I agree. The impression that I have from Fisker is that their product was not well engineered compared to competitors like Tesla. The Fisker Karma looked nice but they did have quality problems. Using lithium-ion batteries from A123 was one of their mistakes (even before bankruptacy, A123 had problems).

Same here

To be honest I wouldn't say apple is behind the times when it comes to something like this. They sacrificed this feature to make the user experience better due to battery life limitations. You could argue that they should have anticipated this by coming out with a larger iphone, but IMHO, i dont want a large phone. The impression I get about apple features is that they are conservative with new features because they are paranoid about breaking the user experience, mostly battery life. I don't have first hand knowledge but I'm sure those early android LTE phones didn't have very good battery life.

Here's an easy analogy: being a professor is pretty similar to running a small business. You attract funding, you manage cash flow, you pay your employees and you produce goods (ie. in the case of a professor, the goods are research output). If you don't do these things well, your lab will go bust, just like a business would. Nobody would argue that being a business owner is stress free even though you don't have a boss breathing down your back, so why would being a professor be stress free?

Battery materials are reported in mAh/g because this way they are independent of the battery size. You could stuff say 50g of this material into a battery meant for a car or 1/2g of this material into a battery meant for testing in a lab and you can roughly estimate the energy storage abitlity of the material. Both of these cells will have a voltage of about 3.7V on average. The units of mAh/g tells you about the amount of lithium that can be stored by this particular material so that it can be compared against other materials on an equal basis.

Huh? You don't consider numerical methods that approximate integrals to be true calculus?
This is true calculus. You don't need to know anything about the future voltage curve or current, just the past.

This is the equation to calculate capacity consumed in a battery (which is a numerical approximation to an integral):

capacity consumed = capacity at last check + (current + current at last check)/2*(present time - time at last check)

The equation above is the trapezoidal rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapezoidal_rule) applied to the integral in my first post.

I hate to pull this one out, but trust me, I'm a battery scientist that makes mathematical models of batteries for a living.

To calculate the capacity used in a battery, you apply the following equation:

capacity = integral(current, dt)

So yes, this is calculus. To solve this you would use a numerical approximation to the integral, such as the trapezoidal rule.

I love lastpass. No need to remember login info at all (except for your master password). The _only_ problem is when using my phone/ipad, it's a bit difficult to dig up passwords.

PS:

Yes it does. It allows you to do something useful with your numerical codes. Maybe not needed for academia, but certainly for other industries.

I jumped from Matlab to Scipy/Numpy, skipped Octave, but I'm so happy with Scipy/Numpy that I wouldn't consider using Octave.

From a purely numerics point of view, I'm sure Octave has all the features that Scipy/Numpy has. Most of the benefits of Scipy/Numpy come from the Python programming language itself, which I have to assume is much more developed than Octave's language. Being able to write GUIs for your scientific apps using tkinter (or some other library) or reading/writing to excel formats directly or wrapping your code up using pyexe for distribution or interfacing your python code with the web or a database is just the start of the Python advantages (after a quick search I see that Octave can do some of these things, but I'm sure Octave doesn't have all the libraries that Python has).

IMHO, if scipy/numpy ever get working with PyPy, then this would truly be amazing.

TFA didn't suggest that she was forced.It said she took the advice of the TSA worker over the advice of her doctor. The doctor's note said to avoid the body scanner, she asked the TSA worker if it was ok, and the TSA worker said yes. IMHO, a doctor has more credibility over a TSA worker in this case, I'm not sure why she didn't think so.

I agree. I don't know anybody who uses a computer and doesn't rely on Microsoft Office. And crossover office is not good enough (it might work well enough, but it's not easy enough for my parents to install themselves).

It comes down to the fact that distros like Ubuntu are still too difficult to use for normal folks. Give your parents Ubuntu and see how far they get trying to play a DVD or uploading music to an ipod.

Actually this is exactly what I want. I need something like an Asus RTN16, but cheaper. The Raspberry Pi seems to fit this bill quite nicely.

"NHTSA in fact drains the gas tanks on gas cars (including the Volt!) BEFORE they wreck them because of the danger of the gasoline."

Do you have a reference for this? Not that I don't believe you, but if this is true, GM just got a whole load of bad press which may have set back the electric car over something that was NHTSA's fault. It's unbelievable that they wouldn't test gasoline cars and electric cars on the same footing. If they first drain the gas tank then they HAVE to drain the battery before the test for a good comparison.

I think the tweet idea is slightly different. For example, a lot of work that a scientist does is collecting data to make sure equipment is working properly. Usually these experiments aren't worth publishing and probably wouldn't make it past a peer review because 1) they're usually not novel experiments 2) they don't tell a story or add much value, but I think it could be useful to share this type of data. I mean, if you've collected it, why not share it?