During the winter I keep my home at 55 degF and don't even bother with sweaters or other outer wear unless I'm not active (e.g., watching TV). Given that it was -11 degF last night, it makes a big difference in the heating bill. But mostly it's what I prefer.

Yes, farmers today spend some time in modern farm equipment. But most of that is only during the few weeks of planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. The rest of the time it's still a very physical, demanding job. Try doing a major overhaul on a tractor or rounding up cattle for branding and vaccination if you think modern technology makes farming life easy.

But all the changes of modern agriculture happened too recently to have any evolutionary effect. Even with an ox or horse pulled plow, it still takes a great deal of strength to plow a field, and you walk just as far. Harvesting with sickles is still physically demanding. And at least 90% of people lived on farms until at least the middle of the 19th century.

The abstract says "Thus, the low trabecular density of the recent modern human skeleton evolved late in our evolutionary history, potentially resulting from increased sedentism and reliance on technological and cultural innovations."

The authors obviously know nothing about the history of agriculture. It wasn't until about 150 years ago that technology finally improved farming to the point where the dawn to dusk drudgery was reduced. Until then farmers easily walked as far as hunter-gatherers everyday, and probably butchered more animals (another task requiring great strength). Until the late 19th century almost everybody worked on a farm, so there wasn't nearly enough time for evolutionary changes to occur.

Oklahoma and Colorado share only a short border, and there are no major roads connecting them. What makes Oklahoma think Colorado is to blame for all its marijuana issues?

In the first generation of SMR drives there was no support for sector remapping and garbage collection in either the OS or the drives. Random write performance suffered a great deal as a result.

But the next generation of SMR drives will have an address translation layer similar SSDs which supports sector remapping and garbage collection. Much of the firmware will be adapted from what's in SSDs, but yeah, I'd be suspicious of first generation address translation firmware in SMR HDDs even though both WD and Seagate have worked on SSD firmware before and have experts in the technology.

The next generation of SMR drives will also have areas of non-SMR (lower density) tracks to support random writes without the read-modify-write penalty. A new ATA and SCSI command set is being worked out where the host can tell the drive which addresses will likely contain random write/read data, which will likely have sequential write/read data, etc. This will require cooperation from both the host and the drive to implement but should reduce the random write SMR penalty.

I'm sure you meant SMR, not PMR. PMR doesn't affect read or write times one way or another. But yes, SMR works a lot better for sequential writes than for random writes.

In the first generation of SMR, no garbage collection or sector remapping was done. The shingled tracks were separated into "bands" of a few tracks, and when a random write was done all the tracks in the band past that point had to be rewritten. These drives just bite the bullet on random write performance. Sector remapping and garbage collection are scheduled to be done in the next generation of SMR drives, I don't know if they're out yet.

Seek time is not the same thing as the time needed to actually read or write data. It's just the time needed to get the head to the track where the data resides. Once the head is there, the drive still has to read or write the data.

With these SMR drives, on writes there's the read-modify-write penalty of having to rewrite entire tracks, and this is not reflected in the seek times.

I have worked at both drive companies and large storage vendors and can back up everything you say. Among other things, drives for storage arrays often have larger RAM caches and have special vibration sensors because large arrays of drives produce unique vibrations.

And yes, large customers often get special attention from drive companies. They get samples long before everybody else. While part of it is to keep large customers happy, it's also because these customers spend the time and money on doing a lot of testing, which as you say includes environmental as well as reliability and performance. Large customers have staff experts in drive testing and can often pinpoint exactly what caused a problem, something retail consumers can seldom do. For these reasons it's worth it for drive companies to give large customers special treatment.

No, every drive company goes through models that are worse than others. You look back 20 years and you'll find reports of bad WD, Seagate, IBM, and other drives. It doesn't mean the company is cashing in. Drives are extremely complex devices and the technology inside them is rapidly changing. That means one drive model may use new and radically different technology than a previous drive even though from the specs the capacity increased only a little. On top of that, different drive model families at the same company are done by different teams. Some teams are just better than others, and often upper management doesn't know there's a problem until a bad drive is released. There is a valid point to be made that at least Seagate should have tested these drives better before releasing them from manufacturing. The problem is that if they totally messed up, it's obvious from the beginning. Beyond that, things become dicier. Engineering samples are not made on the same production lines as released drives. A failure during manufacturing that wasn't present during development may not show up until a lot of drives are made. Companies do testing on manufactured models, but there's still pressure to push the drives out. If they cut corners on testing at this point, a bad model still gets released to the public. But when it happens it's seldom deliberate. When I worked at a drive company I saw releases that were delayed by months when it became obvious there was a late-stage problem.

Drives in USB enclosures do support SMART data reporting using a protocol called SAT which embeds ATA commands inside of SCSI commands over the USB interface, it's just that a lot of system software doesn't support that. I have one of these drives, and I agree they're complete crap (mine died after a year). But the SMART data does say the drive is very bad.

What the article didn't factor in is that new car sales are currently almost at pre-recession highs, and still growing (http://www.autoalliance.org/auto-marketplace/sales-data ). Cars that would have been purchased in 2009-2011 are being purchased now. Given that most cars are on the road for at least 10 years, you have to factor in that in the next decade we are going to have a younger, more efficient automobile fleet than we would have without the recession.

For their first few years, airplanes had no practical use. They couldn't fly far or very high, they were unreliable and hard to control, and they couldn't lift very much. Mostly they gathered crowds to watch and took people up on short joy rides. But this provided the foundation and impetus for further advancements.

Even if you could recharge a car in 5 minute, service stations would require massive upgrades in electrical capacity to do it. It's not something that could be done with standard 220V lines. For long distance trips on Interstates in the western US, you would have to run heavy duty electrical cables for dozens if not hundreds of miles.

"That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world." That one sentence at the end explains it all. English became dominant because the Americans and the British dominated science after WWI. German was the lead language before 1900 because that's when they dominated science. It didn't help that Hitler caused many of Germany's remaining best scientists to emigrate to America and Britain in the '30s.

There has always been a glut of postdocs. In the early '80s when I was thinking about getting a doctorate, the dismal job market in academia was a major reason I didn't. A friend of mine got a doctorate in botany and wound up at a backwater university in a city he never wanted to live in. The truth is that if you're a superstar, you'll find a job. Anybody who's just very good or excellent (and you really should be to consider getting a doctorate in the first place) is left scrambling.