Goliath Acquired David

They are precisely incompatible because Blockchains are all about programmatic, self-enforcing arbitration. In a correctly-functioning Blockchain, there is no entry-point for non-permissioned humans to meddle with outcomes. This is not a bug but a feature.

Ethereum keeps hard-forking and has thereby undermined its legitimacy. The premise that code is law is central to Blockchains. The necessary corollary is that human-law is irrelevant within the space of outcomes on the Blockchain.

In Bitcoin, no human court can prohibit a transaction from going through, or being valid. Bitcoins cannot be confiscated by fiat. Full stop. Blockchains were designed to create a purer, more mechanical and reliable arbitration than the courts can give.

> In a correctly-functioning Blockchain, there is no entry-point for non-permissioned humans to meddle with outcomes. This is not a bug but a feature.

How about that DAO, eh. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-dao.html

1nm carbon nanotubes... I doubt these can be produced at macroscopic scale.

Moreover the difference between 1.05 and 1.06 nm drastically affected freezing point. I don't think these can be built, en masse, to such precision.

Well, they wouldn't have to be made with precision provided there's an easy way to separate them. Which is still difficult but could be doable.

> Moreover the difference between 1.05 and 1.06 nm drastically affected freezing point.

I think the author might have misread something. The Van der Waals radius of a carbon atom is only 0.17 nm, so the radius of a single tube can't vary in steps of 0.01 nm. Maybe this just referred to the average tube radius?

Hmm. A tube is composed of many carbon atoms in a ring. Add one more atom, you increase the circumference by 0.34nm but the radius only by 0.34/2pi=0.054nm. So still looks infeasible.

Perhaps at this time.

People don't even understand how important materials science is. All they think about is digital/hype technologies.

This paper looks a lot like a materials hype paper. The mathematics for the design process are interesting, but the material/actuator itself looks pretty poor.

The actuation forces are incredibly low - if i've eyeballed correctly - around 10 micro newtons and it requires a large bulky magnetic field setup, only shown in the supplementary section.

One obvious example is the development of semiconductors and the subsequent technologies.

The country is simply too large to physically secure everything.

We'd have to become a police state to even begin to protect every potentially sensitive area. You can kill people with almost everything and it is infeasible to prevent it altogether by force of arms.

Should the state really presume to sway cultural trends? It seems strikingly arrogant and likely to be counterproductive.

Cython is really fantastic. It makes you realize that there is often not a huge reason to leave Python if that's what you are comfortable with. The community has simply produced so much.

Log is often used because it makes linear proportional returns. It makes the most sense when gains are considered derived from the principal, ie proportional returns from capital. See an example below.

As others have mentioned, maximizing log is equivalent to maximizing the underlying.

But when considering returns on accruing capital, a 20% loss is much worse than a 20% gain is good, and similarly a 100% gain is much less good than a 100% loss is bad. This is correctly captured by taking the log. In the case where money is simply accrued from some external source, and their is no proportional return, log isn't necessary.