Many fine physicists have burned away their lives grappling with the problem of quantum gravity. - R. P. Woodard

These companies should consider using Fossil. Fossil is a mature DVCS, BSD-licensed. It is extremely elegantly written, and provides client, server, GUI, CGI executable and web server in a single binary file. It includes a Wiki and a bug tracker for each project. It does not litter your working copy with unnecessary files - only a single dot-file in the highest directory. It was not written in two weeks.

Fossil deserves to be much better known, but for some reason Git gets all the attention.

https://www.fossil-scm.org/

Free project hosting is available here:
http://chiselapp.com/

I have given up contributing to Wikipedia. My contributions are invariably reversed by an editor. Collectively, editors seem to spend their time annotating pages with [who?], [reference needed], etc, but then they revert any attempt to fill in the missing information.

Thank you, Forrest Mims, for "Science Probe!".

No need to wait for self-driving cars. If the NSA is using neural networks to analyse big data and look for terrorists, it will sometimes miss obvious terrorists, and sometimes classify harmless people as terrorists. I would hope that the latter would be screened out by human review, but there's not much we can do about the former without improving our understanding of neural nets.

When a web page is slow to load, it is often because of all the data that must be loaded from 3rd-party sites - Google Analytics is one of the worst, but there is also Facebook, Twitter, etc (probably for 3rd-party logins). SPDY is not going to fix that. If Google wants to speed up the web, it should start by reducing the latency of its own services.

Exactly right. Also, from the purchaser's viewpoint, he wants good quality oranges but wants to pay the poor-quality price.

There are purchasers all over the country who could make best-selling orange juice, if only they could buy good quality fruit at trash prices. The flaw is in their own business model, not in the way that oranges are produced.

How would a mathematician run a simulation?

(1) It would not be a QCD simulation of the whole universe, because in most times and places a simpler approximation than QCD would be sufficient.
(2) Special Relativity - helps the simulation, because it constrains the crosstalk between different star systems, different galaxies etc. A full simulation of the entire universe would not be necessary.
(3) Quantum Mechanics - hinders the simulation, by increasing the computational complexity. Incompletely decohered multiple worlds must be simulated, and this is hugely computationally expensive - unless you have a quantum computer.

A corollary of the simulation hypothesis is therefore: if we are living in a computer simulation, then quantum computers are physically possible, at least in the host world.

Yes, the mass hysteria in Britain is terrifying.

Children evacuated from swimming pool after prosthetic leg mistaken for paedophile

The original story is ambiguous, but the linked articles appear to state that it was the operator of Freedom Hosting, not TorMail, who was charged with enabling CP. If the feds can run a Tor client to see what a site on the dark web is offering, it is a reasonable assumption that the hosting provider can do the same, and should do some basic diligence to ensure that the sites he is hosting comply with the law.

It is interesting of course that GMail, EC2, AT&T etc escape responsibility for what their customers do.

Bruce Schneier said "What I took away from reading the Snowden documents was that if the NSA wants in to your computer, it's in. Period."

This applies even if you are using TOR. TOR conceals your IP address, but it cannot remove the vulnerability of the end points - the client and server of the web/mail/whatever service. The Silk Road server was running PHP, and was probably compromised within hours of coming to the attention of the authorities. For the next two years the FBI was most likely building a case by parallel construction.

It is not a smart idea to use TOR or other services to break the law.

Well spotted. The figure guessed above (0.13V) is incorrect because the maximum power density and maximum current density do not occur under the same conditions.

The paper claims "an order of magnitude" higher power density than Li ion batteries. The table in the png file shows that, by "an order of magnitude", they mean a factor of two.

Some of the technological problems are mentioned in comments below.

It's a very nice piece of scientific work, but I don't expect these batteries will be coming to our phones any time soon.