Why would he bother? He has a successful company, why would he want to buy a company that burned through that much money with no noticeable product."
Let's see: according TFA - "...about 1,000 Better Place cars are on the roads..." and "Sunday’s announcement left many questions unanswered, especially what will happen to its cars and charging stations. Better Place has also installed a network of stations in Denmark and has operations in Australia, the Netherlands, China, Hawaii and Japan." And according to Wikipedia: "By mid September 2012, there were 21 operational battery-swap stations open to the public in Israel".
That may not be excessively impressive, but 1000 cars in operation, 21 charging stations in Israel, and others in six other nations is not "no noticeable product."
Although the Sea Wolf submarine project did not have this particular problem (insufficient buoyancy requiring retrofitting) - it did have the problem of starting the construction of the submarine before the design work was finished, which then delayed the project and drove up costs as the builder waited on the designers to finish their work. The cost increase for the Sea Wolf was 45%. And it is not as if the U.S. had limited experience in building submarines.
The Spanish program was projected as costing 550 million Euros per sub, if they can fix the buoyancy problem by lengthening the sub by less than 30 meters (very likely) then they will be doing better than the Sea Wolf program.
BTW - another to describe the situation is that once all of the specs were completed, the Spanish Navy discovered that it needed a bigger sub than originally planned. Many U.S. defense programs have had similar experiences. Not as scandalous sounding though.
Sorry... hundred thousands of dead people in the decades AFTER the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and AFTER Chernobyl say something different.
...
Yes, they say they don't exist.
Please provide a citation to an actual scientific study supporting these claims. You can't. There aren't any. This is just urban folklore.
The total number of deaths attributable to the atomic bombings, but occurring after October 1945 (when the last of the acutely injured perished) is no more than about 4000 people. Nearly all were individuals that received high levels of radiation exposure close to the bomb hypocenters.
No. Companies are allowed to keep reasonable financial reserves, but the billions that Apple and other companies keep are anything but reasonable reserves, and are unprecedented. This was worked out decades ago, but they stopped enforcing it.
Amen to this. Apple is currently engaged in the largest stock buy-back in history, $60 billion so far.
In essence, with its immense cash reserves, which instead of tangibly building the business in some way, or increasing the compensation of its foreign workforce, or making its product more affordable, it is benefiting those holding tons of stock options (the execs), who will only pay low, low capital gains taxes on the wealth being transferred to them risk free.
With a 350% mark-up the price of Apple products have virtually nothing to do with their costs of manufacture or doing business. They are charging every penny that they think the market will bear. In other words they are already squeezing every dollar out of the consumer that they can. If they have to pay a little more taxes on their profits, it will come out of their margin.
The very influential critic Edmund Wilson, prominent beginning around 1920, is the apparent source of this prejudice - he despised Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft - really all recent or contemporary fantastic literature being written in English (if it was old enough, Swift for example, it might get a pass).
I think critics' low opinion of some of those authors was deserved, because while those authors were masters of world-building, they were not masters of prose style. Their use of the English language feels flat and unimaginative. In spite of the rich detail of Middle Earth, Tolkien's prose, for example, is just as much uncreative aping of English epic writing as the Book of Mormon was Joseph Smith's aping of the King James Bible.
Valid points - Tolkien's prose is uneven in quality, and parts of LOTR are quite leaden, but the delightful Hobbit, for example, is entirely free of Saxon epic styling. But Wilson's dismissal was all encompassing, and drew few distinctions among these hated fantasists.
Lewis was better, over all, than Tolkien. But Wilson's attack on Dunsany, Lovecraft, and James Branch Cabell simply shows him as a pretentious fool. The fact that the greatest writer of the Twentieth Century Jorge Luis Borges (one of those Spanish fantasists, BTW) admired Lovecraft is enough to discredit Wilson.
One of the reasons I admire Wolfe's writing of the 1970s and recommend it to my friends who "don't read science fiction", is that Wolfe's prose in The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Peace is just as powerful as anything by Proust or Nabokov. Unfortunately, Wolfe's rich feel for the English language disappeared in the 1980s and some of his recent novels and short stories sound as bad any most genre fiction.
Agreed on all points (unfortunately, on the last). The The Fifth Head of Cerberus had a powerful effect on me, ditto Peace, and especially and forever The Book of the New Sun, which will in the fullness of time be remembered as a landmark work of the Twentieth Century. Soldier in the Mist is quite good, but with the odd There are Doors his genius seems to start to fading. I started the Book of the Long Sun but after the first volume, I did not want to be disappointed again.
