In an analogy to the automatic dismissal of cold fusion experimentation that Price notes, for more than a century, the US Patent Office automatically rejected patent applications directed to restoring baldness, because it was "inherently unbelievable" and "involved implausible scientific principles". This was the same rejection applied to applications for perpetual motion machines, teleporters, etc. - they can't possibly work, by definition, so the application is claiming a useless invention and is therefore ineligible for a patent.
Of course, then Rogaine and Propecia were invented and proven to cure baldness, and eventually the courts had to step in and tell the patent office that they were wrong and that hair restoration was at least theoretically possible.
Any citation for this story?
No account I have found about the discovery of the hair-growing properties of minoxidil, and its patenting (like this one) mentions any such rejection, or lawsuit. I find lawsuits about patent priority, profit-sharing, about misleading marketing of the drug, and patent infringement, but absolutely nothing about the USPO rejecting the patent or being forced to grant one by any court.
Professor Price mentions "two reports (in 2013 and 2014) on tests of Rossiâ(TM)s device by teams of Swedish and Italian physicists whose scientific credentials are not in doubt, and who had access to one of his devices for extended periods".
Which vaporizes any credibility Professor Price might have for commenting on science.
The two reports, never submitted for peer review, but simply dropped on the Arxiv pre-publication site, have been subjected to careful dissection, and the results are ugly. They never really had "access" to the devices in any meaningful since. Rossi controlled the device at all times, and specified what they could and could not measure. None of the scientists on the teams were independent, all of them had worked with Rossi in the past in one capacity or another, and Giuseppe Levi has long been a Rossi collaborator. This personal interest in the result completely nullifies any attempt to leverage their "credentials" into "credibility".
It is possible I think for a Philosophy Professor to offer useful insights or commentary on science. But he first must actually understand science, and know the difference between a genuine experiment and a con man's parlor trick.
When a Mars colony is completely self-sufficient for Earth, making everything they need to run their whole economy, then definitely they should be completely independent politically.
I also propose that they should choose to be ruled by unicorns. Because by the time it becomes possible for a Mars colony to be completely self-sufficient we will be able to make unicorns through genetic engineering. They won't have magical powers, but they will be immortal and super intelligent, and we would be wise to submit to their superior wisdom.
When people talk about self-sufficient colonies on Mars they generally seem to have no concept of how far we are from having a technological basis to make that possible, no matter how much money is spent on Mars colonization.
Living on Mars is pretty much living in a vacuum, in a high radiation environment - just like living in space. Space flight qualified hardware for a small habitat like the ISS (home to 6 people, maximum) cost on the order of $100 billion, which represents the labor of something like a million person-years of effort. This support ratio of (lets round down) of something like 100000:1 makes the notion of self-supporting space colony fantasy. To support itself the ratio must be reduced to 1:1 (for a subsistence level existence), or higher (1:2?) for a more a enjoyable lifestyle. Consider also that currently that 80% of the time of the ISS crew is spent on ISS maintenance, and this this is not out of an 8 hour day of labor, with weekends and holidays off, but of most of their waking time.
Conservatively we need a five order of magnitude increase in productivity (think AI controlled, completely autonomous nanotech factories) to make Mars colonization on a self-sustaining basis possible. Quibbling to knock off a factor of 2 or 3 in my cost estimate, of even a factor of 10, or 100, only puts an insigniciant dent in the problem.
Please cite this strange treaty regarding Antarctica you are referring to. It looks nothing like The Antarctic Treaty the rest of the world knows about. It prohibits military bases, but military stations dedicated to scientific and other peaceful activities are permitted.
Not even the Madrid Protocol (a addendum that went into force in 1998 and expires in 2048) that bans mining prohibits constructing settlements on Antarctica.
The Antarctic Treaty System does not even challenge the claims to national sovereignty that have been filed over most of the continent. If any nation making such a claim wishes to build a settlement, or permit one to be built, in their claimed zone of authority, there is no other authority to challenge them. Indeed, it is assumed that nations making sovereignty claims, or operating stations in Antarctica, exercise national legal authority there.
No it is not some dirty international treaty keeping colonists from flocking to the Utopia Way Down Under.
Next: Movies, no matter how hit they are, are really, really not a reliable source for predicting the viability of anything in the real world. Doesn't matter how much attention they paid to the science advisor. If they were, they would be called documentaries and they would be show on PBS.
