each rocket costs about $50k, not so good for antiartillery

Just reading the prior patents cited by this patent, I can't understand why this isn't prior art or so obvious from prior art that it doesn't warrant patenting. It seems like the patent examiners aren't will to reject stuff like this instead of letting it get fought in the courts. If our leaders truly want to help small business then they need to end crap like this and make patent examiners do their job.

Or Silicon Valley

A few years ago I went to a talk by an expert on explosives detection. He said, "if someone tells you they can detect explosive better than a dog, don't believe them, because we don't really know how well dogs can detect explosives."

To think the discovery of the structure of DNA is only 60 years old. I believe James Watson is still alive. Sort of like the first moon landing was only 66 years after the first manned powered flight. Or the progress from the first transistor to the modern laptop that has five plus billion of them. Anyone care to give some other examples?

If you are concerned about population consider India, more people than Africa and 1/15 the area.

This is impressive, of course another way to state it would be: it delivers the energy of one laptop battery in one pulse. One must keep in mind the difference between energy and power.

It is the close proximity of pigs, ducks, and people on Chinese farms that is a major source of flu virus mutations.

It will be ok in North Carolina since their legislature said you can only use linear extrapolations of sea level rise to plan building in coastal areas. Guess they didn't get beyond simple algebra in school (no quadratic equations etc).

I looked up Singapore individual tax rates. Max out at 20% and 0% on capital gains. Looks like a good deal for him. I assume Calif will get some tax out of him too before he leaves. I assume he must have another citizenship already. Notice Singpore requires two years residency before you can be a citizen. Of course maybe there is a billonaire's exception.

Near the end of the paper is this wonderful understatement: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

The dual slit experiment reminds me of Frost's poem, "The Road not Taken." Even though you take a fork in the road you will know you could have taken the other road and wonder what would have happened if I took the other road. If the path was blocked then you wouldn't wonder about it.

As a Phd chemist, I believe the hardest major is chemical engineering. Not only do you need to study chemistry but also master subjects like heat and mass transfer.

White leds are actually blue leds with a phosphor to down convert some of the blue to yellow and red. If you look at the spectrum of white leds (go the Cree web site) you will see there is a peak in the blue part of the spectrum, particularly with the "cooler white" versions which should be helpful as a daytime light for folks who have a problem with their circadian rhythms.

I looked up info on caffeine. Takes about one hour to go into your system and it has about a 5 hour half life. I put this into spreadsheet and found that a simple rule is drink x amount of coffee to start the day then 1/2 x in three hours and another 1/2 x in three more hours. This will keep your caffeine level pretty constant and it will decay to about 15% of x by the time you go to sleep. There is quite a bit of variation with different people so this is only a starting point.