Are you sure? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

No, it's actually somewhat true, but that doesn't mean any of those doors are necessary desirable destinations, or that getting less than A's in a class is a barrier to any actual measures of success (e.g., happiness, status, high-paying job, etc), or the opportunity cost of working towards that A results in a overall better life.

Of course, although there are very few consequence for lower GPAs in early schools, there are actual consequences for a pattern of mediocre grades as you advance in schooling (putting students in "tracks" is nearly inevitable regardless of your schooling options) which does pin you into certain corners of future outcomes.

At least in the USA, it's possible (and perhaps even not uncommon) to break out of the consequences of "tracks", however, in many countries in the world, it's nearly impossible to do so, so it is not exactly a "myth".

We'd like to think there should always be a second chance at a door, but often in life there are usually not. However, most of the time, there are often many alternatives, some of which may be even better than the original choice, but this isn't the same as a second chance at a door, and you need to learn to identify these situations and catch that door before it closes, if it's something you really want. If you need to teach your kid anything, that's probably the thing to teach them.

Similarly, the opportunity cost of working for something as abstract as all A's, might be too high a cost to pay relative to other uses of someone's time (say spending the time learning/practicing some valuable "hobby" that would be valuable in the future, or on interpersonal relationships). As someone who used to spend time working with college admissions officers, I'd say this is the unspoken reality of the college application game that parents often fail to understand: A's can only get you so far...

No, we are either creating our personal slaves, or our new masters (or both, but over time)...
In either case, the misery we are bringing forth is probably our own...

Once mechanical machine marvels were our slaves, then in the industrial revolution, in some ways, they became masters of those workers on the assembly line and made many lives miserable along the way...

Electronic computers also started out as our slaves, but sometimes we are the slaves to our electronic creations and/or in the process of making some computer workers lives more miserable along the way...

There's no reason to believe AI will be much different. Although it will likely enables many achievements, it will also no doubt make some lives more miserable along the way to a potential post-blue-collar (workers replaced by machines run by computers), post-white-collar (workers replaced by computers run by AI), economy...

OR, perhaps we use the same method but look at the data a different way (e.g., like a turbo code uses the same basic error correction code technology, but permutes the input data)... I suspect the brain does something similar to this, but I have no evidence...

Not exactly ;^)

Th232 + neutron -> Th233 (which isn't as stable stable)

Then two stages of beta- decay

Th233 -> Pa233 + electron + anti-neutrino
Pa233 -> U233 + electron + anti-neutrino

The problem is with U232 production is because all of these intermediate products are also fissile in the reactor (e.g., can interact w/ stray fast neutrons and undergo extra neutron decay before undergoing beta- decay resulting in U232 instead of U233).

However, the issue isn't that U232 is so unstable it decays with products that emit large amounts of gamma radiation (which in the decay chain, Tl208 is a big gamma emitter so it's really dangerous), it's mostly that you can't use chemistry to separate U232 from U233 (since only the mass is different, not the valence electrons). You either have to use advanced techniques (e.g, laser isotope separation), or modify your reactor parameters so that U232 production is reduced.

The ironic thing is that purported proliferation resistance of U233 is because reactors can be deliberately tweaked to increase the concentration of U232 to denature the U233. However, as I understand it, there is no particular technical reason to do this other than proliferation resistance (except to make it more dangerous to potential nuclear power plant workers as if that was a goal). If a rogue country wanted to operate a Th reactor to create large amounts of U233 w/o a limited amount U232 contamination, apparently it's not that hard to do (basically replacing the fuel more frequent schedule than normal, since most of the U232 yield comes at the end of the fuel cycle where there are more high energy neutrons bouncing around)...

If your goal is to simply produce a bomb, (not necessarily a large one with optimal yield), apparently India detonated an experimental U233 bomb as part of their Pokhran-II tests back in 1998... I don't think that bomb was a fizzle...

Caltech the post-doc world (which is portrayed in TBBT) and Caltech the under-grad world (which is portrayed in RG) are actually quite different worlds that exist mostly under the same roofs (except for the UG houses which are apparently a world upon themselves).

I haven't noticed them making many references to Caltech in TBBT, but when they do it's not totally out of line with what I remember about interacting with post-docs at Tech (nobody calls it the Institute), but of course it usually isn't quite right. I'm guessing that is probably due to one of the script writers Eric Kaplan who did not go to Caltech, but Harvard as a grad turkey, not a post-doc...

I used to eat this type of candy when I was a kid. The wrapper was not so delicious, but it was mildly sweet and added a slight "gummy" candy experience when you got saliva over it, so most kids actually WANTED to eat it (not that it was the most sanitary thing to do).

FWIW, it was not unlike the edible rice paper that many folks use to keep macaroons from sticking to a baking sheet or that cake decorators use in conjunction with printers for edible paper...

Of course rice paper isn't remotely water proof, but now days industrial food chemistry technology is much more advanced and capable of simulating many tasty treats, so at least the taste aspect is certainly within the realm of possibility...

Although states are not allowed to regulate interstate commerce, this is not the specific issue in this case.

A person living in NJ can buy a Tesla (purchased on the internet and shipped from out of state), because that is interstate commerce issue and NJ regulations are trumped by federal interstate commerce regulations.

