... except for the Northeast Corridor, which shows that high speeds and large populations make it economically effective -- just as California will.

When San Francisco and Los Angeles build airports in their downtown cores, come back and talk to us. The trip times will be comparable and the rail journey will be more comfortable by far.

... and this writer goes "off the rails" yet again

Certainly, few people drove on the first five miles of controlled-access highway --- but the fully built-out Interstate system is used by many millions. To describe the entire project as only the Central Valley segment is foolish at best and malevolent at worst.

It's not the worst idea --- but the track is exceedingly curvy, speeds could never be very high, and in the end it wouldn't be much cheaper (if at all) than building a new line. Plus the large (if often ignored!) population centers in the Central Valley would be entirely bypassed by a coastal route, relegating them even more to backwater status. Further more the coastal route is anyway owned and mainly run my freight rail, who would fight to the death against any encroachment. The current HSR project builds an entirely separate and publicly-owned right-of-way with no grade crossings, for maximum speed, access to population centers, and ultimate public benefit.

The above post suggests that money should instead be spend on Bay Area or Southern California transit projects, but this is a false dichotomy (trichotomy?) -- the public benefits from spending money on all three of these areas (North, South, and HSR to connect them). In the North: BART is extending south from Fremont to San Jose (coming end of 2017!), Caltrain is electrifying to boost capacity and speed, giving frequent, fully electrified, and high-capacity transit all around the Bay. In the South, Los Angeles Metro now has more miles of public rail transport than any other region: lines are being build through downtown, to the airport, through the heart of the Wilshire corridor, and to East LA and the San Gabriel Valley. High speed rail will tie these two great regions even closer together, compensate for our overcrowded highways and airports, and benefit the entire state.

The above post suggests that "Grade separation is key" --- the project described will be entirely grade-separated, reducing pedestrian deaths, drivers' waiting time at crossings, and boosting the system's speed.

The above post suggests that California won't match Amtrak's Eastern corridor which has "curvey rights-of-way," --- but the project described here is acquiring property to build long, straight segments to achieve much higher speed's than the Eastern Acela trains.

The above post suggests we build Hyperloop instead --- but this invokes a technology completely untested at these scales, wheras the project described here uses proven technology.

Finally, the above post suggests an "electrified self-driving autobahn" .... at which point I lost any remaining faith in the writer's ability for rational thought.

I am shocked that by LA Times writer Ralph Vartabedian's article on the supposed risk and overruns to California's ongoing high-speed rail (HSR) effort. Vartabedian is a known opponent of HSR whose every article drips with antagonism against this project, as a quick review of his past articles will clearly show. Anyone who reads the purported analysis (in fact a single Powerpoint file, taken out of context) will quickly see that the article's claims are not justified -- for example, a *possible* $3B overrun (really less, since this compares against obsolete estimates) does not equal a 50% budget problem for a project of this size. The entire state stands to benefit immensely from this project, which will connect BART, Caltrain, and VTA users in the North with Metro, Metrolink, and Amtrak users in the South --- and connect both to the isolated, ignored, economically-depressed Central Valley. Californians, and all who believe in progress, should embrace this transformative project and reject the uniformed mudslinging by the Vartabedians of the world.

Small, red dwarf stars are "that way" merely because they have lower mass. So there's nothing systematically different about the amount of heavy elements in them, relative to Sun-like stars. In fact, our study said nothing at all about the likelihood of these planets to host life -- our knowledge of the requirements for that are slim enough, and our understanding of these new planets still too shallow, to say anything definitively about life on these planets.

Also, so far there is no clear sign that the occurrence of planetary systems around these small, red stars correlates with the heavy element fraction of the star -- but it's a field of active research that our team is looking into.

Indeed -- but what we didn't know about planets back in the MoO era could fill a lot of modern exoplanet textbooks. Nonetheless, I'm sure all my hours of MoO-playing as a child (and after) helped contribute to me writing this big paper.

The flat (Mercator-projected) map of Luhman 16B is available here for download. Feel free to import it into whatever program or game you prefer!

Good question! Atmospheric scientists aren't actually sure yet whether brown dwarfs should have "bands" like we see on Jupiter and other Solar system gas giants (this was discussed at a meeting in Washington, D.C. Jan 2014) -- and our mapping data wasn't quite sensitive enough to definitively answer that question. (We're less sensitive to axisymmetric features than we are to longitudinal variations). The vertical "stretching" of the map's features toward the poles is an unavoidable artifact of our analysis technique. Cloud patterns may be less elongated than they appear!

Hubble has better resolution at visible wavelengths, but remember we're seeing the planet's thermal radiation and not reflected (visible) light -- so the planet is over 10 times fainter in the visible than at at infrared wavelengths (Figure 6 in the paper). Hubble can also see into the infrared, but because it is smaller than the largest ground-based telescopes Hubble does not offer the best resolution in the infrared.