- a very interesting comment by one of the 77 year old engineers who was at the event. Is this old age making a man more conservative and risk-averse? Would today's engineers in their 20s be able to devise a space program if they had to? would they get a chance to with the baby boomers still holding on to the positions of authority? I'm often amazed at how young pioneers tend to be, but perhaps it's just a statement about cutting edge fields and risk takers, I suppose the silicon valley folks in the 90s were in their 20s.

Would society trust engineers in their 20s with cutting edge high budget work these days?

>>Do we actually need all those agriculture products?

>Yes, we do.

What if we reduced our meat consumption, and reduced consumption of other water-hungry foods?

You are of course very correct about being more efficient about water use, as proved by many people in many desert and semi-desert areas.

Cost is a main reason for teaching one to many.

Videoing decent presentations (rather than a professor messing around with a cheap web cam) also costs (equipment, recording and editing staff), so probably is more expensive to run initially than teaching lectures in big halls.

Getting people together in one space probably has other pedagogical values - though you are correct it is possible to have distance based university level education, e.g. The Open University. Even the Open University tries to find group learning spaces for its students though (online forums, residential summer schools) as it believes there is pedagogical value in students sharing a space to work and learn in.

Education as a racket that's all about money? - I suppose this depends on your philosophy. Many people believe there is more to education than just making money, e.g. the bettering of people, social value, psychological self-realisation, broader socio-economic concerns like reducing crime.

"maybe this is just the start for a class of privately run astronomical and Earth-observing facilities in space?"
- If a university or a national research body (not necessarily in USA, somewhere in Europe, or India, or China or whereever) "bought" the satellite, would this be something novel? Do universities or other non-government research units own satellites? If so, it might not be big news....

On the other hand, if Google/Elsevier Publications/Microsoft buy it and start charging university researchers for access to data, maybe this would be news. Is this a likely scenario?

I'd love to hear from astronomers who work with this kind of data and might have some informed opinions on how this is likely to go....

"Why is Radio Shack not offering modern electronics courses, along with rentals of some gear too hard to afford yourself?" - because the profit margin is too low? Maybe the expensive stuff takes too long to repay if it's hired out, breakage rate, etc.?

I guess if I was one of the technical crew who had to work with this stuff and be exposed to its toxicity, I'd be welcoming my boss researching a way of making my life safer. I'm sure the technicians love working for NASA but given the choice between working with highly toxic fuels that might burn them/ give them cancer/ other nice side effect, or something less damaging, I am sure they'd be all in favour of an option that won't harm them and won't potentially leak into local water tables, get drawn up into local water supply / agriculture and end up in their kids.

My experience is the people most likely to moan about health and safety are those whose greatest risk of an industrial injury is stabbing themselves with the office stapler. Folk working in genuinely high risk environments seem quite grateful their bosses have to abide by regulations.

Given the world is trademark crazy (well the big companies and lawyers, anyway), and given that there are only 456,976 four character words (using the western 26 character alphabet) - how close are we to every four character word being owned by somebody?

Can any experts out there who work with sensors and EEG comment on 1. the efficacy of a cap mounted EEG sensor array (are there issues with making sure sensors are correctly in contact with the skin rather than hair, etc.)? 2. Challenges around correct automatic analysis of received data? What kind of accuracy is required from this kind of set up to be able to conclude successfully how fatigued an operator is? What is the permissible level of error with readings (do you need to be super-accurate or is this kind of rig very error-tolerant?)

Interested to hear whether this is likely to be a very reliable piece of equipment or something prone to error and annoying to use and will therefore be sabotaged as quickly as possible by the operators ("Gee Bob, I'd be happy to wear it but the danged thing just doesn't seem to go since I accidently dropped it in a puddle last week").

PhD's in Stanford are easy to get? I am surprised by that. His work looks fairly rigourous and he's had a few papers published. The methodology he employs in his PhD seems reasonable enough - which aspects of his thesis ("Learning and short-term retention of paired associates in relation to specific sequences of interpresentation intervals") do you have an issue with?

I also note he has a first degree in Maths, so I guess he's probably ok on this knowledge. Probably he could get by undergraduate level engineering.

You note "Let's see how long he'll last": reading his curriculum vitae I'd say probably a little while longer, seeing as he completed his PhD in 1966 and has been producing papers and been employed since then, that's about 45 years so far...

One man's weeds, another man's area of natural beauty......