Slashdot Mirror

Better, the Caltech mirror version is up, and is on a solid pipe/server, so will probably stay up.

One astrophysicist now claims Black Holes are made by Freaking Magic...

This comes after NuSTAR found Black Holes "wherever it looked" {my words}, ""We found the black holes serendipitously," explained David Alexander, "We were looking at known targets and spotted the black holes in the background of the images."" anywhere between 0.3 and 11.4 billion light-years from Earth. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130909154918.htm

NuSTAR http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/ and http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/nustar/main/index.html#.UjDw25I03n0

Now it's a race to explain this, and in the lead is Marco Spaans with mini black holes aka "Quantum uctuations in the form" that I would
tend to think would of made itself more pronounced than just adding substance to a Black Hole.

I honestly believe that the Chinese should switch to some sort of romanization like pinyin, even if it does not have100% of what the Chinese characters provide. I understand the heritage and cultural proudness of having your own characters, [...]

I also honestly believe that English (and French) should reform their horrible spelling. But how would you react to:

Ay ålso änestli b'liv ðat inglisx (ænd frencx) sxuld riform ðer hårib'l spelin. Bat haw wud yu riakt tu:

(Used sx and cx for s and c with accents, Slashcode can't digest UTF8 yet)

This will look ridiculous to most people, because they are not used to it, even if it is a superior way of writing. There is even a famous quotation by Mark Twain on the subject. Note that the irregularity of English spelling is not without real-world consequences, since irregular spelling causes the effects of dyslexia (note: dyslexia is genetically transmitted, but its effects manifest only when dealing with an irregular orthography. Same person who is dyslexic in English may not be in Spanish or Japanese).

And yes, English spelling is just as difficult as Chinese characters or the Japanese mixture of Kanji and Kana. Only, Chinese characters do not cause dyslexia (not to the same extent as English at least).

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/182889/
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/04/05/1522215/getting-a-literature-phd-will-make-you-into-a-horrible-person
http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/bioforum/1997-December/025426.html
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/

I have the same gut reaction... This research as described in the article summary seems to twist together aspects of horror, torture, and slavery.

But then again, I feel somewhat the same way about the development of AI... And we all may be simulated humans already:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

But somehow that it is not quite the same visceral feeling as thinking about small human brains being created to do arbitrary experiments on...

By the way, on the person who brought up the Parkinson's question:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/lack_of_DHA_linked_to_Parkinsons.aspx
"According to the researchers, among the mice that had been given omega-3 supplementation - in particular DHA - omega-3 fatty acids replaced the omega-6 fatty acids in their brains. Due to the fact that concentrations of other omega-3s (LNA and EPA) had maintained levels in both groups of mice, the researchers suggested that the protective effect against Parkinson's indeed came from DHA.2"

Although that was experiments on mice... Not to say mice don't suffer or probably dream too...

Going far down the slippery ethical slope...

That said, somehow I doubt all scientists will abstain from this research. A couple ideas on scientists:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence. (Albert Einstein)"

So, what is the moral foundation for our work in any profession?

Someone else mentioned that space gun orbits intersect Earth. Why couldn't you fire it off at the Moon for a slingshot course correction that way?

Would it work in Kerbal Space Program? It might, but you'd have a orbit that went out to lunar distance from the earth. It could have a low perigee, but the apogee has to be somewhere near lunar range. You can have a free-return trajectory that loops around the moon, grazes the atmosphere for aerobraking, then re-enters. That was one of the emergency abort modes for Apollo.

There are more advanced tricks. There's a way to exploit the earth-moon-sun system to get into a ballistic capture orbit. While a single body can't make captures, two and three body systems can. There's a small entry window in both position and velocity through which the spacecraft must pass, but it exists.

> and you have not even touched on the argument between vector and quaternions yet and whether gimbal lock is a difficult or trivial problem.

I intentional did not discuss Quaternions nor Euler angles. Discussing singularities would be a natural progression for the discussion and one I hope that the student would next purse.
i.e.
        "Is matrix form the only way we can represent an orientation?"

IMO bringing them up at this stage would just be too confusing as people are still coming to terms with the bigger picture and the implementation details. Once they get a handle on that they we can introduce special edge cases and how we can "solve" them.

I'm quite well aware of Diana Gruber from the old rec.games.programmer days and the (almost endless) arguments whether "quats" were equivalent to half-angle-axis representation (they are.) For the more advanced student a good paper is written by the modern "father" of quaternions:

* "Quaternions" by Ken Shoemake
http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs171/quatut.pdf

> Saying the "same principle is used for 3D" is hand waving in the context of the subject of "is math hard"

Somewhat. I agree higher dimensions quickly becomes verbose and cumbersome, However that is a perceptual belief. Whether you are doing an inner product (dot) or exterior product (wedge) in 2, 3, 4, ... 7, 11, etc. dimensions is (largely) irrelevant if one understands the basics. IMHO it is more important for the "stigma" of 3D+ math to be removed so people will feel more comfortable working in higher dimensions. i.e. Use their confidence from 2D to slowly understand 3D and then grok 4D. The higher dimensions of 5+ are "not intuitive" so anything we can do to help them avoid the false stigma "math is hard" is a good thing. (Aside: one can visualize a 3x3 matrix or quat if one learns a different way of thinking, or in this case, "seeing".)

