anusinha

I've been thinking about a "digital chemistry set" for a while. It's something that would certainly be fun to play with and that we have all the information to do--chemical reactions follow established rules and exceptions could be hardcoded in.

I've thought about an organic chemistry chemical program. If you're not familiar, a huge component of organic chemistry consists of memorizing and understanding reactions and their mechanisms, and reactivity of organic molecules. A digital lab where you could mix arbitrary compounds together and see what happens could be a powerful educational tool suitable for supplemental use with another ochem course/self study.

Transplant technology has been around for a while, but only in the past decade have we started to get better at it. This is a function of improved training, improved facilities, experienced doctors, and better post-operation treatment. It had been theorized to work in the past, but only now are we able to implement it. As someone else noted, Bone marrow transplants are among the most difficult transplants.

Someone I know who lost a significant amount of weight told me that his best source of motivation was measuring his weight every day and plotting it.

> spending my time on engineering and research of my own..

In some fields, this is very easy. It's easy to buy a bunch of cluster time on Amazon EC2 or something and run lots of machine learning/other research applications. This is awesome and is one of the great things moving the field forwards.

It is much more difficult in the physical and life sciences where starting out costs are extreme. Many great ideas do not become reality because of how expensive starting a company in those fields are and how difficult it is to raise money in those fields. Lots of VCs are cutting funding in these areas because of the comparatively high risk and pharmaceuticals are slashing R&D budgets in order to pick up smaller companies and secure rights to compounds, etc. Funding is very difficult in these fields and the framework of academia is sometimes the only reasonable way to carry out original research.

At MIT, 6.00 is an introductory course. Most EECS majors do not take it. It's intended for people interested in EECS but who do not have much prior experience. It is in no way an easy course though---it's fast paced and covers a large amount of material. The only thing "introductory" is the minimal background assumed.

A lot of the computer science classes already have a lot of material in a ready to go digital format so it's easier to get them online. The others will follow, but it's harder to convert all the material from a "brick and mortar" class to a digital class of the same quality. There also might be a perceived need or demand for computer science classes.

6.00x looks more theoretical and might teach you more computer science.

CS50x looks less theoretical and more of a survey of different programming languages and patterns. It's a good "get up and running in several different ways" class.

Or many of the other promising and fascinating technologies currently being developed. Not all of them will work, but a few innovations will go a long way to fixing the energy problem.

This is a strong reason to pick devices that let you use a microSD (or similar, hopefully non-proprietary) card for extra storage. I will never run out of memory on my smartphone for that reason, since most "bulk data" that I encounter is music, photos, etc.

This isn't very smart.

Most delays and jams and other various issues drivers deal with are a result of human error. Suppose a driver on a highway slows down because {they see something interesting, their kid acts up, life happens}. This makes the car immediately behind them slow down. And the car behind that slows down. It's been shown that this forms a wave that propagates backwards at 12 mph or so. The fact is, this delay is caused by a human mistake/issue.

In a world in which every car drives "optimally", or at least without many of the human error mistakes that currently are made, many traffic jams will be a thing of the past. Many issues will cease to exist any any issues that do exist will be ameliorated and fixed by a machine that can do it better than most humans (or at least, the average joe) can. Perhaps one will be able to drive at the speed limit the entire distance from source to sink if the traffic grid is integrated into the network.

The transition to the post-driver road, however, will be difficult.

UPS could also benefit greatly if they play their bargaining game right and form a good partnership. Breaking into shipping is difficult, even for a company as large as Amazon.

incremental progress and changes can come from this. but nothing truly revolutionary will come from this strategy.

"Cancer Research" and "Energy Crisis" seem to be pretty good sources of funding these days. A lot of labs have small projects/applications in these two fields since it often greatly helps them get funding.

I would not be surprised if they integrated igoogle services into google plus somehow. perhaps a split newsfeed+widgets service. it would be an effective way to drive a nontrivial amount of traffic to google plus.

It would have to pass through a fairly hydrophobic (the pore) layer. The water can barely get through since it's polar but uncharged; most metals in solution are charged ions and wouldn't be able to pass through the barrier.

This article is long and makes a lot of good points about things that you can gain from receiving doctorate. It sort of obscures one point that I think is the most important thing.

You learn an incredible amount about what you're studying and what you're interested in, and an academic environment is where some people learn best.

