I mean they don't do precise timing that is universal. They can be used as I understand for short timing in any specific location but not for timing that is by itself correct for two different locations. Is that correct?
I'm not quite sure how to approach this. First of all, we must ignore the large relativistic effects because then the notion of common timing becomes moot (What time is now at Proxima Centauri? Well, it depends on how fast you fly the clock there.)
Once we constrain ourselves to Earth, GPS indeed provides correct time for a specific location... any specific location. Since there is no limit on the number of GPS receivers, you can have two receivers at two locations and they will be all providing the correct time - or, shall we say, the same local time.
Earth is not just rotating around its axis. Earth is also rotating around the Sun, and the Sun moves on its orbit within the Galaxy, etc. etc.
Earth's orbital speed is about 30 km/s. The test distance is 730 km. Neutrinos traveled the same path in 2.4 ms. Earth during this time moved by 30 km/s * 2.4 ms = 72 meters. Since the neutrino was emitted at the speed of light, even though the source was receding, it can be interpreted as if the receiver was closer to the source than anticipated.
If the Earth's vector is not lined up with the test path then the excess time will be varying from the -150 ns to +150 ns.
This wouldn't be a problem in classical mechanics because the speed of the neutrino would be less than c and both deltas would take each other out. But since I'm not a physicist I will stop right here:-)
They don't automatically work out the precise timing. So if one is using GPS for timing one can't just rely on the standard GPS software and calculations for timing.
That must be bad news for manufacturers of GPS timing receivers. As matter of fact, I was working with this very receiver, it's tiny but it tells you time with 15 ns. accuracy - it is more accurate than the error in the experiment.
But as I understand the OPERA people weren't using the GPS timing, they physically moved a synchronized clock (and compensated for the effect of moving it.)
Alice predicts the value Bob will send, a minute prior to receiving it
Bob is superfluous here; he is not sending anything that Alice doesn't know. Alice can flip a coin and write the outcome down. Then she copies it on a Post-It note and sticks it to the monitor. Then she looks at it a minute later, compares with the earlier record and finds that they are identical. This only means that she sent the information into the future, which is not very unusual.
60 ns translates into 18 meters at the speed of light. If the error was that large any car GPS device would be showing you as driving on some other street.
I was working with some high precision GPS receivers, and they can place you on the map with accuracy of a couple of centimeters. The shape of the Earth is also pretty well understood now.
One unfortunate possibility would be that the clocks are wrong. They had to move them between sites, since they weren't willing or able to synchronize them over the radio where they are (the varying propagation paths would be hard to deal with.) A more pleasing (to me) outcome would be that FTL is real.
Care to share some of your ham radio circle people with me?
He can't share people who are not into that social network fad. If you want to contact me, CW or PSK31 would be far more productive:-) but I'm open to MFSK variants too. Or RTTY, like the Sprint two days ago. A path from EL09 to CM97 shouldn't be too bad.
Oh, by the way, eQSL and LoTW save trees:-) You might want to change that on QRZ.com if I managed to convert you into my faith:-)
Yet it's hard to understand how a company like HP could just give up on tablets - if they have.
I can imagine such a discussion at the top level at HP.
"Hello, everyone. We have a problem. We are making a tablet with our own OS. It is not quite ready yet. There are no applications, and no signs that any would show up any time soon. The market is split between Apple and Google, with us competing for the last 1%. We have no talent to take it further, since every talent that we had was smart enough to leave us as soon as they could. Even we, who are sitting in this board room, aren't familiar with these tablets; we simply have no clue what they are for and how one would use them. Our production costs are high, and our overhead rates are even higher. Seventeen layers of bureaucracy are so expensive that even if we manage to make the tablet for $100 we still have to sell it for $500 to break even. What I'm saying here is that we aren't setup to manufacture anything, really. We can't afford having a product."
i honestly have seen a sharp decline in the last year or so.
In part it's because your demands for quality are slowly going up. As we are getting older we have less time left in our lives to go through pages and pages of inane chat and recycled memes.
If you can't give it physical meaning or measure it, it isn't there
If you can't measure it, today or in principle, it doesn't mean that it isn't there. For example, a Flatlander would be unable to measure the height of a cylinder that I put onto his sheet-world. The Flatlander only sees a circle. But the cylinder has height, irregardless of the Flatlander's opinion.