From: http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
---
Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.
Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world.
---

Also, a focus on early abstract academics (ABCs and gold stars) has deprived young children of time spent in nature and playing with sand, water, rocks, leaves, sticks, sunlight, and such. This means they have little physical appreciation for what abstractions like quantity, mass, heat flow, energy, and so on relate to, so kids have less physical intuition to bring to math and science. See John Holt and John Taylor Gatto for alternatives.

I think it may be more that kids realize that people who study STEM tend to get shafted economically relative to the degree of work. Example:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

There was another article on how there are less Electrical Engineers. I read the EE Times forums and many EEs say they tell their kids not to go into the field based on career prospects and working conditions.

Also on the failure of the US academic system for STEM:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human

printf("Hello World!\n");

Convince me where the math is in that.

Can a computer interpret it? If it can, then it's maths, because all a computer can do is manipulate symbols, which is maths. If, of course, it can't be interpreted by a computer, it may not be maths.

If you really want to learn about _working_ AI and not "when I was a boy we did it in the snow, both ways, uphill" then do
https://class.coursera.org/ml/class
Machine Learning by Andrew Ng.
After that you can do
http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html
Learning from data by Yaser Abu-Mostafa

Half of Hintons course was about history and what didnt work in AI. Its great to know those things if you have interest in the field, but its not something you should start with (snorefest).

They are in deep space, so they have an infinite sink at nearly zero deg kelvin.

I don't think it's in "deep space" by most definitions as that's generally considered to be outside of the solar system. Also, L2 is not around the 2.75K that is estimated to be the average temperature of space. The temperature of space around Pluto's orbit is estimated at 35 to 40 K. This site states that Herschel passively cools to 80K So I would guess that the temperature at L2 is 80K and they are in fact using the He to cool to ambient as you already suggested.

Lots of details are in the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) study from last year. Not sure when NASA is going to release details about their version, but I bet it is pretty similar. http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/asteroid_final_report.pdf

sorry to rain on your parade, but the Wrights did not know about stability. All their planes were instable in pitch. Without constant corrections by the pilot, all Flyers could not fly in a straight line. What did they do to correct this? Put a ballast weight in the back of the plane! This helped in so far as it increased the pitch inertia, so the pitch motion would be slower and thus more easily controllable, but it also shows that they did not understand the basics of stability. http://authors.library.caltech.edu/21217/1/CULaiaawfp84.pdf

Let me focus on just the incentive to cheat aspect. As you noted, in 2012 nineteen states were totally uncompetitive. In those states under the current system there is zero incentive to cheat because the outcome is binary: either you manage to successfully flip a previously uncompetitive state without getting caught or you fail completely. The risk of any kind of cheating at the presidential level in these states simply isn't worth it. This all changes in a National Popular Vote (NPV). Now cheating in uncompetitive states can be very rewarding.

Let's look at a close election: 2000 Bush v. Gore. Under an NPV, Gore's margin of victory in 2000 would have been about 544K votes, or 0.52% of the total popular vote. If you look at just two uncompetitive states, NY and TX*, you need only swing the vote in those states by about 4% to reverse the results of the NPV election (NY: 4%, TX:4.2%), and that's just in two uncompetitive states. Throw California into the mix^ and you now only need to swing the vote by about 2.5% in each state to flip the election. Spread out to all 50 states, you only need to come up with 10K votes in each state to completely reverse the election.

You don't even have to cheat to make this happen. Consider the voter ID laws that are proposed or on the books in many states. There's a reasonable argument to be made that voter ID laws protect the election process by mitigating vote fraud. However, some studies # estimate that voter ID laws depress turn out of lower socio-economic voters, who typically vote for Democrats, by as much as 10%**. If we can assume this is true, and the recently rejected TX voter ID laws were in place in the 2000 election, Democratic voter turn out there may have been lower by about 640K votes; more than enough to flip the election.

Under NPV, all 50 states have a powerful incentive to monkey with their voting laws because with just a little nudge they can affect the outcome of the entire national election. Hence, the eventual outcry for a national system of standards for elections.

* New York: 6.8M votes, 25% margin of victory for Gore; Texas 6.4M votes, 21% marge of victory for Bush
^ California: 10.5M votes, 12% margin of victory for Gore
** State of Texas v Holder http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/415387/texasopinion.pdf
# 2011 paper by Dr. Michael Alvarez of the California Institute of Technology http://vote.caltech.edu/sites/default/files/vtp_wp57.pdf

