BTW, here is their actual message to the fans announcing their retirement:

http://www.cartalk.com/content/time-get-even-lazier

This makes me feel sad. They were a great part of Saturday mornings. I know they are up at retirement age, but I hope they find some other projects that help them share their wit and wisdom. Click and Clack Rock.

Can we call these "somewhere between PCs and tablets" machines "lap-tabs"? It's just snappy.

and Behold the Mystical Power of EXPONENTS!! Prepare to be amazed!! We will magically create numbers so big they are Unimaginable!!

Agreed.

There is great value in knowing which things we (i.e. humanity and the scientific community) understand and which we don't. To me this is the primary message and the joy of reading/listening to Feynman. Over and over again he sketches out what we understand in a field and then highlights the questions that remain, and shares his enthusiasm and wonder for those unanswered questions that are waiting out there for a sharp mind grasp. This focus on the unanswered question is what makes his work so inspirational. It makes you want to become a physicist so you can go out and solve some of those mysteries. And that also is what differentiates Feynman's approach from how science is taught in most places. It's taught with a focus on what we know, which unintentionally gives the student the impression that we mostly understand things, which is completely wrong.

On another note, as a computer scientist and architect of large systems, it is important for me to know what is do-able and what is not, which problems we have solutions for, which are intractable nonstarters, and which we have a chance to solve in the right situation with the right brainpower applied. The details of why are less important. For example, I don't need to understand deep crypto to know what we can encrypt the comms between these two components. I know it's a solved problem, what it can and cannot do, and that's all that matters to me. Put it in my toolbox along with sorting, hash tables, full-text indexing, AJAX, machine learning, and hundreds of other techniques, each of which is its own deep field, and I can use this knowledge to design systems with high confidence that they are going to work as planned.

...published in the 1960s and I don't think have ever really been brought up to date...

They have been updated. From wikipedia: "Also released in 2005, was a "Definitive Edition" of the lectures which includes corrections to the original text."

And the Amazon page says: "The revised edition of Feynman's legendary lectures includes extensive corrections and updates collated by Feynman and his colleagues. A new foreword by Kip Thorne, the current Richard Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, discusses the relevance of the new edition to today’s readers."

Freedom isn't free! It cost folks like you and me.
And if we don't all chip in, we'll never pay that bill.
Freedom isn't free! No there's a hefty fucking fee.
And if you don't throw in your buck o'five who will?

If you don't throw in your buck o'five who will?
Ooh... buck o'five

Freedom cost a buck o'five

(please visualize this sung by marionettes.)
Parker and Stone 'Putting The "F" Back In Freedom'

Seems like this would have big potential for use in all-optical routing, but I did not see any mention of that in the articles. Any optical routing pros out there who can tell us if this tech is applicable?

Also "Friday". Full of interesting ideas and just plain fun.

Not all that obscure, but worth a mention. So many great books to choose from, but start with "Time Enough for Love" and "Stranger in a Strange Land."

But a month after the patent is public you'll be able to go to China and get it cheap.

Why is "Europe's Spaceport" in South America? Isn't that South America's Spaceport?

I hear google is starting a new service where you get your electricity for free, but they get to keep all the usage data and do whatever they want with it. As a first test of the utility of this they are modeling when people are home and when they are not, then door-to-door sales organizations get to participate in an auction to buy time segments of people at home. Rumor has it that the Girl Scouts and the Jehovah's Witnesses were having a bidding war for your house at 6:45-7:15 PM next tuesday. Next they will target your computer with ads for porn when you are using the laptop after 11PM and the wife has set her alarm earlier than 7AM and turned off the upstairs lights. Other applications to follow.

Ok, ok, i just made that up.

We blew a big opportunity with the body disposal. Here's what they should have done with the body: Cremate him, grind the ashes up extra-fine, then add them to a batch of 50,000 or so of those cakes that go in urinals. Optionally print a picture of his face on the cake. Distribute evenly across the US. Good times ensue. Some measure of karmic justice is achieved. Being eaten by fish just doesn't have the same impact.