This isn't really true. Any reasonably coherent group has common interests and engineers or workers in general certainly are such groups.

The degree to which ones relationship with ones employer is voluntary is also fairly doubtful. It is voluntary only in that there is a possibility to choose among employers, but even if they were in perfect competition this does not make making the choice voluntary. That is only voluntary as long as one has the resources to become ones own employer.

The engineers at google might have those resources if they banded together and formed themselves into a worker co-operative, or had a union which regularly threatened that they would form themselves into such an entity, and that might give them an equitable share of their production. In more capital intensive industries the workers, even collectively can't do this, and must resort to threatening strikes. These are policies necessary for getting a good share of wages even in competitive markets and when people form cartels against people who don't even have a union there will be a reduction in wages.

A house seller might be a friendly adversary in transaction, but in a world where ordinary people do not own houses, but rent them with no realistic chance of every buying, it ceases to be quite the same situation and that is more akin to the situation that most workers are in with respect to those who own capital-intensive companies and land.

While cars are about 30% efficient, this is far from the Carnot limit. Even in Otto cycle engines, like in typical car engines a compression ratio of 10:1 is enough to produce a theoretical cycle efficiency of 60% (http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/OttoCycle.html).

Furthermore, not every car uses the Otto cycle and things like gas turbines (Brayton cycle), Diesel engines (Diesel cycle) do exist. Even existing turbo-compound diesel engines like the 3rd generation Diesel-Ethanol Scania 9-litre engine achieve thermal efficiencies of 43-44%, depending on fuel. There are also all sorts of potential future innovations, such as camless engines which have the potential to make engines smaller and lighter as well as increasing valve control so that more efficient cycles can be implemented. Then there's the possibility of adding additional power strokes, for example, by adding additional cylinders in which exhaust gases are further expanded, or by using water injection followed by two additional strokes to make use of the expanding steam.

Beyond this there are really experimental things like wave rotor engines and other inventions that may well continue to improve car engines to keep them competitive for well into the future, especially for people who like light vehicles with high power-to-weight ratio. Of course, batteries will still make sense, since hybrid configurations may permit engines to run at fixed loads and batteries might become lighter I still.

I especially doubt whether fully electric trucks and busses, a thus whether electric *vehicles* to achieve the goods and people moving capacities of gasoline powered vehicles, are practical at all, although I have little doubt that they will likely become hybrids.

I have strong doubts whether learning the multiplication table as a table is useful (although showing people a multiplication table to demonstrate that these small multiplications can be tabulated is sort of okay). If done as rote memorization it does however not seem like real mathematics.

It might serve as an excuse to give people experience in applying the commutative and distributive laws of multiplication, but I imagine that it's fairly rare that it's done that way and that it's usually treated as rote memorization. However, if you do things correctly you can perform multiplications about as quickly as someone who knows the multiplication table by only memorizing that 7*7=49, how to double a number, how to halve a number, how to triple and number and how to divide a number by three. Then you can compute 9x as 3(3x), 5x as 10x/2, 8x as 2(2(2x)) and all the others. If you want to go to multiplying all numbers up to 12 you can choose either to compute 11x as 10x+x or by additionally memorizing that 11*11=121.

This is good exercise if it's done right, but I think that the point of it is to understand the commutative and distributive laws of multiplication as preparation for algebra. If one after doing this wants to learn to compute things quickly one will, once one understands the general principles have no difficulties learning to do so.

Aluminium honeycomb is used as a single-use shock absorber and deforms very evenly and I imagine that the same thing is true of this paper stuff. It's fairly impressive, but is best seen in an image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Single-use_crushable_aluminium_honeycomb_shock_absorber.jpg.

There are actually helmets designed to reduce the rotational forces though. For example, I remember my own university trumpeting one helmet design in which a kind of inner helmet was allowed to slide inside an outer helmet on a low-friction liner. Simulations demonstrated a reduction maximum strain forces on the brain. There's a presentation on it here by the company which now manufactures them: http://mipshelmet.com/how-it-works/the_invention and since it's a simple design I suspect that it will be a component of the helmet of the future.

However, honeycombs make excellent single-use shock absorbers, so those surely have a place in helmets as well.

Even if the site you link to were reasonable there is every reason to believe that helmets can be made truly excellent and made to give incredible protection both against shocks and rotational forces.

I prefer to compare it with the altitude record for sailplanes, which is 15445 meters (50,671 ft). Of course, pressure drops off exponentially with increase in altitude, but it's still not all that much higher.

It would depend on how quickly the two came up with the idea and how much thought it required.

For example, going to the different field of mathematics/theoretical computer science, no one would say that Cook's theorem was obvious, but despite this it was almost simultaneously proven in the West by Cook and in the Soviet Union by Levin. I think that the right way to judge obviousness is to have it done by the patent examiners, although it might be hard for them to be 'skilled in the art' when examining patents in very specialized fields.

While it's probably hard mathematics I do not think that finding a bunch of explicit solutions to such problems is likely to be all that novel.

While It might sound as if though it's a claim to have found an explicit formula for n-particle motion in every case, it's fairly clear that they're talking about particular cases. It also seems unlikely that he makes trivial errors given that he got a PhD from MSU.

Yes, and it's because it doesn't make sense that we immediately understand that it means something different.

When someone asks how cold it is answering with the temperature is a good answer, but that isn't really the precise answer to the question. It depends on context and when we aren't talking about heat engines and ratios of temperatures in Kelvin then we understand that that it's 'twice as cold as -10 C' means something like 'the rate of cooling of body at about 37 C in the present conditions is twice as high if were -10 C and there was no wind'. The only way to not come to such a conclusion when one thinks about it is to purposefully not understand.

I don't even believe that this is something that might risk causing misunderstandings about heat and temperature, because people usually have fairly good intuition about the cooling effect of the wind and arrive at this interpretation naturally as soon as they give it any thought.

The AC is making a serious error here and it almost seems as if though he imagines the US to be the entire world even weather-wise.

Meanwhile, here in Europe we have weather so unusually warm that it's almost unnatural. I live in Sweden and this time of year I can usually do such things as skate, ski cross country and engage other snow-requiring activities. However, today it's been six degrees Celsius and I'm seriously considering taking a short drive with the top down tomorrow provided that it's sunny.

This is of course kind of anecdotal but actual data (http://www.smhi.se/klimatdata/meteorologi/2.1353/showImg.php?par=tmpAvv) demonstrates the same thing. About five degrees warmer than the normal temperatures and probably much warmer during the warmest part of the day.

Well, I imagine that the total chilling effect on a human is doubled. Half the temperature reallly only makes physical sense in Kelvin though (i.e. "The hot end is at 600 K (326.85 C) and the cold end is 300 K (26.85 C), so the heat engine is at most 1-300/600=50% efficient").

It almost definitely isn't. I remember transforming plasmids with parts for tetracycline resistance into bacteria in highschool and I can't imagine that this would be allowed if tetracycline were something that one would want to use as an antibiotic for humans.

Also, people have debt in dollars, which therefore have actual value, since people need it to pay interest and to eventually pay them back.

It seems that combatants are defined as those who participate directly. I modify my previous statement, replacing 'combatant' with 'member of the armed forces of a party to the conflict'.

I do not believe that this is obvious.

By assigning him a special status the army does effectively incorporate him as a, possibly unarmed, auxiliarly. Not every combatant participates by directly participating in hostilities. Logistic support troops are a common thing after all.