But if you talk about double or half the temperature you have to use kelvins. Is 20C twice as hot as 10C? Is it twice as hot as 0C or -10C?

Double 300C is 873C Half of 700C is 213C Half of 800C is 263C So 300C is significantly more than half of 700C-800C Doubling and halving temperatures in C only makes sense if you apply the offset of 273C to make these calculations from 0.

I was curious about the messy units. 33740F is 19000 Kelvin which is clearly the unit that would have been used in the original article. At least the gizmodo article got the ratio right "heating it to 14 times its melting point". I was almost sure they would have done the ratio in F but they must have used the number from the article.

Far too much emphasis on "people of color" in this article (and to be pedantic my color is white so I am a person of color, the color is white). If it was about the clearly dubious logic of banning people who match the name+birthdate of someone else then I would agree with this - it is a terrible criteria. Not comfortable about a racist agenda creeping into the article though. Not John Smith born 1/1/1990 although I am sure there are loads of them.

"Not much else is known: Its power is strangely classified, but the laser likely operates in the 15 to 50 kilowatt range" ... "It also presumably excludes the cost of shipboard electrical power, likely in the thousands of watts, that would be needed." Impressive efficiency, lasers do well to be 10% efficient so 100KW would be a decent baseline power. They should have said hundreds of thousands of watts. Probably just bad editing but not a good sign about this article.

This is simple - tell your children the pros and cons and let them make their own decisions. At age 17 they can choose which way to go, it is really not upto you to decide their futures beyond this point.

There is no way to distinguish binary data from encrypted terrorism. A entire encrypted disk that asks for a password is clearly encrypted and the lawyers can have much fun deciding what this means but what if I have a few Gb of data from some obscure program on a dedicated logger partition. In this case there is no immediate way to prove that this is not encrypted (commie propaganda/terrorism/insider trading/worry of the day) data, this is not hypothetical - I am sure that it is done today. Does this mean that people are guilty until someone produces a app that can read a binary file? Even this is not the end of if because if I was a halfway cunning terrorist I would write a app that happily decodes my nefarious data as something innocuous. It will not be long before it is possible to have 2 or more passwords that decrypt into entirely different results - it might already happen but what will happen when this is common? It is the kind of thing that the legal system needs to be able to deal with.

Think of a ground frost. At night thermal radiation from the ground goes through the atmosphere resulting in cooling but air can only radiate weakly (it is transparent) so cools far less. The result is that the ground ends up colder than the air.

In a vacuum you use this to control the temperature of a spacecraft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

White in the visible and black in the infra red. Not exactly a new idea but based on the strange words they are using I suspect that they are trying to patent this.

Given that all the power from the PU-238 will eventually be converted into heat in the lander (10% via electricity) this is 320W of heat that needs to be dissipated. For a lander sitting on ice this could seriously affect the results - it would certainly vaporize some of the surroundings.

Looking at the original link http://www.themarysue.com/marv... they are redefining Thor as the being that holds Mjölnir. Which is tough on the demigod Thor who happened to be the wielder of Mjölnir. They do seem to have confused Mjölnir and Thor but I am sure this is entirely deliberate and I am equally sure that nobody really cares. Comic books take religion/mythology and rework it as seems commercially appropriate but this one does seem to be gratuitous - they could have used a generic costumed superhero where retirement and replacement is normal (Watchmen) but replacing immortal(ish) gods is a bit much.

Thor the son of Odin. http://www.rosala-viking-centr... Hmm. Costumed superheroes can move on from generation to generation as done well in Watchmen but genuine gods are surely a bit more stable.

If you buy a car then you are buying a complex machine with many failure modes. There is a huge business dedicated to saying that these failure modes are due to human failure or engineering oversight. Both are possible but the human element dominates - at a guess for every mechanical/software failure there are at least 100 human failures. The insurance industry loves this kind of issue. I suspect that when safe computer controlled cars become practical the insurers are going to be a issue.

If you are responsible for a subsystem and you discover a potential fault then the temptation to quietly fix it in future versions and not worry about the 'probably OK' past is huge. This is human nature but the company needs to have schemes in place to allow people to say that something is wrong without worrying about being sacked.