...
Although I heartily agree with the sentiment that no movie is a documentary (unless it is a documentary, and even then...), I have a far more fundamental criticism of the fool writing for Newsweek citing The Martian as showing that living on Mars is plausible.
He utterly fails to understand what was depicted in the movie.
First, according to the movie life on Mars is one of extreme hardship and extreme, ever present danger.
So far this is quite realistic.
Further it shows that billions of dollars of hardware built back on Earth is essential for every little thing on Mars. Mark Watney cannot make anything - he can only repurpose (usually for a lower, subsistence purpose) what was already sent. The movie's vision of living on Mars provides no hope whatsoever of placing a self-supporting colony of any kind, much less a luxurious resort existence, on the Red Planet for centuries to come.
Of course this is "so far". This is after only 15 months or of exposure. If detection and intervention had not occurred this number would have kept rising as lead accumulated in children's bodies.
So it's a local problem with idiots to cheap to use silver solder on their pipes?
Because in a city with a 27% poverty rate most residents recently built their houses to spec, and had plenty of money to spend on silver solder too? Probably they spent all their silver solder money on hookers n' blow too.
Look at the stats on Flint, MI. The median age of housing there is 1953! These are poor people living in ancient run-down housing!
Sure the wise Emergency Manager running the town (not elected by the residents) was totally in the right sending corrosive water to the residents to save a little money. If it poisons the kids living in the houses by dumping lead into their water, it is just too damn bad!
This in no way "says the opposite". In fact it reinforces the point that some people (like the good people at Amoco) chose a safer (and probably more costly) means of increasing the octane rating. The rest of the industry just kept pushing the cheap toxic lead solution.
Interestingly as late as 1983 it was a personal priority for Reagan's first EPA head, Anne Gorsuch Burford, to try to remove all caps on lead content in gasoline, at at time that the evidence of harm was staggering.
In my understanding of it increased alcohol consumption is strongly correlated with an increased strength of the local gravity field, judging by available evidence.
My main experience with Yahoo is Yahoo Groups. Worst web app I've used on a regular basis. Pretty much nothing works as you might expect, and it certainly doesn't do it every time.
I second this. And it has been getting worse. Major function breakdowns in 2009, a new site design in 2010 that worse than the old one, then the curse of the "neo" roll-out in 2012, worse still than the one before. It is said to be the largest collection of discussion groups on the Web, but it is almost unusable. There were decent designs for discussion groups for decades to borrow from, this is not rocket science.
At this point, going to to Yahoo Groups has been so painful for so long, that I am reluctant to give it another shot to see if I can use it again.
Where they *really* differ is in audience size and rate of change. CNN is in a long term down hill slide which has been going on for more than a decade. Fox is generally been able to attract a larger and larger audience in that same time frame. Fox is being successful, CNN is dying.
Meanwhile, in the Real World, where we can look at charts of actual numbers we see that this is nonsense. Fox News viewership peaked in 2009 and has been dropping ever since. CNN has followed a similar downward trend (it peaked a year earlier in 2008) but has maintained a steady market share for several years, its drop merely paralleling Fox's decline.
It is interesting that the common liberal refrain is that Fox News is lying about stuff while CNN isn't. Or the alternate perspective that Fox News is unbiased and CNN is. Reality is BOTH are biased in their own ways, and if anything Fox is more creditable given that it's audience is growing while CNN's is in decline...
If only we didn't have studies like this one that shows that Fox "News" viewers score below those with no information while CNN viewers score above this information-free cohort.
I would also add "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are the aether of the 21st century.
This is actually quite true, not sure why someone modded you "flaimbait". Must be someone that doesn't understand that subject matter.
Dark Matter has never been directly observed, neither has Dark Energy. They are just suppositions that according to our current understanding, something must be there. This is in the same league as Aether - it was thought at the time that you needed a medium to transmit any sort of information, like sound waves.
I believe you are confused about what it means to "observe" something.
The observational support for Dark Matter is staggering. There is simply not enough matter of any of the types that we have in the Standard Model to explain the directly observable effect of gravity in the Universe. Dark Matter out-masses all of the types of matter we understand by 5-to-1 in the Universe; and right here at home, in our local galaxy, the Milky Way, it out-masses all conventional forms of matter 20-to-1. We can easily detect its gravitational influence, and produce maps of its distribution. Only if you believe that nothing can be "directly observed" from its gravity (as if it were "less real" than light, say) could your claim be defended.
