I think that's a reasonable approach. We can never have perfection, but we can strive to avoid mistakes, and one way is through requiring better evidence, as you called it "beyond doubt". What standards would you suggest?

Yep. A physicist trying to explain a balanced line to other physicists, without knowing the word for it.

Haldane would be spinning in his grave.

If the end of the coil that is hanging is grounded (earthed), it becomes an autotransformer. As it's shown, it's a variable inductor and the disconnected end is irrelevant and has no meaningful physical effect at the frequency a spark transmitter could have reached.

This comment seems to get closer to what they actually mean in their scientific paper. But the article about it is garble and the paper might suffer from second-language issues, and a lack of familiarity with the terms used in RF engineering.

Sorry, I was being sarcastic. I happen have built more than one counterpoise.

The point they're missing is grounding of the "asymmetric" half of the antenna, and that's to keep a static charge from building in the antenna that'll zap through your electronics (or you) for safety reasons.

Sometimes. But you're missing what a Counterpoise does.

Ah, I missed the Sweden reference, thanks. Too much stuff to read this morning and I'm skimming at best.

Damn, I wish I would have patented that and all its quantum magic...

I noticed that my vertical transmitting antenna often works better if I connect a horizontal wire about the same length as the antenna to ground at its base! The wire isn't connected to the transmitting side of the circuit at all! And how well it works varies depending on the length! Obviously there is some deus ex machina at work here...

Clearly you missed the bit where they invoked quantum mechanics, surely that explains away all the inaccuracies, like the fact you can already buy chip scale dielectric antennas

The thing that I really hate about Innovation Stories is that the reporter invariably doesn't understand what's going on, and invariably is easily convinced that The Obviiously Very Technical People have some very valuable invention.

Marconi's connection to the center tap of a coil with one end not connected worked by broken symmetry? Really? It wasn't just a method of tuning a coil to the correct reactance for a particular frequency?

I'm not against the death penalty; I'm against making irreparable mistakes.

There's a way to prevent gung-ho justice: if judgment is later found to be in error, visit the same penalty on those who condemned. Tho I vaguely recall this principle comes from Sharia law, and if so it doesn't seem to limit behavior much in Real Life.

I don't know the case -- was it an American elk or a moose? Cuz both are dangerous under the wrong circumstances, but moose far more so.

Blinking (along with spinning, whirring, and clattering) was mandatory for any computer in the 60s.

Not to mention looming.

How does heat affect the orbit?
if you break space junk up it continues on the same orbit.

And radiative momentum transfer can't exceed the momentum of the photons hitting it which won't be a lot or you'd also be pushing on the space station too.

try to imagine the internet without any reliable search engines and no paywalls. In this model all the information is free and out there and is either completely unusable or impossible to locate and no chance of a concensus on what information is the highest value.

If there is no added value why do people pay then? They could put their work up on Xarchiv or just post it on their own web site or submit it to many other journals. When it comes to other journals the model is either author pays or reader pays. Elsevier is reader pays. so called open content journals are author pays. There's even hybrid journals where if the author doesn't pay the reader must. For most journals there usually is also a page charge to the author no matter what.

Yet this people willingly submit their work to journals of both stripes.

The cost is what prevents a tragedy of the commons. Journals who have good names are desirable to be published in and also desirable to peer review for. This becomes a virtuous circle and tends in the long run to promote the best work worth my time to read. That's what I want. there's too much to read. I want some filter on the process. Some level of curation.

When publishing houses can enforce that with either model then cost of that is negligible compared to the resulting value.

Why is a paywall bad? I think it is a good thing for companies to provide services of value and get rewarded for it. I'm sad to see traditional publishers who pay for reporters and columnists be undermined by aggregators that leach content and don't do much. The problem is that google news drives what traffic these sites still get and they limp on that and the ad revenues it brings in, but the aggregators profit hansomely without incurring the costs of creating the content.

I'm happy to see that the Wall street journal bucked this trend and managed to find customers for it's pay wall and I'm sad the Ny times isn't succeeding as well.

I don't begrudge people their paywalls.

It's a long distance from things like internet.org and the alternative walled gardens of the internet with unreachable content that breaks the internet.