4e18 seconds of thrust??? The halfway point is only 6e9 seconds out. That gives you 6e6 m/s delta-v. Still prohibitive, but if the journey is 6000 years you have exp(2e5/3e5) ~= 2.

Genetics and evolution are tied up together. Evolutionary theory has led to insights in genetics and vice versa. Any understanding based on genetics has evolutionary theory to thank as well.

Redundant? Who said this before me?

"a common calculation using spectral analysis and data compression" should read "a common calculation used in spectral analysis and data compression" instead.

My body is already a touch interface, baby.

I thought the title of the book might be "Fucking and Punching" but I guess not.

What about the mom? Giving birth to a frisbee must have hurt.

Let this post be a lesson. If a blind guy can spell perfectly on the Internet, so can the rest of you slobs!

It probably just means the spacetime metric has two positive terms and two negative terms. Instead of

ds^2 = dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2 - dt^2

you have

ds^2 = dx^2 + dy^2 - dt^2 - du^2

Can a real physicist speak to this?

Eliza: What makes you think what I've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things you have ever heard?

How about the stock exchange? People buy and sell all kinds of commodities there without ever using them.

Actually, we do it because it's haaaahhhd.

Dr. Kuchera-Morin is primarily an artist. She's truly interested in doing what she says in her TED talk, which is bringing all disciplines together to share knowledge, but she originally imagined the Allosphere as the ultimate multimedia theater. The artistic computer music community (especially the people in the MAT program, which she directs) are heavily into spatialization using a large number of loudspeakers and the Allosphere will facilitate such art presentations. If scientists can get some use out of it, all the better, but I sense (I really don't know) that she pitched the Allosphere to UCSB's world-renowned physics department in order to get funding. She's been talking about the Allosphere since the founding of the MAT program (1999 I think), and I still don't know how she did it.

Haha, yes, I fell for it. Would you believe the "I haven't had my coffee yet" defense?

Well, that's the end of that.