Reminds me of graffiti I once read on the wall of an outhouse at a remote paleontology camp. "INVERTEBRATES RULE!" To which someone else penned the response "Grow yourself a backbone, bozo!"

There's a definite machismo pecking order in the natural scientists, with the lordly dinosaur men (some of whom are women) on top, with their dirt encrusted pickup trucks with empty beer cans bouncing around in back. I remember one of them at a conference remarking to me after hearing a paper about sticklebacks, "That's natural science nerd-dom for you -- an insignificant little fish!"

Jellyfish are beautiful creatures, but I'd guess that robotic jellyfish is about as nerdy as it gets. But a GIANT jellyfish robot -- that's something else. One thing about machismo is that size definitely matters.

This is how America has become a nation of creative eunuchs: myopic focus on near-term profit. Commercial viability? Why the hell would you expect a beyond the bleeding edge technological adventure to be commercially viable? Hell, Columbus' voyage was not commercially viable, although it ultimately brought fabulous weatlh to Spain. The Wright Brothers' Kitty Hawk plane wasn't commercially viable, but it made the brothers rich men. The civilian space program was not initially commercially viable, it was initially an act of national vanity and competitive paranoia. It paid for itself many times over in remote sensing and communication satellites. Yes, I know about Clarke's 1945 proiposal for geostationary communication satellites, but if *that* had been the motivating factor, there'd never have been funding for the Explorer program (1958- present). It took the threat of the Soviets gaining access to and control of the high frontier for us to make the leap into the financial dark.

The capacity to do something amazing is valuable in itself, because it is a step into the unknown. In the unknown is plenty of space for more timid imaginations to construct "commercial viability".

Think of it as rattling a silent saber.

if you want to frob around with something, an old Android phone is a pretty good platform. But if you want to create something that can be reproduced and extended by others, then you need something which is in production *now* and into the reasonably foreseeable future. If you want to teach about technology from the ground up (the primary purpose for the project), and courage a take-it-apart-redesign-it-and-put-it-back-together approach to learning, you want something packaged as parts.

I've mucked around with Arduino, and it's cool, but it sits in a certain band of capabilities. It's terrific for interfacing and one-off prototyping. But there's room for a more capable package supporting more elaborate software. I see the two projects as complementary.

It proves the system works, you dunce.

Well, i'ts highly doubtful that they used anything close to 60K in cash. It'd be interesting to see what the *marginal* costs of the video were, Probably nowhere near 60K.

Cost in a large organization isn't the cash you shell out to do a thing; it also includes a share of the costs needed to be *able* to do a thing. Let's say that you make a movie at a marginal cost of $0. You then charge the $0 project a share of the cost of the movie-making infrastructure.

It's obviously a naval version.

I'm going to run out and dip my chips in Corinthian and Doric liquids to see what happens.

I think you're overreaching by turning this into some kind of anti-male conspiracy.

Just the other day my daughter (who is high school) was telling me her friends were signing an on-line petition against a commentator who made remarks about the Steubenville rape case which supposedly blamed the victim for ruining the perpetrator's lives.

"Have you signed it yet?" I asked.

"Not yet," she said.

"Don't sign it until you've read the remarks in question for yourself, and considered *all* the possible things she might have meant by them. And then only if there is no reasonable case to be made she might have meant something else, because if you're calling for somebody to lose their job you may only have one shot at getting it right."

Self-righteousness can infect any of us, ultra-progressive or paleo-conservative, evangelical Christian or militant atheist. The problem with self-righteousness is that it feels so damned good; it's the crack cocaine of moral reasoning. It's an easy, cheap high. People really do act like they're strung out when they're getting their self-righteousness hit; facts and reason can't make a dent.

Look at Donglegate dispassionately, and what you'll see isn't some anti-male conspiracy, but garden variety moral narcissism. I don't like what this person said so I'm going to make sure he loses his job. It's a petty, tawdry affair transformed by malignant self-regard into an obscene parody of moral heroism. I admit there is some poetic justice in this young woman losing her job herself, but the depressing truth I've seen over the years is that most of the time no good comes of a situation like this. People usually don't learn their lesson, they retreat into a bubble of supporters who reinforce the perpetrator's delusions of martyrdom.

I regard self-righteousness as so morally destructive I refuse to indulge in Schadenfreude, even if it seems innocuous. Lincoln said it best: "with malice toward none, and charity toward all." That's the way to live an enlightened and responsible life. Do what you must, but take no pleasure in others' misfortune.

What makes you so sure?

It seems to me that as a first approximation, if a solar cell lasts long enough to recoup its acquisition cost, it has generated at least as much energy as was used in its production. That's because the cost of the energy used in production is rolled into the acquisition cost of the cell.

