Does anyone have actual data or methods to predict this kind of effect on human bodies?

Yes [long pdf]. The FCC cites the specific IEEE and NCRP studies they used to set RF exposure limits. You are correct about the wavelength effect reducing human RF absorption at AM broadcast frequencies, an effect shown in the frequency-dependent FCC exposure limits (page 17 of the pdf file).

There are some famous examples of this working. But only because the parents had time, money, and high standards. Yes, not necessarily, and that's not all the story!

Proper home-schooling is a tremendous time commitment. It requires either a stay-at-home parent or dependably scheduled shift work. Even with lesson plans prepared by others, the home-school parents must spend time preparing and managing their child's education in addition to the face-to-face teaching time.

Money is rather irrelevant in many states. You can spend piles of your own money on a prepackaged curriculum if you wish. That is much less expensive than private school tuition, which is a big reason home schooling became popular (the benefits of a Catholic school education, without the tuition bills--or nuns). But you can also enroll in "virtual academies" that operate as charter schools in most states. They use the charter school funding to pay for the materials, certified teachers to assist you, and the required standardized tests. This comes at no additional charge, courtesy of your school taxes.

High standards will help you be successful. I think it's more accurate to say you should have motivation, meaning that you have standards consistent with your child's abilities, and consistently require those standards be met. Not all will be superstar students, but all can learn the discipline to do their best. That is the best predictor of success and happiness I know of, no matter what path your child follows.

You left out a key factor: patience. If you don't have the ability to stay with the program, to keep working with your child until he "gets it ", you will not be an effective home-school parent. The same is true for traditional teachers: the ones who don't care enough to persevere through the tough parts are poor teachers, the ones who treat the setbacks as opportunities are following the path of Jaime Escalante.

What I'm saying boils down to this: it's not whether home-schooling is right for your child, rather it's whether you are are the right teacher for her. If you're not willing to make the commitment to be that teacher, please don't home-school. You won't be doing your child a favor.

ABS: Drivers can do better than ABS but only if they're really experienced. Also only if they have brakes that are amenable to modulation. The power-assisted brakes on most modern cars are heavily damped, causing a noticeable lag (a tenth of a second or so) between pedal pressure changes and braking effect. The ABS actuator is in the hydraulic system, bypassing the power assist booster and thus allowing fast response when a wheel loses traction. ABS can release the locked wheel and reapply the brake almost instantly. It is not possible to do that with the brake pedal, no matter how skilled a driver you are. The brake booster doesn't respond fast enough, no matter how well trained your foot is.

ABS allows for "good enough" at the weakest link in the system: the human element! That is what makes it a good solution.

Another one comes up in embedded programming. Optimizing compilers assume that a variable that hasn't been written to inside a loop won't change inside that loop, so its evaluation is moved outside the loop to optimize for speed. But if that variable is changed by an external influence (an interrupt service routine, timer, input pin status, etc.) the optimized code will never see it. For example: while (DataNotReady) delay(); /* yes, there are better ways but this saves code space in memory-limited microcontrollers */ can be optimized to evaluate DataNotReady only for the first pass of the while loop, so it never exits if data isn't ready. The ISR changes the flag, but the while loop doesn't see it. That's why embedded compilers include ways to disable specific optimizations that break this type of code.

The fuel tax has a useful advantage: drivers of heavier, less fuel-efficient vehicles pay more tax. Consider a 45 cent per gallon fuel tax and 2 cent per mile road-use tax. Drivers of a Suburban getting 15 miles per gallon pay 3 cents a mile for the fuel tax, so the road use fee saves them a penny per mile. If you have a Prius getting 45 miles per gallon, you pay only one cent per mile for fuel tax, so the road use fee costs you an extra penny per mile. If you have a Tesla, your tax went from nothing to 2 cents per mile: about the same as the cost of electricity to recharge the car in many states (200 mile range on a 40 kWhr recharge = 5 miles per kWhr and 10 cents per kWhr). It reverses the tax incentive to drive a more efficient car!

About the bottle and altitude effects. Use a plastic bottle and fill it not quite full. Squeeze the sides gently to displace about a third of the air, then cap it. Now you have expansion space, so your bottle won't be pressurized. You can open it safely in flight and take a drink. This also applies to toiletry items, especially if you're flying (or driving) from sea level to a high altitude city such as Denver. A tightly sealed bottle can pick up more than 2 PSI from the altitude change, helping the contents ooze out. That's why I was putting bottles into zip-lock baggies long before TSA made it mandatory.

