Ah, my favorite among such is the warning from a hair drier I bought some years ago. It said: "do not use while sleeping."

I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense or not, so I'll err on the side of naivete. The construction and operational validation has been paid for, which is the largest part of the cost. The ongoing costs are things like salaries, materials and supplies for subsequent operation, maintenance, and improvements, which are far smaller.

There is no scientist I have ever met who thought LIGO was, in the end, a poor choice of investment of national research funds. There were plenty prior to its stunning first detection (myself included) who thought they were chasing ghosts, but all of those doubters have been converted. The important thing to understand is that LIGO's contributions weren't just detection of a black hole merger (in itself, a hugely important event because it demonstrated the hypothesized existence of gravitational waves), but the establishment of a new field of astronomy based on gravitation, an entirely new means to observe the universe that provides information previously completely unobtainable. Our eyes have been opened where we were previously blind, and the ongoing results are, and continue to be, astounding.

There's a nice fact sheet summary at: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/s...

I've been using it to write grant applications, and I share your opinion. It frequently makes mistakes (and 5 is worse in many ways than 4o). While it can certainly be used to create a rough draft of a document, the result is similar to what you would expect from a junior associate, with the same kinds of mistakes that create an, "OMG, no," response in the reader when it starts to make things up.

There was a lot of talk about how rapidly it would accelerate in performance. That progress seems to have stalled this year. I have a hard time thinking that we've started to see the ultimate asymptote of performance, but it seems like we've hit a region where the easy, early gains have all been made.

EBay is your friend. Plenty of them available there!

It isn't just that new factories are fully automated, it's that they must be so in order to be competitive. The only way manufacturing in America can be competitive to manufacturing in low-wage / already-automated countries is through automation. The era of factories being built with lots of human employees is gone, and even in the industries we thought would never fall to automation, robotics is making significant inroads. Why? People are just too expensive.

There is a lot of backlash against p-values. I won't enter that argument here.

But, accepted standards are that p-values need to be below 0.05 in order to be taken seriously in a biological study, and, even then, they aren't that strong until they get substantially smaller. (Note that in physics, they've been burned so many times by crappy significance values that the standard there is 5 sigma, or about p = 0.0000003.)

This paper, according to the summary, reported an effect at p = 0.079. That's substantially above p = 0.05. Me, I probably wouldn't publish anything at that p-value, but take my licks and move on to the next study, having learned how to design better experiments.

In the US, bus rides take far more time than driving because of the very frequent stops. Where I live, many urban bus lines stop every two blocks, suggesting that there's some underlying requirement that a passenger need not walk more than a block to the bus, which I find to be an absurdly low bar. Frequent stops not only make the bus ride take longer, they shatter any hope of the vehicle being efficient, importantly including the metric of particulate emissions from brakes and tires.

The subway, where I live, when underground, stops every half mile or so. When above-ground, it starts to act like a bus, again, which, again, is absurd, and deleteriously impacts both service quality and efficiency.

Until the number of stops for buses and trams is reduced, there's no possible way to make above-ground public transportation time-efficient for passengers, even with dedicated lanes on the road.

Why the venom towards academia?

More importantly, why is this post not marked 0: Flamebait? It's an ad-hominem attack based on almost no information, and certainly not an objective assessment of the interview or the book.

Yes, office real-estate owners are suffering right now. Know who else is? Everyone who has a 401k or pension fund that's invested in REITs, which is the vast majority of them, and thus, a heapload of people with pension funds. Does that justify a hypothetical ginning-up of RTO opinion? No, but attacking real-estate owners are deeply evil is stabbing oneself (or your siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, etc) in the foot. Don't have a retirement plan yourself? Well, that's just poor planning.

Why such disdain for experts? Are you not an expert in something? Do you not have skills that rise above others in some domain? Do you think your opinion on those matters are valuable, and if so, why can't someone else have a valuable opinion on their domain of expertise? If you need legal advice, do you not seek out someone who has spent years studying the law? If you need work done on your car, do you not seek out someone with years of experience with your model? If you need heart surgery, don't you want your surgeon to have done that operation thousands of times? If you fly in a plane, don't you want the pilot to have many thousands of hours of experience?

Or do you somehow think that being an expert in some field automatically means classification as an idiot? I pity anyone who thinks that to be true, because they don't realize how much they benefit from expertise every minute of every day.

I'm always trying to sleep when aurora displays might be visible in-flight, but thanks for the fantastic idea, should insomnia ever strike.

Flying westward, I was fortunate enough once to have had a window seat with a flight path that just kissed the southern tip of Iceland or Greenland (I'm not sure which). It was a brilliantly clear day, and you could see the flow lines of the glaciers and where they calve off into the ocean. It was one of the most beautiful natural scenes I have ever seen. Praise be to $diety, indeed.

The editors fly Spirit, maybe?

It's a guess. I know someone who used to work at Spirit in their IT department (QA in particular). After working there for a while, he emphatically told me to fly any other airline.

Patrick Winston, one of the fathers of classical AI, was known for famously, and derisively, predicting that we would have a microprocessor in every door knob, thanks to the microelectronics revolution. Thankfully, he was mostly wrong as even IoT didn't get quite that far. But it sure feels like AI is going in that direction.

Ferchrissakes, why do we need an AI to autogroup our browser tabs? I mean, WTF?

Yes, it was similar to that, except it was, somehow, an integral part of the laptop itself.

It was definitely weird, but no weirder than things we've seen more recently, like Google Glass.

I recall someone visiting my PhD laboratory from IBM. Never caught their name, but it could have been David Hill, because he had a laptop with a special fold-out mechanism and harness that allowed you to wear it around your neck and type while standing with nearly-natural arm and hand position on the keyboard. He said something about it being a prototype of which he had only 1000 made. I never saw one of them again.

Read Ignition!, an excellent and entertaining history of the development of liquid rocket fuel by John D. Clark (one of the main protagonists of the field), with the truly excellent forward by Isaac Asimov that includes the following excerpt:

Search for a PDF, and you'll find it. I've had the fortune to meet a number of scientists cut from the same cloth as Dr. Clark, and they are among my favorite people. I'm sorry I never had a chance to meet him.

Any sort of combustion-level heat in the presence of nitrogen and oxygen creates lots of messy NOx byproducts (that are all atmospheric pollutants), so, yeah, unlikely to be a pure N6 -> 3(N2) reaction without at least restricting its decomposition environment to exclude O2.

My father designed instruments to measure atmospheric concentrations of NOx (and I wrote much of the software for them) for one of the biggest manufacturers of things like that. He explained the chemistry to me years ago, and NOx pollutants are nearly unavoidable in the presence of O2.