And I think of the wonders XEROX brought to us every day when I fire up my Star and telnet about the Internet.

This could become worse than the Dancing Plague of 1518 or the June Bug epidemic of 1962!

Worse, this shows every sign of being a hysterical contagion, capable of being transmitted over the Internet and infecting it's victims through contact with their computers, tablets, and smartphones!

The good news is that I know of a possible cure, and if I can reach my Kickstarter goal of $500,000, I can begin work on a treatment for the unfortunate victims...

Just yesterday, I picked up a water glass in a restaurant. I also used the silverware.

5 bucks to a busboy, and someone could have gotten a pretty clear set of my prints. Oops.

Worried about someone getting YOUR fingerprints? Wear gloves everywhere. Bring along a handkerchief to wipe everything down if you momentarily have the gloves off.

Low tech doesn't mean no tech.

What? No Bear McCreary soundtrack?

As a bonus, the robots can protect us from The Terrible Secret of Space.

I just hope they don't get all philosophical. Remember the lesson of Bomb #20...

> when and if sea level actually starts to rise... we'll talk

Water level measurements from the San Francisco gage (CA Station ID: 9414290) indicate that mean sea level rose by an average of 2.01 millimeters (mm) per year from 1897 to 2006, equivalent to a change of eight inches in the last century. The rate of rise has increased to about 3 mm per year over the past 15 years.

This is the oldest tidal guage in continuous operation in the United States, and is located near the Golden Gate.

http://www.energy.ca.gov/2012publications/CEC-500-2012-014/CEC-500-2012-014.pdf

Tragically that is the result of political decisions ranging from Cold War era corn subsidies to trying to undermine the sugar cane industries in countries that we don't like. At one point there was simply too much corn being grown to consume, so industries started looking for other things to do with it. They have done some amazingly clever things, but also things like HFCS and ethanol. Eventually the food industry basically broke food into its constituent parts: fat, salt, and sugar. Fat from (hydrogenated) vegetable oil and sugar from refined corn. Toss in some texture from modified soy, maybe a bit of wheat, sprinkle salt on it and add some circus grade meat so you can put "beef" on the box--poof, Hot Pockets.

...so in a way, it's the government that made us fat.

Food moves through the intestine at roughly a constant rate. If it takes more time to absorb calories than it does to make it to the colon, then those calories don't make it into your bloodstream. That is why liquid calories are so dangerous; they are very efficiently absorbed and don't contain the fiber, etc. necessary to feel full.

If I might add to your spot-on assertions: There was a documentary on obesity called The Weight of the Nation that quite clearly explains the differences in basal metabolic rates between two people.

Two women of the same size and weight are sitting at a table drinking tea (or whatever). One consumes 2000 calories a day as she always has and has never had a weight problem. The other struggled with weight her whole life and eventually dieted to get down to her current weight. She consumes 1300 calories a day to maintain that weight. The difference is in their base metabolic needs; the naturally thin woman is less calorie efficient than the dieting woman. Thus, if they eat the same amount of food--2000 calories a day--one women will keep her same weight, while the other will start gaining. That is also the core of the "yo-yo diet" problem.

There are all kinds of other examples, such as Native American populations that have lived off of fish and basic agriculture for centuries becoming obese and struggling with diabetes and heart disease because they gained access to McDonald's, while the near-by white populations remained unchanged.

I think that people confuse the fact that a calorie deficit will necessarily lead to weight loss with a linear relationship between food intake and metabolized calories when in reality everyone's ability to metabolize food into calories is different.

Most of what you said is spot-on, but fructose is not really metabolized differently than glucose. Both are six-carbon sugars and fructose is immediately rearranged to glucose enzymatically. But, again, not disagreeing with the rest of what you said--it makes a huge difference how we consume sugars and what they are consumed in combination with.

Sucrose is cleaved into fructose and glucose by enzymes in the saliva, but there is also an odd glitch in our metabolic pathways that tends to divert energy derived from free fructose directly into fat storage instead of converting it all to glucose. One theory is that since fruits ripen during the warm months and fruits often contain an abundance of fructose, that it once served as a trigger to start storing fat for Winter, but who knows. The problem boils down to more calories in than out, but it can make a difference how those calories are consumed.

Solar has reached grid parity in Eurozone countries. The only way nuclear could undercut it now is if the entire continent stopped installing solar and diverted all their resources into nuke plants.

It seems like every person that breaths the same air as me at a conference, stumbles across my website, applies for a job, etc., tries to add me to their LinkedIn network. I get a zillion emails with "Someone you don't know and don't want to know wants to add you to their LinkedIn something something." And people keep setting up these groups for former members/employees of stuff, which just dilutes the pool of useful contacts further. LinkedIn is useful for keeping track of former colleagues (because we all move around a lot), and I do occasionally get non-spam from people finding me on LinkedIn, but the SNR is ridiculous.

As an American living in Europe, I could not agree more with that statement. In fact, one of the bigger unifying forces seems to be disdain for the European Union and making fun of the French. (BTW Israel is also an associated country of the EU and I doubt anyone is thinking of Israelis when they say "European.") The idea that a Brit has more in common with a Finn than a collection of treaties their respective governments signed is just wrong. However, this was a difficult concept for me, as an American, to wrap my head around simply because countries here are so tiny (and have such long histories)... they're the size of states, they all belong to a big "union," therefore EU = US is an easy shorthand. It is really difficult to see things from the other side of the Atlantic until you spend a few years here because European countries don't export their culture (e.g., TV and movies) the same way as the US.

I'm not an armchair engineer, but I am a real scientist. And while I have never seen anything at this scale, I have read a lot of proposals. This one did not set off my general bullshit alarm.

I really, really like that Musk has everyone talking about the Hyperloop and the ancillary discussions of public transportation in general, but there are a couple of details that are glossed over in the big, long document. One is the acceleration/braking by linear induction motors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he seems to jump from idea that they already work in rotary engines and that MVA inverters are already commercialized (in mining equipment and trains) to the conclusion that they therefore will work in the linear configuration shown in the document. The wording there was sneaky.

The second is holding a vacuum, ~0.001 Atm., through the whole tube. Has that ever been demonstrated on such a large scale? He shows some metrics from commercial pumps, but then seems to assume that they will scale constantly with volume... how many pumps? Spaced how? What sort of maintenance requirements? How long to pump down the shunts at stations where modules are loaded/unloaded? Vacuum is non-trivial at commercial scales. Perhaps this sort of thing is commonplace and I have just never seen it (and I have seen vacuum chambers that would accommodate a pickup truck). But it felt to me like he was making a lot of assumptions about how easy it is to work with vacuum at those scales.

Those are both issues that can be demonstrated/prototyped, but it is as naive to say that the proposal was anything more than a whitepaper as it is to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.