Scones. They get cooked at around 230C, as do a number of other baked goods.

We renovated last year, and as part of it, we replaced all the light fittings in the house and changed all the globes to LEDs.

The globes may have cost more, but they have a significantly lower energy consumption.

No, it does not work that way. Natural gas power plants are big gas turbines, like aircraft engines. (Some are derived from aircraft engines.) When they are turned off, fuel consumption goes to zero.

Here's a wordless animation from China showing the details of how a big gas turbine plant starts up and runs. It's very clear, and not dumbed down.

So they had a bad meeting. It happens. It's even worse across language barriers. Most successful business teams get over that.

Google gets that automatic driving can kill people. The guys from social pushing "Cruise" put shiny plastic on lane keeping and adaptive cruise control and call it automatic driiving. They're right in the middle of the "deadly valley" - it's good enough you can take your hands off the wheel, but not good enough you can trust it. Those guys are going to be a problem.

GM is in serious legal and PR trouble right now because they have an ignition switch problem which causes cars to stop if people have a keychain with too much stuff on it. 13 GM people have already been fired. Google has never faced having to take responsibility like that.

The software industry is used to being able to dump its product liability on the customer. This will not work in the "Internet of Things".

In the real world, they're not. Here's the current CAISO output graph for all of California (which is 800 miles long and has a wide range of climate zones, with wind farms hundreds of miles apart) in the last 24 hours. Max wind generation today: 3600MW. Min: 300MW. That's over a 10:1 ratio. Checking PJM (the power grid for the northeastern US), today's max was 3200MW. Min: 900MW. About 3.5:1. Most days, those ratios are around 4:1.

So you still need a lot of natural gas plants that can be started up when the wind fails. Understand that load varies about 3:1 over the course of a day, in a predictable way, with peak load in midafternoon. Solar power output matches air conditioning load very nicely. Wind, not so much.

The price of bulk power goes way down late at night. Once in a while it goes negative for an hour or two. This happens on PJM when load is low, Ontario Hydro has excess water they're running through generators, the nuclear plants are running smoothly and don't want to shut down, and the wind turbines are getting good wind. The hydro and nuclear guys have a slow response time, so they'll pay to generate power rather than shut down for a few hours. So the wind guys, who can stop in a minute or two, drop out rather than pay. The turbine blades go to zero pitch and feather, the brakes come on, and the turbines slow and stop.

Read the entire paper, not the summary. There are some interesting points there. One is that NSA does not have a shortage of cybersecurity experts. That's because they train them. It takes three years of full-time training. The agencies that complain that they can't find anybody aren't investing in their people in the way that NSA does. Other agencies don't invest in their people like that.

This is typical of employer whining about not being able to get the people they want. Sure, the companies who want people with some very specific skill set, right now, often at low pay, can't find them. Organizations that are willing to train people don't have those problems.

One unexpected item from the paper: "One operating system, having been installed in almost a billion devices, has yet to attract malware in any significant way -- although it is falls short of being provably secure." What are they talking about? QNX? VxWorks?

Doing this is called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, or SLAM. There's been enormous progress in that in the last decade. The basic idea is to take a large number of images of the same scene, possibly with inacccurate data about where they were taken, and build up a 3D model. It sort of works most of the time. Some algorithms do well indoors, especially where there are lots of strong edges and corners. Those are easy features to lock onto. Outdoors is tougher, although outdoors you can usually use GPS. It's a basic capabiilty robots need.

The video is frustrating. There's no comparison with previous work. Is this an advance, or did they just use known algorithms.

Why should the Linux kernel have a compression algorithm in it?

There's a way to do video compression so that frame rate doesn't matter. It's called Framefree. (PowerPoint, unfortunately). With that, you can crank up the playback frame rate as high as the output device can go.

Framefree was developed at Kerner Optical, which was spun off from Lucasfilm. Kerner went out of business a few years ago, and although there was a web site "framefree.us" and even a browser plug-in, it never caught on.

