statements that are ~50% true... this is actually pretty hard, mine some dataset for statistical info?

generally, I would look into RDF, (protege and topbraid composer free will let you poke around for free without knowing the data format)

US 2000 Census in RDF

Freebase has all manner of data in RDF

http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/ public data sets, not all in RDF but "it's more important that the data have structure" and all that

cancer stats

Thanks for explanation. Now my model is that you consider carbon nanotubes very important technology for increasing computational power (more than many other hardware-related technologies), so they are also a very important component in calculating Singularity timeline. Makes sense, though I lack the knowledge necessary to discuss it.

I posted the most relevant abstract. If they spent some fairly large time writing that, why should I assume I can do better?

Because they were writing for a different audience -- for people who already know a lot of context.

Now it's your choice whether you want to discuss with an average LessWronger, in which case you should provide more content, or you want to discuss only with people who are experts in some area, which is completely legitimate, but perhaps you should state it more explicitly.

It is indeed kind of mean that I ask how this piece fits into everyone's puzzle without disclosing my puzzle, but I do worry about security and that sort of thing and this was a good experiment on how people would respond

That's good. I was hoping you will not get the impression that we are somehow biased against discussing singularity or carbon. :D

What kind of explanation are you looking for? Are you a physicist? Have you taken physics?

Assuming you know some things but aren't a condensed-matter physicist: 1) single-layered graphene's intrinsic scattering rate is extremely low, so nearly anything else that causes scattering is going to dominate. 2) it is an exceptionally poor screener of electric fields, due to the low density of states. 3) it is entirely surface, so there is no interior region to be unaffected by boundary effects (though graphene is usually in poor mechanical contact with the substrate, this loose coupling is not weak enough to strongly suppress surface phonon scattering). Note that 'the top side, away from the substrate' is not distinct - the relevant carrier electron states straddle the center plane.

So, what happens? You've got an electron in the electrical field, accelerating. It eventually scatters. What does it scatter off of? The substrate, mainly, by one mechanism or another. Whichever it is, some energy is dissipated directly into the substrate (that's what it bounced off of), and the electron bounces off in some other direction. This electron bounce is not heat - the electrical field just goes back to pushing it forward again, and it goes - very orderly except for the isolated scattering instances.

The main ways the graphene itself gets warmer are by a) a carrier electron does manage to scatter off of a graphene lattice phonon (this is a really weak process, but it happens, and when you get rid of the substrate it dominates) ; and b) phonons from the substrate are transmitted into the graphene lattice (this is also weak because graphene binds poorly to the substrates mechanically speaking, but it's not extremely weak).

That's the summary of what's going on. It applies equally to single-walled carbon nanotubes, and to a lesser extent, multi-layered graphene and multi-walled carbon nanotubes.

I don't think the impact of writing my comment would've been significant, but I don't see any reason to make our situation worse on the margin.

Not necessarily. We don't know what he was going to say, so we hardly have enough evidence to say it would be unhelpful. Also, while this forum doesn't necessarily have a lot of influence, there are many people who are mildly influential that like to peruse this site. Just the chance of inspiring such a person would likely have an impact on technological development. Not a significant one, but maybe enough to cancel out the contribution we have made by reading and considering this post.

My reaction: You have posted a link to some invention, without explaining why it is related to singularity more than any other random technical invention. Sure, there are three hyperlinks where I can get more information, but I would like to get some explanation from the article itself. Or maybe you just use "how does X advance singularity timelines?" as a synonym for "X is cool"; I don't know, and you didn't help me avoid this suspicion.

What would I like to find in articles like this? A short explanation of context (for people who know nothing about carbon nanotubes, which is not a typical LW topic), and explanation of why do you think this invention is exceptional (even when compared with hundred other inventions made and published in the same year). Something like this -- the following text is completely made up, just to better illustrate what I mean:

Estimates of Singularity timeline are often based on the Moore's law. However, in recent years the progress in computer speeds has slowed down. Computers are not getting faster anymore. Their increased power is mostly gained by adding more processor cores, which is not the same as making faster cores. Also the electric power consumption increases linearly with the number of cores, so even if in 2050 we get a computer capable of simulating a human brain, it would require more power than is produced by Sun. One possible solution is to avoid an integrated-circuit approach and build the computer directly, atom by atom. (Just like we got a thousandfold increase in capacity and speed by replacing vacuum tubes by integrated circuits in 1960s.) To make it possible, we need a material that is able to do -- blah blah blah -- but material with such properties is not known yet. However, recent experiments with carbon nanotubes suggest that they are similar to what we need. More details about physical properties of carbon nanotubes are here: [1], [2], [3].

Any you don't have to put "Singularity" in the name of the article. "Recent advances in carbon nanotubes research" would work fine.

Curious if people would be willing to articulate negative sentiment on this piece?

It seems like we should all see advancements like this as a way of training our intuition about how the tech tree will go and also make efforts to do outreach into important communities as they are growing. If graphene transistor and remote cooling cpus eclipse efforts in parallelism or biological computing, then researchers in that field have a lot of influence to spread to users as well as developers.

Also, to most people this is a highly counterintuitive phenomenon and some people I hung out with for a while used to talk a lot about the utility of physics intuition.

Some hypotheses for negative affect are that the story is not relevant or interesting (strong evidence this is not the case), that those people who have the technical expertise to discuss it don't want to discuss it off secure channels or...

The overall impact seems small to clock speeds, since it's speculative and there are several possible ways the same thing could be done. And the impact to clock speeds on singularity timelines is itself pretty small, since once you have working code, making it faster or raising money for more hardware seems like a much smaller problem.

It's interesting and I hadn't thought of it, but it's not weird. The losses are from coupling between the substrate and the carrier electrons, so it makes sense that the energy will go there.

so the singularity by far is something after which we cannot predict how things are, but we're going to look at roughly similar cases for that?

The comparisons people generally make are to agriculture and industrialization.

I'm also an insider in this in the sense that I've been a professional software engineer for 16 years

Okay. Part of my academic background is physics, including nanoscale physics- but if anything, being half-educated about it makes me reluctant to speculate.

For example, there's a technology under development which would use nanotubes and van der Waals forces (if I remember correctly) to do binary memory on a scale that's a massive jump from what we have now- I think the claim was they could store a petabyte in the volume of a dime. If that works, that'll be huge- you could significantly change computer architecture with the ability to store abundant memory on the same chip as the CPU, for example. But I'm reluctant to bet that it'll work until it works.