The discovery of cosmic acceleration similarly is direct observational evidence of the existence of Dark Energy.
These two physical realities are so different from the hypothesized "ether" of pre-modern physics that it is clear you do not understand any of this.
While I am a dyed in the wool empiricist, and firmly believe in the fundamental importance of understanding the Universe in terms of what we can observe about it... the Universe does not give us any guarantees that a correct mathematical model of its structure necessarily must produce specific observable confirmation.
Or, perhaps observable confirmations are possible in principle but will never be observable in practice. For example, any experimental confirmation that requires direct manipulation of a super massive black hole is not going to happen, unless we get lucky and can find a natural experiment that meets the requirements.
We cannot lay down requirements of how the Universe must behave. It is what it is, and we must learn how to deal with it.
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy. Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history. It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
Could at least give a hint as to what's so bizarre about it in the summary.
Y'know, as opposed to all those boring run-of-the-mill fusion reactors...
Possibly the headline writer meant to say "Germany Fires Up Weird New Fusion Reactor" and forgot to add "Guess what happens next!"
Yes, it is click-baitism infesting the summary.
What is really interesting about this is that the stellerator is the oldest fusion reactor design approach, being given a new trial with 21st Century design techniques.
Funny thing about the Libertarian right. They loudly espouse the views that the only true rights are property rights, that contracts (backed by government power) are sacred, and that everything can be reduced to financial considerations.
But if anyone not of a member of their socioeconomic cohort shows a trace of being concerned about their property rights, about the violation of contractual terms, if seeking compensation in the only available way; then venom and mockery gush forth. How dare they!
But in truth, many companies — and technical recruiters — that are proclaiming their devotion to [ANYTHING AT ALL] from the hilltops aren't really [ANYTHING AT ALL] organizations."
The booster would be largely intact, but distorted like a crushed coke can.
I don't think so. If you read TFA you would discover that this thin hollow aluminum shell is hitting the Moon at the relatively slow (as hyper-velocity cosmic impacts go) of 2.3 km/sec. This makes it almost twice as fast, with four times the kinetic energy per gram as the muzzle velocity of the famous.220 Swift hyper velocity round which was long the highest velocity production bullet in the world. When a bullet going this fast hits something hard (like the ground) it explodes into fragments.
The impact energy is in fact 2.6 MJ/kg, compared to the energy needed to completely melt aluminum, heating from 0 K, which is only 1.0 MJ/kg. It is also just a bit less than the energy content of gun powder.
The article does include this plainly inaccurate statement; "During the impact, much of the energy went into crushing the booster and only a shallow crater was formed." The slower delivery of energy to a larger area as the hollow shell smashed into the surface no doubt led to a shallow (and probably larger) crater, but the energy of this impact is a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the mechanical strength of aluminum, and so the effect of crushing the tank is negligible.
Apparently it's a universal human trait to wonder "What happens when we hit X with Y really hard/fast?". This trait also probably led to the evolutionary dead end of "hey, watch this!"
Unfortunately the "Hey, watch this!" procedure ends often enough with an (inebriated) "hitting that" that the "Hey, watch this!" genes get passed on to the next generation, before that last final great "Hey, watch this! It's going to be effing AWESOME! (Hold my beer!)"
They would charge companies to use it, which makes it unusable in the bigger picture. If they opensource their algorithm and word list under a good license, this has a chance. Until they do that, this won't go anywhere.
Imagine the big mail/freight carriers having to pay them every time they have to translate a 3 word address. Not going to happen.
Absolutely. If this entire database and resolution software cannot be embedded in an arbitrary device free of charge, it has no chance.
Promoting this idea and monetizing it are mutually exclusive.
Slashdot Mirror
In an analogy to the automatic dismissal of cold fusion experimentation that Price notes, for more than a century, the US Patent Office automatically rejected patent applications directed to restoring baldness, because it was "inherently unbelievable" and "involved implausible scientific principles". This was the same rejection applied to applications for perpetual motion machines, teleporters, etc. - they can't possibly work, by definition, so the application is claiming a useless invention and is therefore ineligible for a patent.
Of course, then Rogaine and Propecia were invented and proven to cure baldness, and eventually the courts had to step in and tell the patent office that they were wrong and that hair restoration was at least theoretically possible.
