in which position are white sharks? Next to deaths by stepping on a rusty nail while running at the beach?

Hey, man don't underestimate the dangers of tetanus. Rusty nails are a real killer, especially when they're attached to boards.

This is one of the many reasons I don't go anywhere near the ocean

The reason I don't go anywhere near the ocean is because I've got a chance of being killed in a car accident on my way there (and back). Actually being killed in the ocean? That's nuthin'.

When you are printing a 10nm wire into the silicon chip, you are not very far from doing it atom by atom as the wire is only like 50 atoms wide.

Perhaps, but at least with lithography you can do it across the entire wafer (or die) area in a single go. That's batch processing all the transistors at once, rather than serially processing them with AFM.

Silicon atoms are 0.2nm wide. We're getting into "why aren't you just directly pushing the atoms around with atomic force microscopy?" territory.

you probably could. However, for a processor with 10^9 transistors and perhaps a dozen layers, it gets pretty time-consuming to build it by pushing atoms around one at a time.

I am amused by this bit in the summary:

But as we approach 10nm, 7nm, and 5nm, the low-hanging fruit disappears

I'd say the low-hanging fruit disappeared a few decades ago. Continuing down the feature size curve has for many years required a whole slew of every-more-complicated tricks and techniques.

That said: yes, going forward is going to be increasingly difficult. You will eventually reach an insurmountable limit that no amount of trickery or technology will be able to overcome. I predict it'll be somewhere around the 0 nm process node.

Propose a $0.12 increase, settle for a nickel to get it passed. It's better than nothing...

Take pictures of all the documents and send them via snapchat. Isn't this the kind of application it was made for (restrictred permission viewing)? It's, like, toooootally secure.

There are a number of studies that have examined the life cycle energy costs for photovoltaic panels. Start with this and go from there. Some numbers I've seen (like this) indicate the energy payback for monocrystalline PV modules is around two years; less for other technologies. Those numbers are from 2011, so I suspect that with increased manufacturing volume the numbers are even more favorable today.

A different argument that could be made comes down to basic economics. If solar panels took substantially more energy to manufacture than they produce over their lifespan, it would be reflected in their price. As the GP argued, albeit poorly, one can look at the price for a commodity and get from it a rough sense of the energy investment that it embodies. The wholesale price of PV modules is $1-2 per W of capacity, which one could argue represents tens of kWh of energy input. Even if there are externalities not captured in the price, and the total energy cost was hundreds of kWh per panel, that's still one or two orders of magnitude lower than the total lifetime output of the same panel.

Right now a typical installation (complete, by a contractor, not DIY) is $7/watt for residential, and sunny places like LA get 5-5.5 hours/day, or 1800-1900h/year, with most panels warrantied for 20 years. That's 37000Wh life per panel watt, or 37kWh

you need to refresh your dimensional analysis, because you are missing a term or two. 1800-1900h/year * 20 years = 37000 hours of productive life per panel, not 37000 watt-hours of total output. If the total lifetime output of a solar panel over 20 years was a measly 37 kWh (roughly the daily energy consumption of a home in the United States) no one would buy them.

What's missing in your analysis is the power output of the panel during those daylit hours. For the 5 hours of peak generation during the day, you could expect about 200 W for a "standard" panel. (You'll get not-insignificant power generation during all daylight hours, but we'll focus on peak generation for now.) That brings the lifetime output to something like 7.4 MWh, which at wholesale (not residential customer) electrical rates of $50/MWh equates to $370 worth of electricity. Even taking net present value into consideration, the energy cost breakeven for manufacturing solar cells is measured in years, if not months.

Solar panels are not merely an energy storage device that captures conventional energy sources during their manufacture, only to trickle that energy out with sunshine. They are a net energy producer many times over. With (currently impractical, not-at-scale) methods for storing and buffering the power, it is feasible to power the entire PV manufacturing and installation pipeline entirely with solar power.

It is graduated from 1 to 11. At the bottom is the subscript "MPH x 100". I'm used more to "RPM x 100"!

For a mass production vehicle, the display may not make a lot of sense. But for the one guy who is ever going to drive the car, I think we can trust him to understand what it means. It's no worse than an aircraft altimeter.

jet engines are for flying, any other use is stupid

don't tell that to Bruce Wayne!

This is just like those breakthrough articles about the space elevator where some fascinating new development has brought us that much close to building the space elevator, such as the decision to use crushed red velvet for the upholstery

I disagree. Crushed red velvet would be almost purely an aesthetic decision. There are aesthetic considerations in the cockpit, sure. (The Rolex chronometer is a pretty piece of work, but a good wristwatch would function just as well.) But the videos present substantial engineering and design content that, if it had not been properly considered and addressed, would have sunk the entire endeavor.

The comment on not using aerodynamic down force is rather telling

I think the comment is better interpreted as "we want some downforce, but not so much that it crushes the front suspension." I suppose ideally you would have zero downforce on the wheels, so that you have essentially zero rolling resistance. But as a practical matter you need to have some for stability. better to have some than risk having none, or negative (airborne!). Plus, if the wheels aren't actually in contact with the ground, it can't claim the record as a "car."

Bloodhounds aren't exactly known for their speed.

Neither is Greyhound.

A wireless charger is fine for keeping the phone topped off at my desk where the phone's sitting for hours with the display off

Of course, at that point, you may as well have a (wired) dock, or a cable. It's not like it's that hard to get power into a phone.