I was watching the test on a friend's Cox Communications cable service, and they also switch to a shopping channel (cable channel 8) for emergency alert activations. Their cable system apparently is incapable of showing the alert on all the (digital?) channels, so they simply show it over analog shopping channel 8 and have a system in place to switch everyone to that channel automatically whenever an alert is triggered. It's a bit annoying if a test is scheduled during, say, an important football game... er... episode of Mythbusters... whatever. On the other hand, it is even more jarring than the alert tones, so you'll certainly know something's afoot.

If you have one of their Motorola digital cable boxes, when it goes into emergency alert mode and auto-switches to analog shopping channel 8 for the message, the front clock display changes to "EAS" as well. If you're suddenly watching the shopping channel and "EAS" is displayed on the cable box *and* you have the wonderfully annoying (and intentionally so) alert tones, you *should* be able to figure out that now's the time to read or listen. At least, that seems to be the general idea.

I did notice that I didn't get the alert over cable until after I'd finished watching it on OTA TV (and chatting about it afterward), so chalk up a minute or two of additional latency to the cable company.

Actually, as was explained in detail in the video, random is easy. Completely devoid of repetition is vastly more difficult. This was not simply random, this was mathematically non-repetitive. Using random numbers outside of the audible range would not necessarily preclude repetition, and using random frequencies is atonal sound, not tonal non-repetitive "music" as was the intention of the piece.

Completely random is trivial. Mathematically-sound aperiodic and repetition-free is a completely different kettle o' fish.

Note that the composition used the 88-tone chromatic scale of the standard piano keyboard. Without that constraint, you could make a much longer atonal composition, of course, but the point of the exercise was to use discrete mathematics and music to create a tonal composition completely devoid of repetition.

I was afraid you were going to tell me there were five researchers, but you don't even *look* Cardassian.

From the sound of it, it'll almost inevitably end up costing money. With that in mind and by the powers vested in me by absolutely nobody in particular, I hereby dub it "feemail".

(One *could* say that it is supposed to be a kinder, more respectable alternative to the rough-and-tumble wild west of existing (e)mail, but then there are those who think it's just a prettier version that will inevitably cost a bunch of money.)

I would *love* it if I had a viable alternative for my primary printing purpose, but alas, there is none. You see, I am now a scuba instructor (in addition to my real job), and there's really no way to carry and use a netbook, tablet, or such underwater (and I don't mean just in the shallow end of a pool).

I picked up a small black and white laser printer (as toner is *absolutely* impervious to running), a pack of very heavy high-quality paper, another pack of card stock, and plenty of hot lamination supplies. When I need something like a class roster, rental equipment assignment sheet, or the like, I print it on both sides of heavy paper and laminate it. (The same thing is on both sides, so no matter where it ends up at the pools, springs, or boats, it's always visible and convenient.) If it's something like a "lesson plan" pick-sheet, I'll print it on card stock, nip a corner, laminate it with thicker plastic, and punch the nipped corner for attachment to a trigger snap. Doesn't last forever, but it'll certainly last more than a few classes, and I'm always optimizing anyway (which would require a revision regardless).

Now, this isn't to say that I'm paper-centric. The class rosters and gear sizes and assignments get typed into an online form, and at a click, they are sorted and arranged into three tables (by student name, by wetsuit number, and by scuba gear number), and a PDF is dynamically generated with maximized text size given the class size. I can login and change anything at any time, and I can always reprint. The paper is only a necessary convenience (and will not cause me to cry if a wayward student sets a scuba cylinder down on top of it, hehe).

Of course, things like student exams are required on paper for record-keeping purposes, but I count those as the students printing-by-proxy. (I *did* completely redesign the multiple choice answer sheet to be *much* more user-friendly. The existing one distributed with the instructor materials is, get this, type-written with single-spaced rows of capital letter O for the answers. I get much lower missed-response averages with an alternating-row shaded, letter-containing oval, sets-of-five answer sheet.)

I remapped the non-NumLock keypad to the various keys to control my TiVo in SlingPlayer. Zero is the 30-second skip button, the decimal point is back-skip, nine and six page up and down, five and two play and pause, eight is the TiVo button, and SlingPlayer mute and system mute round out the rest.

It's actually quite a nice system (much nicer than Control-F, Control-B, and other seemingly randomly-chosen keys). I use AutoHotKey to set focus to the SlingPlayer window and send the key or keys, so they work regardless of which window had focus. Makes it trivial to skip commercials, but I retain the use of the numeric keypad.

I hate to point you out in Hollywood physics, but I believe you have caught yourself one Newton short of a fig idea there. ;) (Everyone misspeaks once in a while, so I do not begrudge you the error.)

The friendly name you give the force is irrelevant. Calling it "lift", "thrust", or "general uppityness" makes no difference to the physics. There is the force due to the acceleration of gravity on the mass of the aircraft, and there must be an equal and opposite force acting on it in order for there to be no net acceleration. This upward force can only come from an equal and opposite force acting on the air in which the aircraft is hovering.

Obviously, with force being the product of mass and acceleration, you can trade off between those. You can have a relatively small mass of air greatly accelerated in a downward direction, or you could have a relatively large mass of air accelerated less.

For a helicopter, the longer the blades, the more air on which they act, and the less acceleration is therefore necessary in order to yield the same force. To go even more extreme, consider a Harrier. The Harrier has a very narrow column of air *greatly* accelerated to yield the required lift, while a helicopter has a much larger column of air and needs not accelerate it nearly so drastically.

Being impinged upon by the jet blast of a hovering Harrier is certainly going to be more "windy" than being in the rotor wash of an equivalently massive hovering helicopter, but it has nothing to do with "lift" versus "thrust". It has solely to do with the mass of air acted upon and the acceleration thereof.

Actually, you hit the nail on the head (or is it nailed the drive on the head?). Everyone's seen those little air holes with the "do not cover" notices, right? Those are, of course, to provide for pressure equalization. So, how does that impact durability?

While the drive is spun up and in use, the heads in your drive do not touch the platters. They float just above the surface on a minuscule layer of air. As ambient pressure is lower the higher your elevation, the number of air molecules available to provide lift to float the heads is reduced. If your elevation is sufficiently high, I can certainly see the potential to impact drive durability.

(Actually, I knew someone who years ago had an IBM Microdrive, i.e. the CompactFlash-sized drives from before flash density was what it later became. He went to use it while up in the mountains one day, well above 10,000 feet, and it quite died. He found out (too late) that it used an air bearing, which truly does not work without sufficient air.)

Hehe, of course, if your elevation were sufficiently high, you could also encounter heat transfer issues (convection is unavailable in a vacuum, after all), but I don't believe that should be most significant for drive durability at elevations at which people generally live.

Although it is not quite as colorful, I personally loved the closing: "With all appropriate respect,"

Now that, dear friends, is irony.