The idea is that the intermediate frames between key frames are mesh-based morphs, rather than MPEG-type block updates. Compression is compute-intensive, and playback requires a GPU. You can generate as many intermediate frames between keyframes as you want. Intermediate frame generation means interpolating the mesh points and then warping the image pieces to fit. So not only can you have very high display frame rates, you can also have ultra-slow slow motion. No MPEG-type blockiness, either.

While Framefree compression never caught on (probably because a high performance GPU in every set top box and DVD player was too expensive back then) the technology is used in sports programming to generate ultra-slow slow motion without using ultra-high frame rate cameras. Maybe it will make a comeback in the era of "4K" video with 60FPS frame rates.

That's the way it should be. If you want to subscribe to something, use RSS. That's totally under the control of the recipient. If you unsubscrbe from an RSS feed, there's no way the sender can keep sending to you.

It's easy to follow an RSS feed if you're using Thunderbird; a bit harder if you're a Google slave.

Now, from the people who brought you PCMCIA cards... Remember when you could slot an Ethernet interface or a modem into a PCMCIA slot? Same idea.

Phones should be going in the other direction. No connectors at all. A phone today has about four or five radios in it; do any data transfer over WiFi or Bluetooth or the cellular link. Charging should be inductive, which will happen when one of the three competing wireless charging systems wins. Phones should be waterproof, shockproof, dust-resistant, and close to indestructable.

Energy harvesting technology is real, but you don't get much energy unless there's a transmitter nearby, or a really big one in the area. There are now ICs which slowly accumulate energy in a capacitor, and when they have enough, power up some device and run it for a few milliseconds. Depending on RF levels in the area, you may get some useful output several times a second, or several times a day.

Now if you had something like a microwave flashlight (an low power oscillator and horn antenna) you could wave it around and wake up RFID tags, which could then report back. That could be a viable commercial product, more for industrial and commercial than home use. ("Where's a carton of P/N xxxxx-xxxx parts? Oh, there it is, behind that other box.")

This is not good. This is being done by people from "social", where nothing really has to work. It operates in the "deadly valley" - enough automation to allow the driver to take their hands off the wheel, but not enough automation to handle hard situations. Most of the major auto manufacturers already have that working. Toyota calls it "Lane keeping assist". It's coupled with "smart cruise control", which measures the distance to the car ahead and controls speed and braking. Ford, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Cadillac have similar systems. Audi already has such as system. But Audi won't let it take full control. "The driver is still responsible", they say. Audi disengages their system if the driver takes their hands off the wheel.

So this is a known technology which none of the major automakers trust enough to give it full control of the vehicle. That should tell you something.

"Cruise is currently taking pre-orders for its first system." Typical. Is there a Kickstarter, too?

These seem similar to the Nao, which is a line of small humanoid robots from France. About the same price point.

What you can do with them depends strongly on the sensors. If the joints are position-controlled only, and you don't have force feedback, locomotion and manipulation will be clunky. There are some simple robot components, such as 6 degree of freedom force sensors for wrists and ankles, which are insanely expensive today, because they're made by hand for research and industrial purposes.

If you have all that sensing, plus three axes of accelerometer and three axes of rate gyro, you should be able to get Boston Dynamics type agility out of the thing. If the DARPA Humanoid Challenge produces some usable open-source software, it should be possible to move that down to toy-sized robots.

This is cool, and certainly buildable, but probably not too useful. It has all the problems of Personal Rapid Transit systems, plus the problems of suspended monorails, plus the problems of maglev.

PRT systems are cool, but to accomodate a lot of people going to different places, you need a lot of stations and track. If a lot of people are going to the same place, bus/railroad car vehicles are more effective. Lots of airports have tracked tram systems with vehicles/trains in the 10-100 passenger range, but none have two or four seaters. It's this scaling problem that's killed PRT systems.

Here's a small-car PRT system that's just about to open in Korea. It's more of an amusement park ride than a transportation system. Note that the guideway is much heavier duty than in the proposed maglev system. This is typical of monorails that get built vs. monorails in pretty pictures. Once you deal with all the real-world problems, like high wind stresses, a truck hitting a support pole, being able to evacuate people from stalled vehicles, and such, the components get bigger. Compare proposed LA monorail from 1950s with actual Chiba monotrail from 1970s