He is not the first Nobel Laureate to be fascinated by the drums and vibrating membranes. Sir C V Raman, of the Raman Effect fame, was intrigued by the Indian drums, the Tabla and the mridangam. He published why and how they produce harmonics (paywall) back in 1920s. A synopsis.

In some sense it is not a surprise because his main work was on vibrating electromagnetic fields, and the natural modes of vibration of circular membranes is a very good way to practice the mathematics of vibrations.

So that there is one for each flavor of ice cream in Baskin Robbins.

In the heydays, immediately after the IPO, when Netscape stock price was zooming up, Marc Andreesen boasted, "The desktop is irrelevant. OS is irrelevant. The Browser is the new king of the hill" (not an exact quote). Microsoft took the threat seriously, fought hard, fought dirty, and killed Netscape as a company. But it could not kill the idea. It won the battle with Netscape but lost the war with the browser.

Once someone with serious financial muscle, namely Google, took up the idea, it was game over for the desktop. Google docs has much smaller set of features compared to Microsoft Office. But it is enough to meet 100% of the needs of 90% of the population. It is also enough to meet 90% of the needs of the remaining 10%. Mere 10% of the user base using these bells and whistles for just 10% of the time. ChromeOS is based on a Linux kernel. Android pads and phones are based on Linux. Linux has taken over the server market. It has been the decade of Linux.

In a meta sense, the old PC desktop market was based on selling everyone the superset of needs of all the users. Grandma wanting a machine to look at pics of grandkids was buying a machine capable of developing C++ projects or doing video editing. Once Apple broke the market into two pieces, content creators and content consumers it was a true paradigm shift. But even grandma needs to type a letter once in a while. The browser is enough to meet that need,

Similar shift will happen in automobiles. Everyone is buying a machine that can refuel/recharge in 10 minutes to go another 250 miles. Even the second and the third car of the family is bought with the same mind set. But it can change very quickly. Solar is picking up. It is cost effective for people to ditch the grid. Utilities are looking for a way to keep them in the grid. Grabbing a piece of the transportation energy market would be very attractive to them. When Big Oil gets a real well financed competitor well versed in dirty local politics, the electric utilities, that is when electric cars will take off.

There are many technologies maturing. Basic range of 100 miles is well within reach. Range extending options based on rentable charged batteries, battery swaps, towable range extending battery packs, range extending IC engines are all possible. The challenge is not the technology, but the investment needed for infrastructure.

This is interesting work, and very well presented no doubt. But it shows why your PhD guru is making you spend seemingly unreasonable time doing literature surveys. At first glance this work seems to be very close to solution adaptive meshing techniques used in computational physics.

Using a bunch of sample points to represent a function is fundamental to computational physics. Stress Analysis, Colorful oops Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Electro Magnetics etc etc. Solution adaptive meshing is a very popular technique in these algorithms. Make a crude mesh and compute a crude solution, use the gradients in the function to determine where the "cells" are too large or the representation is too poor. From there we go to "p" refinement where we jack up the order of mode shapes in the finite element, or "h" refinement where we refine the mesh by adding points, or "r" refinement where we move the mesh points from less important regions to more important regions.

In the "h" refinement technique one would insert points based on cell-centroid, cell-circumcenter or longest-edge-bisection etc.

This work, which seems to be 2D, these techniques are first published back in 1980s, and it was extended to 3D in 1990s.

The commercial CEM package made by Ansoft to solve 2D electromagnetics called Maxwell was using the Voronoi polygon based refinement of 2D meshes. It shipped in 1990. They were doing 3D Voronoi polyhedron based solution adaptive refinement of sample points in 1993 version of their 3D product HFSS.

http://www.google.com/search?q...

The fundamental particle humans are made of is not fermions. That particle is called moron. That is why they are able to occupy mutually contradictory policy positions simultaneously.

I have seen them order the roast duck with the magno salsa.

Are you sure all those jerks were really Mensa members? It is quite possible to falsely claim mensa membership to elevate their obnoxiousness to the next level.

Why are we even thinking of this humongous expensive castles in the air projects? All we need are a set of trained butterfly wranglers in the Amazon to make butterflies to beat their wings at 180 degress out of phase with the tornado seeds. Like Bose noise cancelling device these counter wing beats will cancel the tornadoes. People never think of simple solutions. Always it has to be a huge multi trillion dollar project.. sheesh.

Large distributed development. Multiple point check ins. (Our divisional build is around 100 execuables and 300 dlls. Corporate level build would easily exceed 1000 executables). Our build group will launch builds on every library every hour and immediately report compilation failures and link failures. But that is just the beginning

Then comes the installation and packaging failures. The dynamic libs get out of synch, wrong dll gets packaged in, etc

Then the build is good, it does not crash on every project. But it fails daily validation suite. After clearing that hurdle the build fails certification (same as validation but more detailed comparison with golden results).

So typically our last daily build is about one day old, last validated build is two or may be three days old. Last certified build could be three to five days old.

And this is a great improvement compared to the past.

Biggest advancement that helped us were dirt cheap prices for storage. So we are able to keep multiple older working builds for the developers. Not all of them need the latest build. Second biggest thing was the multicore machines with enough horsepower to launch all the library builds simultaneously. Third was the drop in network bandwidth prices, we are able to consolidate and synch the source code repo with very small (for a developer I mean, not for a video watcher) latencies.

I don't know why they are making such a big deal about 22 Gigawatts briefly. Is it really worth bragging in this day and age? In 2014? It is on the record someone generated 1.21 Gigwatts briefly at 10:04 PM November 5, 1955 using some home made contraptions, extension cords and a lightning conductor, in Hill Valley California. By Moore's law, we should be generating so much more than mere 22 Gigawatts.

OK, OK, Higgs field is quite dangerous, and right now we seem to be sitting in the just-the-right-value. And if the Higgs field gets more energy the whole universe might collapse. But the most important question is, "Is the lower Higgs field energy anthropogenetic?". Do we have any kind of plans to absorb sudden injection of high energy into Higgs field in Andromeda galaxy? I never trusted the Andromedans and we are just trusting them not to energize the Higgs field? Just bomb them just to be safe.

You are correct in those aspects. Speed limits are violated by 100% of the people 80% of the time. And all the violations you mention are common. But stop sign compliance is quite high if you count rolling through at below 5 mph as a reasonable approximation of stopping.

EEE for Embrace, Extend and Extinguish was the old strategy that worked in the PC era when Microsoft leveraged its monopoly on OS to kill the competition that played by the old rules. For it to work, Microsoft needs to have a monopoly to begin with.

EGA is the name of the game in the Android. Embrace & Get Assimilated.

All your bases are now belong to us.

It appears that way. And I do my fair share of calling other drivers idiots and imbeciles. But by and large Americans obey traffic laws very well, the compliance rate is very very high. I know for a fact that the violations are at least two orders of magnitude higher in India. The accidents/fatalities/injuries per 1000 passenger kilometer stats tell the whole story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Jamming signals is illegal, and it could affect lots of legitimate use of cell phone use without being distracted. Data link for emergency and police vehicles, streaming in music, passengers using cell phones etc. So what he did was wrong.

But he could could have bought one of those russian style dash cams. Mounted it on near the roof line, looking sideways and downwards. May be two such cams on either side of the vehicle. Record it continuously and report the actual distracted drivers, along with the video footage to police. Or without even going to police upload them into some kind of YouTube channel and shame them into compliance. When they see how seriously long, their "momentary" glance at the texts, the distance covered when they were distracted, most sane people will feel compelled to comply. After all, 99.9% of the people do come to full stop at stop signs even when there is no other vehicle is in sight, without any one policing it.