Comment Re: wimpy talk (Score 1) 187
So what you're saying is in a hundred years my grandkids will be happily living their lives as ghosts in the machine and/or megaflocks of nanomachines?
Comment Writing for comics (Score 1) 58
I'm writing my own material and learning to draw because I don't see another way to make what I want to make. I look at your body of work and I wonder: How you were able to slide these incredible missives from the Gonzoverse under the brane, and was there anything you did early on that allowed you to make the incredible defining works in your bibliography (Transmet, Planetary, Authority)?
Comment Re: Bad Science (Score 1) 315
They got micronewtons from watts, not kilowatts.
Comment Re:Bad Science (Score 1) 315
That depends,of course, on how well it scales. If you can get enough thrust from a small enough energy input, you can partially or completely remove the dependency on giant volatile chemical vats.
Comment In a taxi (Score 1) 310
Waiting on a stand with a Dell Inspiron 7500, the biggest, heaviest beast of a laptop I've ever owned. Months later I was accused of programming while driving the taxi, which never occurred to me but, it occurs to me, would have been texting-while-driving before it was (un)cool to do so.
Comment Ablative battery armor (Score 1) 330
So someone takes this, layers it with ablative armor, and suddenly you have a long-range, well-armored vehicle. What's the problem?
Comment Re:One problem.... (Score 1) 330
Luckily having a giant tank of gas under the car is much safer.
Comment Re:Not All Of the Magic Words (Score 1) 330
And powered by thorium?
Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What's new in legacy languages?
liquiddark writes: I was listening to a younger coworker talk to someone the other day about legacy technologies, and he mentioned .NET as a specific example. It got me thinking — what technologies are passing from the upstart and/or mainstream phases into the world of legacy technology? What tech are you working with now that you hope to retire in the next few years? What will you replace it with?
Submission + - Chemistry Students and Postdocs Take Safety Into Their Own Hands (sciencemag.org) 1
Jim_Austin writes: It's a scandal: Academic science labs are generally far less safe than labs in industry; one estimate says that people working in academic labs are 11x more likely to die than their industrial counterparts. A group of grad students and postdocs in Minnesota decided to address the issue had-on. With encouragement and funding from DOW, and some leadership from their department chairs, they're in the process of totally remaking their departments' safety cultures.
Mysterious Underwater Circles Off the Coast of Denmark Explained 37
sciencehabit writes "The truth behind the mysterious underwater circles that periodically appear off the coast of Denmark has been discovered, and sadly it doesn't involve aliens, fairies, or the fabled lost city of Atlantis. In 2008, a tourist snapped photos of several large dark rings that appeared near the white cliffs of Denmark's island of Møn in the Baltic Sea. The circles, several as large as a tennis courts, sparked numerous theories of their origin—some more outlandish than others. In 2011, when the formations reappeared, scientists discovered they were actually round bands of marine eelgrass, similar to rings of mushrooms known as fairy rings. Because eelgrass usually grows as continuous underwater meadows, scientists were still baffled by the rims of lush eelgrass with barren cores. Now, researchers say they at last know the rings' true cause."
Comment Re:Flawed model (Score 1) 206
basic IQ can be measured.
And it is subject to the Flynn effect. So saying "It can be measured" hardly invalidates the idea that a better model of intelligence for aged brains will incorporate the various other things that are affecting the measurement.
Comment Re:Orders of magnitude (Score 1) 199
Because scientists, unlike media, have a method for indicating precision of results, and order of magnitude is an intrinsically fuzzy term, whereas about ten times is not.
Comment Re:Stop posting about non-existent fuel cells (Score 1) 199
Which it isn't. The past 20 years haven't been at a standstill. Predicting future product releases based on not having released the product would always give you an infinite horizon. It's not a useful metric.
