It's hard enough to be scratchproof to the vast majority of things we encounter in our daily lives. Once you're harder than quartz and tool steel, there's not much you'll encounter in normal circumstances that can scratch you.

It's really not the spinel aspect that I find neat. It's the blurb about their process. They say they got it to work by two things: one, extreme purity (no surprise there), and two, mixing. No matter how well you try to mix fine powders together by any normal means such as shaking, you're never going to get a perfect mixture where all of the particles pack down together to their optimally dense arrangement. Apparently they've come up with a process that allows just that (they don't go into details).

Well, that's worth far more than spinel. Cheap and scalable production of materials comprised of perfectly arranged microstructures? It seems like such a thing could things in every field of materials science, from batteries to superconductors.

If, that is, it lives up to how the article makes it sound. TFA is rather high on hype and short on details.

Oh, right, like Shatner was so much better as a director - that wonderful ST5.

Supermarket scanners have often used synthetic sapphire for some time now (decades?).

Well, it certainly is if you ask mathematicians. :)

The top execs at the biggest companies are far from untouchable - they get fired by the board more often than you think (Balmer is a recent famous example; I think I've worked at 3 companies now where the board fired the CEO and most of his reports).

So when we don't force women into tech and nobody joins, what do we do? We still have this huge tech disparity between the genders. And someone things this is WRONG. So the next stop is, what, pay women twice as much as men for the same job?

Also, before someone brings the wage gap up. If women were getting paid less for the same job as men in engineering, wouldn't companies what to fill their rank with women in order to save money? As far as I know the wage gap only exists because men and women tend towards specific jobs. I am all for eliminating the stigma of a female truck driver or a male housekeeper... but aside from either giving out incentives that are unfair to another group... what can we do?

And yes, I am aware that there are still "boys club" or brogrammer organizations out there. Yes, this should be stomped right out. I haven't worked for one in over a decade though, so I don't know where they are. None of the major companies that employ around here would dare have sexist or racist hiring policies.

Wow, I would have showed up 1 minute late every day just for the entertainment value. But then, I never did pretend classes and grading were going to be important in the real world.

created equal

Equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.

Socialism I can live with, people should help one another out. How we do it and how much it costs are debatable. But Social Marxism where nobody is allowed to succeed at all? Where we force people into roles and jobs that don't want to have? What the hell, man?

...which are completely freaking worthless if they're turned off by default. 99.9% of users will never visit and study every available config option, and the other .1% will be wondering why it's not the default setting if it's so great.

Your post is like those who insist that MySQL has safe data settings for those who know how to enable them, while ignoring the fact that almost everyone uses the configuration as shipped. Unsafe by default is an insane and undefensible way to distribute software. In fact, I can't think of a good justification for ever allowing the unsafe values to be set.

But what the in-falling observer sees as the spatial axis, the distant observer sees as the time axis. And special relativity means distance is a matter of perception, and all of this must vary smoothly. There's no way to make stacked cubes work with those requirements - it's bad enough to allow for smooth rotation of axes in Euclidean space, but with the continuously varying metric of GR it's right out.

The sibling post is on the right track. Informaton density requires mass density, and mass density distorts space, putting limits on what's possible. The whole idea of the Planck length comes from that in the first place.

Because of the way black hole formation works, if you have a fixed density in a small region of space, with no black hole, if you extend that density to a large enough region of space you get a black hole - exactly according to surface are being the limit.

It's just semantics, I think. If you want to lose weight, the kind of food you eat will determine your likely success in that endeavor, because it will affect both the amount of calories your body burns, and the difficulty of sticking to your diet. Saying "it's just in vs out" oversimplifies to the point of misleading.

We keep trying to fix the wrong problem.

Fix the last mile problem, and everything else goes away.

So if being a woman actually counted for them in STEM hiring (not against them), then you'd agree there wasn't a problem?

Don't let me disturb your worldview with facts, but in every IT or other STEM area I've seen (in the US at least), Women would be hired ahead of Men if they were anywhere close to being able to do the job and were interested in it.