Skip this version and wait for them to start producing bobbles

I'd agree with Joe_Dragon that apprenticeships can make a lot of sense. Your post makes me think about something else, putting a few factoids together in a new way. I'm thinking, speculating a bit from what I saw in academia the 1970s and 1980s, that there was a time, decades ago (like before the 1970s) when academia was growing so fast (exponentially) that people from industry without PhDs or much anything beyond real knowledge could become well-respected reasonably-paid teachers (unlike today's somewhat disrespected and poorly-paid adjuncts). In the 1970s, exponential growth of academia stopped (as David Goodstein points out). So, at that point, there came a glut of PhDs on the market with few job prospects since academia kept churning them out at a rate appropriate for exponential growth that was no longer happening. Working conditions for most new faculty plummeted (supply and demand). It became impossible to get even a mediocre college teaching job without a PhD (or at least a Masters for lesser schools). So, academia over the last couple decades became staffed with *only* academics with little real-world life experience which it generated internally. The two-way interchange between industry and academia became essentially one-way, academia to industry. Add to this in the USA the loss of the family farm, loss of good hands-on union mechanical/electrical jobs with apprenticeships, the expansion of the school year, and the increase of opaque black boxes in industry, and the result is few entering academia had any practical non-academic experience or had any way of getting any (like by summer jobs). This of course is all a bit of an over-simplification, yet is may explain why courses are less useful now? References:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

More links here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

See also my: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

Bottom line: most real education is "self-directed education", whether it is in the garden, in the shop, in the library, or in the "classroom". However, self-directed does not mean we do not learn much from other people, whether face-to-face or through their writings or recordings. Thus, you learned from people who wrote the textbooks, even if the "teacher" you say regularly face-to-face may have had little to offer.

You may be beyond this, but this is probably a good way to learn computing almost from the ground up these days:
http://www.nand2tetris.org/

Or one can build programmable computers from Redstone in Minecraft? :-)

It sounds like anyone who teaches optimization by teaching assembly probably does not know much about optimization, since assembly is just a distraction from it, especially given today's compilers can generally write better assembly for most CPUs than most programmers ever could. The real optimization challenges are in algorithms, thinking about prioritization of values and managing complexity (of both data and implementations)...

Nand-to-Tetris is a bottom up book. "Data and Reality" by William Kent is a complementary book that is in-a-sense top-down:
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm

I'd also recommend playing around with Forth (or a latter day equivalent like "Joy") to get a good sense of factoring problem well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language)

My kid st

All Los Alamos staff have been ordered to change the combination on their safe if Dr. Feynman has been seen in their office.

Maybe from vitamin D deficiency, not enough exercise, not enough mind-body interaction -- as well as the fact that one can "prove" any crazy thing by logic in the absence of experimental validation?

On the general topic see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

In answer... http://www.caltech.edu/search/sites/asteroids%20nasa#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=asteroids%20nasa&gsc.page=1

Here is the link to the pdf download at California Institute of Technology: http://www.caltech.edu/search/sites/asteroids%20nasa#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=asteroids%20nasa&gsc.page=1

The TPF-I was an infrared interferometer that did most certainly use optical interference. Several designs were suggested but they all involved actual light from each telescope being collected and allowed to interfere at the combiner. http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA484941

LISA also involves sending light (laser light in this case, not astronomical light) along two different paths and optically combining it. http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~veronica/CaJAGWR/info/general/shaddock.pdf

Theoretically you don't require a fibre optic link (some TPF proposals didn't have one) if you can send the light through free space, but you still have to send the actual light from each telescope to a combiner. That will not work over distances like the diameter of Earth's orbit, as the OP suggested.

Building on that theme: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
====
Some quotes on social problems in science

Here are some related broad quotes on social problems in science, some of which relate to competition for funding.

From an article about a sociologist and anthropologist who studies science and technology, Bruno Latour:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour

"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."

A quote from another academic, Brian Martin, involved with Science and Technology Studies:
http://www.suppressedscience.net/physics.html

"Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack the critic's ideas or the critic personally-by censoring writing, blocking publications, denying appointments or promotions, withdrawing research grants, taking legal actions, harassing, blacklisting, spreading rumors. (1)"

From David Goodstein, who was Vice Provost of Caltech:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face. "

About a book by Jeff Schmidt, a previous editor of Physics Today magazine:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

"In this

As I understand it, humans will always produce antibodies to fight infections like HIV. Unfortunatly, the antibodies that humans normally produce in the attempt to neutralize and HIV infection don't appear to be very good at it. The short story is that somehow HIV evolved to avoid having many fewer binding locations so the most effective "Y" shaped antibodies cannot effectively attach bivalently (in two places). This bivalent attach is apparently the most common strategies used by our immune system.

Apparently some people can make more potent antibodies called bNAbs, but often HIV mutates to avoid these as well, but sometimes there are successes.

I'm unclear on why this new Canadian/Korean HIV vaccine would be any better at bootstrapping the immune system than the most recent failed attempts. The only novel part that I can tell about this, is that they are using "whole" (but genetically modified) HIV instead of putting HIV protein genes codings into more common viruses, but if HIV is as crafty as it seems to be, this may only be a simple shot-in-the-dark hope that somehow bootstrapping the immune system will allow the body to come up with a way to fight off HIV before it gets a chance to overwhelm the immune system. Color me skeptical as that was what the other vaccines attempted to do, but it's not clear that this will be a successful route.