This is not to say that some PV cells don't manage to recoup the energy used in their production, e.g. PV cells used in spacecraft.

Anyhow ten seconds with Google Scholar produced the following abstract

A number of detailed studies on the energy requirements on the three types of
photovoltaic (PV) materials, which make up the majority of the active solar market:
single crystal, polycrystalline, and amorphous silicon were reviewed. It was found that
modern PV cells based on these silicon technologies pay for themselves in terms of
energy in a few years (1-5 years). They thus generate enough energy over their lifetimes
to reproduce themselves many times (6-31 reproductions) depending on what type of
material, balance of system, and the geographic location of the system. It was found that
regardless of material, built-in PV systems are a superior ecological choice to centralized
PV plants. Finally, the results indicate that efficiency plays a secondary role to embodied
energy in the overall net energy production of modern solar cells

Citation: Pearce, J., & Lau, A. (2002). Net energy analysis for sustainable energy production from silicon based solar cells. ASME.

I know it's very common to roll a little bit into the intersection, and usually you can without creating any real problem; what you're doing is dispensing with a certain margin of safety you feel you don't need. You're aiming to stop in a safe zone beyond the line, but if for some reason you need a few more feet then you'd end up out of that safe zone. This might happen if someone is tailgating you, or if you are somehow impaired or distracted. Being distracted is a lot more common than people realize because *you usually don't notice you're distracted*.

Responsible driving is largely a matter of acquiring conservative habits; habits that give you a margin of error or a way out in an unexpected situation. In responsible driving you also have to account for the limitations of *other* people using the road, such as the distracted pedestrian who steps out into the intersection because he has the lights in his direction, or the many, many people who don't seem to be able to make a left turn without cutting through the oncoming traffic lane.

Personally, I always aim to stop at the stop line, then I proceed slowly into the intersection until I can see the cross traffic, stopping again if necessary. Still, it's absolutely true that many if not most people have fallen into the habit of aiming five feet or so beyond the stop line, and probably most of them never come to any grief over it. But I think it's worth asking what they actually gain by it. You don't get where you're going significantly faster by cutting off about two seconds (one Mississippi, two Mississippi) per intersection.

Unsafe driving pretty much amounts to developing habits that cut off our options in an unexpected situation, but feel safe; especially habits which when which examined turn out not to do much for us.

Underlying your reasoning is a piece of faulty logic that, if it were true, would mean that the people who build Ferraris are all strong and beautiful.

In any case, if you're complaining about people citing each other's papers you don't have the least inkling about how science works. It's about building a web of evidence.

Sure, but what I'd like to know is the cost of tankering the fuel you need to make a powered landing into space.

Sure, but don't be too sure of that. Having spent many years both in IT and as a consultant, I can tell you that most people have very little idea of how the structure of the company that employs them works, so "I don't see it" doesn't mean "it's not there."

I met another consultant at an ACM event who told me this story. His largest client hired him because they'd laid off an entire layer of middle management. The new CEO had come in, looked at the org chart and asked, "what do these people do?" Nobody knew, so he said "get rid of them." That turned out to be a damned good way of finding out what those people did, which turned out to be all the functions related to coordinating the different parts of the organization. Management brought him in to find a technological fix that would save them the embarrassment of hiring all those people back.

Of course I much more often dealt with the opposite problem: people seeing business value in procedures that just move data around. I don't know how many times I've been handed a fat sheaf of "reports" to analyze, only to discover that it contains almost nothing but busywork.

In any case I think the question posed by the summary ("can this work elsewhere?") is the wrong one. If it works *anywhere*, it's bound to work somewhere else. A better question would be "Which organizations could make this work?"

In my experience the most critical factor in whether an organization will succeed is the quality of the people work for it. An organization full of nothing but intelligent, open-minded, cooperative and conscientious people would tend to succeed no matter kind of management structure you chose for it. A strongly hierarchical business structure tends to work well for tasks where you do the same thing over and over, or churn out things to external specifications. A flat, non-hierarchical structure tends to work well in situations where an organization has to redefine itself frequently, as in response to chaotic business environments. But that said, good people will tend to make any structure work in any situation.

Each style of organization has its drawbacks. Flat organizations sometimes spend undue time making routine decisions as they struggle to get everyone onboard. Hierarchical organizations have multiple single points of failure where one bad manager can ruin the efforts of everyone working beneath him.

Well, the sinkhole in question is believed to be 100' across and 15' - 30' deep. That's about 4400 cubic yards of fill material, which is *not* lightweight. The material would be staged on or near unstable ground and the work would no doubt be hazardous. It'd be a complicated and dangerous engineering project; maybe if a sinkhole like this developed under Monticello, but we're talking about a couple of ramshackle ranch houses. It'd make more economic sense to put up a fence and let them fall into the ground.