As Peter S. Beagle, and others, have observed in essays - the prejudice against fantastic literature in academia and "serious" criticism is an anomaly that arose in the early 20th Century, and is largely confined to the U.S. Throughout almost all of history literature based heavily on fantastic elements was the norm, and was commonly accepted even after "realistic" literature became a mainstream phenomenon.
The prejudice is very ethnocentric. "Magic realism" from Latin America is lionized, but the literary equivalent by an English speaking writer is ignored or worse. The very influential critic Edmund Wilson, prominent beginning around 1920, is the apparent source of this prejudice - he despised Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft - really all recent or contemporary fantastic literature being written in English (if it was old enough, Swift for example, it might get a pass).
Sometimes a mainstream author will turn out a bland effort in this direction which gets praise, but no one seriously writing in the fantastic literature vein ever does.
Having has to suffer for a time working for a company that had something of a scam going regarding employees and AmEx cards (Litton Industries, absorbed by Northrop-Grumman in 2001) I have some insight into how the story might have unfolded.
Litton Industries had AmEx cards issued to employees. It had your name on them, you were required to activate and use them, you were solely responsible for paying the balances, but the limit was set by AmEx based on Litton Industries' financial situation and thus were effectively unlimited. You were required to pay all company travel expenses with them (even charging airline tickets to them) and file for re-embursement when the trip ended (or monthly is it was long-term). Thus the employee could be on the hook for quite substantial amounts of money at the direction and for the benefit of the company.
Something like this could have happened to the poor employee.
But back to Litton Industries. They could not process a reimbursement claim (which required multiple sign-offs) within a week, it often took two (or even more). And they had a "payment cycle" that cut a check only once a month, if approval came in by the cut-off date. So if you took a one-week trip, filed immediately upon return, it was almost impossible to get the check in hand before the monthly bill was due, and thus you either had to pay the balance off out of your own personal funds, or you were hit with a late fee that the company would not reimburse for.
... the bankers who caused the problems paid for BHO's election/relection rather then being prosecuted...
The "banker" (financial institution) money went very heavily for Romney, not Obama, 3-1 in Romney's favor in fact. Obama did not prosecute the numerous (extremely rich) malefactors in the Bush Crash it is true, but their attitude is always: "Well, what are you going to do for me now?!".
How prevalent are industrial bitcoin mining operations? That is - people setting up racks of optimized servers that only run when the very lowest electricity rates are available. Does anyone know anything about this? Such an operation would not seek to hold bitcoins. but merely produce them and cash them in to collect pay the bills and make a profit in conventional currency. Of course the could hold their bitcoins, but that would be combining a separate line of business with the mining.
If the cost per bitcoin some are estimating here (~$30) is correct then this would be a compelling business opportunity. Once the servers are paid for, a crash in bitcoin value only leads one to turn the servers off until the value rises again (making running them profitable), much like oil wells that only produce when oil prices are high.
You are really this desperate to defend G. W. Bush's legacy as President? You realize that you are in effect attempting to argue that a screw-up by the French military proves that Bush is not the most incompetent person in the world. Quite apart of the logical fallacy involved here, this is just an amazingly low bar to set for Bush to clear. From a purely PR (aka "spin") aspect you should rethink your strategy here.
Gosh. Another AC who - without reading the article - knows the true obvious answer that all those Nobel laureate were to dense to see.
If you bothered to read it you would see that the fact that positrons can be emitted by other sources is precisely why they are not calling this a signature of dark matter yet. You would also see that your "explanation" holds not a single drop of water - the positron flux detected is omnidirectional and does not vary with time ruling out any sources local to the solar system, much less the Earth, as a significant contributor.
You should move on to explaining other great mysteries of science, but of course without reading anything about them first.
Did you actually read the section of the article you linked to? If you did you would have read this: "If one is willing to pay $300/kg for uranium, there is a vast quantity available in the ocean. It is worth noting that since fuel cost only amounts to a small fraction of nuclear energy total cost per kWh, and raw uranium price also constitutes a small fraction of total fuel costs, such an increase on uranium prices wouldn’t involve a very significant increase in the total cost per kWh produced."
How much uranium is in seawater? 4.6 billion tons, roughly one hundred thousand times current annual consumption.
How much can we afford to pay for uranium without driving up the cost of nuclear power significantly? Well, in a year 2.7*10^12 kwh of nuclear powered electricity are produced, with a value of something like 270 billion dollars (assuming an average price of $0.10 or so). To produce this 50,000 tons of uranium are consumed, or about $5000 worth of electricity per kilogram. Looks like paying $300 per kilogram for uranium is unlikely to seriously inconvenience the nuclear power industry.
