Not how I meant for it to come across, my bad. I agree—you need to encourage kids to do amazing things, and in that respect, I suppose this story does some good. I’m not sure the Apple comparison is fair, but I see where you’re coming from. I’ve known kids as young as the kid discussed here who have done amazing…

Agreed, I’m with you there. Those kind of people are rare indeed, and I wish we had more of them.

and Howard’s wrong... ;)

I’m sure this kid is extremely intelligent, and no doubt driven as heck. However, stories like this do a disservice to the kids who don’t get fame by building fusors in their sheds, but keep their heads down, go to a top tier universities, and become tenured professors who go on to do real science to help humanity.…

A probe on the edge of the solar system is about to obtain detailed data about the surface of pluto, and meanwhile, uneducated religious fanatics are hell bent on returning millions of people in the middle east to the middle ages. For all our intelligence, we’re still the scared, superstitious, stupid species that…

Excellent post Sarah—it’s nice to have someone with a strong technical background writing for Gizmodo.

It is the nature of science, you’re right. When you deal with p values and confidence intervals, there is the implicit understanding that there is some percent chance that those results are simply the product of chance, and that the null hypothesis is indeed true.

It’s probably water at about 0 ºC, or 32 ºF.

The discussion doesn’t have to be about Tesla, but the notion that full-sized EVs won’t catch on because Tesla currently sells a performance vehicle aimed at the S-Class market seems a bit of a stretch...

The sad matter of fact is that that people who know very little about a subject tend to overestimate their ability to comprehend it.

You’re right Zippitydont—it’s that kind of certitude that tends to get people into trouble when making predictions. My bad. I think my main point is simply that many people (particularly politicians who make decisions that steer our energy future) tend to overlook the technical details (and longer term prospects) that…

I think people a 100 yrs from now would smile to themselves at a comment like that. They would think about the 10GW fusion power plants recently built, and laugh at the naivety of the green movement at the turn of the 21st century (like we laugh at turn of the 20th century predictions)