That's clear evidence of one dimensional thinking. ;-)

No actually I confused the melting point of carbon dioxide (well actually a sublimation point) with that of alcohol. Talking of scientific illiteracy though you seem to be pretty good with numerology. ;-)

So far the beams are just at the injection energy of 450 GeV from the SPS and you can see some splash event in ATLAS here. The real test will be when they ramp the magnets up to 11kA currents for the 6.5 TeV beams. Hopefully this time our understanding of the universe will break before the machine.

Instead of responding with anger and vitriol how about we talk rationally? I'm interested in electric cars and would love to own one once they make economic and practical sense. However given the comments it seems that the warranty on the transmission is far more conservative than that on the battery pack so the ratio is still about 2-3 times longer life for the transmission only it is ~8 years vs. 20.

On top of this the study you linked to made no mention of aging effects without regard to use: battery capacity declines with age and that decline is non-linear with time. If the current technology is post 2008 then I doubt they will have a good understanding of the aging yet and will be using projections which can be inaccurate.

However I admit that I am surprised by the far longer lifetime for batteries that they are claiming which is great. Sadly though this page tells me that they still have a way to go yet. If leaving the battery at -30C or below for a day will invalidate the warranty then the car is still useless for those of us who live in Canada.

Lastly though even at 8 years (with degraded capacity) the "fuel" cost is still significant. At 100k miles for a $20k pack (using the figures from the OP) and assuming $0.10/kWh and that 85kWh=265miles that works out at $0.232/mile. If I assume 30mpg for a petrol powered car that works out at a cost of $6.96 per gallon-equivalent or $1.83/litre which is 2.5 times the current cost of petrol in the US (according to Google)...and that's before we factor in the longer life of the transmission.

So my numbers may have been off but the conclusion is still the same. At the current cost of petrol in the US ($0.70/litre in March 2015) you save ~5.66 cents/mile on fuel so the price per kWh of a battery needs to drop to $66/kWh to match the cost of petrol over a 100k mile lifetime.

Oops - sorry the freezing point of pure alcohol is apparently -114C...that's even cold by Canadian standards!

You cannot "freeze dry" alcohol because alcohol is a pure liquid at room temperature and to make it solid you would need a temperature of -78C which is a little on the cold side for anyone not Canadian. Powdered alcohol is actually alcohol absorbed by something else as desribed here and if you want to make it yourself the instructions are here... just don't do this if you happen to live somewhere where you are now not allowed to do it anymore!

That's an interesting read. While nothing in the order says criminal penalties it mentions the laws which apparently let one person rule by diktat so I expect that they specify the penalties.

The part I thought interesting though was that any of these funds which come under the control of an "American person" are included. I'm guessing that this means Americans with jobs in the financial sector abroad are going to have a hard time: if they follow this law then they may find themselves breaking local laws, or at least out of a job, and yet if they don't they will be breaking US law.

I wish them luck trying to figure out how to deal with the slightly insane decrees coming from their leader. Now I think of it didn't the US have a revolution to get rid of a king who was issuing somewhat insane decrees? A bit of nostalgia for the "good" old days is one thing but I think you might be taking this a bit too far. Mind you it was issued on 1st April...

...is because not every website is subject to UK law. They can pass whatever laws they want but it will not affect any website where UK law does not apply. I'd not be so fast to ascribe this to ignorant politicians though. The cynical side of me sees this as a way that the politicians can claim that they are strong on family values without actually doing anything meaningful that might alienate some voters.

That may be true but that is not really relevant since the article is talking about "inexpensive" electric cars and a BMW is not usually what spring to mind when I think "inexpensive car". The questions you need to ask are: can you replace the drive train on a say a Ford Focus for $20k and how long will it last before I need to do that?

Since a Ford Focus costs less than $20k even in Canada the answer to the first question is that yes you can replace it for less than $20k (by buying a new car if necessary). The answer to the next question is that it probably comes with a warranty for 5-7 years which is ~2-3 times the life of a battery pack. Now to offset this electric cars have cheaper fuel and, I would guess, cheaper maintenance but whether this offsets the cost of the battery depends on the individual usage of the vehicle and things like the future price of petrol which is hard to estimate given recent fluctuations in the price of oil.