First, as you suggested, it can be simple code that requires specialized knowledge. For example, a customer walks into a bar and says "Hey, can anyone here code me something for Renesas R5F2136CSDFA?" If you are not already familiar with at least basics of the IC you need too much time to become efficient. There are hundreds of just Renesas MCUs, and there are tens of MCU Manufacturers (Microchip, Atmel, Analog Devices, TI, etc.) - so this is a very steep (or wide) learning curve. It's even worse if you have to also design the hardware to run it all on. There are tons of catches, and errata summary for every silicon is printed on several pages.
Anyone can learn to write it given the proper documentation and materials to work with. - yes, sure. However if you, as a customer, need a working code, you have to be out of your mind to give the job to a guy who heard about the chip first time in his life. Some of those "materials" are thousands of pages long. Some aspects of programming for those MCUs are not documented. Frameworks (libraries) have bugs, side effects and whatnot, and they are hundreds of thousands LOCs long. You also need to know which libraries work and which don't; generally, you should approach the project having a good toolkit at your disposal - a compiler, an RTOS, a DSP library, an I/O driver package for this particular MCU, a TCP/IP stack, etc. These tools also must work with each other; you can't easily run a task ripped out of VxWorks under FreeRTOS or QNX. You will also need some programming hardware, and it may cost pretty penny in some cases.
Second, the code itself can be hard to write. For example, you want a good, secure AES implementation on a MCU that doesn't have an AES peripheral (some AVR32 do, for example.) You probably need to write most of cipher code in assembly, most of key management in C, and you need to interface with something to send keys in and out (if out is an option.) On top of that, your product should be resistant to various hardware-based attacks (power, timing, emissions.) Such side effects of most machine instructions are not even documented. You will have to verify your design using test equipment. This task is hard.
Third, the code itself may be unobvious. For example, the customer wants you to write a complete APCO-25 stack. Where do you start if you have never written a wireless stack in your life? How do you even organize it? In practice people write it and then rewrite and then rewrite some more until it becomes usable. Is your customer willing to wait until you learn, and pay you all the while? Sometimes the answer is "no" and you must come into the contract armed with previously acquired skills. Plenty of those skills are very specialized, and sometimes localized. That Project 25 code that I mentioned is specific to North America. An Indian programmer would likely have no exposure to it - even if he may have had experience with similar protocols. Older people often have more experience; plenty of contractors here are 40 and older; they know what they are doing.
Fourth, you need to think about the quality of the code. A spaghetti code that doesn't check any input will work fine on correct data, but it will crash and burn on erroneous input. If you are building a life support system - or just a TV remote control - you probably don't want that. You can write good, reliable code for a MCU. However your options on reporting a problem are very limited (there is no printer or Internet connected to a TV remote.) You have to write the code so that it simply doesn't crash. You can't afford a crash. This is different, culturally, from the GUI coding for Windows. There if it crashes you break into the debugger and see what happened. If an MCU crashes things just stop, and you (without an ICE, and often even with it) can't tell what happened and how you got there. Interrupt handlers are notorious at that. Writing firmware requires good coding discipline. Every routine that you put in
Making music and making money are completely different skills.
That's true everywhere. Writing a good, fast code in C and assembly is in no way related to smooth-talking a client into signing a contract to develop the abovementioned code. Many programmers who are capable of the former in their sleep can't do the latter if their life depended on it.
The musician in your example (talented but poor) needs to either learn how to develop his business or hire a manager. A talented programmer can develop business skills to manage his own business (contracts, ISV like iPhone/Android) or he can join someone else's company; then business opportunities will be taken care of by someone else (along with the lion's share of profits.)
It is not easy for a programmer to gain businessman's skills. I'd guess it's equally hard for an artist. But that's what the money is paid for. If you don't want to touch that, you are still free to code (or compose music) in your parents' basement. Only don't expect anyone to know about you or want to pay you.
The author puts "book editors, journalists, video store clerks" into that creative class. It's hard to see why a video store clerk (what is a video store?) is a creative persona. He is merely shining the scanner on your purchases. He can be illiterate for all practical purposes.
Musicians? Well, those that are good are doing OK. The rest... perhaps they are in the wrong business. Same applies to "aspiring novelists" - there is always ten graphomaniacs for one semi-decent writer. Good writers are even more rare.
Computer programmers are also like that. Those who write simple, boring code - but lots of it - will lose to their Chinese and Indian competition. Those who write difficult code remain in business. I personally specialize in microcontrollers, hardware, FPGA, real-time and high speed stuff. There is plenty of work in this area.
