Where is the Table?

Backreaction: Experiments with GPS

The biggest mystery in the universe is clearly the male brain. What happens if you leave my husband alone with a GPS receiver? He’ll spend several hours measuring the position of a table. For what I’m concerned the table is on the patio. Besides this, I’m every product developers nightmare since instead of reading manuals or tutorials I randomly click or push buttons till I’ve figured out what they’re good for. That’s a good procedure to find out every single way to crash the system, but usually not particularly efficient to actually use the device or software. Stefan instead goes and reads the manual!

GPS receivers are the ultimate guy toy, since it’s an electronic gadget which pretty much guarantees you’ll never have to stop to ask for directions.

Wrong Metric, Sir

SciGuy: What is more important: Energy or healthcare?

What is clear is that Americans and American companies value health care over energy by at least a factor of five, and perhaps much more.

That’s pretty incredible considering that, in the modern world, energy is nearly as essential as good health care, and that substantial energy research is considered a requisite to meet future needs.

Or so I would argue.

I think SciGuy makes a mistake her in equating dollars spent with importance. I think one has to consider phase space and pregnant women.

There’s an adage in research that it takes one woman nine months to produce a baby. If one gathers nine women, they will not be able to produce a baby in one month. Research takes time, and there is a point at which adding more money to the problem does not yield improved results — you only benefit if there are new lines of research to be pursued, i.e. the “phase space” of the problem can’t be restricting you. Medical research has lots of problems that can be investigated, and a large number of drugs that can be researched, as well as improvements in diagnostic equipment.