There's a Javascript library by Andrew Plotkin for this sort of thing that handles 'a/an' and capitalization and leaves your code less repetitive, etc.

the salient example of Einstein

Better examples of outsider-scientists from around then include Oliver Heaviside and Ramanujan

Again, I don't care whether the person remained an outsider for their entire life; all they need to have done is to have made a contribution while outside. Thus Einstein in the patent office fully counts.

Moreover, it is worth noting that Ramanujan was brought to England by the ultra-established G.H. Hardy, and even Heaviside was ultimately made a Fellow of the Royal Society. So even they became "insiders" eventually, at least in important senses.

While [negative selection] filters out some good people, it probably does not reject the very best, otherwise we would see an occasional example of someone making a significant discovery outside academia.

I predict that we will indeed see this before too long, now that we have the internet; and it will thus turn out that some of the best people were being filtered out. Access to information and social support/reinforcement is a huge limiting factor.

And of course, if you're willing to look a century back instead of just a half-century, you find the salient example of Einstein -- who didn't even have the internet, but still managed to advance science from outside the "establishment" (which was a sizable apparatus in his time and place, just as it is in ours).

I think it's in Chapter 12 of Drexler's Nanosystems, which may be worth citing regardless. ETA: or to read about it online, Chapter 11 of his MIT dissertation linked at the top.

Great post on a very important topic.

One suggestion: pictures would help a lot here. Norvig's AIMA has some very nice illustrations in ch 16 (I think)

P(p)=2x; in the second, P(p)=2-2x

Not sure how you worked this out. Not clear what X is

Apparently .24nm is twice the Van der Waals radius and .1nm is twice the Bohr radius. I'm not sure which one has a better case for being called the "true radius".

You're thinking of "nanites", I'm pretty sure.

Isn't an H atom more like 0.1nm in diameter? Of course it's fuzzy.

I agree with steven0461's criticisms. Drexler outlines a computer design giving a lower bound of 10^16 instructions/second/watt.

Should there be a ref to http://e-drexler.com/d/07/00/1204TechnologyRoadmap.html ?

Quibbling about words: "atom by atom" seems to have caused some confusion with some people (taking it literally as defining how you build things when the important criterion is atomic precision). Also "nanobots" was coined in a ST:TNG episode, IIRC, and I'm not sure if people in the field use it.

I recently tried drinking oil for the Shangri-La diet and it made me want to puke; is there some tasty preparation you recommend?

My headaches mostly went away with daily flaxseed oil or fish oil. I have no particular reason to expect you'd see the same, but it's easy to try. I take 1 or 2 tablespoons of flaxseed oil per day.