I stopped reading when I got to the statement "And then there's the benefit of halting climate change". I have no doubt that this will curb (perhaps significantly) human impact on climate change (and therefore I'm generally all for this type of research), but to say that it will HALT climate change illustrates a complete lack of recognition that human activity is only one contributing factor in the current trend of climate change. Climate change is for the most part a natural, inevitable, and ongoing process. Trying or expecting to "halt" it is akin to trying or expecting to halt the rotation of the earth, and the statement of such claims or goals undermines the objectivity of the article.

How about creating a new poll mechanism where the person can actually type in a number when answering a numeric poll question? That way the poll results that get reported can be automatically adjusted to a logarithmic scale that best matches the distribution of the actual numbers. It fact, it could report the results in a few different ways, including a few charts and graphs to explore different interpretations of the results.

Why is it that Ms. Pac Man always makes it into retro games arcades, but hardly ever the original Pac Man? Back in their respective heydays, wasn't Pac Man way more popular than Ms. Pac Man? Is it a licensing issue? What gives?

All my Kodachrome slides, dating back to the 70s, look as good now as the day they came back from the lab.

... or your eyes and the slides are degrading at the same rate.

Research any new product before purchasing it and you'll discover a long list of problems that it has. No product is without issues. If you refuse to buy a product because you're aware that it has a few issues, then you're either going to go your entire life without buying anything, or you're going to have to start buying things without doing any research. At least knowing what the issues are beforehand gives you the ability to judge whether or not the issues are insurmountable for you so that you can avoid the purchase rather than saying "WTF?" after buying it. Are the iPhone 4 issues insurmountable? Are they worse overall than the list of issues you'll find on most other cell phones currently on the market? Well, the answer to that is very subjective, but from where I stand the iPhone 4 looks like a pretty solid product overall.

I think the question is easier to understand if you knock everything down a dimension, because then it can actually be visualized. Take the surface of any three-dimensional object that doesn't contain any holes (e.g., a cup, but NOT a coffee mug with a handle). Can the surface be stretched/distorted to be shaped into a sphere? The answer is fairly obviously yes. But is this also true for four-dimensional objects? Stop trying to visualize it; you can't. You have to rely on the math instead. But that, I believe, is the question.

That's not quite true, though. A lot goes on in a Blu-Ray player between decoding the raw H.264 stream an pumping an HDMI video signal to the TV. There's the matter of handling all of the many nuances of turning an interlaced signal into a progressive signal, for example. Some players do this sort of thing way better than others, and the resulting difference in video quality is definitely noticeable. Then there's the matter of converting between different framerates. It may sound like a trivial task, but a lot of the low-end players do a quick-and-dirty job of it, resulting in lower-quality video. I'm not sure about audio. I suspect similar differentiating factors are at work there, too. That being said, paying $5000 for a Blu-Ray player is a bit ridiculous. Avoid the $90 Walmart specials, sure, but the average $400 Blu-Ray player or a PS3 will give you audio and video that you'd be pretty hard-pressed to distinguish from the best.

I suspect that their formulas and/or intuitions (whatever the source of their declarations) are nowhere close to being more precise than what a minute hand can represent.

A fifth of an inch thick? When I initially read "sheets of carbon nanotubes" I was envisioning something on the order of micrometers thick. I'm sure this is still progress, but the story isn't as exciting as I was initially expecting it to be.

One thing I've never understood about this explanation is that it doesn't explain why it's always the anti-particle that falls into the black hole. Wouldn't chance dictate that half the time it will be the particle, causing the black hole to take on the extra mass?

(I'm sure the answer to this question is somehow related to a similar question that I've always had... and that is: why is the universe composed almost entirely out of matter rather than being a mix? and why aren't there any anti-matter black holes?)