sterna's comments

I bought a netbook because I wanted a computer that I could easily bring along while traveling because I went to a lot of meetings abroad at the time. I could easily have afforded a laptop but they were not nearly as portable at the time, so the MacBook Air style computers have also had a big impact on netbook sales for people like me.

Please be aware that Celsius is not a SI unit, Kelvin is used in stead as the standard temperature unit. The only reason why many people use Celsius is because it makes sense in their daily lives. The melting and boiling point of water are both important in cooking and the freezing point is also important for the weather. Therefore it makes a lot of practical sense to use Celsius and people have stuck to it even though it is not an SI unit.

Mecanical parts are the most difficult thing to switch because there are many things defined in relation to one another. For example the american UNC threads have different angles than the metric ones do and therefore it is impossible to replace one with another. For this reason alone it will take very long time to do a full switch from one unit system to another. However, many "metric" units are actually slightly adapted imperial ones. For instance you can get a lot of 25 mm stuff in Europe that is almost equivalent to the 1 inch stuff you get in the US (1 inch = 25.4 mm) and similarly there is a lot of 30 cm and 60 cm stuff in stead of 1 foot and 2 feet stuff.

Regionalized units have the same damaging effect to manufacturing as closed software ecosystems has to software development. The only reason most US citizens do not feel the pain of this fragmentation is that they do not have to buy anything that is not adapted to the US market. Again, this is because the US is the biggest market on the planet and thus it is profitable for big companies to adapt their products to US standards.

However, supporting several unit systems is a huge tax on startup companies that work in manufacturing and therefore they reduce innovation and competition, causing harm to everybody along the way.

It is true that the US has had remarkebly high birth rates during the last 30 years compared to most of Europe and the rich cuntries in Asia. However, once the trend for low fertility has been established it is extremely difficult to break. Even the countries in Europe that have given strong economic incentives to have children have still not managed to keep their fatility rates at replacement level. The only exception is Ireland, which has strong anti- abortion laws. Teherefore it important of the US to confront the problem of declining fertility before it has turned into a permanent problem.

That is not entirely true. Nuclear fission is not powered by the sun, nor are nuclear fusion plants on Earth (when they arrive). However, fission is only possible because of the existence of heavy nuclei that were initially created during super novae explosions in massive stars billions of years ago so you could argue that is is also at least star powered.

The ingredients needed for fusion on the other hand are thought to have been created during the some of the early stages of the Big bang so fusion is truly independent of stars.

If you have a bounded system growth will eventually level out. Physical considerations makes it unfavorable to go below the atomic level for feature size. Therefore growth in transistors per area is bounded and Mores law will eventually stop being true and therefore it is nothing but a phenomenelogical law.

I think Kurtzweil has suggested going into 3D for CPU design with multiple layers of circuits, but I have seen no serious attempts to realize this so it is a bit of a long shot to depend on to keep the pace of growth intact. However, it still does not resolve the fundamental limitation of Moores law, it only extends it for some time.

Solid materials are much more complex than single atoms and support several types of multiple particle states. One noteworthy example is the Cooper pairs that result in conventional superconductivity. Spin-liquid states are also multi particle states with the interesting property that they exhibit entanglement between the magnetic moments of the atoms, and it is this entanglement that makes them intersting for quantum informatics because it can be used fo form qbits.

An intersting feature of the Herbertsmitihe crystals that were used for the study is that have a geometric structure that frustrates the ordering of the magnetic moments (or spins) of the atoms. The magnetic moment will try to align in opposite directions but the crystal structure has three magnetic moments in each unit cell and therefore only two of them can allign in an energetically favorable state while the last one is unable to moove into a stable equlibrium. Since there is no distinction between the three magnetic moments per se, the frustration is spread across the whole solid structure and a "large" entangled stage is formed.

Because these states are not locallized they are not constrained by the atomic properties of the cryatal atoms and therefore they are allowed to accept excitations at a continous range of engergies rather than the discrete ones that we normally see. It is a little bit similar to free electrons in metals. They can also be excited by a continous range of energies because they are free to move within the material.