In principle, beamed power to power airliners is not impossible.
Tricky - certaintly.
http://authors.library.caltech.edu/3303/1/PARaipcp04a.pdf for example is a paper on doing this for vehicles to launch into orbit.

However, airliners are rather easier in some ways.
The 275 megawatts needed to boost the space vehicle are moderately less for the airliner, a 10m diameter, not 3m beam receptor is plausible for aircraft, making the frequency and/or dishes lots easier.
Range could also be considerably lower than the assumed 150km.
In use, it would involve multiple chains of dish stations, and microwave transmitters, perhaps 90km apart.

On the plus side, this can save _lots_ of power, as the airliners have to carry almost no fuel. (some for emergencies perhaps)

"The Casimir effect is the best known example of negative energy:" [Dumb Scientist]

This is going to be one of my rare responses to your posts. Prepare to be ignored for the most part, from here on in. ... Get a clue. If you are seriously using that link as a citation, then you lose. You did not properly comprehend what it said. ... Dude. I know you are a scientist. But do you even really know what the Casimir effect is? Of course I expect you will by the time you answer (if you do). And if you do answer, I probably won't reply. But at this very moment, at the time you first read this, from what you have already stated, I suspect that you really don't know what it is. [Jane Q. Public]

Comments like these suggest that you're not really interested in studying physics. On the other hand, John Cramer's Alternate View columns inspired me to study physics in high school. In 1998, FTL Photons introduced me to the Casimir effect. In 2001, I made an offhand remark about these faster-than-light (FTL) implications to my experimental physics professor, and he asked me to give a presentation to the class.

The next comment I wrote summarized the first part of my presentation. The second part showed that virtual particles actually slow down light in the standard vacuum, because photons spend some of their time as electron-positron pairs that travel slower than "true" lightspeed. Because the Casimir effect suppresses some of these virtual particles, light actually travels faster between the plates (perpendicular to the plates) than in the standard vacuum. This is called the Scharnhorst effect.

The Casimir effect can be modeled mathematically as a negative-mass region; Hawking showed that negative energy is necessary for certain effects on WORMHOLES to take place in conjunction with such a negative mass. But he did not claim that the negative energy was supplied by it. But that does not establish a direct relationship between the two. It is a very FAR cry from equating negative energy with the Casimir effect. [Jane Q. Public]

Why are you talking about Hawking? I already pointed you to "Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition":

"The following model explores the use of the 'Casimir vacuum'[12] (a quantum state of the electromagnetic field that violates the unaveraged weak energy condition[11]) to support a wormhole..." [Morris, Thorne, and Yurtsever, 1988]

Nevertheless, Hawking's findings did not point at Casimir effect as a source of negative energy; they merely indicated that negative energy was necessary for the negative mass to have the calculated effect. Not the same thing. [Jane Q. Public]

Again, why are you talking about Hawking? You might want [1] to read "FTL Photons":

"Since the energy density of normal vacuum is defined to be zero, the vacuum between the metal plates actually becomes a region of negativ

There is a lot of work on the dynamics of such diffuse halos around the galaxy, including the "galactic corona" high temperature component. The other AC's collision times seem kind of high, as using a density of about 10-100 particles per cubic meter, I get collisions as happening on timescales of ~30,000 years. This is a long time, but still short compared to some astronomical processes. An important figure would be the mean free path, which for the ~100 eV temperature again, gives a mean free path of about 10 light years. Since this is much smaller than the size of the system under consideration, the system is "collisional," meaning collisions matter and it is not just a bunch of particles streaming along independently.

Additionally, if the temperature were cooler, you would see more collisions. With plasmas, since you have charged particles that can in principle interact with each other at any distance, collision times instead refer to the time it takes for the velocity of a particle to be significantly changed. Slower (cooler) particles take less effort to significantly change their velocity than ones that have a lot of momentum. So if it were the case this was a bunch of cold gas moving quickly, collisions would be even more important.

Anyway, it is hard to dig up much that isn't behind a journal paywall, but for example there is some material here that gives a taste of how much dynamics and work may be present even in this defuse medium. The cooling time for even that really low density plasma, due to collisions and synchrotron/Bremsstrahlung radiation, is about a billion years or less. So smaller galaxies and clusters can have the gas cool down before it falls into the galaxy, which makes it kind of "rain" down and not come back unless heated by something like a star or supernova. Larger galaxies, including our own, have a different behavior where the infalling gas does not cool down that quickly, and can actually undergo quite a bit of heating as it falls due to shocks (the infall starts supersonic, and at some point there will be some heating just from the compression of getting closer to the galaxy, enough to make the infall no longer supersonic and hence a shock at such a boundary). You can get all sorts of quasi-stable equilibrium in set ups like this, where you can talk of a hydrostatic pressure keeping the hot gas from all falling in. And it doesn't take much to keep the process going for time scales long after the creation of the galaxy, as effects from supernovas to turbulence from magnetic fields will add a bit of heating needed to keep gases from cooling enough to completely fall back into the galaxy.