Any citation for this story?
No account I have found about the discovery of the hair-growing properties of minoxidil, and its patenting (like this one) mentions any such rejection, or lawsuit. I find lawsuits about patent priority, profit-sharing, about misleading marketing of the drug, and patent infringement, but absolutely nothing about the USPO rejecting the patent or being forced to grant one by any court.
Indeed when Upjohn filed a patent for hair loss prevention in 1971 it was granted right away.
But, ahem, I do see a striking analogy here though between this account, and the accounts supporting Rossi's cold fusion system...
Professor Price mentions "two reports (in 2013 and 2014) on tests of Rossiâ(TM)s device by teams of Swedish and Italian physicists whose scientific credentials are not in doubt, and who had access to one of his devices for extended periods".
Which vaporizes any credibility Professor Price might have for commenting on science.
The two reports, never submitted for peer review, but simply dropped on the Arxiv pre-publication site, have been subjected to careful dissection, and the results are ugly. They never really had "access" to the devices in any meaningful since. Rossi controlled the device at all times, and specified what they could and could not measure. None of the scientists on the teams were independent, all of them had worked with Rossi in the past in one capacity or another, and Giuseppe Levi has long been a Rossi collaborator. This personal interest in the result completely nullifies any attempt to leverage their "credentials" into "credibility".
It is possible I think for a Philosophy Professor to offer useful insights or commentary on science. But he first must actually understand science, and know the difference between a genuine experiment and a con man's parlor trick.
When a Mars colony is completely self-sufficient for Earth, making everything they need to run their whole economy, then definitely they should be completely independent politically.
I also propose that they should choose to be ruled by unicorns. Because by the time it becomes possible for a Mars colony to be completely self-sufficient we will be able to make unicorns through genetic engineering. They won't have magical powers, but they will be immortal and super intelligent, and we would be wise to submit to their superior wisdom.
When people talk about self-sufficient colonies on Mars they generally seem to have no concept of how far we are from having a technological basis to make that possible, no matter how much money is spent on Mars colonization.
Living on Mars is pretty much living in a vacuum, in a high radiation environment - just like living in space. Space flight qualified hardware for a small habitat like the ISS (home to 6 people, maximum) cost on the order of $100 billion, which represents the labor of something like a million person-years of effort. This support ratio of (lets round down) of something like 100000:1 makes the notion of self-supporting space colony fantasy. To support itself the ratio must be reduced to 1:1 (for a subsistence level existence), or higher (1:2?) for a more a enjoyable lifestyle. Consider also that currently that 80% of the time of the ISS crew is spent on ISS maintenance, and this this is not out of an 8 hour day of labor, with weekends and holidays off, but of most of their waking time.
Conservatively we need a five order of magnitude increase in productivity (think AI controlled, completely autonomous nanotech factories) to make Mars colonization on a self-sustaining basis possible. Quibbling to knock off a factor of 2 or 3 in my cost estimate, of even a factor of 10, or 100, only puts an insigniciant dent in the problem.
Please cite this strange treaty regarding Antarctica you are referring to. It looks nothing like The Antarctic Treaty the rest of the world knows about. It prohibits military bases, but military stations dedicated to scientific and other peaceful activities are permitted.
Not even the Madrid Protocol (a addendum that went into force in 1998 and expires in 2048) that bans mining prohibits constructing settlements on Antarctica.
The Antarctic Treaty System does not even challenge the claims to national sovereignty that have been filed over most of the continent. If any nation making such a claim wishes to build a settlement, or permit one to be built, in their claimed zone of authority, there is no other authority to challenge them. Indeed, it is assumed that nations making sovereignty claims, or operating stations in Antarctica, exercise national legal authority there.
No it is not some dirty international treaty keeping colonists from flocking to the Utopia Way Down Under.
...
Next: Movies, no matter how hit they are, are really, really not a reliable source for predicting the viability of anything in the real world. Doesn't matter how much attention they paid to the science advisor. If they were, they would be called documentaries and they would be show on PBS.
...
Although I heartily agree with the sentiment that no movie is a documentary (unless it is a documentary, and even then...), I have a far more fundamental criticism of the fool writing for Newsweek citing The Martian as showing that living on Mars is plausible.
He utterly fails to understand what was depicted in the movie.
First, according to the movie life on Mars is one of extreme hardship and extreme, ever present danger.