You don't know anything about Richard Garwin, clearly. Nor do you understand how Federal funds are allocated. I could go on but that is already a lot of stupidity packed into one sentence.
Richard Garwin is the most distinguished defense scientist in the U.S., and provides scientific advice to the government (like the advice quoted in TFA). At age 85 he is unlikely to be cooking up any billion dollar projects of his own.
as we share no mitochondrial DNA and the quantity of admixture is ~%4 at most.
That would only indicate that Homo Sapien women were either promiscuous or raped by Neanderthal males, and then the women raised the offspring as their own. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down directly from the mother to the child, so it basically says that Neanderthal men were not welcome in the Homo Sapien society in general, but that cross breading still happened....
What?! The evidence is consistent with Neanderthal men being welcome in Anatomically Modern Human society, but not Neanderthal women!
This is exaggerating the evidence of social unit size differences. Neanderthal sites are smaller, but the Cromagnon sites are quite small also. It is the difference of an average group of 10 and an average group of 20. Extrapolating to major differences in social skills seems unwarranted.
There are some theories that the Neanderthals were actually quite smart, compassionate, and had a sophisticated social system....
Indeed theories that hold the reverse (that Neanderthals were in some way significantly inferior to modern humans) are actually difficult to support convincingly. Neanderthal sites are far more similar to contemporary H. s. sapiens sites than they are different, and differences that can be well supported are not generally good evidence of any sort of inferiority. The technical skills and tools and social practices of Neanderthals and modern humans are virtually identical for the same time periods. The implicit assumption of inferiority has long permeated and contaminated the interpretations of Neanderthal archaeology.
This is a theory we know is wrong. If it were true there would be lots of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (passed on by the mother to her daughters) in the modern human population. Instead there is none (http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947).
Personally, I'm more partial to the theory that we *are* Neanderthals (hybrids) and that they didn't 'die out', but were simply bred away...
This is an outdated theory (I used to like it myself though). There is evidence of gene flow between H. s. sapiens and H. s. neanderthalensis, but not very much. Theories that modern humans simply outbred them and replaced them are viable, but not ones that propose that the two species interbred to form a new single hybrid.
A key quote: "Although mitochondrial DNA from multiple Neandertals has shown that Neandertals fall outside the range of modern human variation, low-levels of gene flow cannot be excluded." In other words we definitely are not them, but may (probably do) have some of their genes.
You are right to point out the quibble of "no time to train the crew" is straining at a gnat.
But you are having some trouble in trying to swallow the camel. Project Apollo cost $200 billion in current dollars to solve a much easier problem (an 8 day trip) compared to a year-and-a-half trip with an enormously larger delta-vee requirement (if you come back). Perhaps, in a similar national level high priority crash project, like the U.S. undertook in the "space race" it could be done in not much longer than 8 years. But you are looking at something exceeding the cost of Apollo.
Yes, I know Mars One claims they have a plan for a one-way trip that will only cost 6 billion: "The six billion figure is the cost of all the hardware combined, plus the operational expenditures, plus margins." (Emphasis added.)
They also don't address the costs of maintaining the colony in perpetuity - it saves on the really hard problem of return but creates a permanent multi-billion dollar annual obligation to the Earth to keep their colony of four people alive.
In fundamental physics, we simply can't find anything that deviates from our current theories at scales smaller than a galaxy and at energies small enough to be relevant to anything except the big bang and future particle colliders.
There is still no general theory of superconductivity.
Anyway, "weirdness" you are talking about is about Quantum Mechanics. Einstein didn't like Quantum Mechanics. Today we know we was wrong by saying "god doesn't play dice".
Time slowing the faster you go is weird. Matter and energy being the same is weird. Gravity warping space and slowing time is weird. Plenty of weird stuff came from Einstein.
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Why would he bother? He has a successful company, why would he want to buy a company that burned through that much money with no noticeable product."
Let's see: according TFA - ..." and
"...about 1,000 Better Place cars are on the roads
"Sunday’s announcement left many questions unanswered, especially what will happen to its cars and charging stations. Better Place has also installed a network of stations in Denmark and has operations in Australia, the Netherlands, China, Hawaii and Japan."
And according to Wikipedia: "By mid September 2012, there were 21 operational battery-swap stations open to the public in Israel".
That may not be excessively impressive, but 1000 cars in operation, 21 charging stations in Israel, and others in six other nations is not "no noticeable product."
