemistry technology is much more advanced and capable of simulating many tasty treats, so at least the taste aspect is certainly within the realm of possibility...

Although states are not allowed to regulate interstate commerce, this is not the specific issue in this case.

A person living in NJ can buy a Tesla (purchased on the internet and shipped from out of state), because that is interstate commerce issue and NJ regulations are trumped by federal interstate commerce regulations.

A non-independent automotive dealer in NJ cannot sell a Tesla to a person living in NJ, because that is not addressed by current federal regulations and now against NJ state regulations.

However, the FTC has some jurisdiction in this area if they can prove that it is anticompetitive. Unfortunately the current supreme court rulings on this topic (e.g., wine, contact lenses) really only cover internet sales (e.g., what Tesla is doing now), not forcing states to license brick/mortar business to sell products in their jurisdiction.

For instance, the 18 states that require some form of state-owned liquor stores or wholesalers, aren't required to let say Jack Daniels open up a company store in a mall to sell their product in their jurisdiction. That would likely take another supreme court ruling and I don't see that coming any time soon given the magnitude of such a ruling.

Apple wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember the Altair and IMSAI?
Windows wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember Kildall's Digital Research CPM/86 and IBM/Microsoft OS/2 collaboration?

The real lesson? Let other do the pioneering market research for you. Then do it better and faster than they can...

Historically, first mover advantage often isn't what it's hyped up to be (ask CompuServe, AltaVista, Yahoo, MySpace, and AOL/Netscape)...

Nokia creates tablet.
Nokia destroys tablet.
M$ destroys Nokia.
M$ creates a tablet.
A tablet destroys M$.
Linux inherits the earth?

Yet, you don't get to choose a Apple laptop with an AMD instead of and Intel processor, a Samsung handheld computer with an A7 processor instead of a Exanos or Qualcomm. In life, things come in sub-optimal bundles and you pick your poison.

The problem is that we often only have a few choices even in a commodity market because of economies of scale. The economics of spending billions of dollars to develop high performances CPUs have dwindled the field to a majority player and a consolation player. Likewise, in the US, there aren't an excess political resources to fund billion dollar campaigns where only 1 person wins, so there is only about 1.1 political parties. When you scale things back you get more diversity, (e.g., local politics or SoC chips), but at the top of the food chain, it's not much freedom and not much service...

Imagine trillions of years from now on a planet far-far away, some technician named Vort assembling computer subroutines from a small number of libraries (known as the Legacy code) that dropped from a space probe billions of years before he was born.

Vort's creating "organic" software to get one of his jobs done, one that's just like Vort's ancestors created using these well-known components that always seemed to do the job. It's really expensive to assemble components this way because the Legacy codes are very inefficient, and you need to string together lots of calls to get all the requirements you need for the job, but it's known to be a sustainable process and even if nobody understands it, Legacy code doesn't have any "secret ingredients".

Back a few decades ago, Vort recalls there where two movements that tried to change the way code was assembled to get a job done:

One was to actually modify software to have it do what you wanted it to do, but the purveyors of this black magic were evil companies that wanted to keep these modifications to themselves and you could never be sure what type of modification they made or what side effects they had.

The other group was called the Open movement which wrote all new code free of the original Legacy libraries, but offered them to everyone so that they could see for themselves. Sadly although there were many experts among the Open group, normal users of open code did not have the expertise to validate the new code so it was just as mysterious as the Legacy code. Contrary to popular belief, the new open code has been used at most less than 10 years (meaning tested less than 25 years), the Legacy code has been tested for 1000's of years...

Nope, Vort, will continue to use the original Legacy code. None of that modified code for Vort, also, none of that open code created from scratch. Vort would continue to use Legacy code...

FTFY, you may be an OPEN code advocate, but you are a LEGACY food advocate, not an OPEN food advocate.

In a few localities, it is actually illegal** to call yourself an engineer or offer engineering services if you don't actually have a PE license (akin to practicing medicine or law w/o a license even if you graduated from medical or law school).