To summarize, if you are truly creative in what is in demand then there will be always someone willing - and desperate - to pay you.
If magnetic material (like, in a Hard Drive) is moving inside a static magnetic field, it'll produce a current. That'd probably be enough to wreak havoc on a hard drive.
If magnetic material is moving inside a magnetic field no current will be produced simply because you don't have any conductor for that current to flow through.
To prove this take two magnets and move them relative to each other. You will get varying forces and magnetic fields, but nothing else.
If you want to generate a current you need to move a conductor through a static magnetic field (or vice versa.)
faster than c speeds are ok but require your mass to be purely imaginary.
What does that mean?
It only means that the vector of mass is projecting into a dot in your 3D space. The 'i' component of the mass can be large or small but you can't detect it.
For example, an African warrior throws a spear exactly at you. You see the spear as a dot all the time and have no way to detect its movement because the velocity vector of the spear is always a zero-sized dot in the plane of your vision.
On top of that, there are trees in Siberia. More than one. Probably more than one billion. Most are tall fir and pine trees. There is no chance of seeing anything through the foliage.
Of course, if you aren't bright enough to read where it says "Search for programs and files" and type in that box, you probably don't need to be administering a calculator, let alone an enterprise server.
I have about a hundred different software applications installed on this laptop. Do you know I remember all their names? Do you know I remember which ones are installed on which computer?
Menus are self-discoverable: you click on them and you see what's there. Search requires you to know a good part of the answer before you even start.
I can't speak for everybody, but I personally have signed up for a couple of mailing lists of publishers. Of course I haven't given them any true personal data, and the email that they have is a long, unique address under my own domain.
I signed up because I'm interested in books of these genres and it doesn't bother me to have Thunderbird filter and file those emails into a certain folder. Then when I have nothing better to do I can go through the new announcements and see if there is anything I'd like to read. There are maybe a couple of emails per month, hardly a bandwidth concern, and I never see those emails until I want to.
The other problem is that the prof. was a drama queen
I'm pretty sure he intentionally selected this way of responding. After all, he should know all about dramas - far more, at least, than an average police chief does.
Other people (above in the thread) noted that a meek response to this event would have resulted in nothing. He had to escalate to put the police into the defensive position. That indeed happened; then he tricked them into removing another poster - this time a clearly harmless one - and now he has an excellent case.
I assure you the first amendment did not mean I got to put whatever I wanted on my office door, or do whatever I wanted on government property.
The big difference here is that this is a university. The professor put the poster up not for himself to look at - he could have done it inside, or at home altogether. He put it outside to communicate something to people who walk by; this was meant to be a message, primarily to students. It is professor's job to communicate with students at work. Typically it is done inside of an auditorium or a laboratory, but I personally was also taught things in the field and in the parking lot (when the equipment that we studied was bolted to a truck) and at an industrial site (when the equipment had a building constructed to house and cool it.) Posters with various educational stuff were occasionally hung here and there.
I can understand that not every poster may be fit for a prominent placement. However this is something that educators ought to decide amongst themselves, based on educational reasons. The police shouldn't have any part in that since the posters in question were obviously harmless and didn't threaten anyone in particular. In fact, the police interfered in the educational process as the professor designed it. The design may be good or bad, but that's not for the police to decide.
It was hung outside his office and not in his office. It did talk about killing people
Does it mean that posting "Thou shall not kill" is also a violation? If so, the police in that University is suffering from the ostrich syndrome.
It's a University, not a kindergarten (this might be not obvious from observing the behavior of inmates.) Still, professors at a University are expected to discuss complex matters. How can one teach history - or, in this case, literature - without mentioning one of favorite pastimes of humanity - murder and mayhem? Perhaps that University only allows their students to watch teletubbies?
Electricity is not much cheaper than gas. In the USA it is at best close - $0.30/kWh for electricity vs. about $0.11/kWh for gasoline.
However electricity is infinitely renewable and has no emissions (regardless of whether these are harmful or not.)
The only problem with electricity is that it's very expensive to store it, and we don't know how to store enough. In the end, though, electricity is the answer (or perhaps hydrogen.)
Slashdot Mirror
I mean they don't do precise timing that is universal. They can be used as I understand for short timing in any specific location but not for timing that is by itself correct for two different locations. Is that correct?
I'm not quite sure how to approach this. First of all, we must ignore the large relativistic effects because then the notion of common timing becomes moot (What time is now at Proxima Centauri? Well, it depends on how fast you fly the clock there.)
