If antimatter is gravitationally repulsed by matter, then it could help explain dark matter. Instead of requiring a huge expansion of the Standard Model, it may simply be that the vacuum is gravitationally polarized.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1106.0847.pdf

(I'm a big fan of Hajdukovic. Whether he's right or wrong, he asks fascination questions).

There is indeed a profound shortage of STEM workers, in much the same sense that there is a profound shortage of 2014 Corvettes on sale for $10.

The past twenty years has been dominated by the MBA and the JD. The same people who demand outrageous salaries on the premise that they are indispensible, seemingly have a difficuly time understanding supply-and-demand when it applies to other people.

If you are capable of getting a degree in a STEM field, then you are likely more intelligent and rational than the average person. And an intelligent, rational person is less likely to commit to years of graduate work given the low salaries and job security that seem to be the norm. Why work and sweat so hard, when your CEO is just going to send your job to India so he can get his quarterly bonus.

When STEM grad students can expect $100k job offers out of the gate, and MBAâ(TM)s have to live with their parents to make ends meet, I bet our âoeshortageâ of STEM workers vanishes rather quickly.

(Have both a MBA and most of a Ph.D. in physics. Gave up the Ph.D. after I met brilliant people in my field who were in their 10th year as a postdoc and needing food stamps to make ends meet.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

The researchers got the result they wanted, so they didn't bother to check if they were actually correct.

And actually, that's being kind.

In the 30+ years I've been gaming, Grim Fandango was the best game I ever played. Such an absolute joy, and an ending that was worth the journey.

If I had to choose between Grim Fandango 2 and Half-Life 3, GF2 it would be.

You *do* know that Matlab has been supporting GPU computing for some time now? We bought an entire cluster of several hundred nVidia GTX 480's for the explicit purpose of GPU computing.

It depends very specifically on the application. There are some fields that are currently tied to nVidia due to "legacy" code (a strange term for code that can't be 1-2 years old) that is written in CUDA. If so, you can buy an equivalent nVidia.

If you're writing your own app (which if they're studying combinatorics seems likely) then rewriting the core loop in OpenCL is reasonable.

OpenCL is a higher-level abstraction, and you do lose some performance compared to CUDA, but it's worth it in my opinion simply for portability.

I've been working in academic HPC for over a decade. Unless you are building a simple 2-3 node cluster to learn how a cluster works (scheduler, resource broker and such things), it's not worth your time. What you save in hardware, you'll lose in lost time, electricity, cooling, etc.

If you're interested in actual research, take one computer, install an AMD 7950 for $300, and you will almost certainly blow the doors off a cluster cobbled from old Core 2 Duo's, and you'll save more than $300 in electricity.

My favorite book on impacts. Scarier than any Stephen King novel you'll ever read, because it's real.

http://www.amazon.com/Rain-Iron-And-Ice-Bombardment/dp/0201154943/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360966611&sr=8-1&keywords=rain+of+iron+and+ice

But that's just it. Publishers *do* get money from resale.

If I know I can pay $60 for a game when it first comes out, play it for a week or two and then sell it, I'll buy it opening day.

But since I can't resell it, I wait for that sucker to hit the bargain bin before I even consider it.

...will shoot lens flares instead.

I'm hard of hearing. It's not because of noise, I actually can't stand loud sounds at all. It just runs in the family. I've got it, so does dad, so did grandpa, and so on.

While *any* advance in restoring hearing is nice, how about concentrating on helping those of us who never had a choice, rather than those who just stood too close to the speakers?

I don't think those games will be "exclusive", not in the traditional sense.

Microsoft/Sony seem to be aiming for a Christmas 2013 release for their new consoles.

If Valve were to release their Steam box in, say, July, with HL3/L4D3/TF3/P3 as launch titles, they would have 6 months of exclusivity simply because the competing platforms haven't been released yet. And that 6 months would be enough to let them steal a *lot* of potential Xbox 720/PS4 customers away. I know I'd buy one in a split second.

I suspect Valve will surprise us this year. We know they have their Steam console coming out this year. But the XBox 720 and Playstation 4 are also coming out.

So Valve has to be running right out of the gate. My hunch is that they have Half-Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Team Fortress 3, perhaps even Portal 3 either sitting on the shelf, or close enough that they could ship within a few months. Those title are to Valve what Mario is to Nintendo, or Halo is to XBox. Drop them all at once, and I suspect you'l sell a fark-ton of Valve boxes overnight.

... Google failed to appreciate how popular its new terms would be, and sold out in less than an hour, so it will take 3 more weeks until the next shipment of terms arrives.

I pity Amazon, having to wait 3 more weeks for terms.

[No, not bitter at all about being backordered, why do you ask...]

Actually, you can read all the shorts here:

http://localroger.com/

Good times too. Reminds me a bit of Niven.