An important thing to note, however, is that these experiments were carried out at 1.6 K, where thermal fluctuations play a very small role compared to room temperature. Therefore it is not likely that this effect will be portable to regular electronics devices. More likely quantum informatics applications include massive server like facilities that has the infrastructure to cool the devices down to cryogenic temperatures and the best we can hope for in terms of avaliability is some kind of cloud service.

There is an interesting press release at Phys.org: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-newly-quantum-liquid-beauty-sim...

Edit: Corrected BSC pairs to Cooper pairs, and added a bit more information after reading the actual paper which is available for those sitting behind a pay wall: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7429/full/nature1...

It is actually not very difficult to make stock, except you have to wait some hours for it to cook, so I guess lack of time to cook is the driving force behind soup stores. However, if you don't have the time to cook stock it is likely that you also lack the time to cook the rest of the meal to a quality that matches the expensive stock...

The bottled stock you can get in regular supermarkets is also better than the cubes. I can recommend it.

My mother committed suicide when I was five years old. She was lost for seven months and I never really understood she was dead until several months had passed. It took years before I actually came to the point where I could cry. Believe me, it is better to embrace the sorrow now and deal with it rather than to keep it within you for the rest of your life.

The brain is designed to process signal and if there is none it will sometimes make up its own. I guess you can compare it to dark current in photo-multipliers.

People who have tinnitus will hear the sound you describe or something similar all the time. When I was little I had the same experience as you, but now I have developed tinnitus and never get rid of that sound any more. Sometimes it also becomes rhythmical which very annoying. The only thing that helps is to ignore it.

Yes Chromium without sync works fine for me too.

edit: Gmail works fine for me in Denmark, maybe it is only a regional outage?

Phosphorus recovery is an important problem indeed, but there already exists a solution:

http://www.grontmij.com/highlights/water-and-energy/Pages/pe...

The main problem at the moment is a lack of incentives to use it at waste water treatment plants, but I guess this will come with increasing Phosphorus prices. Still it would be beneficial to start recovering more Phosphorus already now but this is a political issue rather than an Engineering issue in my opinion.

Maybe less than two years ago, otherwise he would need to have superhuman powers :)

This kind of user behavior will be very expensive in terms of capacity requirement at the super chargers. If everybody comes in at lunch time and dinner time there will be at least 30 minutes of queue to get to a charger.

This is not the first time Norway has been interested in Thorium, already in the sixties they had plans to exploit their rather large Thorium deposit. India also has large deposits and also has a trial reactor scheme going similar to the one in Norway with Thorium-Plutonium MOX fuel.

There is a lot of information about Thorium on this site: http://energyfromthorium.com/

You can call it what you want but one thing is for sure. These prices demonstrate that the competition on the US telecom market is limited. In Denmark you only pay for out going sms (typically around 5 cent) and you can get a plan with unlimited sms, 7 hours of calls and 2 GB of data for 20 $ a month. This is because we have fierce competition on our telecom market as a result of the old monopoly company being forced by government to lease their network to upstarts at fair rates.

Philanthropy is much bigger in the US than in the Nordic countries so there is much more money to go around. That being said there has traditionally been a feeling among the rich that they have already given their share to education through the high tax rate.

Historically construction has been the most popular type of philanthropic project. But in recent years the scope has been broadened a lot because the welfare state has had to retract some of its branches, and thus education has also risen in popularity.

Denmark has been doing the same since the nineties and we have also developed over capacity. We get around the waste problem by "reusing" it in road construction.

BTW Denmark is the neighbour to Sweden so I guess they have their inspiration from us.

You can already do this with Labview and National Instruments hardware. It is quite easy to program and Labview is inherently a parallel language so you get that for free, but the price is way too high.

One FPGA module costs around 3000 $ and a Labview licence costs around 10000 $, at least in Denmark. It is probably cheaper in the US.