Emperor Julian the Apostate! (AD 332 - AD 363)
"He is clearly Rome's second ever philosopher-ruler, after the great Marcus Aurelius. But if Marcus Aurelius was weighed down by war and plague then, Julian's greatest burden was to be that he belonged to a different age. Trained classically, learned in Greek philosophy he would have made a fine successor to Marcus Aurelius. But those days had gone, now this distant intellect seemed out of place, at odds with many of his people, and certainly with the Christian elite of society. "

http://www.roman-empire.net/co...

--nice bio by Gore Vidal, too.

Because the chips need to be made on single-crystal material, which needs to be grown on a single crystal substrate.

This is, by the way, not particularly new in the solar cell research community. Photovoltaics researchers have been developing technologies like this for a long time-- it's called "epitaxial lift-off" or "monolithic metamorphic" in the most recent versions (with "metamorphic" indicating a change in lattice constant), but older variants were called "cleft" and "peeled film technology".

"A key stumbling block in the effort to combat global warming has been the intimate link between greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth."

Time to cue up the warning about correlation not being causation.

Most particularly, in this case: when the economy gets better, people buy more stuff. There's a correlation between how many teddy bears people buy for their children and their income. That doesn't mean that increasing the production of teddy bears will increase average income. When the economy grows, people buy more.

These are traffic lights. Traffic lights with cameras attached.

They're just traffic lights in the shape of robots. Which is pretty cool, when you look at the pictures.

That link says nothing whatsoever about rules for government employee e-mail.

That's a link to rules about ISPs archiving e-mail that is the subject of a subpoena.

The link you give says nothing of the sort. The link states that a government may require an ISP to archive e-mail subject to a subpoena.

That has precisely nothing to do with State Department employees, nor does it say anything whatsoever about what e-mail addresses they use.

That is a great example of "ABCs"-- Argument By Changing the subject.

I've never quite understood: why would anybody want to get out of jury duty?

I've often suggested that, but this is the first time I've heard anybody else suggest it.

Yes: vote, but the candidates on the slate should be randomly selected from the population

Exactly. And tools and organization are the two most useful skills... for efficiently killing things.

Paying somebody else to do it turns out to be a very efficient strategy for killing.

Nevertheless, this is silly.

Humans are the most deadly predators that the planet has ever had. Killing stuff is what we're really really good at. Making weapons is something we're really really good at.

Zombies... their weapons are teeth and fingernails. Their tactics are go straight in and attack regardless of tactical situation.

They wouldn't have a chance.

Dimpled spinning ball

ice in bottoms of craters

glints bright in sunlight.

The ethics violation isn't that he was paid by a corporation.
The ethics violation is in not disclosing it.

Wow- that's cool. Thanks for the graphs!

I never would have guessed that for the rotating coordinate system the trajectory would be so very close to a straight line, although once you graph it, it makes sense.

Cool!

That doesn't seem right. You are doing the calculation in the rotating coordinate system of the Earth?

Equatorial rotational velocity of the Earth is 465 m/s. The center of the Earth is stationary in the rotating coordinate system, so over a 22 minute drop, the lateral displacement should be 614 kilometers. That's not the distance by which you miss the center, since as you deviate from the initial radial line the gravity vector changes direction, but the effect of that will be small until you get to distances that start to be comparable to 10% of the Earth's radius, so it should be close to the miss distance.

It's a non-Keplerian orbit (even in the non-rotating frame), so you don't come back to the same place you started.

No, it can't; it's not a Keplerian problem. You could calculate the period using Kepler's laws if the Earth were a point mass. But it's not. You could calculate the period using the Brachistochrone calculation if the Earth were a uniform sphere. But it's not. The Earth is layered, with the density changing as you go closer to the center. Only way to solve the problem correctly is numerical integration.

(I'd actually be interested in seeing the calculation done in the article.)