This is not your typical astrograph. I was able to find out, I think, that the CCDs have a pixel size of 15um, which is a normal figure. But this is at f/1 (!), so that is about 0.9 arcsec/pixel. Not too shabby. Not enough to spot the little green men on Mars, though.

It is an array of "LL" type CCDs made by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. They have a pixel size of 15 um. The imaging circle diameter is anyone's guess, but I bet it's real big. A significant portion of that 3.5m aperture. This thing must have a ridiculously high image resolution, probably in the gigapixels.

Really? I took E&M as a college sophomore, and the last couple weeks of the course were an intro to quantum mechanics. It was difficult. Even if you could stretch that couple weeks over a much longer period of time, I doubt that any high school would attempt it.

Feynman wrote that book "QED," which was for a general audience and is sort of an intro to quantum mechanics, but he had to take a very unusual approach in order to pull it off (and of course you don't get to learn any of the math).

I was a math major. As a kid, math was what inspired me. But other kids are inspired by different subjects, less "valuable" subjects, and we have to see this as a benefit rather than a detriment.

"Our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future it won't service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children... our task is to educate their whole being."
Ken Robinson, from this truly amazing TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

The FTC uses the Herfindahl index to evaluate market competitiveness. Using just the top 5 carriers (the big four and Tracfone), the current index is 1810 (market share data from here).

'According to the DOJ-FTC 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines, the agencies will regard a market in which the post-merger HHI is below 1500 as "unconcentrated," between 1500 and 2500 as "moderately concentrated," and above 2500 as "highly concentrated." A merger potentially raises "significant competitive concerns" if it produces an increase in the HHI of more than 200 points in a moderately concentrated market or more than 100 points in a highly concentrated market. A merger is presumed "likely to enhance market power" if it produces an increase in the HHI of more than 200 points in a highly concentrated market.'

So by their own definition this merger will raise "significant competitive concerns" since the HHI will increase by 650 points to 2460. With all the other little guys added in, it is fair to say that the final number would be more than 2500, i.e. "highly concentrated."

There are ways to formulate a gravitational potential in 2 dimensions, but I think the idea is that if they existed gravitational waves (actually, all waves) would reverberate when propagating in 2 dimensions, and become distorted. Huygens' principle does not apply in 2 dimensions. See this link: http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath242/kmath242.htm

Tyler Cowen addresses this in a very interesting way in a short ebook called "The Great Stagnation," and it does have to do with limits on technological progress, although more about the kinds of applications that have arisen since the 70s.

You bring up a very important point in how this is all going to develop in the future, which is Moore's second law. Capital costs to build a fab plant go UP exponentially. We're already at the point where it costs about $10 billion, the GDP of a country like Georgia or Brunei. You have to wonder if it will be earlier than 2020 when we stop building new ones if at that time they will cost more than the GDP of countries like Sweden or Taiwan.

Sounds similar to PLA.

This is referred to as the resource curse.

Well, this is their series C, but yeah, I'm kind of amazed at the amount.

The credits are not bought by the state. They're bought by utilities, which have state-imposed quotas to meet, if their production isn't clean enough. This is sensible, since utilities will otherwise have a relative market advantage from externalities in the form of pollution.

Nearly 5000 kWh/yr from a 3 kW system would be very high specific production. I think you're overestimating a bit.

You might want to check out PVWATTS, which is an online estimator, or if you really want to get into it, PVsyst is an excellent modeling application that has a free demo.

I am a solar installer. A typical 3 kW rooftop installation costs about $20k, nowhere near the 60k you came up with. Large utility-scale installations make money in the long run, selling power at market rates. This has been true for a couple years now (primarily because of new markets for renewable energy credits in many states). The challenge, as another commenter pointed out, is cash flow and financing.