Hear hear, my friend! There was never a single war in Europe before the invention of paper currency. The Romans, in particular, were an eminently peaceful people!

The Roman emperors would never have done such a thing. (Except when it was convenient.)

Its a chemical equilibrium. The tinting reaction is catalyzed by UV. One of the major downsides of those glasses is that the reaction is also hindered by heat, and so they're not as effective on hot days.

I'm also an experimental physical scientist. My experience tells me that I have absolutely no idea what kind of meta-data I'll want to keep track of in the future, and I only know what I want to keep track of now, which is probably a small subset of what I'll want to keep track of in the future. Every sample that I make is assigned a unique serial number (Experiment N Sample M Piece Q etc). All the master data is in my lab notebook which I keep anal retentitively. Any metadata that I know now that I want to keep track of is contained in there. Any analysis I do on any sample I make is also filed under this serial number. Now I just need to convince my boss to let me switch to an electronic notebook (like Microsoft OneNote) so that I can assign each sample or each experiment its own tab so I don't have to jump pages back and forth in my paper notebook.

This poster has a great idea. You should definitely go to talks, especially if you're near a large university, especially if its prestigious. One of the most efficient ways to learn a field is to go to talks. Theres a really steep learning curve, but its my experience that researchers (professors, graduate students) LOVE talking about their work, with anyone at any time. Ask for their slides if you liked the talk, email them questions. Email the people who wrote their citations questions. If you're near a public university, you have access to any of the many or all journals they inevitably subscribe through the library. And because most journals are now electronic, it is incredibly efficient to do literature searches and dig up cited papers.

I'm working on my PhD in Chemistry, I used to be a theoretical student and have transferred to experiment. One thing I've learned lately is that theory has gone in a really different direction than its heyday in the early 1900s. There was alot of unexplained observations and, frankly, Einstein was fucking brilliant. Special/General relativity were entirely thought up in his own head, with no experiments to back them. On the other hand, quantum mechanics had been begging for discovery since the photoelectric effect. The 1900s were a massive period of consolidation for physics and science...we're in an exploration period again. These days, theoretical people tend to focus on new algorithms to solve 3 body problems, and frankly, working out the massive consequences of everything we've achieved in the past 100 years. Think the period after Newton's Principia before Maxwell's equations. Right now, we're looking for the equivalent to Langrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, Hooke's law, etc etc. We're getting there with things like density functional theory, but theres a LONG way to go.

Wouldn't really matter. If it ends the solvent evaporation step as silicon dioxide, its silicon dioxide. And this step seems unlikely to me too because they claim that its completely non-toxic...no solvent that evaporates that fast is non-toxic.

I'm a PhD chemist. I work on the absolute cutting edge of extremely thin glasses. To say that a glass is a solid or a liquid is a mischaracterization. Solids and liquids are thermodynamic phenomena. Glasses are not thermodynamic. They are liquids that are prevented from crystallizing because molecular motion is inexorably slow. Also, this company is full of crap. Thin film silicon dioxide doesn't flow like a liquid.

I've got a friend who just graduated in physics with a 2.85. You know what phrase gets him to work? "Cleanup on aisle 6." Thats right, he's a janitor at the Wal-Mart next to campus (Purdue).

Granted, physics is slightly different as a field than CS. So heres another argument. Someone mentioned this: Tuition of 20k + lost wages of 60k for one year of school is an opportunity cost of 80k. Well, if you want to work for a top company like Procter and Gamble (where I'm currently working) those extra GPA points will probably get your resume to the top of the stack. Why is that important? Because P&G recruits what they proclaim as the "Best of the best." And they really do. Forbes didn't rank P&G's employees #1 in the world for having a reputation for innovation and intelligence for shits and giggles. Regardless of your GPA, you'll start at the same salary, but first you've gotta get that far.