A non-independent automotive dealer in NJ cannot sell a Tesla to a person living in NJ, because that is not addressed by current federal regulations and now against NJ state regulations.

However, the FTC has some jurisdiction in this area if they can prove that it is anticompetitive. Unfortunately the current supreme court rulings on this topic (e.g., wine, contact lenses) really only cover internet sales (e.g., what Tesla is doing now), not forcing states to license brick/mortar business to sell products in their jurisdiction.

For instance, the 18 states that require some form of state-owned liquor stores or wholesalers, aren't required to let say Jack Daniels open up a company store in a mall to sell their product in their jurisdiction. That would likely take another supreme court ruling and I don't see that coming any time soon given the magnitude of such a ruling.

Apple wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember the Altair and IMSAI?
Windows wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember Kildall's Digital Research CPM/86 and IBM/Microsoft OS/2 collaboration?

The real lesson? Let other do the pioneering market research for you. Then do it better and faster than they can...

Historically, first mover advantage often isn't what it's hyped up to be (ask CompuServe, AltaVista, Yahoo, MySpace, and AOL/Netscape)...

Nokia creates tablet.
Nokia destroys tablet.
M$ destroys Nokia.
M$ creates a tablet.
A tablet destroys M$.
Linux inherits the earth?

Yet, you don't get to choose a Apple laptop with an AMD instead of and Intel processor, a Samsung handheld computer with an A7 processor instead of a Exanos or Qualcomm. In life, things come in sub-optimal bundles and you pick your poison.

The problem is that we often only have a few choices even in a commodity market because of economies of scale. The economics of spending billions of dollars to develop high performances CPUs have dwindled the field to a majority player and a consolation player. Likewise, in the US, there aren't an excess political resources to fund billion dollar campaigns where only 1 person wins, so there is only about 1.1 political parties. When you scale things back you get more diversity, (e.g., local politics or SoC chips), but at the top of the food chain, it's not much freedom and not much service...

Imagine trillions of years from now on a planet far-far away, some technician named Vort assembling computer subroutines from a small number of libraries (known as the Legacy code) that dropped from a space probe billions of years before he was born.

Vort's creating "organic" software to get one of his jobs done, one that's just like Vort's ancestors created using these well-known components that always seemed to do the job. It's really expensive to assemble components this way because the Legacy codes are very inefficient, and you need to string together lots of calls to get all the requirements you need for the job, but it's known to be a sustainable process and even if nobody understands it, Legacy code doesn't have any "secret ingredients".

Back a few decades ago, Vort recalls there where two movements that tried to change the way code was assembled to get a job done:

One was to actually modify software to have it do what you wanted it to do, but the purveyors of this black magic were evil companies that wanted to keep these modifications to themselves and you could never be sure what type of modification they made or what side effects they had.

The other group was called the Open movement which wrote all new code free of the original Legacy libraries, but offered them to everyone so that they could see for themselves. Sadly although there were many experts among the Open group, normal users of open code did not have the expertise to validate the new code so it was just as mysterious as the Legacy code. Contrary to popular belief, the new open code has been used at most less than 10 years (meaning tested less than 25 years), the Legacy code has been tested for 1000's of years...

Nope, Vort, will continue to use the original Legacy code. None of that modified code for Vort, also, none of that open code created from scratch. Vort would continue to use Legacy code...

FTFY, you may be an OPEN code advocate, but you are a LEGACY food advocate, not an OPEN food advocate.

In a few localities, it is actually illegal** to call yourself an engineer or offer engineering services if you don't actually have a PE license (akin to practicing medicine or law w/o a license even if you graduated from medical or law school).

However, the odds are you probably don't live in one of the few remaining localities that have these restrictions on the use of "engineer" in a job title, but you should be aware that in most localities, simply by practicing engineering often puts you under the jurisdiction of the local board and local/state boards usually have some rules for people that are "exempt" from licensing, but able to practice the profession. Therefore, even if you are not required to be licensed, you might have some professional responsibilities, you may simply be ignorant of what they are (and ignorance of the law is generally not a valid excuse in a court of law).

**About 20 years ago, I was working for a company that was bought by another company headquartered in another state where it was illegal to have the word "engineer" in a job title w/o that person being a licensed P.E. A year after the merger, the company was cited by the state board as employing non-engineers w/ engineering titles and as part of the penalty/settlement was forced to change the job titles of nearly everyone in my department (e.g, from applications engineer to technician level 3, or from engineering team manager to technical team manager). I remember one of the newly minted technician level 3s disagreed with this decision and stupidly quit in protest.

About a year later, the state changed the rules slightly where we were allowed to be called application engineers again (because apparently a large electronics industry employer based in the state convinced the state board it was generally known that mere applications-engineers weren't allowed to sign-off on actual designs). Of course, for a job title that was say a lead engineer, or principal engineer or a partner engineer, I think many of those still require being P.E. Licensed.

If it turns out we need astrophysical levels of dark energy to initiate such an experiment, maybe you'll forgive me if I take a few steps back...

FWIW: Sandor Herz (aka John Hertz) wasn't born until 1879, but he was friends with Edward Teller (Mr H-bomb) and funded lots of research (mostly defense related). BTW, Sandor didn't invent the rental car idea that bears his name, but he did found the yellow-cab company...

Here is one of Sandor's most popular quotes...