Folks on the autism spectrum may well be better at testing than folks who aren't.

But they may also find the repetitive or tedious parts of testing less painful than folks who aren't.

I know software testing is a big field, encompassing a wide range of activities, and that every job has its monotonous and unrewarding parts. But, from what I've seen -- working with SW development, working with testers, working with kids (and maybe some adults) on the spectrum -- the things that "most of us" find monotonous and tedious are frequently rewarding and reassuring for them.

To the extent that this is true, it's a terrific win/win/win scenario. Companies get people particularly well-suited for the job. People well-suited for the job get work that they enjoy. People not well-suited for the job don't have to stick with drudgery because "nobody likes to do it but somebody has to".

Passively cooling an object below ambient temperature seems... counterintuitive. I think I understand what's going on here, but I'd like to see some more thorough discussion. Particularly, I'd like to know how you can find any passband in which an object at ambient temperature radiates more heat than it takes in from direct solar exposure, except the bands blocked by the atmosphere.

That's an interesting claim, but entirely fictional, as far as I can tell. I followed the story closely at the time, and in the end, every report I saw put the blame on a defective Perkin-Elmer null corrector assembly (reserving some blame for NASA's inadequate oversight of their development and testing processes).

Why are you trying to rewrite history?

I expected you to say that it HAS helped your general learning capacity, but you're implying that it hasn't. Could you please clarify or reinforce your point?

Perhaps. As you can surely tell, this is well outside my expertise.

Forgive my imprecise wording. Brain wiring is malleable, but there's a lot of built-in structure, especially around perception and language processing.

I'm remembering that it was controlled-vocabulary, but speaker-independent. I think it was trained on spoken digits -- a very small vocabulary. It's been a long time, and I may be misremembering even the most basic details. Still, it was impressive to hear it picking out numbers where all I could hear was noise.

I remember a demo out of IBM, I believe, for recognizing controlled vocabulary in high-noise environments. It handily OUT-performed humans -- listening to the test audio, you couldn't really be sure there was a human voice at all, but the software detected and interpreted the speech with high accuracy.

This demo would have been circa 2000. I can't help imagining that there's been more progress since then.

The proposed task, where the interference is correlated with the original sound, seems like fertile ground for superhuman performance again. The original signal gets replicated and redundantly presented. Our brains are hard-wired to be confused by that, but it seems like a well-designed speech-recognition system could take advantage of it.

Fifty THOUSAND dollars!

Okay, the two older sibling posts make sense to me. Thanks for helping me clear my mental fog.

Instead of comparing the cost of generation of solar power to the retail cost of power from other sources, shouldn't we compare it to the cost of generation from those other sources?

It would appear that this says a lot more about your thought processes than about anything OP actually wrote.

Think about how long it takes a meteor to descend through the atmosphere and decelerate to terminal velocity. It's a few seconds.

Now, think about how quickly metal or rock conducts heat, and how quickly heat dissipates into moving air or solid ground.

Nearly all the object's kinetic energy goes into compression heating of the atmosphere. Of what's left, nearly all goes into ablating the object's surface. When the object hits, its interior is still cold.

There, there.

...and they wouldn't stay that squished for very long. The explosive rebound of the comet's surface would vastly exceed its escape velocity. Or, to put it more succinctly, BOOM. Unless, of course, you can wrap it in a stasis field, or stabilize it with some other layer of handwavium...

Refrigeration is only one of numerous ways to do air conditioning. The important thing is modifying the air's properties (temperature and/or humidity) to better suit a target application.

In this case, the dinosaur had a sophisticated heat exchanger, one key component of air conditioning. But the "air conditioning" (warming the air) isn't the function they're emphasizing -- they're emphasizing the "chiller" function, where that air controllably cooled blood circulating to the brain.