When a physicist talks about "temperature" in this context it's just short-hand for "average velocity"... it doesn't necessarily imply thermal equilibrium, even. So 1e6K means a high average velocity. Now, if it were a dense gas there might be collisions that would do things like excite electrons into higher states, which would then decay by emitting photons (light), and so the gas would lose thermal-kinetic energy over time. In a sufficiently diffuse gas, loss processes like this are very slow because the chances of collision are very slow, so it can stay "hot" (that is, have a high average velocity) for a long, long time.

Uh, no. If the collision rate weren't high enough to excite electrons into higher states, it wouldn't be radiating X-rays, which is how Chandra detects the gas. Not a whole lot is known about gas in halos like the Milky Way's, but clusters have been extensively studied, and the gas is pretty close to thermal equilibrium, but not exactly. Hot cluster halos are ubiquitous, and it's not terribly surprising that more isolated galaxies have hot halos as well. The gas heats from loss of gravitational potential when it falls into the halo, and it stays hot because there are few cooling mechanisms, and because subsequent infall repleneshes it.

I have tried to get some people at NASA Advanced Concepts interested in a voyage to Sedna (now near perihelion at ~ 89 AU). Sedna is especially interesting because of its orbit - there is a chance it is an interloper from another solar system. It's so far away that a trip in a reasonable time would require a higher velocity than Voyager.

Note, by the way, that the next double Jupiter - Saturn orbital assist would require Jupiter passage ~ 2018 and Saturn passage in ~ 2019. These only repeat every 19.87 years, so we better get to it. With a double gravity assist and ion propulsion, we could get to Sedna in a reasonable time.

You may well joke about this sort of thing but Data General (that I know of) produced a RAID DAT drive. The version I used had 5 drives but it would go to a total of 7. http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~rdv/comp-arch-storage/FAQ-1.10.html For the organisation I worked for, it was a great piece of kit as it allowed us to stream backups for three different servers to what was effectively a single tape drive. We would never have been able to afford even a modest library so this really was reliable, fast and cost effective. Alas, the follow up to this drive used DLT and that model was entirely outside of our price bracket.

From the mid 1990s by the Vice-provost of Caltech: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."

More like that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

Also:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/26/peer-review-as-censorship/

All reasoning is also based on emotion, which relate to perceptions, assumptions, priorities and preferences which are, to some extent, outside of pure rationality (which why "technocracy" has many issues).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error

But the biggest issue is that our socio-economic-political system is not well-adapted to handle "externalities" including systemic risks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Any reasonable projection over the next twenty years shows we will almost certainly have dirt-cheap PV given exponential growth of that industry and rapidly dropping costs. We may even have hot or cold fusion in that time (and other things). With alternatives on the way, there is not a very good case to be made for risking destroy our groundwater for just a bit more fossil fuels:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power-the-world-in-16-years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity#Solar_power
http://pesn.com/2012/07/19/9602138_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_July19/
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/414559/a-new-approach-to-fusion/
And so on...

Accounting for externalities (including US defense spending for long oil supply lines), renewables (and energy efficiency) have been *cheaper* than fossil fuels since the 1970s... Two resources on that from around 1980:

Grammar Nazi strikes again! It is because of people like you that we delay the orxogrefkl riform, and wi dont hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld

NASA is due (this month?) to make a final selection between three competing Discovery-class proposals. Among them is the Titan Mare Explorer, the first attempt to put a boat on an extraterrestrial sea. How cool would that be? Good overviews of the proposal are here;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Mare_Explorer
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2011/08/time-and-updates.html

A more detailed description is here;
http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/titan2010/presentations/aharonson.pdf

Disclosure: If the TiME mission is selected, I am hoping to work on it.

Vitamin D deficiency is a hazard of indoors work, and contributes to why academia in general is messed up (along with other parts of the industrialized world). Likewise for people not getting enough good nutrition from omega 3s and vegetables -- poor health just makes people messed up. Other ideas I've collected on improving health:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Here are some links I put together for context about current academia:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

See especially:

      "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
      http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

      "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
      http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

And one other that is not there:
    http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Good luck.

Dr. Stone was our first-quarter Physics Profession at Caltech in the Fall of 1982, where I was at first an Astronomy Major the, when I realized what I liked about telescopes was making them rather than looking through them, I changed my major to Physics.

Things didn't work out for me in the long run at Caltech, so in the end I graduated from UC Santa Cruz. I don't have my Doctorate yet but I did well in what graduate school I did attend.

Tsutomu Shimomura, of Kevin Mitnick fame and I were close friends at Caltech. Tsutomu and I met at Frosh Camp, the Freshman Orientation carried out at a Summer Camp on Catalina Island, out in the Pacific. It was quite cool.

Did you know that Tsutomu is a nuclear weapons designer, yet never obtained any manner of college degree, let alone a PhD? The chances are pretty good he never graduated high school.

While I graduated high school, my grades were quite poor as I have totally blown off all forms of formal education I have ever had anything to do with.

Caltech doesn't care whether you so much as graduated kindergarten you see, provided you demonstrably have the insight to do original research.