Although the Sea Wolf submarine project did not have this particular problem (insufficient buoyancy requiring retrofitting) - it did have the problem of starting the construction of the submarine before the design work was finished, which then delayed the project and drove up costs as the builder waited on the designers to finish their work. The cost increase for the Sea Wolf was 45%. And it is not as if the U.S. had limited experience in building submarines.
The Spanish program was projected as costing 550 million Euros per sub, if they can fix the buoyancy problem by lengthening the sub by less than 30 meters (very likely) then they will be doing better than the Sea Wolf program.
BTW - another to describe the situation is that once all of the specs were completed, the Spanish Navy discovered that it needed a bigger sub than originally planned. Many U.S. defense programs have had similar experiences. Not as scandalous sounding though.
Shouldn't that be porcine aviation? (You know, pigs flying and all that.)
...
Sorry ... hundred thousands of dead people in the decades AFTER the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and AFTER Chernobyl say something different.
...
Yes, they say they don't exist.
Please provide a citation to an actual scientific study supporting these claims. You can't. There aren't any. This is just urban folklore.
The total number of deaths attributable to the atomic bombings, but occurring after October 1945 (when the last of the acutely injured perished) is no more than about 4000 people. Nearly all were individuals that received high levels of radiation exposure close to the bomb hypocenters.
No. Companies are allowed to keep reasonable financial reserves, but the billions that Apple and other companies keep are anything but reasonable reserves, and are unprecedented. This was worked out decades ago, but they stopped enforcing it.
Amen to this. Apple is currently engaged in the largest stock buy-back in history, $60 billion so far.
In essence, with its immense cash reserves, which instead of tangibly building the business in some way, or increasing the compensation of its foreign workforce, or making its product more affordable, it is benefiting those holding tons of stock options (the execs), who will only pay low, low capital gains taxes on the wealth being transferred to them risk free.
Please remember, corporations don't have their own money, every penny they have comes from consumers.
If you raise corporate taxes, prices increase...
Because currently Apple is selling their products to us as cheaply as they can (as a public service?), and have razor thin profit margins?
The non-contract-subsidized price of an iPhone 64B is $900 (you can get it discounted to $850). The cost of parts for that phone is about $188, cost of labor $8, Apple mark-up $700 or so.
With a 350% mark-up the price of Apple products have virtually nothing to do with their costs of manufacture or doing business. They are charging every penny that they think the market will bear. In other words they are already squeezing every dollar out of the consumer that they can. If they have to pay a little more taxes on their profits, it will come out of their margin.
I think critics' low opinion of some of those authors was deserved, because while those authors were masters of world-building, they were not masters of prose style. Their use of the English language feels flat and unimaginative. In spite of the rich detail of Middle Earth, Tolkien's prose, for example, is just as much uncreative aping of English epic writing as the Book of Mormon was Joseph Smith's aping of the King James Bible.
Valid points - Tolkien's prose is uneven in quality, and parts of LOTR are quite leaden, but the delightful Hobbit, for example, is entirely free of Saxon epic styling. But Wilson's dismissal was all encompassing, and drew few distinctions among these hated fantasists.
Lewis was better, over all, than Tolkien. But Wilson's attack on Dunsany, Lovecraft, and James Branch Cabell simply shows him as a pretentious fool. The fact that the greatest writer of the Twentieth Century Jorge Luis Borges (one of those Spanish fantasists, BTW) admired Lovecraft is enough to discredit Wilson.
One of the reasons I admire Wolfe's writing of the 1970s and recommend it to my friends who "don't read science fiction", is that Wolfe's prose in The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Peace is just as powerful as anything by Proust or Nabokov. Unfortunately, Wolfe's rich feel for the English language disappeared in the 1980s and some of his recent novels and short stories sound as bad any most genre fiction.
Agreed on all points (unfortunately, on the last). The The Fifth Head of Cerberus had a powerful effect on me, ditto Peace, and especially and forever The Book of the New Sun, which will in the fullness of time be remembered as a landmark work of the Twentieth Century. Soldier in the Mist is quite good, but with the odd There are Doors his genius seems to start to fading. I started the Book of the Long Sun but after the first volume, I did not want to be disappointed again.
As Peter S. Beagle, and others, have observed in essays - the prejudice against fantastic literature in academia and "serious" criticism is an anomaly that arose in the early 20th Century, and is largely confined to the U.S. Throughout almost all of history literature based heavily on fantastic elements was the norm, and was commonly accepted even after "realistic" literature became a mainstream phenomenon.
