I can't believe we missed this! I just turned down the bin size on the histograms and it really sticks out. What post did you first see it on? Thanks!

Yeah, I know. As several people have pointed out so far, the 3.5 million is a gross underestimate. We plan to do a more in-depth analysis soon.

I had a similar issue with a company that makes industrial plasma etching equipment. After eight months of trying to get off their mailing list I was able to find the CEO's personal phone extension, and started left him a choice voicemail. I got a phone apology each from their PR and marketing heads within the hour, and haven't heard from them since. This may not work if the whole company is in on it though.

Maintaining and caring for old nuclear weapons and facilities is almost half of the DOE's budget. It's not like we can just lock the doors to all the facilities and abandon them....

General relativity is only one small part of physics, and focusing on it wouldn't help you understand a lot of the physics articles that go through here. I would suggest a more balanced approach -- with your background you should be able to work through Griffith's E&M and Quantum books which many undergraduate physics majors use. All the purists out there may scoff at them, but let's face it, your not actually going to work through Zee's "QFT in a nutshell" or many of the other books suggested above on your own. With a bit more of a background in the field, you would be in a better place to evaluate what you wanted to study next.

I pulled up the IEEE bit since it's written for a very general audience, but Oliver's comment on this paper doesn't sound any more positive that the previous ones: "To be clear, this system was not used to perform any computational algorithm." ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/473164a ). The paper is a good first step, but doesn't come anywhere near to proving the claims that the company has made. It is also way less exciting that things that other groups have done, without all the hype, http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5654 being the most recent example. It's a good illustration through (PoV-ray, wut wut).

I haven't studied quantum information theory (I dropped Paul Ginsparg's quantum information theory class after a few days because I had too much work this semester), but it's general knowledge among physicists that Dwave has not made anything worth writing home about. Two wide-audience survey articles about this are http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/loser-dwave-does-not-quantum-compute from IEEE and http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/controversial-computer-is-at-lea.html?ref=hp from the magazine Science

It's hard to believe that such low-strength fields could have much of an effect on soft tissue, let alone bone density: http://thevirtuosi.blogspot.com/2010/05/cell-phone-brain-damage-part-deux.html

I went to a public high school with a intense IB program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Baccalaureate). I worked hard and got into several very competitive private schools, and was hella excited until I got the financial aid package from each of them which wanted my family to pay 1/3rd of the income each year to send me there. Factoring in what my family could realistically have paid, I would have had to take out ~100k in loans for four years. I was pretty bummed out, and I ended up going to my state's flagship public university (not particularly well known for what I wanted to study) -- the same one as many of the B students in my class. Nuts.

...

However, it all worked out for the best. I had a small scholarship and because the tuition was so low I was able to graduate with no debt. I was in the honors program and had my pick of the most interesting classes and professors. My department was pretty small, and I was able to join a research group my freshman year and got a lot of valuable experience in microelectronic fabrication. Also because my school had relatively loose course requirements (unlike U Chicago for example) I was able to take whatever I wanted my senior year (Jackson and Sakurai to all you physics buffs). I had my pick of graduate schools, and I ended up with a fellowship to my favorite. While some of my peers are struggling with their loan payments, I can think about a house. Even more importantly, I also have the freedom to take an interesting but low-paying job when I graduate.

At the end of high school I felt pretty jaded about how it all turned out, but now I see it was for the best. YMMV, but worked out well for me.

I would love to, but the CHDK doesn't yet support a lot of the newer entry-level DLSRs like the XS, XSi, T1i, T2i, etc: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ#Q._What_camera_models_are_supported_by_the_CHDK_program.3F