Tsutomu was on the verge of flunking out of Tech as he could never be bothered to do his homework, when the nuclear weapons community got wind of his interest in Theoretical Physics, largely published in colloboration with 1965 Nobel Physics Laureate Richard Feynman. The result was that every weapons lab in the Free World started hurling job offers at him. Tsutomu figured designing Hydrogen Bombs would be quite cool, so he eventually accepted Los Alamos' offer. His first job there, which I believe was unclassified and so openly published, was designing a hardware cellular automaton that was specialized for the purpose of modeling supersonic air flow. One can use it for designing fighter planes or reentry vehicles.

"It costs about the same as a Cray," Tsutomu explained one day, "But it does just that one calculation at a thousand times the speed of a Cray."

MichaelCrawford, who can't be bothered to recover his password.

Telepathy will be more like voice communication. Reading other people's minds against their will is still going to be difficult.

See:
http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/12710
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1081332/The-Jennifer-Aniston-brain-cell-How-single-neurons-spring-action-pictures-favourite-celebrities.html

One person's "Jennifer Aniston" cell is going to be different from another person's. Or it may not even be present till that person knows more about her...

The only way you can figure out whether a cell is a person's "Halle Berry" cell is if you present a "Halle Berry" stimulus to them and then do the measurement.

That's what a person's wearable computer + BCI could do, and that's how it may be possible to do the virtual eidetic memory + thought pattern store and recall thing. You have an object/media recording, you pick a thought to associate with it, test recall, confirm. So if you ask your computer to do a recall/retrieve and the previous particular bunch of brain cells are firing, your computer recalls that object. You could associate a particular "Jennifer Aniston" picture with a "dancing purple barney" if you want...

Someone might be able to figure out some of what you've been thinking by stealing/accessing your wearable computer or backups, and going through the logs/history (activity, location, storage/recall, etc). But the security conscious might have the stuff encrypted and without the right thought pattern sequence and/or passphrase it might be hard to crack.

I'm guessing that the bike part replacement you mention is more complex than just cutting up a tin can and jamming a piece of metal into the bike.

Actually no, that's exactly it. The author's friend was quite disturbed about the idea of fixing his expensive bimmer with a bit of beer can:

I was so baffled by his refusal even to think about any mechanical subject I kept searching for ways to clue him to the whole thing but didn't know where to start.

I thought I would wait until something went wrong with his machine and then I would help him fix it and that way get him into it, but I goofed that one myself because I didn't understand this difference in the way he looked at things.

His handlebars had started slipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when you shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends.

When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.

"You're going to have to shim those out," I said.

"What's shim?"

"It's a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."

"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"

"I've got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.

He didn't understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"

"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."

I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.

But to my surprise he didn't see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.

As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!

Ach, du lieber!

http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/pirsig.html

You can't improve audio quality of *audible frequencies* by increasing resolution of the horizontal axis (sampling frequency) beyond a rate which surpasses the Nyquist frequency for human hearing.

Nyquist-Shannon notwithstanding, the range of human hearing is wider than 20kHz.

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htm (a properly conducted experiment)

That said, doubling the sampling rate isn't going to do anything for a digital signal. At best, the new signal will simply play each of the old signal's samples twice.

Just because musical instruments produce frequencies above 20kHz (as shown in your link), it doesn't mean that the average human can hear them. Younger people can hear frequencies up to ~20kHz, and maybe a bit above, but most middle age adults probably cut off around 15kHz or lower. Here's one study showing 18-24 yr olds who can mostly hear 24kHz, but they're generating the sound at 117 dB -- a very dangerous level for more than just a few seconds. (http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/00206098409070087?journalCode=ija)

Listening to loud sounds (>85dB) for extended periods of time will decrease the high frequency response of the human ear, so I wonder if high frequency hearing in children and teens of the last decade or two will have even worse hearing that their parents due to the ubiquitous white ear buds.

You can't improve audio quality of *audible frequencies* by increasing resolution of the horizontal axis (sampling frequency) beyond a rate which surpasses the Nyquist frequency for human hearing.

Nyquist-Shannon notwithstanding, the range of human hearing is wider than 20kHz.

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htm (a properly conducted experiment)

That article says nothing about the human hearing range other than making a reference to some other unproven hypothesis. The article does show that instruments produce frequencies will above 20kHz, which was never really in question.

You can't improve audio quality of *audible frequencies* by increasing resolution of the horizontal axis (sampling frequency) beyond a rate which surpasses the Nyquist frequency for human hearing.

Nyquist-Shannon notwithstanding, the range of human hearing is wider than 20kHz.

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htm (a properly conducted experiment)

That said, doubling the sampling rate isn't going to do anything for a digital signal. At best, the new signal will simply play each of the old signal's samples twice.

Ok, this is much clearer

They are certainly lacking the combined time graph plots showing a full orbital phase transition of the planet versus both light (0.04%) and IR (0.001%) with respect to the star to help visualise what is going on.

From here on I will ignore the light component and focus (pun intended) on whats happening with the IR.

