To address your siderant...

****TL;DR Drought. Desertification. The kind that won't stop until the remnants of humanity are only at the Arctic circle by 2100.

My parent post is precisely the kind of mindset I had until sometime last year when I researched this more in-depth. I think this is ultimately why first-world citizens are still ambivalent to climate change: we don't appreciate the potential magnitude of what's going to happen.

So the planet warms a few degrees and some cuddly animals go extinct, maybe even lose some ocean-front property, why should I care?

When I looked at the latest papers myself, I was shocked. The models and predictions have way more confidence than they used to, but scientists simply aren't framing the results at all for the public anymore. (This is understandable due to the fear of stirring up political backlash, but it means the public at large is becoming more and more desensitized to the biggest threat to our species) [Keep in mind that climate change nearly wiped us out 100,000 years ago. Did you know that we all come from roughly 100 surviving humans who holed up in a beach-front cave in South Africa?]

As the Hadley cells expand, the deserts near the equator will grow in size, and the temperate zones will constantly shift North. How much they grow depends fully on what we (and by we I mean China and India) do RIGHT NOW (and by right now, I really mean ten years ago, not ten years from now). If we (again, humanity as a whole, the US makes almost no impact from here on out **except by leading by example**) continue to exponentially grow our coal industry at full steam for the next few decades, then the areas in extreme drought (think worse than the US dust bowl) will basically cover the entire planet by 2100.

Comparing our current CO2 ppm to the dinosaur era isn't accurate enough to spell out our future (I wish it were). Never before has CO2 concentration increased this quickly in such a short period of time. The climate changed gradually over millions of years in the dinosaur era. Biodiversity can easily morph on a planet-wide scale on that time period. Here, we've done that same ppm transition in roughly a century, and with our exponential growth, we're likely to nearly *double* our current concentration in another 50 years. That concentration alone is unprecedented in our planet's entire history, let alone the impossibly short time scale that we'll achieve it in.

Once we appreciate that history has no lessons for our new unchartered territory, we look long and hard at the best simulations we've made to date, which take into account the continents' shapes and locations (which are extremely different from Pangea, I might add), and you find a very grim story: The ocean loses its ability to carbon-sink, the permafrost begins melting and emitting methane, and you have accelerated warming even without anymore added help from us. The result is a disruption of all jet-streams to the point where every year looks different from the previous. Very wet to very dry. Hot to cold. Our existing breadbaskets simply can not handle this level of volatility. Massive crop failure will become the "new normal," and the world's impoverished will be ravaged with famine. Famine is the biggest driver of civil unrest, which probably means many third world countries will simply cease to exist as they degrade into permanent chaos. Almost half of the entire world will become malnourished. This is to say nothing about how the extreme droughts will affect water scarcity, which is already considered the world's biggest risk in terms of likeliness and impact by the World Economic Forum. Water scarcity won't hit the world as hard in more developed regions, because we will burn more energy (like oil, natural gas, and coal...and yes, **eventually** solar power) to desalinate water.

That's the first whammy to humanity. As time marches on, you'll then find the steady desertifcation I mentioned above (Google 'future drought map' and just look at those images until it sinks in). Northern Europe, Canada, and ultimately Russia will, as you alluded to, become wonderful places to grow crops, but the rest of the world will not. Think about the deaths, wars, and sheer magnitude of refugees that will all entail. However, unless we then manage astounding engineering feats requiring resources and coordinated efforts that dwarf World War 2, warming will continue even if we're mostly renewable energy by that point thanks to the long half-life of CO2. That warming will continue the inexorable march of northward desertification until your grandchild is buying oceanfront property in north Canada for a jillion dollars.

What happens after that is a bit speculative, but there is now evidence that mass-desertification of the oceans might explain many of our planet's previous mass-extinction events better than any other phenomenon. (Google 'Canfield ocean') It supposedly is linked to very high CO2 concentrations even beyond that which the dinosaurs enjoyed. Fortunately, all of the work in that field indicates we have at least 150 years to combat the full brunt of that kind of phenomenon. Far longer than the -5 to 15 years we have to fight climate change before it becomes virtually intractable.

To sum up, what the United States does now makes very little difference. We aren't growing anymore in terms of CO2, while developing nations are set to unleash huge exponential growth that will require massive amounts of power. Whatever we do has to take China's view on us into account: that's the only way we can make a difference. But more importantly, the trends on a log plot don't lie. What's coming to hit us like a ton of bricks isn't going to be stopped just like you can't convince 2 billion people to suddenly do what you want. What the world needs now is better climate science and better engineering so that we can quickly and cheaply offset what's coming when the time is right, because right now, we're nowhere close to ready.

