CocoDaPuf

And are you counting the mass of the radiators in the power conversion system when you calculate that time?

He probably is. Based on what I do know about this design, I can at least make a conjecture.

This form of fusion reactor generates energy in a rather interesting way. It actually doesn't do what most electric generators do, boiling water into steam to run a turbine. This skips that whole process by recycling over 80% of the power used back into capacitors, and generating additional energy using the photoelectric effect. The key there is that it's generating electricity directly, without a turbine.

by skipping the whole steam turbine thing, you're producing a lot less heat. It's possible that the biggest source of heat generation in the whole system will be from resistance in the constantly cycling capacitors (and admittedly I have no idea how much heat that will be, could be huge).

But I am also curious about how this would work on a spacecraft. I'm wondering if this is just a power source for an ion drive, (which is significant) or if it's something different entirely...

That's actually really cool.

I will sheepishly admit that Civ V was my first Civ, but everyone makes a big deal over the 1 unit per tile thing (which is quite understandable). I think the tactical complexities of having 1 unit per tile, as well as positioning of ranged units, is one of the major hurdles that makes the AI so bad at combat (which isn't much fun). On the other hand, death stacks of 100 units on 1 tile also doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

But having some finite limit (and perhaps requiring 1 type of unit per tile) sounds like a pretty great compromise.

Why even a cube? You don't need more than 4 faces. (green, red, blue, black)

Edit: Although, now that I think about it, mechanically it might make a lot of sense to have adjacent green/red/blue sides, with the opposite 3 faces being black.

Does anyone have more context on this subject? Are schools improving? Do we have any quantifiable data to point to?

Also, could anyone give me a cultural translation for the president's response to question 2? (I'm sure it's not meant to be as passive aggressive as it reads)

Having just watched your Google tech talk, I can't help but notice an increase in the required funding for the next stage (by an order of magnitude).

I may already have a guess why that is... So is a larger number, more on the scale of other fusion projects, actually more palatable for the kind of investors you need to attract? That seems crazy.