The prejudice is very ethnocentric. "Magic realism" from Latin America is lionized, but the literary equivalent by an English speaking writer is ignored or worse. The very influential critic Edmund Wilson, prominent beginning around 1920, is the apparent source of this prejudice - he despised Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft - really all recent or contemporary fantastic literature being written in English (if it was old enough, Swift for example, it might get a pass).
Sometimes a mainstream author will turn out a bland effort in this direction which gets praise, but no one seriously writing in the fantastic literature vein ever does.
Having has to suffer for a time working for a company that had something of a scam going regarding employees and AmEx cards (Litton Industries, absorbed by Northrop-Grumman in 2001) I have some insight into how the story might have unfolded.
Litton Industries had AmEx cards issued to employees. It had your name on them, you were required to activate and use them, you were solely responsible for paying the balances, but the limit was set by AmEx based on Litton Industries' financial situation and thus were effectively unlimited. You were required to pay all company travel expenses with them (even charging airline tickets to them) and file for re-embursement when the trip ended (or monthly is it was long-term). Thus the employee could be on the hook for quite substantial amounts of money at the direction and for the benefit of the company.
Something like this could have happened to the poor employee.
But back to Litton Industries. They could not process a reimbursement claim (which required multiple sign-offs) within a week, it often took two (or even more). And they had a "payment cycle" that cut a check only once a month, if approval came in by the cut-off date. So if you took a one-week trip, filed immediately upon return, it was almost impossible to get the check in hand before the monthly bill was due, and thus you either had to pay the balance off out of your own personal funds, or you were hit with a late fee that the company would not reimburse for.
I did not stick around there for long.
... the bankers who caused the problems paid for BHO's election/relection rather then being prosecuted...
The "banker" (financial institution) money went very heavily for Romney, not Obama, 3-1 in Romney's favor in fact. Obama did not prosecute the numerous (extremely rich) malefactors in the Bush Crash it is true, but their attitude is always: "Well, what are you going to do for me now?!".
How prevalent are industrial bitcoin mining operations? That is - people setting up racks of optimized servers that only run when the very lowest electricity rates are available. Does anyone know anything about this? Such an operation would not seek to hold bitcoins. but merely produce them and cash them in to collect pay the bills and make a profit in conventional currency. Of course the could hold their bitcoins, but that would be combining a separate line of business with the mining.
If the cost per bitcoin some are estimating here (~$30) is correct then this would be a compelling business opportunity. Once the servers are paid for, a crash in bitcoin value only leads one to turn the servers off until the value rises again (making running them profitable), much like oil wells that only produce when oil prices are high.
You are really this desperate to defend G. W. Bush's legacy as President? You realize that you are in effect attempting to argue that a screw-up by the French military proves that Bush is not the most incompetent person in the world. Quite apart of the logical fallacy involved here, this is just an amazingly low bar to set for Bush to clear. From a purely PR (aka "spin") aspect you should rethink your strategy here.
Gosh. Another AC who - without reading the article - knows the true obvious answer that all those Nobel laureate were to dense to see.
If you bothered to read it you would see that the fact that positrons can be emitted by other sources is precisely why they are not calling this a signature of dark matter yet. You would also see that your "explanation" holds not a single drop of water - the positron flux detected is omnidirectional and does not vary with time ruling out any sources local to the solar system, much less the Earth, as a significant contributor.
You should move on to explaining other great mysteries of science, but of course without reading anything about them first.
There is enough accessible Thorium and Uranium to power our civilisation at current levels until the sun kills the earth.
Care to back up that claim with solid data? because many experts would disagree with that assessment on uranium. and thorium reactors are still experimental.
Did you actually read the section of the article you linked to? If you did you would have read this: "If one is willing to pay $300/kg for uranium, there is a vast quantity available in the ocean. It is worth noting that since fuel cost only amounts to a small fraction of nuclear energy total cost per kWh, and raw uranium price also constitutes a small fraction of total fuel costs, such an increase on uranium prices wouldn’t involve a very significant increase in the total cost per kWh produced."
How much uranium is in seawater? 4.6 billion tons, roughly one hundred thousand times current annual consumption.
How much can we afford to pay for uranium without driving up the cost of nuclear power significantly? Well, in a year 2.7*10^12 kwh of nuclear powered electricity are produced, with a value of something like 270 billion dollars (assuming an average price of $0.10 or so). To produce this 50,000 tons of uranium are consumed, or about $5000 worth of electricity per kilogram. Looks like paying $300 per kilogram for uranium is unlikely to seriously inconvenience the nuclear power industry.