If we don't select the outcome for ourselves, nature will do it for us, whether we believe in it or not.

Now that we all know we're being surveilled, I can understand why others may not make similar posts, but I'm going to risk it and say it anyway. I read the previous slashdot article on the amendment. I immediately called my representative. He voted YES! Even if the ship sinks, I still feel very good about this moment. The system may be dysfunctional, but at least some of us are still doing the right thing. The worst thing we can do is succumb to despair. It may take some really tough times to happen, but we WILL eventually emerge on the other side with a better system. It's what life always manages to do, no matter how dark the times become.

My colleagues work on the exact same gold-based nano-antennae used by this work. All of the nano-antennae on the lens' surface are basically arranged to absorb and re-transmit the incoming light into a near perfect spot. Because it uses metal on nanoscopic scales to manipulate light in a way other than pure reflection (like a mirror), it's in the field of plasmonics. (Below a certain frequency [of light] the electrons in a metal react like a plasma, hence the name.)

Whenever us optical engineers hear about plasmonics, we internally roll our eyes, because metal almost always absorbs far too much light to be useful. Even tens of nanometers of penetration and/or propagation can extinguish almost all of the light. This essentially relegates the entire field to the realm of theoretical curiosities and nothing more. (This work uses 60nm thick gold)

The authors of this paper admit that absorption is their biggest obstacle, as this lens only passes 10% of the incoming light. There are other issues for making this work a reality, but they pale in comparison to the classic brick wall you get when passing light through metal.

You have got to be kidding right? Any reading about Watson will quickly reveal that the subtleties of language (specifically English metaphors, similes, and irony) as well as the ingrained underpinnings of Western culture have been its two biggest obstacles since day one, and that's precisely why IBM chose Jeopardy as their next grand AI challenge.

Having dozens of Chinese colleagues, I can assure you that the hidden meanings and references we bury in the English language are completely lost to them even though they know the English words. Do you really think I will understand their jokes, movies, books, etc, just because I flipped a switch and heard a word-for-word translation from Chinese to English? (Even that situation is absurd, actually, because Chinese-English translators have to see a sentence and translate holistically, where many colloquialisms and phrases lose their meaning in translation)

Here's a quick example:
(Exact translation from Chinese to English) "Watchful caution! Avatar come!"

If you thought that meant a blue creature or a virtual representation of a person was coming for you, you'd be wrong. Chinese gamers call a bombing helicopter/hovercraft an "Avatar," because they first saw one in the movie Avatar. If Watson got that right, he'd have to know a very subtle fact about Chinese culture, and Jeopardy is replete with these cultural landmines.

If IBM can prove a machine understands the deep underpinnings of our language AND culture by correctly answering very apocryphal questions better than a Jeopardy champion, then the company will have effectively demonstrated the world's best language and cultural interpreter to bridge the gap between man and machine.

It is worth noting that much (silicon included) doesn't scatter electrons over such a short range, so a great many materials could technically be quantified as superconductors on this scale.
The reason such small things aren't normally touted as "superconducting" is because the contact resistance with something so small becomes so amazingly large that the whole reason of having a superconductor is destroyed. This is precisely why the superconducting regimes of graphene and nanotubes aren't practical: forming a decent contact is not doable at present.

Because of this, it is far more important to create a superconducting wire of substantial length to save power, as resistance scales with length anyway.

Yes, this is true: IEEE has recently been very lax in separating programming from engineering, further exacerbating this problem.

It was particularly frustrating when the IEEE consultant group in Silicon Valley morphed over time into a bunch of software experts with almost no engineering knowledge.

That's when I finally decided my Optical Society of America membership was worth renewing over my IEEE membership.

I interviewed over 100 applicants, and not a single programmer by trade satisfactorily knew more than 2 answers, while the 10 engineers I found got roughly half of them right. I did find it interesting that almost all of the programmers thought they knew the answers and had gotten them right when they clearly did not.

It is also worth noting that several people were clearly abusing Wikipedia during the phone interviews, as you could hear the rapid keystrokes followed by pauses and that they could not answer simple follow up questions probing their knowledge of the subject matter.

Ultimately, the person who got the job was an Electrical Engineer who deeply understood all of these questions, their follow-ups, and more engineering questions I didn't post, as well as some programming questions like "what's the difference between the heap and the stack?"

Turns out he only got the programming questions right because he was forced to be a Computer Science TA for a semester.

An increasing number of programmers over the years have started calling themselves engineers, and it truly bothers me. This source of ire came to a head 2 years ago when I needed to hire engineers that also knew how to program. Being in Seattle, 99% of the applicants advertised themselves as engineers, and while many of them were intelligent and very well versed in programming principles and practices, not a single one of them knew anything about what would be learned in engineering school.

