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I'm not sure if this works, but Coldwater Desalinization.

And to johanwanderer, I agree. But I'd start small. Filter it sufficiently to use in toilets without gunking things up. As to using it for washing clothes or even showering with the right setup, not too sure many Americans would go for it.

The last thing I want my students doing is mindlessly copying stuff - I want them engaging their brains and thinking about the content which is something that is not easy to achieve! In addition to the use of clickers and questions in the lecture, to relieve the writing part I make the OpenOffice (no PowerPoint!) slides available on the website along with a video podcast of the lecture audio and the computer screen. This lets students listen again to any part they found hard to understand... or to catch up if they "accidentally" miss a lecture!

Unfortunately slides are only part of the issue and I do a good bit of writing on the whiteboard as well (derivations, answers to student questions which need diagrams etc.). So far I have found no easy way to capture this - I know that there are solutions but the ones I have found are not portable and since I lecture in different rooms from term-to-term they are not viable.

This sounds like a job for Super Chalk Board. Seriously, I need to update some of the relevent material; much of what I have on the web site (Chalk Dust see in particular "Delivery") is out of date. Interested?

Too bad we can't do something similar to: http://www.aloha.com/~craven/hcane.html

Or maybe it's like the real movie Barbarella. Space...check, sex....check! Seriously what kind of geek are you?

The Pleasure Organ

When people get it through their heads that drugs don't make the pain go away, only getting off your ass and doing something makes the pain go away, (except in the case of medical painkillers, for the hard of comprehension) then we can talk about legalising drugs. Until then, people really do need to be protected from their own stupidity, or from the stupidity of their peers. Because trying anything once can be a terminal philosophy.

I grew up with people, friends, who used all sorts of drugs recreationally but I didn't know one of them who was addicted to the illegal drugs they used but I knew quite few who were addicted to the legal drug alcohol. Most of those I knew who did use drugs used them to relax though there were some who liked to experiment and others who liked to expand their minds. The ones who wanted to escape reality were the same ones addicted to alcohol. If you want to make laws to protect people from their own stupitity then why not have laws making junk food illegal, alcohol, or driving? Maybe we can also make bathtubs and pools illegal. In California, drowning is the number one cause of accidental death for children 1-4 years of age. In the city of West Covina, there are more swimming pools per capita than any other city in Los Angeles County. Approximately one in every six West Covina households has a backyard swimming pool - with a total of 5,500 pools. Fire Department emergency response records indicate that five to fifteen children drown or near drown within the West Covina city limits every year.

SUBMERSION HOSPITALIZATIONS OF CHILDREN IN HAWAI`I

Ten (10)% of all submersions occurred in the bathtub or toilet; the average child was one (1) year old.

Water-Related Injuries: Fact Sheet
# In 2003, there were 3,306 unintentional fatal drownings in the United States, averaging nine people per day. This figure does not include drownings in boating-related incidents (CDC 2005).
# For every child 14 years and younger who dies from drowning, five receive emergency department care for nonfatal submersion injuries. More than half of these children require hospitalization (CDC 2005). Nonfatal drownings can cause brain damage that result in long-term disabilities ranging from memory problems and learning disabilities to the permanent loss of basic functioning (i.e., permanent vegetative state).

I believe that the biggest obstacle to Chalk Dust is that anyone with enough knowledge to write educational material is blinded by dollar signs. The complaints come from students, who are powerless to develop their own textbooks without the support of established experts. And, to some extent, publishing houses control access to the market, although not to the extent seen in the entertainment industry.

One way to avoid the "work for free" syndrome would be to create a foundation that supports Chalk Dust projects. All I need now is a rich uncle ...

I don't claim any expertise here.

I did get a BS in ocean engineering, but never practiced and it was a long time ago.

Here are a few links though:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hawaii+ocean+ cooling+deep+&btnG=Google+Search

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/09/09 10_040910_deeplake.html

http://www.aloha.com/~craven/coolair.html

http://www.hawaii.gov/dbedt/ert/otec_hi.html

and finally:

http://science.slashdot.org/articles/03/03/24/2351 234.shtml?tid=134

all the best,

drew

It's a bit off-topic, but if you want to help quash viruses and the like, incorporate a basic ip4/ip6 firewall in NIC chipsets.

Home-user PC manufacturers could set to to
"block all unrequested inbound traffic and block all outbound traffic except:
web, ftp, ssh, dns, bootp, tftp, dhcp" and maybe a few others, and provide a web interface where the 1st question after "please enter password" is "who is your email provider" to open up email ONLY to that location. Better yet, if the email provider isn't configured, beep during POST and give the user an opportunity to enter the NIC-bios-setup screen to set it.

Of course, it would need to be at least as configurable as the firewalls built into most "home routers."

The technology to do this is already there, and you can argue it's already been done given that a PC with a network-interface and a software firewall amounts to the same thing, and it's "obvious" that such a system can be burned to firmware. As such, any patents would be narrow and probably serve only to prevent cloning of a specific chipset.

Anyone working on any of the http://www.aloha.com/~knowtree/links.html#BIOSopen -source BIOS projects is welcome to take these ideas and run with them. Granted, if it's in the system BIOS rather than the NIC BIOS it may only work with 1 NIC and as such, be only a proof of concept.

After reading Philip Greenspun's Dec 1st blog rant, that is pretty much the way I feel about MIT's OpenCourseware. Who could have imagined that the same institution that gave us X, Project Athena, Kerberos, the AI Lab, the Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, and of all people Richard Stallman, would turn their back on all this tradition? Call me naive, but I actually believed that OpenCourseware was built upon open-source philosophy, that MIT had undertaken a plan similar to the Chalk Dust portion of my Open Slate project. How sobering that even at MIT, IT decisions are made the easy way -- read something in a magazine, hear something at a vendorama, buy Microsoft and hire contractors to build it.

Okay, so Philip Greenspun is a Harvard man. Hardly a disinterested party. This may explain the motivation for writing the piece, but I see no reason to discount his facts.

I am sooooo disappointed! Time to reach for a Bud. You know why I drink Bud? Because they still deliver it with those horse-drawn wagons. Sometime you have to brush a little manure off the edge of the can, but hey, that's life!

Visit the Open Slate Project featuring Chalk Dust.

I have a different opinion. Building a tablet PC would be a great project for high school students, and provide the market for a new, open-source class of applications. I call it the Open Slate Project. The applications piece I call Chalk Dust.

I have a different opinion. Building a tablet PC would be a great project for high school students, and provide the market for a new, open-source class of applications. I call it the Open Slate Project. The applications piece I call Chalk Dust.

The best as yet is Xscribble, and that is not really handwriting recognition. Closer to Graffiti, it does one character at a time. NICI (Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information) has a promising system. Here are the handwriting recognition links from my Open Slate Project web site.

The best as yet is Xscribble, and that is not really handwriting recognition. Closer to Graffiti, it does one character at a time. NICI (Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information) has a promising system. Here are the handwriting recognition links from my Open Slate Project web site.

Little tangible progess so far, but I now use Linux on a laptop to gain practical experience.

The project is activly seeking partners!

Something simple yet beautiful that isn't new and obscure: F=ma