An "open-source" car opens some interesting legal questions. Hot rodders and customizers can legally build cars that haven't been crash-tested, haven't undergone long-term emissions system durability testing, etc. and register these one-of-a-kind vehicles for highway use (in most US states). Open source designs mean that many people or small companies could be building the same car, no one maker in quantities that exceed the legal threshold for a volume-produced vehicle, but cumulatively in volumes that would require undergoing the rigorous test regimes.

How will the law deal with distributed authority and decision-making of open-source designs? Who would be responsible for performing the tests? Who would pay for it? Who will ensure that all the manufacturers using the design build it to the same specifications as the versions tested? Who will be held responsible in the inevitable product-liability suits?

Both the Netwon's original and the 20th century work of the same name.

...and that's the hardest part of upgrading rail service. The freight haulers own the rails, and Amtrak can run only when, where, and at speeds compatible with freight operations. Even if the trains are TGV class, that doesn't help when their schedule must fit around the freight traffic. To have an effective high-speed rail system, they'll need to get right-of-way, lay the rails, and maintain them to high-speed standards. Even if they could use Interstate Highway right-of-way, the cost of the system is huge. If they choose to skimp and stay on freight tracks (which seems likely), the trains between LA and Chicago will still be running slower than they did half a cantury ago (39:30 then for Santa Fe's Super Chief, compared to 43:00 now for Amtrak's Southwest Chief).

The poor power factor is caused by harmonic distortion, not phase displacement. Phase compensation capacitors don't fix that problem. One CFL doesn't create enough distortion current worry about, but when all the lamps in the house are CFLs it's noticeable, and when every house on the block converts to CFLs there's likely to be trouble. Harmonic current causes disproportionately high losses in distribution transformers, because the proximity effect losses are dramatically higher at the harmonic frequencies. Even though the current is "only" twice what you'd expect for a 13W lamp, the losses in the transformer are higher than that current suggests. There should still be a net energy savings, but having a large percentage of the load be high distortion devices does over-work some parts of the power system. Many office buildings had damage and even fires when PCs were adopted in large numbers. The rated load "watts" appeared to be safe, but the high harmonic current over-heated neutral conductors and supply transformers. This led to electrical code changes for full-size (or larger) neutral conductors, and to requirements forK-rated power distribution transformers.

Before, 1500 Staples employees knew who he was, that he was terminated, and the reason cited by Staples for doing so. Now, millions do. That certainly won't help him find a new position!

That's so very true! Microsoft's past success has become their present burden. They can't remove a function that worked in the last version without some customers calling it "broken". The first Windows release had to support DOS programs, and that means drive letters and back-slash directory separators. It then went into Windows 2, then 3, on through 95, 98, and ME. NT had different (non-DOS) underpinnings, but still had a "DOS shell" for compatibility and still supported drive letters and backslashes. Thus the legacy lives on in 2000, XP, Vista, and on to Windows 7.

It's a lesson that every engineer and programmer eventually learns: be careful what you release today, because you'll be living with that decision ten years from if the product succeeds, and you'll have to put it on your resume if it doesn't!

I'm not saying MS is perfect, nobody is. I do appreciate how difficult a job they have trying to update a product with so long a history and so large a customer base. That's the biggest difference between the established incumbent and the start-ups who challenge them: the new players lack long-time customers, so they don't worry about losing them.

Colorado PBS affiliate KBDI can't delay. Their analog transmitting antenna was badly damaged, and it's not worth the cost to fix it for a few more months' service even if they had the money (and like most PBS stations, they don't have much to spend). Besides that, repairs on that mountain really should wait until the weather improves--which isn't likely until May. Such is life when the antenna is at 11,500 feet!

If you're using a standard connector, use it as intended! A "USB type B" connector should only be 5V, should not exceed the current ratings, etc. If the device being charged is built per the USB slave specs:

- Any USB connector is a suitable power supply for recharging.

- You don't need a special chip, nor a special charger.

- The USB connector is used in a 100% standard way, so there is no risk of damaging another USB device by attaching it to the charger instead of the PC.

- A standard battery charger IC can handle the job at less cost.

- Using standard USB for charging has already been proposed in China.

Truth is an absolute defense to libel. In the US, that's generally true. But it's not the same everywhere, nor for every person and entity. Even if you're "in the right", being involved in a defamation action can be brutal. For a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical account of this, read Uris' QB VII.