Once we constrain ourselves to Earth, GPS indeed provides correct time for a specific location ... any specific location. Since there is no limit on the number of GPS receivers, you can have two receivers at two locations and they will be all providing the correct time - or, shall we say, the same local time.
Earth is not just rotating around its axis. Earth is also rotating around the Sun, and the Sun moves on its orbit within the Galaxy, etc. etc.
Earth's orbital speed is about 30 km/s. The test distance is 730 km. Neutrinos traveled the same path in 2.4 ms. Earth during this time moved by 30 km/s * 2.4 ms = 72 meters. Since the neutrino was emitted at the speed of light, even though the source was receding, it can be interpreted as if the receiver was closer to the source than anticipated.
If the Earth's vector is not lined up with the test path then the excess time will be varying from the -150 ns to +150 ns.
This wouldn't be a problem in classical mechanics because the speed of the neutrino would be less than c and both deltas would take each other out. But since I'm not a physicist I will stop right here :-)
They don't automatically work out the precise timing. So if one is using GPS for timing one can't just rely on the standard GPS software and calculations for timing.
That must be bad news for manufacturers of GPS timing receivers. As matter of fact, I was working with this very receiver, it's tiny but it tells you time with 15 ns. accuracy - it is more accurate than the error in the experiment.
But as I understand the OPERA people weren't using the GPS timing, they physically moved a synchronized clock (and compensated for the effect of moving it.)
Alice predicts the value Bob will send, a minute prior to receiving it
Bob is superfluous here; he is not sending anything that Alice doesn't know. Alice can flip a coin and write the outcome down. Then she copies it on a Post-It note and sticks it to the monitor. Then she looks at it a minute later, compares with the earlier record and finds that they are identical. This only means that she sent the information into the future, which is not very unusual.
60 ns translates into 18 meters at the speed of light. If the error was that large any car GPS device would be showing you as driving on some other street.
I was working with some high precision GPS receivers, and they can place you on the map with accuracy of a couple of centimeters. The shape of the Earth is also pretty well understood now.
One unfortunate possibility would be that the clocks are wrong. They had to move them between sites, since they weren't willing or able to synchronize them over the radio where they are (the varying propagation paths would be hard to deal with.) A more pleasing (to me) outcome would be that FTL is real.
Care to share some of your ham radio circle people with me?
He can't share people who are not into that social network fad. If you want to contact me, CW or PSK31 would be far more productive :-) but I'm open to MFSK variants too. Or RTTY, like the Sprint two days ago. A path from EL09 to CM97 shouldn't be too bad.
Oh, by the way, eQSL and LoTW save trees :-) You might want to change that on QRZ.com if I managed to convert you into my faith :-)
Yet it's hard to understand how a company like HP could just give up on tablets - if they have.
I can imagine such a discussion at the top level at HP.
"Hello, everyone. We have a problem. We are making a tablet with our own OS. It is not quite ready yet. There are no applications, and no signs that any would show up any time soon. The market is split between Apple and Google, with us competing for the last 1%. We have no talent to take it further, since every talent that we had was smart enough to leave us as soon as they could. Even we, who are sitting in this board room, aren't familiar with these tablets; we simply have no clue what they are for and how one would use them. Our production costs are high, and our overhead rates are even higher. Seventeen layers of bureaucracy are so expensive that even if we manage to make the tablet for $100 we still have to sell it for $500 to break even. What I'm saying here is that we aren't setup to manufacture anything, really. We can't afford having a product."
i honestly have seen a sharp decline in the last year or so.
In part it's because your demands for quality are slowly going up. As we are getting older we have less time left in our lives to go through pages and pages of inane chat and recycled memes.
If you can't give it physical meaning or measure it, it isn't there
If you can't measure it, today or in principle, it doesn't mean that it isn't there. For example, a Flatlander would be unable to measure the height of a cylinder that I put onto his sheet-world. The Flatlander only sees a circle. But the cylinder has height, irregardless of the Flatlander's opinion.
What exactly constitutes "difficult"?
First, as you suggested, it can be simple code that requires specialized knowledge. For example, a customer walks into a bar and says "Hey, can anyone here code me something for Renesas R5F2136CSDFA?" If you are not already familiar with at least basics of the IC you need too much time to become efficient. There are hundreds of just Renesas MCUs, and there are tens of MCU Manufacturers (Microchip, Atmel, Analog Devices, TI, etc.) - so this is a very steep (or wide) learning curve. It's even worse if you have to also design the hardware to run it all on. There are tons of catches, and errata summary for every silicon is printed on several pages.
