@Gerry: Increased education is the cost of modernity. If you don't like it, stop using the goods and services that are the consequence of widespread college education. Like, you know, everything invented after maybe 1975.

Granted, not everyone should need a college education, and we need to do a better job of appreciating that. As a society, we need to put more value on crafts and trades, as well as the (decreasing, but hardly disappearing) necessity of unskilled labor.

@Edward: What a testament to the rising ingenuity of american librarians, now six times more productive than they were before.

Automation is a major means by which economies grow. It's called efficiency, and it is a good thing.

Sheet cake in 30 seconds? What was the wattage on that thing?

@andrewdemian:

Now now, no need to be a pizza snob.
I have no doubt the pizza in Italy is better than you'll find here- and that the farther south you go, the better it gets :-) But not-the-best can still be pretty great, and the main things this guy is saying still hold true even in Naples.

*rough, order-of-magnitude

Sorry, typing fail

I've asked this question before- not to anyone who would be likely to know the answer, just people who I thought would find it an interesting question whose ough,der-of-magnitude answer might tell us quite a lot. Similarly, I asked questions about how much ram we have,and how many operations per second we can perform.

What I usually got back was a strong sense that somehow the brain just doesn't work this way. That memories and working memory aren't measurable in bits, and thinking isn't measurable in numbers of logical operations or big-O notation.

I'm glad to see a more numerical answer to this kind of question, even if it is (necessarily) very approximate.

Indiana was the dog's actual name, not nick name. It was Indiana Jones' nickname.

"We named the dog Indiana."
"You're named after the dog?"

@pignose baby:

I think the key phrase missing from your comment is "in our lifetime."

Astronomers are used to thinking on a longer scale than most of us. Say we discover life 20 light years away, and it takes us a thousand years to develop the technology to get there. Who cares how long it takes? It took 300 yearsto send craft to look at the moons Galileo saw, and 100,000 years to set foot on the moon our ancestors had been gazing at. Just knowing there's something else out there could have a profound affect on our technological and cultural development.

Enlarging our perspective on the universe is rarely a bad thing. It would force us to re-examine some age-old questions from a new vantage point.

@Gerry: Thanks for the correction.

I expect it's just source amnesia, though. The professor in question often made pop culture references in class, and was good about attribution. I probably just missed part of the story.

@dforest: That's funny. Reminds me of a story a professor told me about students tape recording lectures. By mid semester the whole class just left tape recorders on desks and didn't attend, so he recorded his own lectures. The class became one tape recorder talking to a bunch of other tape recorders.

Kind of like sending outsourced papers to outsourced graders.

Full disclosure would be a really bad idea. Returns contain far too much information for them to be public knowledge. Even just name, salary, and total amount paid isn't really anyone's business.

Some things I'd like to see released though. How much are different deductions and credits actually costing in terms of revenue? How much do the people claiming various deductions make?
Oh and here's a big one- a list of incomes (no identifiers) and total tax paid- federal income, capital gains, state income. Yes, state income taxes can appear on federal returns because they're deductible. That would settle a lot of arguments about taxes paid by people at various income levels.

Occasionally microwaving your sponges for 1-2 minutes will accomplish the same goal.

Is this trick base-dependent?

I know @Johnny Cat's sum-the-digits is base dependent. In base nine, 9 is writtn 10, the sum of whose digits is 1. But for multiples of 8 in base nine...
9*9-1 -> 88 in base 9. Sum the digits:
88
17
8

Although I haven't proven or seen it proved that this is generally true for 8 in base nine, or if the rule applies to "base minus one" in any (whole) base. Anyone know for sure?

Craig, that's not %, it is pounds per person per year.

So... the linked article doesn't actually contain muchinformation about how a stirling engine is *different* from a regular car engine (Otto or Diesel cycle). It mostly just explains how a heat engine works in general.

The big reasons we're not using Stirling engines everywhere: they can't change their output as quickly as a car engine needs to, and (because we've spent less time and money developing them) they cost more to build. To change that equation you need 1) fuel to be more expensive (stirling engines are sometimes used in solar thermal power, and may end up in fossil fuel power plants if coal and natural gas get expensive enough), and/or 2) a fairly constant power requirement (which would work in a serial hybrid like the Volt where the fuel charges a battery that powers the car).

Actually, a constant power requirement is good for *any* engine because it can always run at it's most efficient rate of output.