Here are some examples of interviewing questions I made to lend understanding of the distinction I had to make between programmers and engineers:
What is a Fourier (or Laplace) transform?
What is a convolution?
What is an RMS mean compared to an average?
What is a duty cycle?
How do you apply Kirchoff's law to a circuit?
What is the time constant of an RC circuit, and what does it mean?
What is the resonance frequency of an RLC circuit?
What is the nyquist frequency?
What does a PID controller do?
What is a normal force?
What is Colomb's Law?
What conditions are needed to change 2 sandwiched diodes into a transistor?
Explain what a conduction band is.
What is a triple point for a material?
What happens to the orbitals of atoms as they are brought closer together?
How can you make steel conduct heat better, and what are the drawbacks?
What is metal fatigue on the micro or nanoscopic level?
What is Newton's Law of Cooling?
What does the Reynolds number tell you?
What is a Carnot engine and why is it special?
What should the flow velocity be directly on a surface experiencing laminar flow?

Programmers had a higher chance of answering the few questions at the top compared to the bottom, but one thing was painfully clear: those who had learned engineering knew most of the answers, and programmers calling themselves engineers usually knew none. This particular list covers many disciplines, but this list actually covers what you'd need to know as a COMPUTER ENGINEER to pass the fundamentals of engineering exam. Computer Scientists simply do not learn an engineering background to have this kind of knowledge.

As a practicing engineer that has seen programmers severely injure people, blow up objects, and burn circuitry due to their lack of engineering knowledge, the fundamental distinction I draw between an engineer and programmer is that a programmer mostly deals with concepts and ideas entirely created by humans, where engineers are forced to understand and deal with nature itself on an everyday basis.

To clarify this point, I usually liken programmers to mathematicians: Good ones are usually scientists and have to constantly utilize the scientific method to get their job done, and their work is constantly invoked by the world on a regular basis, but generally their work routinely deals with abstractions and hierarchies, and they can do their job quite well without understanding how the physical world works. Indeed, some of the best programmers I've ever known have built amazingly efficient "engines" without ever knowing how the physical components they rely upon are designed or operate on a physical level.

I will grudingly admit that there clearly is a fuzzy line between engineer and programmer, but it falls squarely within the Computer Engineering discipline. Some of us "code" in hardware, where the chip physics is our syntax, making us much more in the engineering camp, and some of us move entirely into the machine/instruction language regime, where an understanding of the computer science of creating an abstract algorithm and less of the physics come more into play, making those of us closer to computer science. By the time you get beyond chips reading machine language, the man-made abstract meaning of the 1s and 0s are what fill your mind entirely, leaving the physics to someone else, and that science of crafting a decently run representation is called programming.

The fact that you could go on to craft entire systems using black boxes that operate as you command means that while your efforts are certainly complex and necessary, it is not engineering.

The elements are not really "there," unfortunately, as this demands electrode implants, which are a long ways off from being reliable/safe. As an electrical engineer who built electrode devices to read muscle commands, I can also tell you with confidence that invasive methods are the only possibility, as noninvasive brain/nerve scans are simply too weak to make confident guesses on what you're thinking. 95% is the absolute best I've ever seen for non-invasive in very unrealistic settings (thinking of a single word or looking at a particular picture for tens of seconds), and while 95% sounds great, it means it would do the wrong thing for you in 1 out of 20 commands. Granted, there is a lot of work on invasives, but most engineers won't touch it with a 100 foot pole, as invading a person's skull = FDA regulation until you drown. Because of this, progress is glacial instead of the frantic pace of innovation people are used to in the electronics industry. If you get your technology wrong in even a very subtle way, the class action lawsuit you face from incapacitated customers will dwarf the $10 million prize.

This should be good news. The best DA year will be when there are no awards, indicative that the previous deaths actually went to a decent cause.

My college roommate/best-friend was in the same scenario with EQ and was already flunking his classes, so I offered to play with him for 1-2 hours in exchange for 30 minutes of studying outside. I slowly ramped up the study time outside without changing the 1-2 hours online together. Within 3 weeks, he was studying over an hour a day with me again. (We had the same major, so that was perhaps more fortuitous than your situation) It took a lot of my time and effort, but he at least passed his courses and graduated.

Game Devs not listening to their player base has to be the biggest downfall for the current overall stagnation in gameplay. I may not like Vendetta's play-style, but I'm definitely trying it now that it's obvious their devs care about their playerbase. They deserve that much support.