The LocalTalk connector was not proprietary at all. It was RS-422, on a mini-DIN 9 plug, which could therefore support plain old RS-232 by grounding one side of the differential RS-422 pair. However, RS-422 is much nicer, since it is differential, and even then the system could support greater than 1 Mb/second from the RS-422 driver, although LocalTalk ran at 250 kb/s. The protocol was derived from HDLC. It worked quite nicely, before everyone got ethernet.

OK, physicist mode on...

There are two, critically different velocities of electromagnetic radiation, and you conflated them.

First is the phase velocity, which is v_phi = frequency * wavelength (or v_phi = omega/k, where omega = 2 pi f, and k = 2 pi / wavelength), and is the velocity with which the wavefront of a monochromatic, continuous wave advances, and can be a number greater or less than the speed of light, since a continuous wave doesn't carry information. It can even go all the way to infinity in the case of a wave in a plasma right at the plasma frequency.

The second velocity is v_group, which is the derivative d(omega)/d(k). This is the velocity at which a pulse (formed by a group of waves of differing frequency) advances. It is never greater than the speed of light in vacuum. Note, weirdly, that the index of refraction is defined as c/v_phi, but that this isn't actually the right number to figure out how long it takes a pulse to get through a fiber (or other medium other than vacuum). It's the dispersion d(omega)/d(k) that sets the group velocity and the speed of information propagation.

Altadena, especially, had lots of eucalyptus. Anyone not familiar with it needs to know that eucalyptus trees have two critical properties: 1) they grow fast, and with lots of tiny branches and 2) the wood is so oily it is nearly explosive. At least, as of 40 years ago (when I lived in Pasadena), that was one of the very common trees up the hill in Altadena. People who knew what they were doing spent their lives trimming them to thin them out, knowing how flammable they were.

I suspect that the reconstruction of Altadena will involve a lot fewer of these trees.

I look forward to your lyrical software documentation, accompanied by flute. :-)

"It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere. We're all alone, more or less" ... Red Dwarf theme song

Actually, some of the warnings are much funnier than that. I've seen:
"Substance x is known to cause cancer in the state of California"
I don't know if this is the result of bad editing of the warning by some copy editor, or if this is accepted alternative text. It's hilarious, if read literally.

s/manganese/magnesium/ ?

Other than this, I can't really say more, since I am one of the remaining, non-CHIPS people at NIST. It looks like $30B is already heading out the door, and to some projects we really want to have happen.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nist.gov%2Fchips%2Ffun...

Add on to previous comment: The $280B was the infrastructure package and everything else put together. CHIPS was (only?) $50B.

There is a big difference between approving the money and spending it. The management of the $50B was assigned the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which was a $1B agency, with a lot of work already on its plate. Do you know how hard it is to manage that much money? All of our scientists who wanted to do any management have been vacuumed up by the CHIPS sub-agency, and are working as hard as they can to figure out appropriate uses of the money. Unfortunately, that also means the rest of the agency is desperately shorthanded to do what it was already supposed to be doing.

Most of the money hasn't gone anywhere, yet. Also, the spend period was 5 years, not instantaneous.

The real question is how deep the solar wind implantation has been stirred into the regolith. Direct penetration depth of solar wind protons is in the few-cm range. Mixing due to micrometeorite impact, which is what creates the regolith, stirs stuff down further, but the hydrogen-rich layer might be very thin. The possibility of 5% water weight is stunning, but to me that implies that it may all be very near the surface. That makes it easy to mine, of course, but means the total supply may be limited.

In the far field (for distances much more than the Rayleigh length past the diffracted beam waist), lasers still look like inverse square. However, the effective antenna gain (and hence ERP) can be huge for a laser, which is why it works so well. The divergence angle of the diffraction cone can be microradians for a reasonable size exit optic. That corresponds, to an antenna gain of the order of 120 dB ( (10-6 radians)^2 ). Note I am intentionally ignoring extra factors of 4pi here, just for round numbers.

So, does anyone else here remember the QNX Neutrino demo disk that was released around Y2K? On a single 1.44 MB floppy, they had a bootable version of QNX with basic command line stuff, AND a web browser. As I remember, it would boot on a DEC Alpha (PowerPC), although there may have been other versions, too.

On top of other notes about the questionable titling of the article, there is this. Since the late 1970s, people have been using phase-conjugate optical systems which really do time-reverse a light beam. You can run a coherent light beam through a scatterer (ground glass, e.g.), phase conjugate it, and reflect it back through the same scatterer, and it will come out unscattered! This is used in very high power lasers to undo thermal distortions in the rods, as well as correct for dispersive effects in fiber optics. It's very cute.

Do you have a citation for this? According to the IAEA chart of the nuclides: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww-nds.iaea.org%2Frelns... very little is known about U241. That chart is a fairly definitive summary of the current state of data.