Streaming video needs a switch to turn off the vapid commentary.

My view is that there will always be a niche for in-person classroom instruction. I think the product that higher education should be selling is the opportunity to develop a personalized relationship with an expert. That happens very effectively in the small classrooms of liberal arts colleges.

The non-interactive lectures provided by large universities with hundreds of students in the lecture hall at a time went obsolete when video was invented.

This is in my area of research, and I read and understood the abstract. It does not seem like something that should be posted on Slashdot.

In this case, quantum fluid means a fluid that is cold enough, dense enough, and made of low enough mass particles that it has some quantum mechanical properties (interference is an example in the abstract).

Making a bigger quantum fluid is not really a challenge - you just need a bigger refrigerator and a bigger tank of helium. In this case, they made a bigger quantum fluid of a very specialized type.

No. That is just one small part of quantum mechanics.

This experiment is outside my field of expertise, but I know several people who worked on this experiment and have met Juan Collar several times. It seems like an excellent experiment, but there is a funny side to their results:- Juan Collar has been talking for a long time about how he has been very close to showing the DAMA claim of dark matter detection is incorrect, and now he has confirmed it. I often got the feeling that the COGENT team didn't really believe dark matter existed.

Physicists think computer science means numerical calculus, since most of theoretical physics is difficult calculus problems. Perhaps this is why there are so many physicists who write unreadable code.

You do not know how science funding works in America. My salary is partly paid by a wealthy private donor and partly paid by the government. My boss is paid by the university (he does not actually participate in the experiment). Since politicians want to provide skilled workers for their corporate sponsors, and politicians subscribe to the theory that having smarter workers will compensate for the fact that our workers expect to be paid more than those in China, they provide lots of money for people to have salaries to work in labs on the thinking that it prepares them to work in industry or to teach people to work in industry. However, nobody will give us money to buy equipment or liquid helium, so I am forced to spend vast sums of salary money to save only somewhat less vast sums on the cost of helium. My boss can't just lay of some of his staff and use the money to buy more helium; the government won't let him divert the money.

I hear in Europe it is the other way around; the government will buy equipment for labs but they have no staff to use it. This probably has something to do with why high energy physicists are always flying off to CERN.

I didn't even mention that sometimes we cannot get liquid helium at all when we want it.

As you said, energy used for liquefaction has little to do with the cost of helium. Liquefiers are expensive to buy. We are fortunate to have enough helium users that the capital expense of a liquefier has been overcome. I think we also indirectly pay the person who runs the liquefier's salary, since that is not the sort of thing the government will pay for. Some of what we return to the liquefier is lost before it can be resold.

This topic is complex and much discussed among low temperature and high energy scientists, who need liquid helium to cool their experiments. Unfortunately a large portion of helium usage is waste, such as deliberate dumping by natural gas companies who do not think the helium market (tiny compared to the natural gas market) is worth their time, or welders who still use helium when argon is cheaper.

In my lab, the liquid helium is the primary cost of doing experiments. We spend around $100 for each four-hour experimental session. It is by far our biggest expense. We try to recover as much as possible, but we only get a small refund for returned gas. So, please don't use helium where it is not needed; you are limiting our science, and you may be limiting your own access to medical technologies such as MRI in the future.

Currently only the wealthiest students are paying the sticker price at good private colleges. So if you are not wealthy, it is best to apply first and decide where to go after getting your financial aid offer. Simon's Rock is unusual because it offers merit scholarships, so even wealthy students may get a discount. Many prestigious universities do not give out merit scholarships.

I liked it quite a bit. I graduated three years ago, still like to advertise it in my sig.

At first I was confused by this article, since I was reading it in Opera 10.11. The new version is called 10.60, not 10.6.

The article you linked to is terrible. The technique it is discussing does not allow faster than the speed of light communication. Articles written by journalists about physics are frequently totally wrong, particularly on the internet.

Not only is this idea most likely illegal, it is also cruel. If the horse falls and breaks its leg, it will most likely have to be put down. It's not the horse's fault that it is being used by police.

What if you want to fly somewhere and stay overnight? Do you have to pay $90/hour all night?

The Tevatron has to be partially removed to allow the construction of Project X, which is an accelerator that complements the LHC but does not compete with it. Fermilab is in no danger of being closed due to obsolescence. Many of the people who work there are working on the LHC, and there are many other experiments located at Fermilab.

After congress canceled the Superconducting Super Collider, Europe focused on exploring the "Energy Frontier" and American scientists have focused on the "Intensity Frontier." There are also lots of collaboration and experiments that do not fit into either category. Of course, the rate at which the "Intensity Frontier" is explored does depend on the federal budget, but it will get done eventually.