Unlike gas-electric hybrids, there's no hydrogen-powered "generator" in these cars. Their traction batteries are charged by direct chemical reaction of hydrogen with oxygen in the fuel cell. Also, the Mirai's battery is nickel metal-hydride, not lithium.

I'm not saying they're right, but a lot of people who bought policies or even were enrolled in expanded Medicaid don't necessarily feel that they were "helped". They rather liked the old system where you get along with no insurance and minimal healthcare for much of your life, wait till you get a catastrophic illness in middle age, and then throw yourself on the mercy of the system, which is forced by law and tradition to provide care regardless of ability to pay. Then you just muddle along for a few years until Medicare kicks in. It was a chaotic, unfair, inefficient, expensive, and convoluted system that we all paid dearly for. But was it really that much worse than the Rube Goldberg contraption set up by ACA? Many people don't think so. And only the most deluded liberals ever thought there would be any political payoff from grateful enrollees.

It's not a generational thing. Rather, universities are only hiring people who already have at least one grant, and these days most such people are already middle-aged. Hiring a new Assistant Prof straight out of a postdoc, no matter how prestigious their publications, is just too risky, given the miniscule probability that they will get funded. The new paradigm is for so-called Assistant Profs to get a grant while they are still in their mentor's lab, then start looking for jobs. Nothing sets the creative juices flowing like being set loose in your own lab with nothing but some good ideas, and that experience is being lost. But I'll admit, a big part of the problem is the large number of baby boomer scientists with $150,000 salaries, who could retire comfortably but just don't know when to quit, and keep getting funded mainly because of their political connections.

I wish I'd kept better track of them, but it really seems like about half of the CFLs I've bought with claimed lifespans of 5-7 years fail within 2 or 3 years, even when they're being used in fully ventilated table lamps.

A real eye-opener, and almost an exact replay of the Credit Mobilier railroad scheme of the 1860s: A government-regulated corporation receives a monopoly franchise as well as generous subsidies from the government, yet still manages to rack up huge losses because so much of the money is siphoned off to other ventures, while a few of the principals accumulate astronomical wealth.

Even though a handful of owners of the original NiMH RAV4 EVs still rave about them, the vehicle has always struck me as rather an odd duck. Until and unless the price comes way, way down, the market for battery EVs consists of the environmentally conscious, and what environmentalist would want to drive an SUV, the quintessential symbol of profligate waste, self-importance and environmental degradation?.

Seems to me their claims are contradictory. If the cell doesn't heat up at all during charge/discharge, then it must have very low internal resistance and consequently if there is a short, it will release its energy almost instantaneously and be more, not less, susceptible to thermal runaway and fires (it's carbon after all). No matter how low the internal resistance, the energy when has to go somewhere. Relatively high internal resistance is what makes LiFePO4 cells safe for EV hobbyists - short out a cell and it will heat up and destroy itself, but slowly enough that it won't explode or catch fire. Proprietary lithium chemistries used in commercial EVs have lower resistance and better performance but are much more volatile.

When I was in college (1968-72) the big contest was between FORTRAN and ALGOL. ALGOL was supposed to be more logical, readable and humane, but it certainly was more verbose, and FORTRAN won out with its brutal efficiency, telling the machine what to do, in the minimum possible number of characters. I remember being particularly fond of the Arithmetic IF (a legacy feature even then): IF (X/Y*Z) 100,300,50, which would go to statements 100, 300 or 50, depending on whether (X/Y*Z) was negative, zero or positive. I haven't written a FORTRAN program in decades, but I'm still saddened to hear that feature is now obsolete. (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10758935/fortran-compiler-warning-obsolete-arithmetic-if-statement)

Most of the authors' analysis rings true, but Dr. Harold Varmus, in particular, contributed enormously to the perverse incentives he now complains about when, as NIH Director, he mandated "modular grants", in which scientists simply request grant support in multiples of $25,000 without the traditional detailed budget and without any salary data. Indeed, scientists were (and still are) expressly forbidden from including in their application any information on exactly how they proposed to spend the requested grant money or what they were paying themselves. The predictable response of the universities (and I speak here from first-hand experience) was to strongly encourage faculty to put larger portions of their salaries onto grants, and be rewarded with higher base salaries. Such policies were enthusiastically sold by department chairmen to upper-level administrators as a way of incentivizing faculty to acquire more grant support, while at the same time raising faculty salaries, all at zero net cost to the University. The fact that all this occurred at the same time as the doubling of the NIH budget only encouraged the process. Now the hard times are here again, money is tight, and support personnel are being let go, but faculty are not giving up their higher salaries and the universities aren't going back to paying faculty from university funds to do research, at least not without a fight.

When I arrived at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1968, all programs were running on a Univac 1108, soon to be replaced with a much more powerful IBM 360. In those days every science major learned to code in their freshman year. You would type your program onto punch cards, one instruction per card, then type your data onto cards, and dump into the submission box. Hours later you'd pick up your printout in your (physical) mailbox. Faster turnaround if you submitted at say 2AM. No security at all in those days, so occasionally your program cards would be stolen, if you hadn't duplicated it you'd have to start from scratch.

The opaque price structures of both Verizon and the cable companies show just how essential a regulated service is. If the telcos want to abandon POTS, then in return they ought to be required to offer comparable service on whatever system they propose to replace it with, and at the same price it was on POTS, a price that can never rise more than inflation. After all, electronics costs are dropping all the time, and they ought to be saving millions not having to maintain 2 separate systems anymore. Instead they seem to be offering exactly nothing in return. Where it's still available voice + DSL can be had for $50. Any hardwired replacement, cable or fiber, approaches $100, and so does wireless with a data cap comparable to DSL (150 GB/month). In my area, you can't even get internet without also taking voice. It's criminal. The other thing they need to do is to ban bundling and teaser rates. Mandate standard, transparent pricing: one price for the connection, then separate prices for internet, TV and voice. As it is, the pricing structure all but forces consumers to buy entertainment services if they want a connection at all.

These charter-school folks have a long-term agenda, and that is the conversion of public education from a public service to a fully privatized profit center, with the added perk of eliminating teachers unions as a political force. A key factor in achieving this is that wealth inequality has become so extreme that local governments no longer have the resources to educate the nation's children, but billionaires do. Can parents and boards of education afford to say "no" when, in the face of decaying buildings and teacher layoffs, big-time donors come offering modern, well-staffed facilities, with all the latest IT and other equipment, if only you let the donors do it their way? Once the public school system is reduced to being merely a dumping ground for the worst, most disruptive and unresponsive students, the donors won't have to be so generous, they'll be making handsome profits as the contractors in a privatized fee-for-service education system. It's just like the 1990s when deep-pocketed for-profit HMOs offered healthcare at below-market rates. Once all the nonprofit hospitals and insurers were driven out of business, the for-profits jacked up premiums at double-digit rates for decades. It was a brilliant strategy, and it's happening all over again, in education.

To me, the Times is well worth the 2 bucks a week I pay for it (with an .edu address). The articles are more comprehensive than any of the free news sites, and the ads are low-key. I feel news is something we should pay for, after all, someone has to pay all those reporters, editors, etc. It's become clear online ads aren't going to do it, and it shouldn't be governments paying them either. There are only going to be a few survivors in the online news game, but the Times might be one of them. They'll need millions of subscribers though, and last I heard they didn't even have a million yet.