So far this is quite realistic.
Further it shows that billions of dollars of hardware built back on Earth is essential for every little thing on Mars. Mark Watney cannot make anything - he can only repurpose (usually for a lower, subsistence purpose) what was already sent. The movie's vision of living on Mars provides no hope whatsoever of placing a self-supporting colony of any kind, much less a luxurious resort existence, on the Red Planet for centuries to come.
Of course this is "so far". This is after only 15 months or of exposure. If detection and intervention had not occurred this number would have kept rising as lead accumulated in children's bodies.
So it's a local problem with idiots to cheap to use silver solder on their pipes?
Because in a city with a 27% poverty rate most residents recently built their houses to spec, and had plenty of money to spend on silver solder too? Probably they spent all their silver solder money on hookers n' blow too.
Look at the stats on Flint, MI. The median age of housing there is 1953 ! These are poor people living in ancient run-down housing!
Sure the wise Emergency Manager running the town (not elected by the residents) was totally in the right sending corrosive water to the residents to save a little money. If it poisons the kids living in the houses by dumping lead into their water, it is just too damn bad!
...TEL was the only commercially viable product.
Tell that to Amoco, which never leaded its premium grade gasoline.
citation needed.
i have citations that say the opposite
This in no way "says the opposite". In fact it reinforces the point that some people (like the good people at Amoco) chose a safer (and probably more costly) means of increasing the octane rating. The rest of the industry just kept pushing the cheap toxic lead solution.
Interestingly as late as 1983 it was a personal priority for Reagan's first EPA head, Anne Gorsuch Burford, to try to remove all caps on lead content in gasoline, at at time that the evidence of harm was staggering.
In my understanding of it increased alcohol consumption is strongly correlated with an increased strength of the local gravity field, judging by available evidence.
that developer should have been fired and prosecuted for vandalism and theft
It would seem that they made a strategic decision that getting him to deliver his code to keep the project close to schedule was more important.
My main experience with Yahoo is Yahoo Groups. Worst web app I've used on a regular basis. Pretty much nothing works as you might expect, and it certainly doesn't do it every time.
I second this. And it has been getting worse. Major function breakdowns in 2009, a new site design in 2010 that worse than the old one, then the curse of the "neo" roll-out in 2012, worse still than the one before. It is said to be the largest collection of discussion groups on the Web, but it is almost unusable. There were decent designs for discussion groups for decades to borrow from, this is not rocket science.
At this point, going to to Yahoo Groups has been so painful for so long, that I am reluctant to give it another shot to see if I can use it again.
Where they *really* differ is in audience size and rate of change. CNN is in a long term down hill slide which has been going on for more than a decade. Fox is generally been able to attract a larger and larger audience in that same time frame. Fox is being successful, CNN is dying.
Meanwhile, in the Real World, where we can look at charts of actual numbers we see that this is nonsense. Fox News viewership peaked in 2009 and has been dropping ever since. CNN has followed a similar downward trend (it peaked a year earlier in 2008) but has maintained a steady market share for several years, its drop merely paralleling Fox's decline.
It is interesting that the common liberal refrain is that Fox News is lying about stuff while CNN isn't. Or the alternate perspective that Fox News is unbiased and CNN is. Reality is BOTH are biased in their own ways, and if anything Fox is more creditable given that it's audience is growing while CNN's is in decline ...
If only we didn't have studies like this one that shows that Fox "News" viewers score below those with no information while CNN viewers score above this information-free cohort.
I would also add "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are the aether of the 21st century.
This is actually quite true, not sure why someone modded you "flaimbait". Must be someone that doesn't understand that subject matter.
Dark Matter has never been directly observed, neither has Dark Energy. They are just suppositions that according to our current understanding, something must be there. This is in the same league as Aether - it was thought at the time that you needed a medium to transmit any sort of information, like sound waves.
I believe you are confused about what it means to "observe" something.
The observational support for Dark Matter is staggering. There is simply not enough matter of any of the types that we have in the Standard Model to explain the directly observable effect of gravity in the Universe. Dark Matter out-masses all of the types of matter we understand by 5-to-1 in the Universe; and right here at home, in our local galaxy, the Milky Way, it out-masses all conventional forms of matter 20-to-1. We can easily detect its gravitational influence, and produce maps of its distribution. Only if you believe that nothing can be "directly observed" from its gravity (as if it were "less real" than light, say) could your claim be defended.