Anyone can learn to write it given the proper documentation and materials to work with. - yes, sure. However if you, as a customer, need a working code, you have to be out of your mind to give the job to a guy who heard about the chip first time in his life. Some of those "materials" are thousands of pages long. Some aspects of programming for those MCUs are not documented. Frameworks (libraries) have bugs, side effects and whatnot, and they are hundreds of thousands LOCs long. You also need to know which libraries work and which don't; generally, you should approach the project having a good toolkit at your disposal - a compiler, an RTOS, a DSP library, an I/O driver package for this particular MCU, a TCP/IP stack, etc. These tools also must work with each other; you can't easily run a task ripped out of VxWorks under FreeRTOS or QNX. You will also need some programming hardware, and it may cost pretty penny in some cases.
Second, the code itself can be hard to write. For example, you want a good, secure AES implementation on a MCU that doesn't have an AES peripheral (some AVR32 do, for example.) You probably need to write most of cipher code in assembly, most of key management in C, and you need to interface with something to send keys in and out (if out is an option.) On top of that, your product should be resistant to various hardware-based attacks (power, timing, emissions.) Such side effects of most machine instructions are not even documented. You will have to verify your design using test equipment. This task is hard.
Third, the code itself may be unobvious. For example, the customer wants you to write a complete APCO-25 stack. Where do you start if you have never written a wireless stack in your life? How do you even organize it? In practice people write it and then rewrite and then rewrite some more until it becomes usable. Is your customer willing to wait until you learn, and pay you all the while? Sometimes the answer is "no" and you must come into the contract armed with previously acquired skills. Plenty of those skills are very specialized, and sometimes localized. That Project 25 code that I mentioned is specific to North America. An Indian programmer would likely have no exposure to it - even if he may have had experience with similar protocols. Older people often have more experience; plenty of contractors here are 40 and older; they know what they are doing.
Fourth, you need to think about the quality of the code. A spaghetti code that doesn't check any input will work fine on correct data, but it will crash and burn on erroneous input. If you are building a life support system - or just a TV remote control - you probably don't want that. You can write good, reliable code for a MCU. However your options on reporting a problem are very limited (there is no printer or Internet connected to a TV remote.) You have to write the code so that it simply doesn't crash. You can't afford a crash. This is different, culturally, from the GUI coding for Windows. There if it crashes you break into the debugger and see what happened. If an MCU crashes things just stop, and you (without an ICE, and often even with it) can't tell what happened and how you got there. Interrupt handlers are notorious at that. Writing firmware requires good coding discipline. Every routine that you put in
Making music and making money are completely different skills.
That's true everywhere. Writing a good, fast code in C and assembly is in no way related to smooth-talking a client into signing a contract to develop the abovementioned code. Many programmers who are capable of the former in their sleep can't do the latter if their life depended on it.
The musician in your example (talented but poor) needs to either learn how to develop his business or hire a manager. A talented programmer can develop business skills to manage his own business (contracts, ISV like iPhone/Android) or he can join someone else's company; then business opportunities will be taken care of by someone else (along with the lion's share of profits.)
It is not easy for a programmer to gain businessman's skills. I'd guess it's equally hard for an artist. But that's what the money is paid for. If you don't want to touch that, you are still free to code (or compose music) in your parents' basement. Only don't expect anyone to know about you or want to pay you.
The author puts "book editors, journalists, video store clerks" into that creative class. It's hard to see why a video store clerk (what is a video store?) is a creative persona. He is merely shining the scanner on your purchases. He can be illiterate for all practical purposes.
Musicians? Well, those that are good are doing OK. The rest... perhaps they are in the wrong business. Same applies to "aspiring novelists" - there is always ten graphomaniacs for one semi-decent writer. Good writers are even more rare.
Computer programmers are also like that. Those who write simple, boring code - but lots of it - will lose to their Chinese and Indian competition. Those who write difficult code remain in business. I personally specialize in microcontrollers, hardware, FPGA, real-time and high speed stuff. There is plenty of work in this area.
To summarize, if you are truly creative in what is in demand then there will be always someone willing - and desperate - to pay you.
If magnetic material (like, in a Hard Drive) is moving inside a static magnetic field, it'll produce a current. That'd probably be enough to wreak havoc on a hard drive.
