FWIW, this paper talks about doing this with light (in the context of micro-manipulation). Doesn't look like we will be using this for any star-ship sized objects in the near future...

The basic idea is that you use a light with a specific profile to stimulate the object you want to attract in a way that causes a scattering field such that there is a net force backward to the emitter (it only works if the amount of net forward momentum of the light is relatively small compared to the scattering).

The water stuff referenced by this article works on a completely different principle, though as described here.

They are similar in that they originate with a wave generator, also hitting the target at a glancing angle is a way to achieve the necessary conditions and both provide a net attractive force (aka tractor beam), but the physics is totally different.

In a commercial B747 (if you can find one still flying), where the cockpit would be on a single-decker plane, there is generally a passenger cabin with windows all the way to the nose (although no windows that face forward)... Although that used to be prime real-estate, it is generally relegated to economy-plus (business class and first class upstairs) as the market for premium seating has reduced...

FWIW, there's probably more to be gained by eliminating passenger windows like this Spike aerospace design, although I'd be interested to see how they get around the simulated parallax problem with their proposal...

Actually, much of the goals of ITER isn't so much to research fusion (as much of that was done in the earlier projects like the TFTR project @Princeton, similarly the like the attempts to make Thorium fission reactors like MSRE wasn't to research fission).

ITER is basically a big material science / engineering experiment to see if it is possible to build a plasma containment vessel that withstand the neutron flux and estimate how much it will be to decommission such a beast thing later (after it becomes totally radioactive). Of course there's always the net energy problem (since TFTR never got to net energy), but for tokomak type reactors, this is complicated by magnetic containment power efficiency (can't let that plasma touch the wall) and the diverter architecture (how you clean the plasma of fusion products w/o shutting off the reactor). I don't think ITER is doing too much new research in this area (apparently mostly borrowing from other efforts like MAST, JET, Alcatore, etc)...

With ITER, apparently they aren't making great progress on any of these problems. Sometimes you just have to put a project out of it's misery and start over with a clean slate. I think ITER may have reached that point. Unfortunately, that means the follow-on DEMO project (the attempt to scale the ITER reactor to per-commercial size instead of research size). But obviously, if you don't have something that works, you can't scale it and everything may be a bit premature...

Everyone uses the slippery slope argument in politics and the media... Even on /.

IMO, this whole fuss on Plan B is kind of a crock. It costs about $50 at a drug store (you can get it over the counter and buy it with a downloadable $10-off coupon) with a $35 generic available. Comparatively, a birth control pill runs anywhere from $10-$100 (but mostly commonly hovers around $20 and mail order saves you about $5) and generally requires a prescription to be covered in a health plan (because they will make you mail order it to save money).

Don't know how often people would need to fork over for plan B out-of-pocket in a year, but I think if a person needed emergency contraception more than a couple times a year (out of 12 months) seems like that person probably should be looking at some other form of birth control, maybe? Of course if someone else is paying for it and such a person didn't have a moral problem with it, maybe people don't really care (but people *should* care because currently existing emergency contraception has quite a few serious side effects for those under 25 or have a high BMI which described a large part of the userbase for these drugs, but of course that's not part of the marketing material and no prescription or consultation is required).

FWIW you can't get aspirin/acetaminophen, cold symptom relief, or acne medicine covered as an over the counter medicine as part of a health plan (unless you get a prescription), but because of politics, emergency contraception has a special carveout in this market. Of course the generics available outside the USA (e.g, I-pill) is only about $10 a dose (about the same price as "emergency" Nyquil or Sudafed which your insurance company won't cover). On the other hand, insurance companies would probably gladly cover it gratis (since it's cheaper than pre-natal/pregnancy for them) and they already have this exact legal carveout for non-profits, but it's more fun to raise a stink and energize the base (on both sides of the aisle)...

When you don't have an answer for the whereabouts of 90+% of the stuff your scientific theory calls for, call it dark and get some grant money to find it...

Money.

But more seriously, this is one of the problems with electing a president with a short political CV/resume. His circle of trust doesn't have the critical mass of folks that can survive a vetting process (any than could have already got their job and gotten out after 4 years), so he has to rely on getting suggestions folks in an extended political operative/Washington insider circle which only knows people looking for a job from the pool perpetual bureaucratic lobbyist ruling class that's pretty much bought and sold themselves to the highest bidders...

Are you willing to go so far as minimum wage and immigration laws? Most folks have a line to draw somewhere. Depending on your politics...

Usually when the paycheck of one's friends/neighbors line gets crossed, opinions start to shift. When it finally gets to your paycheck, that's often a bright red line for most folks... The mentality is like this: first they came...

However, it shall be know in the state of California as CalCoin.

CalCoin will be exactly the same as BitCoin, except that there will be a un-elected, board of political appointees created to oversee CalCoin usage in the state. Each board member will collect a 6-figure salary (+travel expenses) to meet 2 times as year for 20-minutes. The board will oversee the writing and signature collection ballot proposition that amends the CalConstitution to enable it to collect of a surcharge tax on every CalCoin transaction by a CalResident to fund education and the construction of new prisons. Of course after spending millions of dollars on this, the ballot proposition will be declared unconstitutional and a lawsuit will then be filed to *out* the names and home addresses of everyone who signed the ballot initiative so that Anonymous CalCoin speculators can lynch them.

On the brighter side, since it will now be joining the "Cal" family of entities, perhaps CalPERS (Public Employee Retirement System) will now be able to "invest" in CalCoin. No doubt they will be able to crash its value like every other speculative investment scheme they have put money into for the last 20 years...

