I am an organic chemist. I'm not the smartest guy in the world but I do know a little bit about making molecules and their chances of doing useful things in the body. I've been doing this for 35 years and I have some credentials though I'm not a Harvard professor. My opinion is that this article is pure, extremely well crafted, bullshit. Throwing in all that math only makes it more so.

It seems that there is no problem so bad, that the coders don't think it can be solved by writing more code.

I knew that the future of reliable reviews at the NYT was over when David Pogue gave MS Word 6.0 for the Mac a good review. It's almost universally seen as one of the worst software upgrades in history.

I emailed him and told him I was disappointed.

I work in a lab doing chemistry things. If someone has an explosion or a fire, it's important that you can hear their screams and, I guess, the fire alarm too. For that reason, headphones are usually banned in a lab environment where you work with pyrophoric materials.

The answer is simple: Wernher von Braun

You need somebody in charge that knows what it looks like when it's finished.

It's important to remember that in vivo biology is not all of science. It's a lot harder to know what you're doing in biology. If you want excellent reproducible science, let's just roll balls down inclines, measure that and hope we don't get sick.

One of the advantages of getting older is that your own visual resolution drops. So you can get just as much information from 720p as from that 4K stuff. The device can try to give you more but you can't use. Same goes for sound. You don't have to stand around and argue about compression algorithms cause you can't hear the difference. It doesn't matter if they're different. You can't use it.

Fusion! The energy of the Future and always will be!

The peace prize is actually awarded by a Norwegian group and the science prizes by Swedes. So you can keep your respect for the science prizes and still cling to your crappy politics. Lucky you.

Hmmm! OK, I'll bite. I think you're making this up and don't really have a clue about recycled helium. I could be wrong but that's what I think.

Right after I posted, I tried the original 6x6x6. I did it by making 6x6's and folding them over onto the growing cube. I was able to almost make it except that I now appear to have only 213 balls instead of the original 216. I left off 3 corners. It would clearly have been more stable if I had all of them. After fondling it a bit, it went haywire and collapsed into the close-pack on one plane. So I smushed it into randomness again.

Maybe those 3 lost balls are what killed the cat.

My wife gave me some of these Buckballs for Christmas a couple of years ago before they were banned. I have to admit, it's real tempting to put them in your mouth. Also, it's impossible to get them back into that cube shape like they were when she bought them. But they are fun to play with. I enjoy them even more now that they're banned.

Your comment is an odd one. Are you saying that the change in stock price was unrelated to Ballmer's resignation?

But at the same time, Steve Ballmer without Microsoft is worth more than Steve Ballmer with Microsoft. And that makes his decision a good one for him, financially.

What if you used a pigeon? A third-party pigeon, that is.

But like he said, you still can't be sure it's secure.

And, of course, you'd need to use a US-based pigeon.