That's silly. We all know that heat rises. It's true that you want to cut a hole in the floor, but it's to get the cold air. (Don't worry... that heat engine will still work.) You need another hole in the ceiling for the heat to escape. Straddle the hole and hold your laptop right there, and you'll get the best cooling. If you don't believe me, just try it!

Left foot on clutch. Left side of right foot on brake pedal. Right side of right foot partial throttle. Let off clutch pedal far enough for the clutch to bite and transmit enough power to have the car straining forward just a bit. Roll right foot gradually off the brakes and onto the gas while continuing to let off the clutch. With just a little practice, you can pull this off with _zero_ backward rolling. You can do it quickly to get a fast start, or slowly to get a nice slow roll.

I think people who are sending their children to this school will be able to teach their children the necessary computer skills just fine without the help of the school.

I also have yet to meet a piece of paper that gives immediate feedback. However, I have met teachers who can give better targeted and more useful feedback than any computer program. Learning tools are great, but perhaps a bit more emphasis should be given to inspiring and training more good teachers.

But "tiny cuts would get infected, and spread," the reason that you're telling me that a high (absurd, but theoretical) dose of capsacin would lead to mass tissue death, is exactly the outcome the immune system fights against! That part wouldn't be affected at all by turning off nerve receptors. Nor would the clotting process. So how exactly does turning off a receptor in a nerve affect the body's ability to heal? Numbing a cut on the outside of the body certainly doesn't affect the body's ability to heal on the outside. The digestive tract is topologically on the outside, so I fail to see the difference. I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I'm genuinely curious since what you're telling me strikes me as being extremely counterintuitive.

Can you provide some refereed papers in support of this? It makes no sense to me since the immune system is not governed by the nervous system. No signal in the nervous system would mean no sensation, but it wouldn't mean that the immune system would stop responding to any effects. There are no nerves from the brain to the white blood cells.

Best upgrade? Going from having no computer to having a computer. Sure, by modern standards my Mac SE with its 1 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive is obsolete. But being able to edit documents without rewriting the entire thing forever changed how I went about my work. My work and home computers are orders of magnitude faster now, but the fundamental tasks that I perform on them haven't really changed all that much.

Suppose you can build some large equipment in space with manufacturing advantages. (Never mind all the effort to set up such a manufacturing base.) How exactly would you get it back to earth where it's needed? It's not like you can just give that fancy gas turbine that you just built a slight retrograde nudge and let it fall back down to earth.

Oops... undoing bad moderation.

Infinity over infinity can be well defined. Consider that by your same argument, I could not tell you that half the whole numbers are even. After all, there's an infinite number of odd ones, and an infinite number of even ones. All that matters is that we can define rules to map exactly one even number onto each odd number. Therefore, we can prove that half the numbers are even despite the fact that there are an infinite number of both. We can also prove similarly that 1/3 of whole numbers are divisible by three even though the cardinality of those that are and those that aren't is the same.

Doing similarly with the lines in a 2D plane, we can define rules that map onto each line that doesn't intersect (y = b for your reference line y = 0) an infinite number of lines that do intersect (y = mx + b, same value b, unlimited selection of m). Therefore, the ratio between the two classes of lines (those that intersect and those that don't) is well known even though there are an infinite number of them, and the probability can be calculated to be 1.

I'm just an organic chemistry professor, so it's been a while since I've thought seriously about math. Some terminology may be a bit off, and the style may or may not be textbook perfect, but the general sketch of the proof is solid.

Having two screens in a laptop won't solve the problem that a laptop inherently has poor ergonomics. Sure, there's lots of screen real estate, but it's not ideally positioned. That, or the keyboard won't be ideally positioned. To me, this setup seems even worse, with no main screen right in front. Though if you insist on that much screen space in a portable package (4.5 kg isn't so bad compared to laptops from a decade ago), I guess this works.

Sounds like you want an external hard drive. Or a fast network connection.

In the interest of full disclosure, I handled user support on ITA Software's search sites from April 2000 to March 2011. My leaving is due to a change in life circumstances, and has nothing to do with Google.

If you search far enough into the future, there generally will be a very large number of travel dates (often the majority) available at the lowest fare. If you're reasonably flexible with your plans, you can find the lowest fare easily. It is easy to find the lowest fare that is currently bookable between airport A and airport B in 2012. Your choice of dates will be somewhat limited since it's still early in 2011, and airlines generally don't make itineraries bookable more than 330 days in advance.

But what you probably really want is not just what the best fare is right now, but how to get the best fare if you have flexibility in both when to travel and when to book. It is impossible to know whether now is the best time to book that fare since fares and fare availability can change at any time in any direction. Airlines sometimes change fares multiple times in a day, and fare availability can change even faster. Furthermore, since these changes are in response to market conditions, even the airlines don't know when the lowest price will be.

The laws of thermodynamics tell us whether the snow will melt, but not how quickly it will melt. The rate is dictated by kinetics, not thermodynamics.

I'm an organic chemist, so this isn't exactly my expertise, but I've given it some thought. Yes, we could control the temperature and pressure variable by using the triple point of water. And as you rightly point out, there is Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water. Problem is, while this standard for water is good for defining temperature (which isn't nearly as sensitive to isotope composition), the tolerance for variability in isotope composition of this water leads to a calculated 1 ppm variability in density (and thus in variability of the measured kilogram). I doubt anyone at NIST would be happy with replacing a system with parts per billion accuracy (an uncertainty of micrograms when measuring a kilogram) with one that only has parts per million accuracy (an uncertainty of a milligram or so when measuring a kilogram). We could tighten the standard for Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water, but the existing standard is already hard enough to achieve. Getting three orders of magnitude improvement probably isn't happening. I suspect we'll ultimately use something relating to silicon-28. Thanks to advances in semiconductor research, we're getting really good at purifying silicon-28.