I don't ever recall environmentalists advocating single-use plastic bags over paper.

That's pretty much the whole reason for their set top boxes.

Aaagh! That's where I screwed up! I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque!

I attributed the sentence you quoted as referring to the other shops he's observed and not to the details in the summary.

If I had to guess, it isn't that steel is stronger in this case, but better at heat conduction/dissipation.

If they want to turn everything into big capacitors, I hope they work in ways to keep you from accidentally discharging it (years ago I took apart a cheap point-and-shoot camera and I touched the capacitor for the built-in flash and got quite a nice shock).

I always looked at it as a really neat puzzle, but one that is easily solved if you know the "trick". Just like those "IQ Tester" puzzles where you have n holes and (n-1) pegs, and you're supposed to jump the pegs checkers-style until there is only one left. It is fun to pass the time, but once you figure it out you're done. Of course, the trick these days is to see how quickly you can solve it, or doing it blindfold, or under water, or whatever. That's why I wouldn't classify it as the "greatest geek toy".

I didn't see the SA article, but I found what I am sure is the paper that caught SA's attention. A 1982 article in the European Journal of Physics by Marx, Gajzágó, and Gnädig. It is an entertaining article on how a physicist can see the universe in a Rubik's cube. However, since apparently a 3x3x3 cube forms a mathematical group, and if one takes quantum mechanics to be consistent with group theory, their conclusions are not very surprising. I am grateful for the reference and I look forward to reading the full paper.

In support of your argument, from the conclusion of the paper, the authors write:

I can't say I think of it as the greatest geek toy. Cool puzzle, but not geek toy. When I think of a great geek toy, I think of something that demonstrates some physical property (like a gyroscope, or one of those glass tubes with a colored liquid that boils when you hold it in your hand), or something like a Mindstorms set where you can explore computing and robotics.

I disagree with your overly-pessimistic comments.

1. Perhaps, but more likely because this is basic research it also can simply have shown to have not panned out.

2. For research at this level, it is never really "finished." There are always avenues to explore and interesting things to look into. The hard part is convincing a funding agency to let you go down those rat holes. The leap between basic research and "weaponizing" is bigger than the leap between basic research and commercializing. In other words, it happens very rarely.

3. I would like to see you provide some examples of this, particularly if you are suggesting this is so common as to happen regularly.

There are many things imposed upon the DoD that they do not want, but Congress inserts them via pork. Stevens was probably the best example of the worst part of the pork barrel process. He probably sent more money to Alaska than Byrd did to West Virginia (remember "the bridge to nowhere"? That was a tiny drop in the Stevens pork money ocean). One example off the top of my head, I recall years ago that he tried to have a NSF polar monitoring station (remember, this is supposed to be in the polar regions) moved to Alaska because it is cold there too. You can easily google major weapons programs the DoD doesn't want, but can't cancel because of pork.

The Air Force isn't going to spend their limited R&D funding on something that was set up with pork money unless it actually turns out to show that it has value (pork doesn't necessarily mean the idea is bad, but more often than not if the idea was good enough to stand up to peer review and other criticism, it would get funding via some legitimate channel).

I don't know why this is intriguing. The way good science is done is you take your criticisms and you refute them when you have an answer. Bad science, such as how cold fusion unfolded, jumps immediately into lawyer mode and other such nonsense. You immediately refute criticisms if you can (i.e., you know the answer off the top of your head), otherwise you go back and look into it (given the size of the BICEP team, I am guessing the PI was not the one who actually crunched the numbers, so he would have to go back to the person/people who did crunch the numbers and check with them). Also, "flat-out deny" is a pretty overblown set of words to use. If they used the wrong background in their subtraction, then they do the reanalysis and give the new results. If they didn't, they show that they didn't.

Don't forget Magic Jack. I hear that is untraceable.

I thought they recalled all you defective Barbies in the 90's.

If you read TFA they eventually go beyond the breathless statements highlighted earlier in the article and repeated in the summary above ("everything we thought was wrong!") and talk about other possibilities. I don't see how this makes one need to reevaluate what we've thought before. A gas cloud is not uniform and has density perturbations in it. It is most likely that newer stars will form in the center where the densities are higher, but it doesn't mean that they can't form on the outside.

That's because he's Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire.

I don't know how it is in law school, but professors get a free copy of the textbook(s) ("professor's or teacher's edition"), and perhaps support material. They get unsolicited texts mailed to them in hope that they'll be used in their course. Some don't give it a second thought and go with the path of least resistance. I did have a few who (younger, and closer to remembering their student days) purposely didn't use the latest edition, or didn't use one at all and pulled bits and pieces out of a number of books that were put on reserve in the library.