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The engineers should absolutely not shut up until they've reached some arbitrary point you care about. They seem to have done good work, have published and writ

by IanCal 7y ago

The engineers should absolutely not shut up until they've reached some arbitrary point you care about. They seem to have done good work, have published and written / worked with Lois to write an explanation more easily understandable to a lay audience which explains the background and what they've done followed by the current limitations.

hinkley 7y ago
Used to be we had TV shows, magazines and the evening news that talked about The Future, and mostly stuck to tech that was at or near the pre-production phase. Those all kinda dried up and what most of us have available in its stead is these 'breaking news' things where every bench-top experiment that got a research grant approved gets written up. This is not even remotely the same thing. Articles like this aren't talking about the near future. It's not even science fiction. It's fiction fiction. Maybe even fantasy. And I have much better authors to chose from if that's what I'm after.
- IanCal 7y ago
  This isn't fiction at all, they're describing a real world problem and the work they're doing to deal with it. > It's not even science fiction No, it's science.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    The scientific method demands replication, and we've talked an awful lot about papers being published that can't be reproduced. When it has been replicated it's theoretical science. But it's still a variant on the XKCD joke about how everything (including guns) kills cancer in vitro but that doesn't mean you can use it to cure cancer. Lab-only experiment might clue the next person into a phenomenon that can make it out of the lab. But making it news when it hits the scientific journals has been a sore subject for a lot of people, and seems like it always will be, and that it might even get worse before it gets better. We call a lot of things 'science' that haven't followed the scientific method, and it's exasperating. This is not the first time materials sciences people at UIUC have looked at self-healing materials. Twenty+ years ago they were looking at lacing concrete to repair small cracks. Really cool stuff... that has not made it out of the lab as far as I'm aware.

by IanCal 7y ago

hinkley 7y ago

Used to be we had TV shows, magazines and the evening news that talked about The Future, and mostly stuck to tech that was at or near the pre-production phase. Those all kinda dried up and what most of us have available in its stead is these 'breaking news' things where every bench-top experiment that got a research grant approved gets written up. This is not even remotely the same thing. Articles like this aren't talking about the near future. It's not even science fiction. It's fiction fiction. Maybe even fantasy. And I have much better authors to chose from if that's what I'm after.

IanCal 7y ago
This isn't fiction at all, they're describing a real world problem and the work they're doing to deal with it. > It's not even science fiction No, it's science.
- hinkley 7y ago
  The scientific method demands replication, and we've talked an awful lot about papers being published that can't be reproduced. When it has been replicated it's theoretical science. But it's still a variant on the XKCD joke about how everything (including guns) kills cancer in vitro but that doesn't mean you can use it to cure cancer. Lab-only experiment might clue the next person into a phenomenon that can make it out of the lab. But making it news when it hits the scientific journals has been a sore subject for a lot of people, and seems like it always will be, and that it might even get worse before it gets better. We call a lot of things 'science' that haven't followed the scientific method, and it's exasperating. This is not the first time materials sciences people at UIUC have looked at self-healing materials. Twenty+ years ago they were looking at lacing concrete to repair small cracks. Really cool stuff... that has not made it out of the lab as far as I'm aware.