Couple this the fact that most of us NOT purchasing BMWs would balk at the thought of having to pay $20k every 2-3 years to keep the same car running and I think that they have somewhat overestimated the price at which electric cars can become inexpensive unless there is a workable solution to convert the huge, upfront cost of the battery into a monthly fee which seems unlikely since when it needs replacing depends on both physical age and usage.

True and so I can understand why an employer might ask (although frankly I think it is more to do with finding things out that they cannot legally ask about). What shocked me was that grad schools wanted to know this. Speaking as a prof who has no Facebook profile whatsoever I could literally not care less about whether a prospective grad student has a Facebook profile. What I look for is someone committed enough, interested enough and lastly smart enough to do research. So if a grad school asks you this I would strongly recommend that you go somewhere else because clearly they have some strange priorities and those priorities will be determining who else is in your research group.

No actually it is a factual statement which has been tested to a precision better than one part in a trillion. In fact it is one of the most precisely tested scientific theories ever discovered. Have you tested you theory on how things work to that level of precision? Have you even figured out what the predictions of your theory are to that level? In fact have you ever done any experiment whatsoever which has agreed with your ideas and disagreed with QM? If not then I think it is extremely clear who is taking things on faith rather than scientific fact.

Go and read - and understand - a book on quantum field theory and then we can talk. Fields are quantized which is why photons have a chance to pass through matter without any interaction. The more matter there is the smaller the chance but it is not zero as you suggest...and if you understood QFT, and QED in particular, you would be able to calculate the chance of the interaction via the various possible channels.

There is nothing wrong with criticizing current scientific understanding - indeed that is often how we make progress - but to do so you must understand the current thinking first and then show how it is wrong and/or do an experiment to show that it is wrong. You cannot just dream up some theory off the top of your head and expect anyone to take it seriously. Established scientific thinking has had a lot of effort spent on testing and confirming it. Anything which will replace it needs to have a similar amount of care and attention to detail spent on it.

Really? I'd suggest you try taking a Special Relativity course where you'll learn that relativistic effects are caused by the rotation of the space-time axes between inertial frames e.g. the reason for length contraction is because the object's time direction points partly along the observers length direction.

Wow it's almost like they are physicists from ~60 or so years ago. I can only hope their knowledge of electronics is more up to date or do they still insist on using valves? We've known for a long time that electron-positron pairs can pop out of the vacuum. This gives rise to measurable effects such as vacuum polarization which changes the strength of the EM force with energy and Casimir effect. In fact Feynman actually showed that a positron (anti-electron) was equivalent to an electron with the direction of time reversed so you can indeed treat a virtual electron-positron loop as something oscillating back and forth in time.

Sorry but that is just wrong. Photons do indeed contain an EM field but the photon is small in size. In addition the interactions are quantum in nature i.e. they either happen or they do not. You cannot use your simple, classical view of physics to assume that there is an EM field and so therefore there must be an interaction: the universe does not work like that.

Many of the high energy photons we produce in the ATLAS experiment at the LHC will travel through multiple layers of silicon before they interact in the calorimeter - not all of them though there is a chance for them to interact. If you passed them through a vacuum though the chance of them interacting with the remaining molecules would be tiny. Indeed if you assertion were right the LHC would not work because the protons in the beam would also be interacting with the beam gas all the time and the beam would rapidly dissipate.

My apologies - I did not realize that journalism used different rules for english and physics to the rest of us. That probably explains why I pay so little attention to most journalism.

I think this issue illustrates perfectly why laws are the wrong solution to the problem of prejudice. You cannot legislate people's morals and, where the law deviates from their moral beliefs, they will find a way around it. The way to tackle these sorts of issues is through education: you cannot just tell someone that discriminating against person X because they do, or are, Y is wrong you have to give them the full picture and let them come to that conclusion on their own - or sadly not as the case may be.

Obviously this takes time but ultimately it leads to a long lasting, more fundamental change in society and is far more effective than trying to force someone to behave in a particular way through threats of imprisonment or fines. All the latter does is makes (figurative) martyrs to the cause and further strengthens the resolve of those who disagree with the law making the problem worse, not better. If you disagree think of a law closer to Slashdot's field: copyright. Many see nothing morally wrong with format shifting material which is legally purchased and yet many a nation's law say otherwise. Has that affected your moral beliefs and/or your behaviour when it comes to format shifting?