I would love to see what you could do with google glass targeted to technicians and engineers at a chemical plant. Set it up with augmented reality systems so that you can look at any pipe in the system and see the pressure, flow rate, concentrations etc. It would make it FAR easier and faster to keep an eye on equipment than we do now. It would also make it much easier for technicians to look around and see what equipment they are going to do to adjust soon.

Google glass needs some time to mature but there are many industrial applications for it.

I would love to have a self driving car. I HATE driving. Right now I live somewhere that i don't have to drive but once I move to somewhere where I do need to drive I definitely want to get a self driving car and affording it won't be a problem.

If they live in any first world country what they are doing is illegal. If they live in a country where it is not illegal that is what drones are for.

I am not saying we should use drones. It is definitely not ethical but it is a inevitable outcome. If you do a great deal of damage to powerful people and then try to avoid any punishment they will use other methods to get back at you.

I also doubt that any country is going to keep these people from the USA. The other first world countries won't and the third world countries cant.

IBM is also doing some of the most cutting edge nanoresearch in the world. At the rate they are going they could end up as something like a major biotech company. Some of their work on nanotech antibiotics is amazing. They have also pioneered a huge amount of technology with graphene.

Lots of scientists I know work in private offices when they are analyzing the data or doing other non-lab work.

Working with others on the actual lab work makes a lot of sense and that is how it is normally done (except in industry where it is slowly becoming more common to have the lab work automated.)

The ONLY issue I have with this is that the level they are testing for does not seem to be based on actual science. We should set a limit on what level of risk outside the norm of driving is no longer acceptable. We should then identify things that increase your risk beyond that point and measure for them. Alcohol, tobacco, texting, talking on phones etc should all be treated exactly the same way.

I don't care why you run a red light and kill someone. If you are high, drunk, texting, talking on a phone, shaving etc it only matters that you do it and the laws need to be based on that. Laws based on feelings and how much you think it impairs someone without any actual science involved are a waste of time and end up harming us all since it increases general contempt for laws.

On a large scale what you are describing is an arcology. We have the technology to build them and they would give a better quality of life at a tiny fraction of the cost that a city does while giving much better services. Mostly humans are pretty stupid and they refuse to change until forced. Humans have to be dragged into the future kicking and screaming the whole way.

What annoys me about McCabe-Theil diagrams is that they are not fundamentally the way the theory works for designing distillation systems. They are basically a way to solve problems using huge approximations before we had the computer power to do it correctly. I much prefer the rate models for distillation column design and think that mccabe-theil should be scrapped. HOWEVER, I think that students need to understand how that stuff truly works and since the algorithms are simple they should write a basic rate equation based solver for distillation column design. Then they would truly understand how the stuff really works and be better equipped to use it.

I just don't like the idea that you learn one method that is supposed to give you the idea of how things really work but then the actual systems you used are based on entirely different theories and assumptions.

One issue I can think of is there is selective pressure on viruses for them to become less lethal over time since killing the host is counter productive. You can't compare now to the past for death rates since as the virus spreads and mutate the pressure is to become less lethal.

If you want to compare the effectiveness of a drug on a virus you need to compare in the same population and random is really the only way to do it since you need to make sure that the mutations you are dealing with are in your test and control populations.

I wish we did not have to do it this way since a lot of people die as a result. I wish we knew more about how our bodies really worked so we did not have to do this. However we don't. We are learning quickly but we are not there yet. If we don't do random drug testing then more people will die in the end and the process will take far longer.

The number one investment you can make is in insulation. Most homes throw away over half of all the heat they generate or have to cool FAR too much because of heat let in during the summer. You should not even think of doing PV work until you have done the insulation work. Insulation pays back faster and does not have the same kinds of damage issues as PV does.

The second investment would be in more efficient devices. Most furnaces are fairly bad and most electric devices in the house are pretty bad. Why run your AC more in the summer because your refrigerator is doing more to create heat than it should?