A lazy and ignorant comment.
You don't know anything about Richard Garwin, clearly. Nor do you understand how Federal funds are allocated. I could go on but that is already a lot of stupidity packed into one sentence.
Richard Garwin is the most distinguished defense scientist in the U.S., and provides scientific advice to the government (like the advice quoted in TFA). At age 85 he is unlikely to be cooking up any billion dollar projects of his own.
as we share no mitochondrial DNA and the quantity of admixture is ~%4 at most.
That would only indicate that Homo Sapien women were either promiscuous or raped by Neanderthal males, and then the women raised the offspring as their own. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down directly from the mother to the child, so it basically says that Neanderthal men were not welcome in the Homo Sapien society in general, but that cross breading still happened....
What?! The evidence is consistent with Neanderthal men being welcome in Anatomically Modern Human society, but not Neanderthal women!
This is exaggerating the evidence of social unit size differences. Neanderthal sites are smaller, but the Cromagnon sites are quite small also. It is the difference of an average group of 10 and an average group of 20. Extrapolating to major differences in social skills seems unwarranted.
There are some theories that the Neanderthals were actually quite smart, compassionate, and had a sophisticated social system....
Indeed theories that hold the reverse (that Neanderthals were in some way significantly inferior to modern humans) are actually difficult to support convincingly. Neanderthal sites are far more similar to contemporary H. s. sapiens sites than they are different, and differences that can be well supported are not generally good evidence of any sort of inferiority. The technical skills and tools and social practices of Neanderthals and modern humans are virtually identical for the same time periods. The implicit assumption of inferiority has long permeated and contaminated the interpretations of Neanderthal archaeology.
This is a theory we know is wrong. If it were true there would be lots of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (passed on by the mother to her daughters) in the modern human population. Instead there is none (http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947).
Personally, I'm more partial to the theory that we *are* Neanderthals (hybrids) and that they didn't 'die out', but were simply bred away...
This is an outdated theory (I used to like it myself though). There is evidence of gene flow between H. s. sapiens and H. s. neanderthalensis, but not very much. Theories that modern humans simply outbred them and replaced them are viable, but not ones that propose that the two species interbred to form a new single hybrid.
Consider this recent article: http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947 .
A key quote: "Although mitochondrial DNA from multiple Neandertals has shown that Neandertals fall outside the range of modern human variation, low-levels of gene flow cannot be excluded." In other words we definitely are not them, but may (probably do) have some of their genes.
It is all about verifiable, repeatable experiments - Oh Anonymous Moron.
Tell me how those N-Rays are working out for you. (Google it.)
You are right to point out the quibble of "no time to train the crew" is straining at a gnat.
But you are having some trouble in trying to swallow the camel. Project Apollo cost $200 billion in current dollars to solve a much easier problem (an 8 day trip) compared to a year-and-a-half trip with an enormously larger delta-vee requirement (if you come back). Perhaps, in a similar national level high priority crash project, like the U.S. undertook in the "space race" it could be done in not much longer than 8 years. But you are looking at something exceeding the cost of Apollo.
Yes, I know Mars One claims they have a plan for a one-way trip that will only cost 6 billion: "The six billion figure is the cost of all the hardware combined, plus the operational expenditures, plus margins." (Emphasis added.)
But they also claim "This plan is built upon existing technologies available from proven suppliers." apparently blissfully unaware of the fact that (as rudy_wayne posted above) that no one knows how to build a workable re-entry system http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-getting-large-payloads-to-the-surface-of-the-red-planet/ . I guess if you wave away all of the really hard problems its all quite easy.
They also don't address the costs of maintaining the colony in perpetuity - it saves on the really hard problem of return but creates a permanent multi-billion dollar annual obligation to the Earth to keep their colony of four people alive.
Einstein appears in The Simpsons. As a zombie. Since he is dead there aren't too many other opportunities for him to show up in Springfield.
In fundamental physics, we simply can't find anything that deviates from our current theories at scales smaller than a galaxy and at energies small enough to be relevant to anything except the big bang and future particle colliders.
There is still no general theory of superconductivity.
>
Anyway, "weirdness" you are talking about is about Quantum Mechanics. Einstein didn't like Quantum Mechanics. Today we know we was wrong by saying "god doesn't play dice".
Time slowing the faster you go is weird. Matter and energy being the same is weird. Gravity warping space and slowing time is weird. Plenty of weird stuff came from Einstein.