There are actually helmets designed to reduce the rotational forces though. For example, I remember my own university trumpeting one helmet design in which a kind of inner helmet was allowed to slide inside an outer helmet on a low-friction liner. Simulations demonstrated a reduction maximum strain forces on the brain. There's a presentation on it here by the company which now manufactures them: http://mipshelmet.com/how-it-works/the_invention and since it's a simple design I suspect that it will be a component of the helmet of the future.

However, honeycombs make excellent single-use shock absorbers, so those surely have a place in helmets as well.

Even if the site you link to were reasonable there is every reason to believe that helmets can be made truly excellent and made to give incredible protection both against shocks and rotational forces.

I prefer to compare it with the altitude record for sailplanes, which is 15445 meters (50,671 ft). Of course, pressure drops off exponentially with increase in altitude, but it's still not all that much higher.

It would depend on how quickly the two came up with the idea and how much thought it required.

For example, going to the different field of mathematics/theoretical computer science, no one would say that Cook's theorem was obvious, but despite this it was almost simultaneously proven in the West by Cook and in the Soviet Union by Levin. I think that the right way to judge obviousness is to have it done by the patent examiners, although it might be hard for them to be 'skilled in the art' when examining patents in very specialized fields.

While it's probably hard mathematics I do not think that finding a bunch of explicit solutions to such problems is likely to be all that novel.

While It might sound as if though it's a claim to have found an explicit formula for n-particle motion in every case, it's fairly clear that they're talking about particular cases. It also seems unlikely that he makes trivial errors given that he got a PhD from MSU.

Yes, and it's because it doesn't make sense that we immediately understand that it means something different.

When someone asks how cold it is answering with the temperature is a good answer, but that isn't really the precise answer to the question. It depends on context and when we aren't talking about heat engines and ratios of temperatures in Kelvin then we understand that that it's 'twice as cold as -10 C' means something like 'the rate of cooling of body at about 37 C in the present conditions is twice as high if were -10 C and there was no wind'. The only way to not come to such a conclusion when one thinks about it is to purposefully not understand.

I don't even believe that this is something that might risk causing misunderstandings about heat and temperature, because people usually have fairly good intuition about the cooling effect of the wind and arrive at this interpretation naturally as soon as they give it any thought.

The AC is making a serious error here and it almost seems as if though he imagines the US to be the entire world even weather-wise.

Meanwhile, here in Europe we have weather so unusually warm that it's almost unnatural. I live in Sweden and this time of year I can usually do such things as skate, ski cross country and engage other snow-requiring activities. However, today it's been six degrees Celsius and I'm seriously considering taking a short drive with the top down tomorrow provided that it's sunny.

This is of course kind of anecdotal but actual data (http://www.smhi.se/klimatdata/meteorologi/2.1353/showImg.php?par=tmpAvv) demonstrates the same thing. About five degrees warmer than the normal temperatures and probably much warmer during the warmest part of the day.

Well, I imagine that the total chilling effect on a human is doubled. Half the temperature reallly only makes physical sense in Kelvin though (i.e. "The hot end is at 600 K (326.85 C) and the cold end is 300 K (26.85 C), so the heat engine is at most 1-300/600=50% efficient").

It almost definitely isn't. I remember transforming plasmids with parts for tetracycline resistance into bacteria in highschool and I can't imagine that this would be allowed if tetracycline were something that one would want to use as an antibiotic for humans.

Also, people have debt in dollars, which therefore have actual value, since people need it to pay interest and to eventually pay them back.

It seems that combatants are defined as those who participate directly. I modify my previous statement, replacing 'combatant' with 'member of the armed forces of a party to the conflict'.

I do not believe that this is obvious.

By assigning him a special status the army does effectively incorporate him as a, possibly unarmed, auxiliarly. Not every combatant participates by directly participating in hostilities. Logistic support troops are a common thing after all.

Sorry, Lembke had an improvement of todays magnetic bearings, not today's magnetic gears.

It would be good if it weren't true that patents were something for the small inventor.

Among novel machines I've looked at recently, there one was invented by a university professor, Kais Atallah (whose invention was a type of magnetic gear, to which he obtained a patent, which got the whole thing funded), Torbjörn Lembke, whose invention was a magnetic bearing, who worked in industry, had an idea for an improvement of today's magnetic gears, wrote a PhD dissertation about it, patented it before publishing and is currently manufacturing it.

You might not call these real garage inventors, but I have a last example. Glenn Thompson, an Australian programmer, who, after what must have been quite careful thought, found a way to make a new kind of constant velocity joint (now called a Thompson Coupling). He patented this, having gotten the patent, got investors and has now, have now, having gotten funded, been manufacturing and selling these joints for some years.

If it weren't for patents these people would likely have obtained minimal reward for their work. If you have an invention, patents do protect it. You might say that they if they were "real small inventors" wouldn't have money to sue, but I imagine that such even a small inventor, with no money and only a good patent, would even in America, be able to take his case to court and win with enough probability to deter patent infringment. At worst such an inventor might be forced to find a lawyer to take his case on contingency.

Usually when one talks about civilians the warfare is such that civilians are clearly defined class, but if during a sustained occupation civilians from one side are granted particular rights, they do in some way become part of the occupying army even if they do not wear uniforms or carry weapons

Surely, for example, a farmer placed by the German army in Poland during the Second World War while a Polish farmer was displaced could not in any meaningful sense be counted as a civilian, due to the particular status he is given by the occupying army. One could think of him as a soldier, only with the somewhat curious rank 'farmer'.

They're certainly not environmentalists and while they are clearly arguing for the wrong reasons there are excellent environmental reasons to mix in ethanol in automobile fuel.

Specifically, the efficiency of a heat engine increases with the hot temperature (which increases with compression ratio). In piston engines this is limited by knocking, which in can be prevented by mixing in various things, some of the horrible or hard to produce, and among these ethanol seems a fairly good choice, it being available in volume and being generally harmless.