If magnetic material is moving inside a magnetic field no current will be produced simply because you don't have any conductor for that current to flow through.
To prove this take two magnets and move them relative to each other. You will get varying forces and magnetic fields, but nothing else.
If you want to generate a current you need to move a conductor through a static magnetic field (or vice versa.)
A static magnetic field has nothing to do with a 900 MHZ or whatever radio signal coming from the phone.
But it would take a very strong field to cause this. The phone would jump out of your hand and stick to the wall first.
faster than c speeds are ok but require your mass to be purely imaginary. What does that mean?
It only means that the vector of mass is projecting into a dot in your 3D space. The 'i' component of the mass can be large or small but you can't detect it.
For example, an African warrior throws a spear exactly at you. You see the spear as a dot all the time and have no way to detect its movement because the velocity vector of the spear is always a zero-sized dot in the plane of your vision.
Einstein was neither anonymous nor a coward.
How can you prove that Einstein was never anonymous?
On top of that, there are trees in Siberia. More than one. Probably more than one billion. Most are tall fir and pine trees. There is no chance of seeing anything through the foliage.
Umm... - the same as in Windows 7, where there's also no run command.
I tried Win-R on Vista, and it says "This task will be created with administrative privileges." Do you think there might be a problem here?
Of course, if you aren't bright enough to read where it says "Search for programs and files" and type in that box, you probably don't need to be administering a calculator, let alone an enterprise server.
I have about a hundred different software applications installed on this laptop. Do you know I remember all their names? Do you know I remember which ones are installed on which computer?
Menus are self-discoverable: you click on them and you see what's there. Search requires you to know a good part of the answer before you even start.
Why would anybody op in for more marketing?
I can't speak for everybody, but I personally have signed up for a couple of mailing lists of publishers. Of course I haven't given them any true personal data, and the email that they have is a long, unique address under my own domain.
I signed up because I'm interested in books of these genres and it doesn't bother me to have Thunderbird filter and file those emails into a certain folder. Then when I have nothing better to do I can go through the new announcements and see if there is anything I'd like to read. There are maybe a couple of emails per month, hardly a bandwidth concern, and I never see those emails until I want to.
The other problem is that the prof. was a drama queen
I'm pretty sure he intentionally selected this way of responding. After all, he should know all about dramas - far more, at least, than an average police chief does.
Other people (above in the thread) noted that a meek response to this event would have resulted in nothing. He had to escalate to put the police into the defensive position. That indeed happened; then he tricked them into removing another poster - this time a clearly harmless one - and now he has an excellent case.
I assure you the first amendment did not mean I got to put whatever I wanted on my office door, or do whatever I wanted on government property.
The big difference here is that this is a university. The professor put the poster up not for himself to look at - he could have done it inside, or at home altogether. He put it outside to communicate something to people who walk by; this was meant to be a message, primarily to students. It is professor's job to communicate with students at work. Typically it is done inside of an auditorium or a laboratory, but I personally was also taught things in the field and in the parking lot (when the equipment that we studied was bolted to a truck) and at an industrial site (when the equipment had a building constructed to house and cool it.) Posters with various educational stuff were occasionally hung here and there.
I can understand that not every poster may be fit for a prominent placement. However this is something that educators ought to decide amongst themselves, based on educational reasons. The police shouldn't have any part in that since the posters in question were obviously harmless and didn't threaten anyone in particular. In fact, the police interfered in the educational process as the professor designed it. The design may be good or bad, but that's not for the police to decide.
It was hung outside his office and not in his office. It did talk about killing people
Does it mean that posting "Thou shall not kill" is also a violation? If so, the police in that University is suffering from the ostrich syndrome.
It's a University, not a kindergarten (this might be not obvious from observing the behavior of inmates.) Still, professors at a University are expected to discuss complex matters. How can one teach history - or, in this case, literature - without mentioning one of favorite pastimes of humanity - murder and mayhem? Perhaps that University only allows their students to watch teletubbies?
Self-defense is disturbing for feminists
Logic tells me that it should be the other way around.
Electricity is not much cheaper than gas. In the USA it is at best close - $0.30/kWh for electricity vs. about $0.11/kWh for gasoline.
However electricity is infinitely renewable and has no emissions (regardless of whether these are harmful or not.)
The only problem with electricity is that it's very expensive to store it, and we don't know how to store enough. In the end, though, electricity is the answer (or perhaps hydrogen.)