As others have pointed out, octave runs (mostly) unmodified matlab code. Scilab doesn't. However scilab is just close enough to matlab to be really annoying if you are used to matlab. I think that is really why octave is more popular than scilab (probably doesn't have anything to do with scilab being more French but who knows.) Don't want to pay $$$$ for matlab? Install otave for free and do almost everything you would normally do with matlab w/o relearning much of anything. One thing about octave though is that the graphics aren't as nice as scilab and aren't nearly as nice as matlab. I am not to excited about the gui (even use the cli on the latest version of matlab) but hopefully this new version will make the graphics in octave more in line with the other packages.

Scientific data by themselves are probably useless. So we have a bunch of numbers. What was the setup of the experiment that generated those numbers? What exactly was the instrument, what are the units of measurement? Did you make any major modifications to the instrument? How was it calibrated? Where is your control? Are those numbers from a good test or a test where someone spilled coffe on the sample? Was that data taken during one of the trials where you left the lens cap on? Reminds me of a bad sci fi movie. That disk has random "scientific data" on it. Any "scientist" should be able to read it and instantly see what is going on here.

Your notes and documentation are probably more important than just the numbers you collect and those are often still stored on lab notebooks. You know what is really important? The journal articles and papers that you write that show all your methods and have pretty pictures showing your good data. A lot of those are still on paper so they aren't going away. So we are loosing a lot of random numbers from obsolete equipment from setups that no one remembers anymore. I am not going to loose sleep over it assuming we still have backups of the papers people published that talked about their setups and outlined their final results.

Also people take absorption and emissivity measurements of the atmosphere in the long and mid wave IR all of the time. If this molecule really contributed that much I would think someone else would have noticed it by now. Also doesn't sound like this is new. I would have thought someone would have already mapped the vibrational and rotational energy levels of this molecule by now. I guess they are the first ones to just put two and two together and say that if the concentrations got really big then this would be a big deal. But like you said there are a lot of molecules that would be a big deal if their concentrations got big. Water, having an odd mickey mouse shape, has a lot more absorption lines through the IR than co2 does. But the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is highly variable.

It can cost up to $1-6 billion for car companies to come up with a new model ( http://translogic.aolautos.com/2010/07/27/why-does-it-cost-so-much-for-automakers-to-develop-new-models/ ) and that is what it costs if you are already a car company and are already making similar cars. If you are a company that has never made a car before then it will cost even more. A lot of foreign car companies only got started because they had help from their governments.

Two things to keep in mind: entering into a new market is not always as easy as opening a lenonade stand, and Ayn Rand novels are shelved under fiction for a reason.

In later episodes they already established that some daleks survived. Besides you can't kill off all the daleks. It wouldn't be Doctor Who w/o Daleks! There are some episodes you can think about afterward. However, like most sci fi it is probably better if you just sit enjoy and realize that it is still better than most of what is on tv -- try not to think too much about it afterwards!

So does this mean that John Hurt is the nineth doctor and Christopher Eccleston is the tenth? Or is John Hurt the 12 doctor? Does it go by when they were introduced on the show or by the Doctor's age? Or is John Hurt not getting counted? Paul McGann was in only one episode and he counts. Actually we never saw Paul McGann turn into John Hurt and we really didn't see John Hurt turn into Christopher Eccleston (he was turning into another doctor but I guess they couldn't get Christopher Eccleston to do a cameo) so in the future could they just keep pulling out more and more past doctors? The nerd in me wants to know!

This is going to be a self made tragedy.

How many times have people gone to the doctor for a cold but the doctor gave them antibiotics almost as a placebo. How many times have people not used the entire bottle of antibiotics? Some ranchers give antibiotics to their live stock as a matter of course so that they can get fatter faster.

Then of course after the Ronald Reagan/Margret Thatcher revolution everything has to be about profits. Well there isn't much profit in antibiotics. If you have a really good antibiotic then the medical comunity will be likely not to perscribe it. They would want to save it for the really nasty bugs. Even if it is perscribed a lot people will only get one bottle and then stop taking it after their infection goes away. The drug industry would rather come up with something like statins; that is something they can put rich people on for the rest of their lives (I am sure there are some in the industry that would rather keep giving out statins than to cure heart disease.) Don't even get me started on creationsits' heads exploding because their bacterial infections are actually evolving.

We already have kids basically getting killed off because they picked their scabs on a minor cut and then got the wrong type of bug. Before antibiotics any little cut was a possible death sentence. Looks like if something isn't done (and I am not holding my breath) we are going to get back there sooner rather than later.

In the US, jocks pay attention to sports while geeks pay attention to math. In the UK, jocks pay attention to sport while geeks pay attention to maths. Clearly at some point in the past US jocks beat up the geeks at took their "s."

Is this intended to be a joke?

Apple doesn't make processors. These days macs use intel chips. Back in the day they used to use powerpc chips made by motorola and IBM. If you go into the way-way back machine they once used m68k chips from motorola. On the iphone and such they just use ARM cpus. Then if you go all the way back to the days when Woz was making computers in his garage you will see that they used MOS 6502 chips. But they have never really been in the cpu industry.

Movie theaters closing because they can't afford to upgrade? Same thing happened when talkies started coming out. In the silent era all you needed was a dark room and a projector -- maybe a piano player. You could practically set up a movie theater in a big living room (assuming you could afford the projector.) But suddenly you needed an expensive sound system wired into the building. Many local theaters went out of business. There were also a lot of stars that could no longer get work. A big all American looking guy might work out great in the silent era. But when everyone figured out that he had a high squeaky voice and a foreign accent suddenly he just wasn't so popular.

Every good junk scientist knows that correlation always equals causality. I am a member of the junk scientists world club. We meet every year. Everyone flys to the west to get to our meeting so that no one will end up flying off the end of the earth. Correlation equals causality is thesis of every speach. So it can't be that people addicted to coffee might be more likely to be addicted to something else as well. If coffee is correlated to death then coffee must cause death!

There is some sugar in fruits. So there was likely a time when having seasonal fruit taste good was a good thing. However having tons of cheap refined white sugar around all year round is relatively new. Most antique sugar cabinets have locks on them. That is because sugar was rather expensive and the head of the house would only break it out for holidays and such. Of course now we get most of our sugar from high fructose corn syrup which wasn't even food before the 1970's.

I wouldn't say most of the cells in your body depend on sugar, but some need it. However we do not need to have blood sugar levels as high as most of the pre-diabetic people running around living off of the high sugar typical western diet. And in fact ketogenic diets (diets low in sugar and carbohydrates) do show promise in protecting against some forms of cancer.

I don't agree. Sugary, at least dietary sugar, isn't needed by your body at all. Your body can convert fat to ketones which most cells can use instead of sugar. Your brain and other organs might need some sugar but your body can convert protien into sugar if it really needs to. So in conclusion:

If you do not eat any protien, you die.
If you don't eat any fat then you don't get any fat soluble vitamns or essential omega 3 fatty acids, and you die (its called rabbit starvation.)
If you don't eat any sugar (and restrict carbohydrates because your body will always convert carbs to sugars) then lets see. Um well your breath might smell of ketones. Umm well you might have trouble going to the bathroom since fiber is technically a carbohydrate (might want to still eat high fiber low carb veggies to prevernt that.) Other than that honestly most people just loose weight, lower their blood pressure and cholesterol, and generally feel better. Personally I lost ~50 lbs. Just saying.

Otto Heinrich Warburg won a nobel prize in the 30's for proving that cancer cells only eat sugar. So you might want to add that to your list as well.