1. Although alcohol based hand sanitizers work reasonably well against germs (mostly viruses and a few types of bacteria), they generally need 15-30 seconds to do their job well enough. You generally don't touch a door handle that long, nor is it likely to glop enough on to your hands to meet that threshold.

2. Alcohol based hand sanitizers are highly flammable, glopping a flammable substance all over a door handle will not make OSHA your friend.

3. At the end of the day, the washcloth is likely just wet w/o the needed concentration of sanitizer which basically renders them a germ infestation hotspot.

FWIW, a more mainstream technique is to use special metal alloy door handles. Although they only work on bacteria, they are at least a known proven method ;^)

In case you haven't noticed, nowadays, in large public gathering spots they don't even put doors on the restrooms at all. In other cases, I often simply take an extra paper towel** and open the door handle with the paper towel and toss the towel in the trash (most restrooms helpfully put a paper towel receptacle near the door just for this purpose). I'll try to make do with this method until they get the Star-trek sliding pocket doors installed everywhere...

** Having travelled in Asia, I've gotten in the habit of always bring tissue paper with me when out and about **just-in-case** it is not available even when not abroad...

When programming Ruby, just wait until you try to figure out how to match the vertical bar block parameter delimiters in your editor...

In addition to being a science consultant, do the writers ask you to be a stand-in Caltech (culture) consultant?
If so, do you actually have an sub-consultant for that, or do you just base it on generic post-doc culture? (seems to be the latter, but I'm curious)

Don't know of such a writing, but perhaps he came up with a clever way to teach classical electrodynamics in a way that mirrors his electron-to-electron time-symmetric approach to QED (i.e., Wheeler/Feynman absorber theory). I mean in a way that is clever enough to think you might actually understand it w/o actually understanding it (which is sadly often a problem with Feynman lectures)... Path integrals and Feynman diagrams for classical electrodynamics? I shutter at the thought of that in sophomore-level physics...

Thermals. More CPUs generate more heat, more heat with the same thermal envelope means you can't run each CPU as fast. Of course in a different environment (say with a liquid nitrogen cooling rig vs an air cooled rig), you could probably clock those CPUs higher.

Just because you can put in more CPUs doesn't mean you should. It used to be the limiting engineering factors were area vs chip yield. Now days thermals are arguably the most important consideration because often you are limited both thermally (and sometimes even electrically) to the amount of power you can deliver to a square millimeter of a computer chip.

Better not tell Mongolia (e.g., Genghis Khan's relatives)...

Buuuttttt think about the Electric Universe Theorists? ;^)

Motivation to preserve? There's really no good motivation for preserving DNA other than historical preservation. Think of this like preserving the source code for apple //e prodos. The ecosystem which that source code was valuable has been long lost, probably never to come again. Newer source code that serves a similar ecological niche in the new eco-system will evolve and probably be better than it ever was.

Some people seem to be obsessed with a philosophy no different than modern day Noah's ark where we somehow survive a major calamity and reboot the past. However, when confronted with modern day evidence of the problems with mono-culture and invasive species which threaten to unbalance whole ecosystems, they somehow fail to see that these survivors of this modern day Noah's ark are likely the vehicles of the new mono-culture and invasive species of our own making. Are we so important that our historical status-quo existence (e.g., the foods we enjoy from our childhood and furry animals we like to watch) trumps the natural development of the ecosystem, or should we learn to adapt or perish as nearly all other species under the sun?

I don't think we ask these types of questions enough. Certainly we have done quite a bit of homo-forming of our planet (e.g., dams, farming, agriculture, mining, industry) over the millennia to get where we are today, but should attempting to recapture the past really be a goal? Or are we just introspectively thrashing ourselves with self-hate for currently/temporarily being at the top of the food chain of our planet? With great power comes great responsibility, but on the other hand is this chant the new "white-man's burden"?