However, the odds are you probably don't live in one of the few remaining localities that have these restrictions on the use of "engineer" in a job title, but you should be aware that in most localities, simply by practicing engineering often puts you under the jurisdiction of the local board and local/state boards usually have some rules for people that are "exempt" from licensing, but able to practice the profession. Therefore, even if you are not required to be licensed, you might have some professional responsibilities, you may simply be ignorant of what they are (and ignorance of the law is generally not a valid excuse in a court of law).

**About 20 years ago, I was working for a company that was bought by another company headquartered in another state where it was illegal to have the word "engineer" in a job title w/o that person being a licensed P.E. A year after the merger, the company was cited by the state board as employing non-engineers w/ engineering titles and as part of the penalty/settlement was forced to change the job titles of nearly everyone in my department (e.g, from applications engineer to technician level 3, or from engineering team manager to technical team manager). I remember one of the newly minted technician level 3s disagreed with this decision and stupidly quit in protest.

About a year later, the state changed the rules slightly where we were allowed to be called application engineers again (because apparently a large electronics industry employer based in the state convinced the state board it was generally known that mere applications-engineers weren't allowed to sign-off on actual designs). Of course, for a job title that was say a lead engineer, or principal engineer or a partner engineer, I think many of those still require being P.E. Licensed.

If it turns out we need astrophysical levels of dark energy to initiate such an experiment, maybe you'll forgive me if I take a few steps back...

FWIW: Sandor Herz (aka John Hertz) wasn't born until 1879, but he was friends with Edward Teller (Mr H-bomb) and funded lots of research (mostly defense related). BTW, Sandor didn't invent the rental car idea that bears his name, but he did found the yellow-cab company...

Here is one of Sandor's most popular quotes...

Although your theory is neat and clean, the reality is probably different.

When things get too neat and clean, there are diminishing returns. Sciences stagnate under reduced funding, industries consolidate which cause trade secrets proliferate reducing the velocity of discoveries. When the situation is less ordered in the world (say after a war), the pace of discovery during rebuilding is greatly advanced.

Sometimes a tear down of some old stuff to make room for the latest shiny stuff. Thinking of a non-eventful plateau period waiting for some new Einstein to be born is a very sanitized way to think about it. Sometimes it takes a rebirth after a major world war.

Ironically (or perhaps fortunately), this reality isn't likely to be an efficient way to stimulate a renaissance in discoveries (as the net cost of wars generally put the whole thing in the red due to the effects captured in the parable/fallacy of the broken window).

Maybe it means we are often simply a complacent species that perhaps needs to be kicked in butt occasionally...
Or, maybe it just means that comparing the rate at two isolated points in history isn't the best measure of the pace progress.

Then again, excluding folks that like to draw graphs that linear extrapolate to the right in a hockey stick and have never heard of a double logistic function, there might be some other ways for statistical experts to interpret this data...

Actually, in the current US economy, it would be more like offering incentives to women to get into the fracking industry... (don't read that f-word wrong)

FWIW, the idea of group/collective guilt (bullshit or not) is not simply a mantra of a victim lobby or a group of rabid Tumblr feminazis, it is likely simply just a higher degree of expression of a generic sociological/psychological human behavior.

Interestingly people with the lowest degrees of expression of these types of human behavior tends to suggest those people might be borderline psychopaths that don't feel any empathy at all or perhaps exhibiting behavior associated with repression and/or projection (e.g., blame the victims).

As with most things in life, a happy medium...

I wonder if they are effectively taking advantage of the the current concentration of dissolved CO2 to operate efficiently (e.g, if we hadn't burned up all those hydrocarbons and acidified the ocean), or are there enough natural CO2 to extract to make this a worthwhile endeavor?

Although I'm not old enough to have had an application that asked if I was ever a member of a communist party, a colleague of mine is old enough and once when I was over at his house, he showed me the carbon-copy of such an application he filled out...

Oh yeah, that was an application for a US government civil service job (not military, or top-secret), although he told me that was a common question on many Job applications of the day (he said the grocery packer job he applied for had the same question, although he didn't have any actual proof of that in hand).