If antimatter is gravitationally repulsed by matter, then it could help explain dark matter. Instead of requiring a huge expansion of the Standard Model, it may simply be that the vacuum is gravitationally polarized.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1106.0847.pdf

(I'm a big fan of Hajdukovic. Whether he's right or wrong, he asks fascination questions).

There is indeed a profound shortage of STEM workers, in much the same sense that there is a profound shortage of 2014 Corvettes on sale for $10.

The past twenty years has been dominated by the MBA and the JD. The same people who demand outrageous salaries on the premise that they are indispensible, seemingly have a difficuly time understanding supply-and-demand when it applies to other people.

If you are capable of getting a degree in a STEM field, then you are likely more intelligent and rational than the average person. And an intelligent, rational person is less likely to commit to years of graduate work given the low salaries and job security that seem to be the norm. Why work and sweat so hard, when your CEO is just going to send your job to India so he can get his quarterly bonus.

When STEM grad students can expect $100k job offers out of the gate, and MBAâ(TM)s have to live with their parents to make ends meet, I bet our âoeshortageâ of STEM workers vanishes rather quickly.

(Have both a MBA and most of a Ph.D. in physics. Gave up the Ph.D. after I met brilliant people in my field who were in their 10th year as a postdoc and needing food stamps to make ends meet.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

The researchers got the result they wanted, so they didn't bother to check if they were actually correct.

And actually, that's being kind.

In the 30+ years I've been gaming, Grim Fandango was the best game I ever played. Such an absolute joy, and an ending that was worth the journey.

If I had to choose between Grim Fandango 2 and Half-Life 3, GF2 it would be.

You *do* know that Matlab has been supporting GPU computing for some time now? We bought an entire cluster of several hundred nVidia GTX 480's for the explicit purpose of GPU computing.

It depends very specifically on the application. There are some fields that are currently tied to nVidia due to "legacy" code (a strange term for code that can't be 1-2 years old) that is written in CUDA. If so, you can buy an equivalent nVidia.

If you're writing your own app (which if they're studying combinatorics seems likely) then rewriting the core loop in OpenCL is reasonable.

OpenCL is a higher-level abstraction, and you do lose some performance compared to CUDA, but it's worth it in my opinion simply for portability.

I've been working in academic HPC for over a decade. Unless you are building a simple 2-3 node cluster to learn how a cluster works (scheduler, resource broker and such things), it's not worth your time. What you save in hardware, you'll lose in lost time, electricity, cooling, etc.

If you're interested in actual research, take one computer, install an AMD 7950 for $300, and you will almost certainly blow the doors off a cluster cobbled from old Core 2 Duo's, and you'll save more than $300 in electricity.

My favorite book on impacts. Scarier than any Stephen King novel you'll ever read, because it's real.

http://www.amazon.com/Rain-Iron-And-Ice-Bombardment/dp/0201154943/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360966611&sr=8-1&keywords=rain+of+iron+and+ice

But that's just it. Publishers *do* get money from resale.

If I know I can pay $60 for a game when it first comes out, play it for a week or two and then sell it, I'll buy it opening day.

But since I can't resell it, I wait for that sucker to hit the bargain bin before I even consider it.

...will shoot lens flares instead.

The motherboard and chipset don't have to be sold with a profit margin since they support CPU sales. It may not even have to do with the profitability of the desktop market. Investors play a large role in steering public corporations. Investors are interested in growth potential, almost to the exclusion of all else.

They don't see growth potential in the desktop market therefore they declare it to be "dead" (meaning saturated). They see instead, and mostly with hindsight, growth potential in the tablet and smartphone markets. So it's the potential for growth in emergent markets which dictates stock prices rather than the health and viability of existing markets. I'm worried about the disconnect here. It doesn't matter whether or not people want tablets instead of laptops and desktops, it only matters that the tablet market is not yet fully saturated.

I'm hard of hearing. It's not because of noise, I actually can't stand loud sounds at all. It just runs in the family. I've got it, so does dad, so did grandpa, and so on.

While *any* advance in restoring hearing is nice, how about concentrating on helping those of us who never had a choice, rather than those who just stood too close to the speakers?

I'm enjoying reading the Washington Post article, linked from Stallman's reference. I'm no expert in this field, but the arguments seem reasonable. Do you have any specific objections beyond name-calling?

I kinda like the Fahrenheit scale for temperature. I'm an SI nut on all the other basic measures. Celsius is good for chemistry, Kelvins for physics, but Fahrenheit for humans. 0 was supposed to be as cold as he could get in his lab (salt water freezes, drivers beware), and 100 was body temperature. Okay it's not quite 100 but that was the original intent which makes the scale pretty good when talking about the weather.

I should also mention that most people want to convert pounds into kilograms, which is nonsense (well except on the Earth at sea level). Pounds convert to Newtons, and slugs to kilograms.

Oh, the one other thing that the US customary measurements are good for is the speed of light, approximately 1 foot per nanosecond.

I don't think that the Vulgate Bible was really accessible to the masses. See Tyndale's wikipedia article on his rationale for an English translation in the early 1500s:

"They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture."

At about the same time in history, Thomas Linacre was studying a Greek Bible and comparing it with the Vulgate. He reportedly said: "Either this (the original Greek) is not the Gospel or we are not Christians." So I think the Vulgate was a lot less accurate than even the earliest English translations including the King James Version.

But I think what's really interesting about this is how the Latin Bible verses were used at the time, and how they were infused with a sense of deep reverence and/or fear. Along comes Tyndale, who translates the Bible from original language sources into English. Among other things he uses informal pronouns Thee and Thou to refer to God. That had to be absolutely shocking to the people at the time, but at the same time restoring a lost aspect of Christianity -- our personal and direct relationship with God.

Now a few hundred years later when people mimic the language of the King James bible in a Christian context, it is with a sense of deep reverence and/or fear, and often used in today's culture to imply a blind religious faith. It's as if humanity somehow wants to create some kind of formality within religion and rely on authority instead of accepting the uncertainty of a personal religious searching.

I should also point out how the early Christian Bible was translated into hundreds of different languages until the Holy Roman church collected and burned all non-Latin translations. So it wasn't just the 1500s that saw language as a tool for control over the masses.