But you need to understand. They really needed that money so they could commemorate the 1812 war.

I really thought oil companies were funding more than a mere 3% of climate science papers.

I think the "insurance" here is mostly historical, nothing more. An actual insurance (public or private) would never pay for your yearly health check-up or for your regular meds. If you tell your insurer that you're planning on having a minor car accident in May of every year, I doubt you'll be insured for very long.

That would be an improvement, but at the same time it creates another problem. Having an industry where only the buyer is allowed to use information is complete nonsense too. I know this opinion isn't popular around here, but for health insurance, the only thing that makes any sort of sense is a public system. It's just sad to see that the US is among the last to realize this.

The card you see is an undergrad engineering project. The PhD is the software that goes with it. You can read all about is here. Trivial localization of a single sound in a quiet environment is one thing. Tracking many simultaneous sources in a noisy/reverberant environment while separating the audio for each of them is a different thing.

You mean like this card? It's indeed designed to use cheap electret microphones. In terms of number of microphones, it's effectively limited to 8 because finding acquisition cards for more than 8 mics is hard. It could probably be tweaked to run on a table using some approximations, but I'm not quite sure how useful it would be on a tablet.

Don't know about this particular project, but back when I did my PhD, I open-sourced my sound localization algorithm. Tracks up to ~4 moving sound sources in real-time using 8 microphones.

Actually, an FFT is often cheaper than autocorrelation because it's N*log(N) whereas auto-correlation is N^2. In any case, it's insanely cheap on today's machines.

Aren't Christmas and Easter about the same guy anyway? ;-)

Anti-matter still has a positive mass. Otherwise when a positron meets an electron it wouldn't release any energy. Personally, I highly doubt it "falls up", as that would be inconsistent with general relativity because anti-particles would not follow a curved space. What would be really cool is if it was found that anti-matter curved space in the opposite direction as matter, making gravity repulsive. I highly doubt that's the case, but it would certainly be a cool discovery.

KDevelop 3 was indeed pretty nice and I used it for a while. But then -- like too many OSS projects these days -- developers decided it'd be much better if they rewrote it. The result is that version 3 stagnated for a long time and when KDevelop 4 was finally ready, it ditched support for many features, including autoconf/automake which I used for all my projects. That's when I switched to Eclipse/CDT and I've been happy with it since then.

My biggest issue with GMOs aren't related to health issues, but economic issues. The use of GMOs tends to not only reduce crop diversity, but it also leads to more resistant parasites, which also help wipe out the "original" crops. So we end up in a situation where we have low diversity and strong parasites and it's a recipe for disaster. It's just a matter of time until global production of a certain plant gets almost completely wiped out, with disastrous consequences. Unfortunately preventing that requires much more than just labeling (though I'm still in favor of it) because it's not just a matter of individual choice. It's a global issue, like many environmental concerns.

Modern codecs are better at 256 kb/s than MP3 is at 320 kb/s. Also, at those rates, it depends a lot on the actual encoder. The newer formats (be it Opus, Vorbis or AAC) all have the potential of giving you perfect quality at 256 kb/s VBR. In the (very) few cases where you can hear an artefact, it's due to the encoder making the wrong decision (e.g. not detecting a transient).

And try Musepack or Layer2 on something extremely tonal like harpsichord or (to a lesser extent) 12-string acoustic guitar. Each type of codecs has upsides and downsides. Overall though a freq-domain codec *with* a good encoder should be better because it still has the option of going with a good time resolution (Layer2 can't ever use a good freq resolution).

Could you please post the specs of the reel to real equipment you're using. To beat a 16-bit digital system, it has to have better than 96 dB SNR and dynamic range. I don't remember having ever seen that.