OCaml is also used extensively. I believe Jane Street Capital's entire codebase is in OCaml.

git/GitHub are not for code. They are for version control. Most common applications of git are in software (since things like MS Word et al. have their own implementation of revision history within the software package), but it's not limited to such.

Suppose he comes up with a better way to build the device. It would be good practice to have all versions available, something that isn't as easy to do with a website. Additionally, his target audience is people who use vim, which probably has a reasonably large overlap with git/GitHub users.

The area in which you can show the condiments/additions of the sandwich is (approximately) one dimensional. It is defined by the line between the patty and the bun, which is fairly thin. There is really only one degree of freedom in placing food there.

it's not quite that. it's a simple tutorial on tabs, buffers, and windows, assumed at beginners.

Git is amazing but I take issue with GitHub. The point of Git is that it's a distributed and decentralized version control system and GitHub gets rid of the decentralized part of that. That is counter to what Git was designed for.

I use a private wiki that I use for storing lots of my personal information. I make a new page per idea and link to it from a bigger page. a good friend of mine keeps a giant google document of ideas and uses text to tag ideas.

The amount of energy you can store in this type of interaction is not very significant compared to other forms of solar storage. Batteries are one class of storage methods, but what's even better is to use solar energy to split water molecules and store it in molecular hydrogen and oxygen (H2 and O2). These can be recombined in a fuel cell to produce water (with no loss in molecules) and produce electricity. A much, much greater energy density, far greater than any existing battery would be in such devices.

Water-Splitting using natural sunlight is a difficult problem and many research groups at top institutions are working on it. The best known group in this field is Prof. Daniel Nocera at MIT. His research is being commercialized by the company Sun Catalytix and there are plenty of YouTube videos of him speaking and explaining his research. There are other research groups as well. The vision for the future is a distributed electrical grid. Each home or building would have a reactor on top that would contain a water-splitting catalyst producing hydrogen and oxygen gas, which can be stored indefinitely under pressure and then released into a fuel-cell device that would recombine to form water (that can be placed into the reactor) and electricity (for consumption). This would be an efficient way to capture much more of the sun's energy than current photovoltaics and is an entirely closed cycle.

Gas and oil are very slow to be regenerated. wood takes significantly less time. I wasn't clear enough originally; I really meant neutral with a short cycle duration.

This is a really misleading article. What they're referring to is placing atoms (and molecules) into states of superposition where the state can be represented as 1/sqrt(2)|left> + 1/sqrt(2)|right>. This is an important first step towards quantum computers--being able to construct entangled systems of many q-bits, but this article is really quite poor in it's description. If you're really interested in this sort of stuff, I'd suggest reading Charles Seife's book entitled _Decoding the Universe_. It's about information theory and discusses quantum computing to a certain extent. I've also heard Seth Lloyd's book Programming the Universe is very good, but I have not read it.

The tricky thing about wood is that it's carbon neutral but still (often) a bad material to use.

It's carbon neutral because when you burn it, all the CO2 released from the combustion reaction originally came from the air. But it's often a bad material to use because many forests aren't harvested in a sustainable manner. The situation is better in Europe and North America, but in many parts of the world, far more trees are cut down than are planted which is clearly a bad thing. Using it as a building material is certainly a good "sequestration" technique.

Yes, Apple employees eat food. Some of them might actually like pizza. To provide good pizza, you need to hire a pizza chef. Is this really something "that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"?

Another big problem with studying high-dimensional spaces is that you run into many configurations that simply do not make sense in three dimensions/correspond to completely nonphysical shapes. This makes it difficult to study real (3-D) structures using many parameters because results in higher dimensional spaces do not necessarily correspond to a real shape.

Basic thermodynamics: converting heat into work is inefficient. A photovoltaic can go straight from the energy of the photons (admittedly restricted to a particular band that they were designed for) with less loss.

Moore's Law in Silicon will eventually run out. This is true and is physically provable. And there are already a lot of smart minds (at Intel and at a few other companies and at many universities) developing post-silicon technologies. It is possible that we will one day shrink down to true molecular electronics using organic semiconductors or similar. As Feynman said, there's lots of room at the bottom. 3D molecular electronics are exciting for me---architectures will have to be redesigned from scratch, maybe RISCs too. It's an exciting time.

(I omit talking about quantum computing because that's currently mostly theoretical. But back in the day, Turing, Church, et al were talking about computability, etc when a real computer (von neumann architecture) did not exist yet. So maybe (I would be confident enough to say probably) down the line, we'll have a quantum computer, but it may not be soon.)