PV is the last step I would take not the first. First insulate the hell out of the house, then make devices more efficient. Depending on climate an attic fan is a great investment to clear out the extremely hot air in the summer. PV mostly just looks flashy but that is about all it is.

I left on my own. I started to hate the physics degree i was working on and wanted to do something else.

I went to an instate school and applied for many grants and also ended up with some loans. Shortly after I started school my business partner died and I was left running a business by myself that I really had no idea how to run. I managed to be a full time student and keep the business running. The work I put in to do that was insane and I had no breaks beyond about 1 to 2 days in a row for 3 years.

I did not do ANY parties when I went back to school. I pretty much just studied, went to class and worked. I was just about at the poverty line income wise but I made it work by not spending money on many things that other people do like cable tv, expensive cell phone plans, eating out etc.

I also decided not to have a girl friend or get entangled in any social issues. My life as stressful enough without adding more. I was also smart in that I did not have any children.

So after doing all of that so far the financial rewards have been very low and I have another 4 to 6 years of very hard work ahead of me before I am done. My coworkers at the biotech company think that this will all pay off hugely once I am done and from everything I can see they are right but I have definitely worked hard and sacrificed for close to 10 years by the time I am done.

Well my professors do think I am the most likely person they have ever had as a student to be a mad engineer. So while you don't have to be insane to do what I do is certainly helps.

What I have done so far will save tens of thousands of lives ever year and the stuff I am working on now will save millions. However, I have not used conventional problem solving techniques. I combine engineering with computer programming in a way that seems natural to me but those I have worked with and my professors say is not remotely normal or natural but it does work.

The program I am starting in Germany so far seems unique in the world. The entire program is based on writing practical computer simulations for engineering applications. It seems like an obvious degree to exist but the skill set seems so insanely rare that it just does not happen. I am the only person doing this degree in biotech that I know of.

I don't believe that most people have zero chances.

During the senior design project most teams just slacked off and put in the minimal work required to get a grade. One of the companies I knew was currently hiring and in the exact field the project was in. If that team had done a good job they would have all gotten VERY nice job offers. Only one other team got offers at all and while it was not amazing it was a good offer and the team had done a very good job on their project. They saved a company that makes cheese about $10M a year just by optimizing the drying operation. It was not hard, it just took a fair bit of careful attention to details. All the math and engineering involved was stuff we could already easily do.

What I find is that life has countless opportunities but most people don't recognize that an opportunity is possible and they put no effort into doing well. If everything you do is minimum possible to get by why should someone go out of their way to hire you over anyone else that applies for the job?

I wish that we truly understood suicide so we could help these people.

There is a lot of stigma attached to suicide and that makes it hard to do a truly objective view of it. I don't like this whole blame the victim mentality that we have about it or saying we are better off without that person or that they are weak willed etc. I want to know the actual biochemistry of it, what neural structures are present that allow suicide to be done. What actually causes these structural and chemical changes? What can we do to help these people etc?

Overall I would say that just trying again tends to help.

My first time in college I did okay but not great. When I went back I was very focused. I knew what I wanted out of the degree and chose it for a very specific purpose. I chose all my classes to further my goals and I worked extremely hard on my classes instead of partying. That work has paid off to an insane degree.

I never intended to go to graduate school. However for my final undergrad project I solved a problem that was considered impossible in biotech using all the skills I had gained as a programmer and also a lot of very hard work. As a result I was asked to go to Germany for a Master's degree and PhD and have continued to work with the biotech company I did my project with.

I will admit that the 80 hour weeks during the project where not very fun or 60 or so hour weeks for the past 3 years with no breaks was not very fun either. However I had a very specific goal in mind and I knew what I was sacrificing for and now it looks like it will pay off better than I had ever imagined.

The world is just too interesting to kill yourself. Heck I want to make myself immortal so that once I am done learning on this planet I can head out and learn things elsewhere. If I could get nearly all engineering and science degrees I would.