The confusing part is the article I linked mentions it dips the IR as it goes around the back, occults with reference to planet==>star==>earth, and refers to a dip of 0.001% in IR output towards Earth and yet they show the dips on the side of the star in the image although the dip is really occurring when the planet is not reflecting back to us, i.e. in occultation such that p==>s==>e and to even a lesser extent, slight here come-on, dip when the occultation is such that s==>p==>e. The extra IR is in fact coming from the other side of the star reflecting from the planet at the stars left and right sides with respect to earth as the planet outer ingresses and outer egresses, hence not a dip... The dip is misleading in their context. The dip in IR is in fact occurring during the planets inner ingress, occultation then inner egress of the star at the back side of the star; an increase in IR occurs as you see the planets forward star facing side, in tidal lock (again due to an increase of IR via reflection of the dark side of the star from the stars outer ingress and outer egress sides of the planet therefore increasing the total forward IR output that we see, in fact it could be said the star is now 1.001 of total IR output luminosity towards earth). The time seeing the IR dip is > than the time not seeing the IR dip. I would therefore be inclined to say that this is a leading spike before and after occultation of the p==>s==>e in that scenario. And that the true IR output of the star==>earth can only be seen as an average of this whole process. (I say this because the planets outer ingress and outer egress at occultation of s==>p==>e would still provide, very-very-very marginally, some IR much-much-much less than the 0.001% observed upon reflection of the star and thusly cannot be readily dismissed as being insignificant, neutrinos are insignificantly small!)

</$0.02>

The orbital image leaves a lot to be desired... Come on, 1/3 of the phase is shown! Thanks to Nasa's usual attempts to hoard its images, here has a little more information on that orbital phase.

This plot of data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals the light from a "super Earth" called 55 Cancri e. The planet is the smallest yet, beyond our solar system, to reveal its direct light. Super Earths are more massive than Earth but lighter than gas giants like Neptune. While this planet is not habitable, the observations are an important milestone toward being able to eventually perform a similar technique on even smaller, potentially Earth-like planets.

The plot shows how the infrared light from the 55 Cancri system, both the star and planet, changed as the planet passed behind its star in what is called an occultation. When the planet disappeared, the total light dropped, and then increased back to normal levels as the planet circled back into view. The drop indicated how much light came directly from the planet itself. This type of information is important for studying the temperatures and compositions of planetary atmospheres beyond our own.

Although they try to explain what is theorised to happen, HTF does the infrared dip when the planet passes behind the star? Is the star not the total possible output of IR available in that system? i.e. The effects of IR don't stack when the planet is in front of the star; you don't get more output from the system than is available from the source! The planet AFAICT is dark sided, relative to us, when passing the forward facing part of the star, relative to us, which means it should be much cooler on that side than the star facing side blasting towards earth when as the planet egresses the occultation, from the opposite in which they ascribe above...

Without any mention or reference to the stars wobble regarding the planet to disprove my theory, I suspect the orbital times are more likely half that TFA suggests which means it is seriously nipping around. Maybe it is too difficult to get a wobble indication due to the fast speed of the planet and the distance from the star? I doubt it though. I speculate that the dip in question is the time it takes to pass the front of the star, relative to us.

Would someone care to make a speed calculation based on the possible variables such that: the star is similar in size to ours, the planetary orbit is 18hrs (imo 9hrs).

</bonnetrattler>

According to the retrieval mission concept from Caltech's KISS, the rock will be parked at a Lagrangian point or lunar orbit.

The Japanese also had geometry that exceeded their mathematics.

The book chapter "How Science Works" by Goodstein is available here from the author's CalTech web page.

Goodstein is a physicist, and so am I. I read the chapter and found myself agreeing with it completely...

BUT

...the examples he uses are almost all examples from physics, and a lot of his analysis isn't really applicable to science in general.

The central issue he examines is the picture of science as an enterprise involving powerful theories that make predictions, which are then tested. This is a lot more applicable to physics than to other physical sciences, less applicable to the life scienes, and even less applicable to medicine or clinical psychology, which aren't really sciences at all.

IMO he correctly depicts physics as an enterprise where scientists behave adversarially (not impartially as depicted in high school science textooks), but the truth eventually becomes known, and the result is a theory that is absolutely known to be correct within its sphere of applicability. On p. 13 he discusses the myth that "Scientific theories are just that: theories. All scientific theories are eventually proved wrong and are replaced by other theories." IMO he's right that this is a myth -- in physics. For example, relativity didn't show that Newtonian mechanics was wrong, it showed that it was right only within a certain domain, where it had already been thoroughly tested.

But this is nothing like how things work in a field like clinical psychology.

Various universities structure things differently. I have no idea what computer science "should" be, but here's a sampling:

Carnegie Mellon - School of Computer Science.
Computer Science Department
Entertainment Technology Center
Institute for Software Research
Robotics Institute
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Lane Center for Computational Biology
Language Technologies Institute
Machine Learning Department

At CMU, CS gets its own school/department/division, as well as its own major within that.

MIT - School of Engineering Includes:
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Materials Science and Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Nuclear Science and Engineering
Aeronautics and Astronautics
Biological Engineering
Chemical Engineering
Civil and Environmental Engineering

So it's a combined program within the engineering department.