The discovery of cosmic acceleration similarly is direct observational evidence of the existence of Dark Energy.
These two physical realities are so different from the hypothesized "ether" of pre-modern physics that it is clear you do not understand any of this.
While I am a dyed in the wool empiricist, and firmly believe in the fundamental importance of understanding the Universe in terms of what we can observe about it... the Universe does not give us any guarantees that a correct mathematical model of its structure necessarily must produce specific observable confirmation.
Or, perhaps observable confirmations are possible in principle but will never be observable in practice. For example, any experimental confirmation that requires direct manipulation of a super massive black hole is not going to happen, unless we get lucky and can find a natural experiment that meets the requirements.
We cannot lay down requirements of how the Universe must behave. It is what it is, and we must learn how to deal with it.
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy. Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history. It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
And I will add that the most influential recent philosopher on the practice of science was a physicist himself: Percy Bridgman. In this landmark work The Logic of Modern Physics Bridgman clarified ideas about what it means to observe or measure something.
Germany Fires Up Bizarre New Fusion Reactor
Could at least give a hint as to what's so bizarre about it in the summary.
Y'know, as opposed to all those boring run-of-the-mill fusion reactors...
Possibly the headline writer meant to say "Germany Fires Up Weird New Fusion Reactor" and forgot to add "Guess what happens next!"
Yes, it is click-baitism infesting the summary.
What is really interesting about this is that the stellerator is the oldest fusion reactor design approach, being given a new trial with 21st Century design techniques.
Funny thing about the Libertarian right. They loudly espouse the views that the only true rights are property rights, that contracts (backed by government power) are sacred, and that everything can be reduced to financial considerations.
But if anyone not of a member of their socioeconomic cohort shows a trace of being concerned about their property rights, about the violation of contractual terms, if seeking compensation in the only available way; then venom and mockery gush forth. How dare they!
...Granted, they only got there a few hundred years before Cook...
Is "seventeen" covered by "a few"? The earliest settlement of Hawaii is about that old. There were no "English people" at that time.
But in truth, many companies — and technical recruiters — that are proclaiming their devotion to [ANYTHING AT ALL] from the hilltops aren't really [ANYTHING AT ALL] organizations."
The booster would be largely intact, but distorted like a crushed coke can.
I don't think so. If you read TFA you would discover that this thin hollow aluminum shell is hitting the Moon at the relatively slow (as hyper-velocity cosmic impacts go) of 2.3 km/sec. This makes it almost twice as fast, with four times the kinetic energy per gram as the muzzle velocity of the famous .220 Swift hyper velocity round which was long the highest velocity production bullet in the world. When a bullet going this fast hits something hard (like the ground) it explodes into fragments.
The impact energy is in fact 2.6 MJ/kg, compared to the energy needed to completely melt aluminum, heating from 0 K, which is only 1.0 MJ/kg. It is also just a bit less than the energy content of gun powder.
The article does include this plainly inaccurate statement; "During the impact, much of the energy went into crushing the booster and only a shallow crater was formed." The slower delivery of energy to a larger area as the hollow shell smashed into the surface no doubt led to a shallow (and probably larger) crater, but the energy of this impact is a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the mechanical strength of aluminum, and so the effect of crushing the tank is negligible.
Apparently it's a universal human trait to wonder "What happens when we hit X with Y really hard/fast?". This trait also probably led to the evolutionary dead end of "hey, watch this!"
Unfortunately the "Hey, watch this!" procedure ends often enough with an (inebriated) "hitting that" that the "Hey, watch this!" genes get passed on to the next generation, before that last final great "Hey, watch this! It's going to be effing AWESOME! (Hold my beer!)"
who wants an address like 'cuts.goats.shut'. really?
Oftentimes you will have the option of picking an adjacent address bloc, which will be entirely different.
They would charge companies to use it, which makes it unusable in the bigger picture. If they opensource their algorithm and word list under a good license, this has a chance. Until they do that, this won't go anywhere.
Imagine the big mail/freight carriers having to pay them every time they have to translate a 3 word address. Not going to happen.
Absolutely. If this entire database and resolution software cannot be embedded in an arbitrary device free of charge, it has no chance.
Promoting this idea and monetizing it are mutually exclusive.
Better stay away from hungry.awesome.dragons.