I was not assigning fault or commenting on timescales or any coincidences, but pointing out this is likely spilled milk at this point.

Our species will need to adapt to survive, there is no going back to pre-industrial times (or even staying at 1990 carbon levels, as if that would have helped). These things eventually happen and we will need to deal with it eventually.

Note that a few methane plumes is not going to do anything on the timescales of my lifetime either (as many scientists have pointed out, this magnitude of methane plumes are likely to be eaten by bacteria before it gets into the atmosphere), but if large scale methane calthrate deposits (which these are not) were to actually to start a massive release at this point, there's not much we can do about it

Unless I'm mistaken, we really don't have much ability to control things on a geological level yet (and no blowing up all our thermonuclear arsenals to create nuclear winter does not qualify as control, it's basically an uncontrolled experiment). It may be premature to say that any efforts will likely be futile at this point because little is known about this phenomena in specific or climates in general, but it seems to me like we are at the mercy of our planet on this topic (as we always were)...

We really really really don't have a choice, do we?
Historically, this stuff just happens...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Not sneezing itself, but saying "bless you" when someone else sneezes will get you suspended, but shutter to think what would happen if someone said "god is great" when someone sneezed...

Knowing the right people basically requires being in the right place at the right time. For example, choosing one university over another and having your friends intersect with just the right set of people to land you a job. Or meeting a person who just happens to know someone else in a party you are introduced to giving you a tip about joining a startup. Taking the same exercise class at a gym and with someone that knows someone you do can do business with. Choosing to live in one apartment vs another and having a specific neighbor...

In a similar vein, during one conversation I had with my soon to be father-inlaw, he asked me if I could choose, would I be lucky or smart. I told him if I could choose, I would be lucky.

He was quite surprised by my answer, as he expected the typical Chinese answer of being smart (presumably so I could make more money). However, I told him if I could actually choose, smart people are merely a dime a dozen, but lucky people are far more rare if not completely statistically impossible and to choose that would be much more valuable...

After hearing my answer, I think he recognized the wisdom of this choice.

Let's see if...

Google writes the software for the car
Google writes (or pays someone else to write) the simulator
Google runs the test
Google reports the results

Seems like with simulations we would be somehow implicitly trusting google that their simulator sufficiently models reality vs only modeling what the self driving software expected...

Although simulation has its place to improve testability during training and development, how does this test against reality? The reason to test against reality is generally to cover the stuff that you *didn't* expect. It's generally quite easy to fool yourself (and others) that something is good enough if you remove this link back to reality...

Let's see here what we have here...

Okay that one has some science behind it...

Apparently they didn't get the news that apparently sunscreen doesn't help

For HepB sure, for HPV, the jury is still out as "Most infections with high-risk HPVs do not cause cancer. Many HPV infections go away on their own within 1 to 2 years. However, infections that last for many years increase a person’s risk of developing cancer..."

Like unprotected sex and sharing intravenous needles? Cancer is only a minor reason not do partake in these activities....

Actual screening for cancer has only been clinically shown to be effective for breast, lung, colon and cervical cancer. This doesn't actually prevent cancer, only increased the odds of catching it before it becomes serious.

For some people, they tend to strongly advocate these things because it is what they do anyhow. As for the science behind a list like this, the science somewhat vague. Other than stopping smoking and getting your vaccinations, (one reducing environmental exposure and the HepB issue), it's a mixed bag when it comes to science.

The whole thing about eating health is that we really don't know what the hell we are talking about yet. First it's low fat, then it's low sugar, then eating cholesterol is bad, then we find out there's only a minimal relationship to the cholesterol we eat, and then we find out that there's good and bad cholesterol and then it doesn't really show a strong correlation.... Then vitamins good, then vitamins bad... Exercise good, too much exercise bad...

Of course, the answer is not to eat cheeseburgers and not exercise, the take away is to don't take all this crap on the internet as gospel, and all things in moderation, right? ;^)