CalTech - similar to MIT - Division of Engineering and Applied Science
Aerospace
Applied Physics and Materials Science
Bioengineering
Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Electrical Engineering
Environmental Science and Engineering
Mechanical and Civil Engineering

Again combined, but with math, and under sciences.

WISC - Department of Computer Sciences under the College of Letters & Science

Again, nested, but not a combined major.

YMMV.

From 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
    Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
    Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face. (from David Goostein, Vice Provost, Caltech, who testified to Congress back then about this)"

One solution would be a graduate-student level stipend of a "basic income" for *everyone* in the country, so those who were inclined to research could do that, or those who wanted to write free software could do that, or those who wanted to volunteer with local Emergency Medical Services could do that, and others could raise children, and so on. A gift economy could accomplish that too, as could advanced 3D printing, or also better government planning to create free or cheap life-support services related to housing and food. We'll probably see a mix of all that going forward, and there already are aspects of all of those already.

We also need to move beyond this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
"Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt,[1] published in 2000. The book describes how professionals are made; the methods of professional and graduate schools that turn eager entering students into disciplined managerial and intellectual workers that correctly perceive and apply the employer's doctrine and outlook. Schmidt uses the examples of law, medicine, and physics, and describes methods that students and professional workers can use to preserve their personalities and independent thought."

According to the article: "The (hot) fusion community is still living with the aftermath of the cold fusion scandal from a quarter century ago".

While I agree it's a terrific response technically, It's incredible to now see hot fusion scientists from MIT blaming their problems on cold fusion in the 1980s when the scandle is more about what MIT did unprofessionally to discredit cold fusion / LENR; see: http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/mitcfreport.pdf
"The events of 1989-1992 are past history, but one must learn from the past or be condemned to repeat it. I hope that MIT students will also study the wrongs that have been done by MIT faculty and staff, which perverted the process of science in this area. Ironically, those very faculty and staff who so loudly pontificated about the alleged unethical actions of cold fusion researchers Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons are themselves most culpable. They launched distortions about cold fusion that have gained such wide currency."

To explain why PhDs may think and act this way, read this book:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

Just search on Widom-Larsen, LENR, and so on.
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=177379

Yet, some at MIT are finally moving beyond the shame:
http://cleantechauthority.com/lenr-resurrected-by-mit-the-early-detractors/
"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) looks to be one of the first academic institutions to validate the claims that cold fusion is real. Cold fusion is now more commonly called Low-Energy-Nuclear-Reactions (LENR), partly to avoid the stigma the term "cold fusion" evokes. And in a strange twist of fate, MIT -- who was one of the most aggressive detractors of cold fusion in the 1990s -- is now leading the charge in resurrecting the technologies it once vilified.
    Dr. Swarts and Prof Hagelstein of MIT publicly demonstrated how a device can not only run itself indefinitely, but their experiment also produced ten times the energy output that was input. They ran the experiment for two days to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology using a NANOR by Jet Energy. The device, as of this publishing, has been running for five days straight."

Of course, even if LENR does not pan out, we'll have dirt cheap solar long before 2050, too, with widespread consumer-level grid parity in just a few more years, and then probably a stampede of research dollars into solar afterwards (making use of the fusion plant in the sky):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity

That said, I agree with the people at MIT that basic research and applied research should be funded much more lavishly. I think it would be quite reasonable to spend a hundred billion dollars on fusion research just because it is a neat thing and especially would have value in space exploration (assuming other things were also funded at that level like solar panels and LENR and so on).

Although even a vast increase in funds won't really resolve the competition problem in academia given the exponential growth of PhDs; see what this physicist has to say:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

We need a basic income, a bigger gift economy, better local subsistence, and more participatory planning at all levels of government so researchers would truly have more financial freedom to pursue basic research of all sorts.

While within academia there may be scarcity relative to the numebr of PhDs produced and resources allocated: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
as a global society there is more and more abundance:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
in US academia is part of the reason for that.
See also: http://disciplined-minds.com/

Lots more links: http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

What we need is a basic income for all (or similar things), which would allow those with intellectual aspirations to live their lives at a graduate student level without senior academics having such life-and-death control over whether other thinkers can lead a life of thought. Likewise, those who wanted a life in the arts or a life raising children could focus on those things. Our society has become so materially wealthy by everything we have learned over the millennia that we no longer need to live by the old scarcity myths that there is not enough to go around for everyone to have a reasonable good life materially even if few choose to be materially productive) given modern industry, robotics, AI, cheap communications, youtube educational videos, etc.) And beyond that, we've even got at least another good 1000 years of exponential growth possible if we expand into space in the local solar system and build space habitats.

In my time hanging out in Hans Moravec's mobile robotics lab at CMU in the mid 1980s, Hans said much the same thing. He suggested that good research had to involve a lot of failures, and that is why so many of the straight A students you might think would be best at it are actually temperamentally unsuited for a career in research. He suggested people who have some experience dealing with many early failures early in life were more likely to have the persistence needed for a career in research.

Of course, research these days is so problematical for other reasons too, sadly, so many people won;t even get a chance to step up to the plate in an academic sense:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

So I guess they need to persist in other ways.