Unfortunate, perhaps, that's it's happening in Russia, but this is precisely what is needed to get the move to electric vehicles into gear: a massive high-risk investment in mass production of lithium batteries. The raw materials for lithium batteries are not rare or expensive; the high cost is due to the sophistication of the manufacturing process. But with sufficient investment in high-volume output, those costs can be brought down, just as with other high-tech commodities like hard drives or memory sticks. American battery makers like A123 and EnerDel have been unwilling or unable to make those investments on a sufficient scale and remain low-volume, high-cost producers. Try to buy a large-format, vehicle-grade lithium cell, and you'll find several companies willing to sell them, all Chinese. The sad truth is that batteries may have to be imported in order to compete with gasoline in cost per vehicle-mile, but that's still better than importing all that oil.

Rename DHS the Department of Defense, and rename the current Defense Department the Foreign Legion.

ImageQuant was a c. 1986 scientific Windows 3.1 program for quantitative analysis of 2D images. It displayed 16-bit images in either grayscale or false color. Draw a box around any object and it could integrate the intensity within, subtracting the average background of the perimeter. You could draw a long box of any width and it would display the integrated intensities as a line graph, then you could graphically mark off each peak and it would integrate the intensities, with multiple choices for setting the baseline. Select any area of the graph, and it would expand to fill the window. It could also rotate the image. Not sure of the exact size, but it fit on a single floppy.

The publishing industry is an easy target but those who have attempted to create a better model are now finding that it costs real money to publish a journal. When Open Access publishing first emerged at the turn of the millenium, it was estimated that it would cost perhaps $1000 to peer-review, format and archive an average article, and then make it freely available online, theoretically in perpetuity. Since computer servers are dirt-cheap, there are no printing presses, postage or paywalls to pay for, and most peer reviewers are volunteers, it certainly seemed to make sense, and scientists were mostly enthusiastic about the prospect. But it turned out to be more costly than expected. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals were launched with much fanfare on such an open-access model in 2003. But now their charges are approaching $3000 per article, and instead of it coming out of University overhead (via library subscriptions) it is coming straight out of the grants of individual scientists. Where all that money goes I can't say, but the journals claim that it still doesn't cover their full editorial and technical costs. It's great that taxpayers can freely access online the work they paid for, but for scientists the old days of print journal subscriptions suddenly don't look so bad.

The fantasy that we would have legions of superlative teachers and hordes of high-achieving students, if only the schools were run like entrepreneurial businesses free to hire and fire at will, has been disproven again and again in districts across the country. The truth is that traditional teaching methods, having evolved over centuries, are pretty effective at teaching students, if the the students are motivated to learn. Wholesale tinkering with those methods usually doesn't bring improvement and creates as many new problems as it solves. Sure, there are a few truly charismatic teachers that can motivate the unmotivated and teach the unteachable, but there are no structural "reforms" that will make all teachers or most teachers equally effective. The best thing anyone can do for education at this point is to stop the demonization of teachers, which is making an already tough profession even less attractive to any talented person who can possibly do anything else with their lives. As for Gates, if he wants to do something of lasting value, he should spend his billions on green tech and conservation projects, and stay out of politics, which is what the "education reform" movement is all about.

If flat panel vs. CRT computer monitors are any indication, the flat panel TVs will fail far sooner, possibly wiping out the effect of less waste per TV.

Amazon has been selling nonperishable groceries for a while and the central fact is that, unlike most of what Amazon sells, they're not cheap. If you buy in quantity and take advantage of every gimmick Amazon offers to bring down the price, you're still at the high end of the regular price at local supermarkets, before any specials, coupons or loyalty discounts.

You have to accept the fundamental conflict that most PhDs won't get an academic research job, yet the curriculum must be geared to those that will. That is its purpose, to promote the best science possible. Most of them will get some other job, not exactly the job they trained for, maybe as a government regulator, maybe as a lower-level educator. But many top scientists came from (relatively) humble beginnings in PhD programs at state universities, and to eliminate the bottom half of all programs or transform them into training programs for nonacademic jobs would blunt scientific inquiry. In my experience, faculty don't give students false hopes. It seems all I (and many of my colleagues) do is complain about how difficult it is to compete and survive in science, yet the students by and large still want to try to stay in research, knowing full well what the chances are. It really is remarkable. In the arts, of course, it's much worse. It's taken for granted that only a tiny fraction of aspiring actors or concert musicians will get "the jobs they trained for", but no one gripes about how dysfunctional that system is. As far as specialization, I think that is complete nonsense. At least in the biological sciences, Departments have become almost meaningless except as administrative units. Cross-department collaboration is the norm and most faculty could fit just as well into any of half-dozen departments. If anything, the fact that fields are more interconnected has made specialized work less significant. Journals are increasingly categorized not by field of study but by pecking order. Journal articles are accepted or rejected on the basis of what their perceived impact is, not whether they really fall within the realm of the journal's title. For advancing scientific knowledge, the entrepreneurial American system, where each investigator competes for grants through peer review, is unsurpassed. For solving society's problems, though, it might be that a more top-down approach, with true visionaries directing larger groups of scientists, might work better. But if so, we have been moving in the opposite direction. The National Laboratories, for example, have been basically defunded and converted into research institutes where faculty compete for outside grants just like everyone else.

We used Feynman's intro physics book back when I was in college, and though I got an A in every physics course I ever took, I found that book completely baffling. Instead of being logical and straightforward, it was full of mathematical sleight-of-hand, bringing new variables from nowhere, because "we can call this anything we want!", and magically proceeding the final equation. Entertaining, maybe, but as far as understanding the material it was completely useless. He's just one more celeb I can do without.

The article hardly says anything about how it was done. This morning on France 24 news they claimed it was a DNS shutdown by all the major ISPs in the country by order of the government. Does that mean you could get access to all the major sites like Twitter if you just knew their numerical IP address?

Really? Seems to me if anything it has gotten worse. Often several of the first 10 hits are aggregators like bizrate or nextag. And often they don't even have anything resembling the item you were looking for but they somehow have created a bogus content phrase to make it look like they do.

Early electronic EV controllers operated at ~800-1500 Hz and emitted a quite audible electronic buzz or hum. Bay area folks may remember that same sound in the early BART trains. When 15-20 kHz controllers came out, a major selling point was their silence. I vote that we bring back the 1000 Hz hum, even if artificially, as the official EV sound.

I have never subscribed to either cable or satellite, but when I go on business trips and see what I am missing, I am just astonished that anyone (except perhaps a few hard-core sports addicts) actually pays for that stuff. About a third of the channels are nonstop infomercials and another third are old movies and TV shows. The so-called "news" channels are particularly pathetic, just continuously rerunning the same tired stories you see on network news hour after hour, with even most of the same inbred clan of talking heads giving commentary. You might catch a good cooking or home improvement installment once in awhile, or a decent documentary on History or Discovery channels, but surely any reasonable person can get their fill of that stuff from PBS.

The major advantage of Flash is that you can choose NOT to install it. With HTML5 decoding built into the browsers, are we all doomed to watch whirlygigs everywhere, all day long?

At seminars, I found taking notes by hand much more distracting than typing on computer; I had to look away from the speaker and would lose the train of thought. With a computer I am much more engaged; I find myself putting the ideas into my own words. I'm not a great typist, so afterward I would go over the text and correct the errors, which helped to fix the ideas in my brain. I used to do this at scientific meetings but what ended it was that I would have to turn the power-save settings to max and I would wear out hard drives with the constant on-and-off.