rejuvenile

He does point to concrete flaws by linking to this article: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/19/3416369/538-clim...

He does not rehash them for brevity.

Krugman does, in fact, link to more detailed criticisms in his article, specifically this: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/19/3416369/538-clim...

This isn't at all new in the world of mechanical engineering. Devices like the SpaceMouse (http://www.3dconnexion.com/) have been around for decades.

What is new is the Leap Motion device Elon plugged into the workstation. All of the fanciness of this UI can be attributed to the Leap Motion, which has generally been available for about a month.

So Elon plugged in a Leap Motion into software which is already programmed to use a Space Mouse, which took all of about ten seconds, then made a video and published it. What a publicity whore.

He should refrain from stunts like this, lest people get the impression that every advance at Tesla and SpaceX is, in fact, something invented elsewhere and opportunistically seized upon with as little effort as this took.

Perhaps you would benefit from a scheme where each word were assigned a standardized color based on its hash.

The tup build system also does this.

I wonder what the efficiency numbers are. The retrofit will add weight to the car, but won't remove any in the form of a lighter engine. There is also no regenerative breaking, and presumably no way to disengage the engine to run purely on electric power. I also wonder, speculatively, if the power assist will interact degenerately with the existing automatic transmission--perhaps running the car in a less than optimally efficient gear.

I am not an expert in functional languages, but I reason about it (that is, the question "Are FP languages inherently slow?", not the article) in the following way. I am curious to know if this reasoning is, well, reasonable.

- CPUs are inherently not functional. They are imperative, as they are Turing machines. They don't speak high-level math.

- Therefore, programs written in a functional language must always be translated into imperative code for execution. Compare this with an imperative language where the compiler need not perform super-fancy translation.

- If the problem can be mapped efficiently to machine code by the compiler, the functional program is fast; otherwise, it may be slow. Either way, it may be very hard to know what is going on behind the scenes.

- This is not always a lose; sometimes the compiler can perform extensive optimizations because it speaks math, and the functional language will win handily.

- Writing in an imperative language, you always know how your program will behave; however, you lose the opportunity to have the compiler deduce a better way (assuming there is a better way) by writing in a functional language.

- But if there is no better way, you have the opportunity to make the execution very fast by modeling the imperative solution around the constraints of the hardware.

Of course, there are other dimensions to performance, among them programmer productivity and number of defects.

Aerogels can have a surface area of ~2,500 m2 g-1, which is incredibly high.

I wonder if this material, being made of carbon and likely having a similarly high surface area, would make a good capacitor.

I used to make aerogels (a related class of materials) in high school; allow me to give a (hopefully accurate) layperson's overview.

Aerogels formerly held the record for least dense solid. They're not gels, but they're called aerogels because they're made from gels. As the name "aero" implies, they're mostly air, giving them incredible strength-to-weight ratios and insulating properties. Silica aerogels are translucent and quite amazing to hold; it's like holding a cloud.

Aerogels are made from colloids (a.k.a. gels), which are long chains of polymers formed in water. Free-floating around in the water, they form very long, intricate, 3-D maze-like structures. If you've ever made JELL-O, you've made (and eaten) a colloid. It’s the intricate structure of the colloid which keeps the suspended water from spilling out.

Silica aerogels are formed by removing the water from a silica gel, leaving only the maze like structure behind. This structure is very delicate, and if you attempt to evaporate the water out near room temperature/pressure, the capillary action of water will collapse the structure like a dried out jellyfish. However, if you heat and pressurize the system past the critical point, the water becomes a supercritical liquid and it can be removed without pulling the rest of the material inwards.

It appears that what they’ve done here is similar, except they use a multi-step process to deposit carbon on the colloid, then remove the colloid completely, leaving nothing but a carbon maze. I presume they can't make colloids out of carbon directly, hence the multistep process.