ErsatzVerkehr

This view is much more usable than the official one. Thanks!

Looks like you're right:

"1. You are welcome to post pre-submission versions or the original submitted version of the manuscript on a personal blog, a collaborative wiki or a preprint server at any time (but not subsequent pre-accept versions that evolve due to the editorial process)."

http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/confidentiality.html

... But I can see how authors, anticipating a possible Nature publication, would choose to maximize "impact" by not jumping the gun.

> the authors have not chosen to put it on the arXiv

Doesn't Nature forbid authors from uploading pre-prints to the arXiv?

http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/policy/embargo.html

...but the effective storage time of the power recycling cavity in LIGO is about 1 second. This is a rather long time by optical standards, but I'd say it's a long way from "indefinitely".

Ah... a "can of light" as a practical energy storage mechanism. I think it's safe to say that this will remain a complete fantasy for the foreseeable future.

Example: my laptop battery has an energy storage of about 100 Watt-hours = 360 kJ. Suppose we want to store the same amount of power in an optical cavity (two mirrors pointed at each other) with a length of 0.5 meter. The time required by light to make a roundtrip in this cavity is 2L/c = 3 nanoseconds. Thus the power incident on the mirror at any given instant is (360 kJ)/(3 nanoseconds) = 10^14 watts!

This power is high enough that I suspect that even the vacuum itself couldn't conduct it without strange effects (production of particles, for instance).

I'm not sure this is a useful thing to say.

Even in a vacuum, you'll have diffractive losses unless the mirrors are infinitely large.

> Since light is effect by gravity, it must have a mass

Sorry, this is completely false. Light is affected by gravity because gravity is really a curvature of spacetime.

* I guess "curvature of spacetime" is perhaps not the most satisfying explanation of why light is redshifted as it moves out of a gravitational potential well (i.e. if you shoot a laser from earth into space). Nonetheless the answer is still "because of relativity".

And just as often the names are totally arbitrary.

Mersenne primes whose exponents are themselves Mersenne primes.

Concrete is a very good insulator.

The air conditioners are, to a good approximation, just pumping energy out of the train cars that would be released anyway (i.e. the 100 Watts per passenger discussed below), plus whatever power they require themselves to run. Thus it seems very unlikely to me that train car air conditioning is a substantial contribution.

One could argue that perhaps the passengers' metabolisms are increased slightly to make up for the extra heat loss due to a cooler environment. But this has got to be totally negligible with respect to the energy dumped by a stopping train.

It sounds more crazy than cute to me.

Are you serious?

I'm not sure how good a model a heat engine provides for internal combustion. A heat engine assumes a fixed "working fluid" operating between heat reservoirs. In an internal combustion engine, there isn't strictly a "working fluid", since air and fuel are continually added, and exhaust vented away, and combustion adds energy without providing exactly a "heat reservoir".

If you assume a 2000 (kilo)calorie per day diet, you get:

2000 Kcal/day * (4.18 Joules/calorie) * (1 day/86400 seconds) = 96.75 Watts

Actually ALL of the energy is lost to heat.

A hardware problem is still a problem, though... Why would it be "written off"?

Yes, that stood out to me, too, because it is surprising and should be easily verifiable. Any Mailchimp users or employees care to comment?

Bitcoin... a monetary system that requires internet connectivity and CPU usage... in which every transaction is recorded forever and the database is replicated by all participants... is "off the grid"?

We do have the (neglected) .us domain. New York City should be .ny.ny.us

In general, anyone can edit or delete Wikipedia pages.

If you are a "notable person" then you can expect your edits to be reverted, however; on the other hand, if you are not very notable, a page about you would probably not survive very long anyway.

> They shouldn't be spying in the first place.

Should the U.S. spy agency (one of them, anyway) stop spying?

Should the U.S. disband its spy agencies?

Is there a role for "spying" in this age?

There's a big difference between a declaration and a proof.

Your idea sounds a lot like "the internet".

Mail (i.e. the envelope) is scanned for address decoding. I believe the orange barcode is an index into the database of mail pieces and associated decoded address. Although this has a completely legitimate rationale in facilitating the delivery of the mail, it's easy to see that the scanned images and mailpiece database could be archived for much longer than is needed for mail delivery only.

Disappointed that it doesn't correct "The NSA" to "NSA".

Hm, really? I think I agree that "that" is better here, but I'm not yet convinced that "which" doesn't also work.

If we truncate the sentence to "Nitpicker is a language style checker," it is still a true statement, which to me indicates that perhaps "which compares your text" is a descriptive rather than restrictive phrase.

> We live in an age where flatter, more consistent UI designs are a necessity.

Flat vs "3D" user interface elements are just a cycle of fashion.

Meh - your comment history is relatively sophomoric.