If memory serves, you got your SB at MIT in 1973. Is there anyone else in the class of 1973 whose work you respect? Or anyone who was on campus at the time, student/faculty/staff?

Given the change to standard time it was easy to be at the polling place half an hour before it opened. I was seventh in line. When the poll opened there were about fifty in line. I had checked that everything was OK with my March 2012 registration change in early September so I didn't have any trouble, unlike the earlier commenters. Why the legislature thinks reciting a name and address out loud is a fraud deterrent I'll never know.

I haven't been to an Applied Superconductivity Conference for a decade, but at that time people were beginning to sell racks of very narrow band receivers for cell systems with high temperature superconductors allowing a narrower bandwidth than anything one can do at room temperature. Sterling refrigerators at 80K. One was able to increase channel density about a factor of three. I don't think this technology has made it to consumer electronics yet. Or will.

This is a hypothesis based on peripheral involvement with analog and digital RF at 0.5 and 1.5 GHz for twenty years.

AFAIK, the output stage of anything broadcasting above about 2 GHz has to be analog, with the lower frequency signal mixed into a carrier at the higher frequency. Digital synthesizers and chips which can deal with 1.5 GHz directly are still very expensive and are unlikely to be used in the consumer routers. So the final output stage is likely an analog RF transistor.

Analog transistors change characteristics with age at elevated temperature, where elevated is anything over 20C. Implanted ions diffuse with time and temperature, changing junction characteristics. The small structures required by high frequencies are more sensitive to such things.

http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/newberymedal/newberyhonors/1994newberymedal

I wonder if the MP would ban the 1994 Newbery Medal winner about a twelve year old selected as his society's scapegoat and abused as such.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/

Sentry Risk Table

The following table lists potential future Earth impact events that the JPL Sentry System has detected based on currently available observations. Click on the object designation to go to a page with full details on that object.

Sentry is a highly automated collision monitoring system that continually scans the most current asteroid catalog for possibilities of future impact with Earth over the next 100 years. Whenever a potential impact is detected it will be analyzed and the results immediately published here, except in unusual cases where an IAU Technical Review is underway.

The budget for human space flight is more than thrice that for science. NASA is going to spend over $20B on the "new" SLS system for two launches through 2020. NASA must withdraw from two joint Mars missions with ESA because its science budget is being cut $300M and the Webb telescope went over budget. The fact that Webb went over budget because Congress didn't provide timely funding is rarely mentioned; Congress simply blames the agency.

Killed by Newt Gingrich in 1995.

From the press release: "The new factory has design capacity of more than 1 GWh"

I agree whole-heartedly. I've been using JMP since version 2.0. Great for exploratory data analysis. SAS differentiates it from SAS proper by limiting the data sets it can deal with to RAM, but with 4GB of RAM common these days that's not likely to be an impediment.

Almost twenty years ago I compared the sort routine in JMP to Excel's. 30K rows, 28 columns, sort on 3 columns. JMP took about 1% of the clock time Excel did.

Academic pricing is pretty good.

http://www.scotusblog.com/2011/09/the-new-dawn-of-nonclass-aggregation/ discusses class actions in light of the Walmart vs Dukes Supreme Court decision of the last term. If I am reading it correctly (IANAL) the author suggests that class action will be essentially impossible under a series of court and legislative decisions taken in the last two decades. Perhaps Google should ask to have the Authors Guild decertified.

The new dawn of nonclass aggregation

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, of the University of Georgia School of Law, examines the difficulties of class certification after Wal-Mart and Concepcion and concludes that the decisions may ultimately pose broader questions about procedural justice and institutional legitimacy.

The JLab FEL has three segments: an photocathode raised 350kV and now 500kV from ground, a pair of superconducting (SC) cavities that take the low energy beam to ~8 MeV/c, and a small linear accelerator with 24 SC cavities which takes it to 80-140 MeV/c. Laser is pulsed at 75 MHz to photocathode. The efficiency of conversion of energy from electron to light is highly dependent on the electron bunch shape. It's easier to get a good bunch if you start at 500 kV than at 350 kV.

Frequency of the output light is determined by the electron energy and the undulator magnetic field.

Mirrors are cryogenicly cooled and large.

Outcoupling is via a hole in one mirror. It can be as high as 10% in the IR laser. I don't know the UV number.

If electron beam quality is high enough one can do without mirrors. The LCLS at SLAC is an x-ray FEL which does this. Search for SASE FEL for more info.

The JLab FEL uses SC cavities because this allows the recovery of most of the energy of the "spent" electron beam after the lasing section, increasing wall plug efficiency, i.e., light/(power in) roughly a factor of ten. The Navy likes this.

Cornell has a proposal to NSF to build a light source using an energy recovered linac, ERL.

The 28 who sued were long time JPL employees, some with over thirty years service. Since JPL does no classified research they thought the government was over-reaching in requiring they allow open-ended investigations into their backgrounds. The SC disagreed.

The astroengine article has a graph from the Jenkins 2008 paper http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283

The graph shows variations of order 0.1%. A +-3% seasonal change in orbital radius would give a 6% change in R^2 so the effect is about 1/30 of the effect of the radius change. A change in radius to 1.6 AU should cause a drop to 40% of "solar particle" flux hence about 1.3% change in radioactive heat and thus RTG output, or about 10W. The power output measurement appears to have sufficient precision to show such a drop. Cooper does a much better job than I have with these back of the envelope estimates.

Coopers paper is http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4248

Definitely a puzzle nuclear physicists should be looking at.