Did you ever go to a restaurant last year? How about to the movies? Did you buy a book, or a computer game, or a CD? Those are irrational and silly financial decisions made in the name of freedom and independence. Are you stupid for doing that?

Or, instead, do you assign some value to intangibles like "enjoyment of life" and "fun"?

The guy who bought his house for cash understands that what he did was not optimal in purely financial terms. However, he assigns a value to the satisfaction he gets from owning that house. Life would just not be worth living if we never exchanged money for things that make us happy. He's found something that makes him very happy, and he's paid a lot of money for it. You really don't have the right to accuse him of stupidity for doing so.

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

Bacterium genes are spliced into vegetables as one of the most common forms of GMO crops. In general, it's not unusual for genes to be lifted from one genome and inserted into another that would be vanishingly improbable to happen in the wild.

I won't say "impossible" because some genes are thought to have been transferred between species through viruses, but it's a very very rare occurrence.

I'll also head this off and say that I'm not philosophically opposed to genetic manipulation of foodstuffs.

Also watch:

Sherlock
Jeckyll
X-Files
Stargate SG-1
The IT Crowd
Community
Fullmetal Alchemist
Avatar: The Last Airbender

Seriously, there's hundreds and hundreds of hours of television and movies on Netflix that is of comprable if not higher quality than what the networks are currently showing. All for the price of a single fast-food lunch.

Would someone _please_ make full-wave rectifiers for all of those damn LED xmas lights? The 60Hz flicker in my peripheral vision is almost painful to watch. C'mon, manufacturers, we're talking about 5 cents worth of components here.

Ah. Further reading at the MIT site indicates that they are reading at "1THz line rate". They use a varying electric field inside the camera slit to deflect the photons by different amounts onto a 2-D image sensor. Thus, on the sensor, the x-direction contains spatial information, and the y-direction contains temporal information.

They can do this by sweeping the strength of the electric field inside the streak camera's slit quickly. Photons arriving at different times are deflected by different amounts, and thus hit different pixels in the 2-D sensor behind the slit.

In order to resolve spatial location of the light pulse, at the very least they need to have a sensor with a response time on the order of 1ps. Being able to control the exposure time accurately with ps resolution is also a pretty incredible feat.

They have definitely admitted that they're not capturing the entire 2-d image at 1T fps. They might be capturing a 500-pix line at 1THz line rate, but that's unclear in the article and the video.

This is indeed correct. Radiation hard electronics are created at the microchip layout and design level, rather than with external shielding. It requires an understanding of the damage that occurs from ionizing radiation and high-energy particles, and implementing device layouts that are tolerant of that damage.

Let me give you a little hint: current generation designs with tiny FETs and low voltage drivers cannot operate for very long when the gate Vts start to shift.

If, by "don't degrade quickly" you mean "don't degrade," then you're correct. A local science/technology museum has a (resin-coated) core sample of an old landfill, which has a perfectly recognizable 50 year old head of lettuce about halfway down it.

I actually use both a home composter _and_ my city's curbside food scraps collection (called the "green bin"). The reason is that the green bin will accept a much broader range of materials, because they are ground up and hot composted.

All vegetable matter goes into my home composter, but bones, fat, tissues, paper towels, and pet waste go in the green bin. Between composting, green bin, and recycling, I'll sometimes go 3-4 weeks without bothering to take my garbage to the curb, because the bin just isn't full.

I'm pretty sure that neutrino flavour oscillations (which have been observed - taus changing into muons and electrons) are only explainable within the current frame of particle physics if they do have mass.