Current world-wide ammonia production is mostly going to agriculture and is only about 130 million tonnes. 130Mt * 1000kg/t * 4318 Wh/kg * 3600J/Wh ~ 2 x10^15 Joules.

However, the goal is not to replace oil, but to replace gasoline for cars. Natural gas production, has plenty of scale (4.3Tm^3)*** and ammonia production generally scales easily with natural gas production. Also, only about 1/2 of oil production you quote is for gasoline for cars and trucks.

The question is if it is worth diverting natural gas to cars or not (vs converting it into electricity or using it for heating/cooking). Even if it was desirable, it's not an easy question on exactly how to do this because for cars, alternatives to ammonia production are to compress or liquefy natural gas (CNG/LNG). The benefit of ammonia is really is in industrial CO2 containment, but CNG/LNG would be easier to do at a large scale...

However, if there were an economical way to create ammonia from atmospheric Nitrogen w/o using Natural gas, there might be something to all of this... People are working on it, but nobody has got anything commercially viable yet...

***To convert natural gas to barrels of oil equivalent: 4.3Tm^3 * 1BOE / 170m^3 = 25MBOE

Although the energy density of ammonia is less than gasoline (about 1/2 as I recall), the efficiency of an internal combustion engine is like 20-30% where a fuel cell can be closer to 50-60%. It's probably a wash from that point of view...

The price of ammonia tracks that of natural gas (since it essentially all made via the Haber process). Right now natural gas is cheap relative to oil (thanks to all the fracking)..

On the plus side, using ammonia as fuel has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions. Since all the CO2 is happening in an industrial setting when natural gas it converted into ammonia instead of inside your internal combustion engine...

On the negative side, the biggest problem is what to do with all that Nitrogen. Any catalytic process isn't 100% efficient (I think they claim 60% up to 90%) and even if it was, it involves heating of the NH3 (up to 500C) which presumably creates hot N2 and H2. Developing a practical process that carries away the hot N2, but still prevents hot N2 from forming bonds with atmospheric oxygen creating NOx photochemical smog will be another challenge. This is a general problem with heating things up in the presence of air (which has both N2 and O2), but even worse with NH3. Photochemical smog in the form of NOx isn't technically a greenhouse gas (since it's atmospheric lifetime is generally short), but it is partially responsible for acid rain, so it isn't really a clear "green" option...

You seem to be equating brain power with earning power. This is a common mistake made by folks who believe they likely have more than average brain power (tm) and that scarcity of those with brain power (tm) somehow improves earning power.

Today, earning power is most correlated with the amount of capital that your employment responsibilities have associated with. It may or may not be fair, but it is generally true. Historically, people could count on scarcity, but we're in the cusp of a post-scarcity employment environment (in many fields, there won't be enough work for everyone to be fully employed).

The best hope to earn an above average amount of money in a job is to find a company that has enough excess capital to pour some on their employees (e.g., work for a social media company, a hedge fund company, a natural resource processing company like an oil or rare-earth metals, etc.) or simply just work for yourself (start your own company). Although some positions in those companies might require brain power (tm), competition will be tough for those slots, and it's quite possible that it your "true-alpha-male" leader-type might find an easier way into such an excess capital situation (or say start a construction company and make plenty of money that way)...

One complication of the Levi Stadium situation is that the companies do not actually own their office/parking lot, but are merely mostly Class-B commercial office-park tenants which do not have the authority to use the building parking lots that way. The owners of the building are generally large real-estate holding companies and the parking lots aren't normally pay/restricted lots so don't have lot attendants so they would likely have to apply for a Special Event Parking Permit to do this. They would also likely need to re-negotiate lease terms with their tenants to tie up the parking lot in this manner.

If the office buildings you mention have full-time managed parking lots, then they could avoid much of the complication surrounding the Levi Stadium situation since they would-be full-time parking operators already.

A counter-example to this would be the parking situation at the newly constructed Levi stadium for the SF 49'ers. They don't have enough game-day parking spaces for the stadium and they were assuming that some of the surrounding office complexes would be willing to become pay-parking lots on Sunday-gamedays... Sadly, only a few of them "bit" on this opportunity. The purported reason for this is the increase in liability insurance and maintenance (e.g., cleanup costs) involved would not make it worth the hassle to operate as public-parking lot for 8 days a year.

Despite sounding like a good idea, apparently in real life the margin on parking is so low that you can't really do it on a part time basis and make it worth your while. It's not that they are doing it wrong, their business model is to simply privatize the profit and socializing the liability and risks (e.g. city maintenance and self-insurance costs) not unlike a big-bad-bank...

Lower tech and more fun here...

Actually, the transputer had a few good kernels of an idea: sea of loosely interconnected processors each with local memory. However, the actually execution wasn't that good, and the only real market was embedded military signal processing systems. For a while, inmos attempted to chase workstation graphics, but eventually they got killed by the i860 (which is sad as it too wasn't a very good implementation of any idea either, but happened better $/! than the transputer for floating point) which of course eventually died as its limitations caught up with it as well (although many of its ideas lived on in the original Pentium like U/V super-scalar execution pipe, pipelines fp unit)...

One thing both the Transputer and the i860 had in common, is that they were engineering solutions in search of a problem to solve. Perhaps products that embed great engineering ideas often don't translate to good implementations which inevitably fail in the market, but good ideas tend live on and sometimes find their way into the market worthy products...