In the US, bus rides take far more time than driving because of the very frequent stops. Where I live, many urban bus lines stop every two blocks, suggesting that there's some underlying requirement that a passenger need not walk more than a block to the bus, which I find to be an absurdly low bar. Frequent stops not only make the bus ride take longer, they shatter any hope of the vehicle being efficient, importantly including the metric of particulate emissions from brakes and tires.

The subway, where I live, when underground, stops every half mile or so. When above-ground, it starts to act like a bus, again, which, again, is absurd, and deleteriously impacts both service quality and efficiency.

Until the number of stops for buses and trams is reduced, there's no possible way to make above-ground public transportation time-efficient for passengers, even with dedicated lanes on the road.

Why the venom towards academia?

More importantly, why is this post not marked 0: Flamebait? It's an ad-hominem attack based on almost no information, and certainly not an objective assessment of the interview or the book.

Yes, office real-estate owners are suffering right now. Know who else is? Everyone who has a 401k or pension fund that's invested in REITs, which is the vast majority of them, and thus, a heapload of people with pension funds. Does that justify a hypothetical ginning-up of RTO opinion? No, but attacking real-estate owners are deeply evil is stabbing oneself (or your siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, etc) in the foot. Don't have a retirement plan yourself? Well, that's just poor planning.

Why such disdain for experts? Are you not an expert in something? Do you not have skills that rise above others in some domain? Do you think your opinion on those matters are valuable, and if so, why can't someone else have a valuable opinion on their domain of expertise? If you need legal advice, do you not seek out someone who has spent years studying the law? If you need work done on your car, do you not seek out someone with years of experience with your model? If you need heart surgery, don't you want your surgeon to have done that operation thousands of times? If you fly in a plane, don't you want the pilot to have many thousands of hours of experience?

Or do you somehow think that being an expert in some field automatically means classification as an idiot? I pity anyone who thinks that to be true, because they don't realize how much they benefit from expertise every minute of every day.

I'm always trying to sleep when aurora displays might be visible in-flight, but thanks for the fantastic idea, should insomnia ever strike.

Flying westward, I was fortunate enough once to have had a window seat with a flight path that just kissed the southern tip of Iceland or Greenland (I'm not sure which). It was a brilliantly clear day, and you could see the flow lines of the glaciers and where they calve off into the ocean. It was one of the most beautiful natural scenes I have ever seen. Praise be to $diety, indeed.

The editors fly Spirit, maybe?

It's a guess. I know someone who used to work at Spirit in their IT department (QA in particular). After working there for a while, he emphatically told me to fly any other airline.

Patrick Winston, one of the fathers of classical AI, was known for famously, and derisively, predicting that we would have a microprocessor in every door knob, thanks to the microelectronics revolution. Thankfully, he was mostly wrong as even IoT didn't get quite that far. But it sure feels like AI is going in that direction.

Ferchrissakes, why do we need an AI to autogroup our browser tabs? I mean, WTF?

Yes, it was similar to that, except it was, somehow, an integral part of the laptop itself.

It was definitely weird, but no weirder than things we've seen more recently, like Google Glass.

I recall someone visiting my PhD laboratory from IBM. Never caught their name, but it could have been David Hill, because he had a laptop with a special fold-out mechanism and harness that allowed you to wear it around your neck and type while standing with nearly-natural arm and hand position on the keyboard. He said something about it being a prototype of which he had only 1000 made. I never saw one of them again.

Read Ignition!, an excellent and entertaining history of the development of liquid rocket fuel by John D. Clark (one of the main protagonists of the field), with the truly excellent forward by Isaac Asimov that includes the following excerpt:

Search for a PDF, and you'll find it. I've had the fortune to meet a number of scientists cut from the same cloth as Dr. Clark, and they are among my favorite people. I'm sorry I never had a chance to meet him.

Any sort of combustion-level heat in the presence of nitrogen and oxygen creates lots of messy NOx byproducts (that are all atmospheric pollutants), so, yeah, unlikely to be a pure N6 -> 3(N2) reaction without at least restricting its decomposition environment to exclude O2.

My father designed instruments to measure atmospheric concentrations of NOx (and I wrote much of the software for them) for one of the biggest manufacturers of things like that. He explained the chemistry to me years ago, and NOx pollutants are nearly unavoidable in the presence of O2.

Have you followed-through and seen what Destin is charging for that knick-knack? Yes, it seems to be a nicely-designed grill brush. But it is a frelling grill brush. It doesn't need to be high-tech.

And it most certainly doesn't need to cost over $75 when a Chinesium version is $20.

Thinking of the void as an analogy to a gas is misleading, that's why your supposition doesn't work.

The universe is expanding, everywhere, as far as we can tell. Without any evidence to the contrary (and a fair bit of evidence supporting it), the expansion is constant, everywhere, and is described by a value called, you guessed it, the Hubble Constant. Most recently, however, a handful of different measurements have suggested two disparate values for the Hubble Constant, resulting in what's known as the Hubble Tension ("tension" because the two values appear to be being measured correctly, but are not the same).

The idea in this paper, as far as I understand it, is that there are large-scale fluctuations in mass distribution, and we happen to be in a local minimum compared to the average across the universe, thus a local void. Since the Universe isn't filled with a gas under pressure (at least to first approximation), there isn't a grand rushing-in to fill that void. Rather the opposite: the relatively higher density elsewhere is pulling harder by its larger gravity than the mass in our local neighborhood, creating a local anomaly in the large-scale gravitational field, pulling us outward. This local anomaly appears as a local increase to the Hubble constant, adding on to the underlying Hubble expansion. We are, locally, expanding slightly faster than the Universal average.

This local effect might explain the two measurements for the Hubble Constant, one in our region of the Universe which is affected by the local paucity of mass, and one across greater expanses of the Universe where the lumpy distribution of mass is evened out by the law of large numbers.

I read the article to see why black holes in particular would be a useful way of determining position in space, rather than, say, a handful of stars.

The answer is that they aren't just using any black holes, but the ultra-massive black holes at the center of galaxies which spew lots of radiation from their accretion discs, so are bright in radio frequencies, and are far away and have limited self-motion since they are at the center of their galaxies, so are stable from our vantage point.

Someone correct me if I got that wrong.

He's lying through his teeth. Revenue management has used ML for a loooong time to set things like price of different fare buckets, number of seats released to different fare buckets, exactly when seats are released to specific fare buckets, how many seats to hold back, how many instrument-supported upgrades to allow (e.g., upgrade certificates), how many complementary upgrades to allow, etc., forget things like schedule and route planning, and so forth. All three of the big US airlines are already using dynamic pricing on reward tickets such that you get a different price if you're logged in to their web site versus doing it anonymously.

So, again, lying through his teeth.

Succeeds, or causes a different morbidity to the patient, or worse.

I mean, you can inject tuberculin toxin into a tumor too, or radioactive thallium, or any of the vast suite of toxic concoctions, but it might not work out so well for the rest of the patient. Especially if you call yourself an inventor, instead of a medical scientist, with the level of training and knowledge expected for each.

I don't know why anyone would allow notifications on their phone (or their computer).

My time is not available to be interrupted for marketing outreach or other drivel. If it were, there would be a substantial payment required, because of the interference. When I want to know if there is a message to be read, I'll have a look at an appropriate time of my choosing.

Anyone who allows themselves to be bombarded by New! On Sale! Hi! Remember Us! OMG! messages in any medium does not value their time.