I've had trouble sourcing TORX/TOTX parts lately. Can't find them in stock anywhere.

Define practical; it doesn't get much simpler than a weight on a servo. In contrast, how much torque can you get from a small compact flywheel and how much is it going to cost? How quickly can you regeneratively brake it with decent energy recovery?

(You might be interested in this control-moment gyro controlled ballbot.)

I guess it's American usage. We don't ever say "burgled" over here; it sounds funny.

Wow, that really takes the cake. I wonder how they get from switching power to cancer... Actually, I don't want to know.

The book definitely has no shortage of movie-worthy scenes, but it's gonna take a really good director to string it all together.

I don't think usage is as consistent as WP would imply. In pieces with key signatures with lots of flats or sharps, you tend to get naturals without parentheses because it would be too cluttered to put them in.

I am a Berkeley EECS graduate, and I don't think you understand how it works. The department is a single entity, the EECS Department. However the University offers two different _majors_ that lead to a CS degree, in different Colleges. I don't know why they do this, but for example, you generally cannot double major if you're in the College of Engineering, but you can if you're in L&S. So it only has a bearing on your advising and degree requirements.

I took single class in fusion from a cheerfully cynical professor some years back, so please bear with me. It's my understanding that we don't have a good understanding of particle transport in tokamaks, i.e. "anomalous transport". Is this still true? What are the difficulties, and what approaches are people working on right now?

Relatedly, do we really understand H-mode and other enhanced confinement modes? What are the challenges in achieving the "advanced modes"?

Papers/citations would be great, if that's not too much trouble. Thanks for your time.

From my own highlight list:

How much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life.
  --Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Andre Norton, the pen name of Alice Norton, wrote a whole bunch of sci-fi and fantasy books. I've only read the ones that are available for free on the Kindle store (so they're probably on Gutenberg) but I've been very impressed by the quality of the writing, considering the pulp-ish themes.

For example, there's a sequence of books, beginning with The Stars Are Ours!, that treats human colonization of space and contact with alien races. Another sequence, beginning with The Time Traders, considers time travel and advanced alien technology in a Cold War setting.

Broadcom keeps their datasheets so locked down that you have to sign an NDA to get anything, generally. This release comes as a bit of a surprise.

This is good news, but in retrospect, this seems backwards. If you want to grow an ecosystem, you need spec sheets. Did they choose Broadcom for the RPi design without any assurances that the datasheet would get opened up? Was this agreed upon from the beginning, and it's taken Broadcom this long to redact the datasheet? Or did Broadcom have a change of heart when they saw how popular the project became?

Uh, the magnetic fusion research budget has been falling from its peak in the 70s, at the height of the oil crisis. Take a look.

So why don't we have fusion? Because it's damned hard. We don't have the understanding and we don't have the materials. Every single fusion concept through history has turned out to have weaknesses, and most of them turn out to be fatal flaws from a power generation standpoint. The tokamak is our best bet, and that's after decades of research have turned up unstable regions of operation that have to be avoided.

If you knew the history of fusion, you'd be inclined to be skeptical about every new proposal. There are things about plasmas that we don't understand. Simulation is often intractable. Analysis from a physics standpoint is difficult and prone to wishful thinking. This is why people work on stuff that's been vetted, rather than risking their time on something that likely has a fatal flaw.

What the hell is this supposed to mean? The document seems like the standard FPGA boilerplate otherwise, great for showing to management.

I don't know a whole lot about this but I'm on the mailing list for a department that was in the process of migrating to Calmail. (My email goes through a different system so it hasn't affected me.) After a slew of messages this past week about Calmail problems, they've decided to cancel the migration for now. Apparently Calmail is going to the cloud in the future, so they're hoping the existing servers last until then.

IANALE either, but I'm willing to believe it. Even if you have the netlist, the entities in the netlist are logic gates, or composite logic elements. Unless you go through the standard cell library and count gates, you don't know exactly how many transistors there are per entity. I'm also willing to believe that standard cells don't come with transistor counts, because at the chip level you're laying out rectangles of diffusion/metal/polysilicon and nobody cares about the exact number of transistors; plus the distinction gets fuzzy when you parallel devices to increase current handling.