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This whole thing about immigration (legal or not) is simply ridiculous.

Like most industrialized nations, the rate of population growth of the US is declining. We would be under replacement rate already were it not for immigration.

The population growth rate is in decline even with the current rate of immigration, which is at historically unprecedented levels (about twice as many as the early 1920's).

Illegals make up a disproportionally large segment of the prison population, but overall, violent crime is way down. (Blacks also have a disproportionally large prison population.)

Thinking that the country cannot sustain the influx, or that these people will somehow reduce our standard of living by requiring more services, or increase the crime rate is simply not supported by the evidence.

Then there's the innovation. Jobs come not from existing businesses, but from starting new businesses, and from new-ish businesses growing large. Immigrants tend to make the most of their opportunities by inventing new things, starting new businesses, and encouraging their children get educated and become successful (source).

Then there's the infrastructure. Illegal immigrants don't contribute to the infrastructure by paying taxes (as much), but at the same time they become a burden on the infrastructure by avoidance. They avoid the hospitals until something becomes an emergency, they don't alert the police to minor situations before they get out of hand, and so on.

Then there's the exploitation. Illegal immigrants have no recourse when their employer abuses them.

It would almost seem, from a completely neutral viewpoint, that just allowing illegals to become citizens would be a win all around.

I'm not entirely sure what the problem is.

Perhaps someone can craft a reasonable sounding "what if" scenario that outlines the sophistry for me? I'm not having any luck identifying any evidence-based reasons.

Anything but the pure C as defined in the sacred Whitebook pollutes the simple beauty of C and obscures the language's clarity and its similarity to the instruction sets of most common CPUs.

I read and enjoyed "My life as a quant" , by Emanuel Derman.

I would not immediately assume that moving it somewhere else will increase uptime; it puts uptime requirements on the Internet link(s) instead of on the server or software setup. Unless the present setup is quite unreliable or he has a surprisingly good link, I think that would likely be a worse problem.

Now, the idea that you can't afford multiple server nodes: Servers can be very, very cheap. For my home server I use an Acer Revo 3600 I paid 200 euro for; the closest available today seems to be http://www.amazon.com/Acer-VN281-2G-320-Linex/dp/B005WUXW1C (at about $220 including shipping.) Assuming you don't have a license cost problem, this allows you to create a cluster for a very low cost.

Apart from that, I'd analyse what your costs are for a failure, and what the odds of a failure are, and whether your tinkering increase or decrease the odds. I'd assume the odds were fairly small to start with; in that case, it may not make any sense to tinker with the setup to create something that is supposed to be more available. I've easily had several years of uptime on single systems; introducing complexity makes that harder, and if you lack the experience with how to deal with these systems, that's likely to increase the risk. (What happens if somebody start your failover by mistake? What happens if both instances are running? etc)

For your particular use case, it sounds like I'd rather have a good alternative system for handling it if your system fails (pen and paper sounds good), and try to beef up the single machine - place it somewhere it won't have dust, vibration and heat problems, use multiple network cards to avoid risk of cable failure, use reliable disks & RAID, have a good UPS with monitoring, etc.

It's called The End of Eternity and it is about so much more (like how humanity survives The Big Crunch). It's truly epic and worth reading.

A well researched and more detailed treatment on what children are capable of, how we as a society went mad, and how they need to learn independently is in the book "Free Range Kids". My wife and I read this with for ourselves and our two kids and are beginning to try to counter the pervasive paranoia one friend at a time.

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Range-Raise-Self-Reliant-Children-Without/dp/0470574755/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340643190&sr=8-1&keywords=Free+Range+Kids

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9#Processors_and_memory

All user data is stored on the internal eMMC chip; 16 and 64 GB models are available.

Nokia N9 Unlocked GSM Phone with 64 GB Internal Memory--International Version (Black)

1) Be prepared for the fact that many will not have taken a math class in many years, some 5 or more. They will recall little from their previous math classes other than intuition. Their arithmetic skills are poor. Be sure you are evaluating them on their understanding of the stats material, and be forgiving of arithmetic errors

Big agreement here. Check out A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper for an accessible book that explores some of the common misconceptions about stats. Learning what stats say (or don't) is far more useful than learning to crunch the numbers.

I'm teaching stats to economics, business, communications & international affairs students.

I advise "Statistics" by David Freedman, Robert Pisani & Roger Purves for a social sciences public. It also gets bonus points for not publishing a new edition every year where only the page numbers are different.

This professor (I don't know his name) uses the above book and I think he sets a great example: video (skip the first 35 minutes).

Always give concrete examples and show them next how mathematics is used to make abstraction of that. Be very patient (I believe that patience is the most important skill for any teacher).

You really shouldn't generalize about what psychology majors are going to be like. In the department I did my Ph.D in, psychology was closely allied to biology and ecology, and there was another department across campus that did social psychology. Some of the psychologists were pretty darn quantitative. But they were being quantitative about the mind, which is (my bias) maybe more interesting than the examples you used last time you taught calculus. Also, while the majority of students may be psych majors, some will be from other majors. What do you want future lawyers, school principals and politicians to know about statistics? This is your chance to teach them. Sooo, they might have good math skills, or not. But you can't assume that they know calculus, obviously, so you probably want to use a textbook that treats stats as a tool for understanding patterns in data, and goes easy on the theory behind maximum likelihood estimates and so on. I like Perry Hinton's Statistics Explained, but it really depends what you are trying to teach the students to do. http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Explained-Science-Students-Edition/dp/0415332850/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340578689&sr=1-1&keywords=statistics+explained If the psychology majors are any good, they may be more used to thinking clearly about surveys and tricky experiments than you are. Perhaps you can structure the course so that learning goes both ways.

Hes talking about feeding a family of $450 / month. Where I live, Ramen, Chef-boy-are-dee, and Penut Butter and Jelly Sandwhiches run me that much for just me

Buy your ramen from Amazon. 41 cents/pack, free shipping. Chef Boyardee, $1/can. Free shipping. Jelly and peanut butter are similarly priced. I just cut $350 from your monthly budget. $1400 if you feed the wife and two kids the same way (I don't recommend it).

Hes talking about feeding a family of $450 / month. Where I live, Ramen, Chef-boy-are-dee, and Penut Butter and Jelly Sandwhiches run me that much for just me

Buy your ramen from Amazon. 41 cents/pack, free shipping. Chef Boyardee, $1/can. Free shipping. Jelly and peanut butter are similarly priced. I just cut $350 from your monthly budget. $1400 if you feed the wife and two kids the same way (I don't recommend it).

I wish you were right.

THe motivational speakers I read like Larry Winget say otherwise. You are there to work the absolute hardest possible to the point of exhaustion. Blue collar jobs I had did just this and you were fired and replaced as someone else would be happy to do it a dollar or two an hour above minimum wage. That is the real world 70% of the world that is not privileged lives in. Hell, I have had several jobs where you were fired if you were more than 3 minutes late to work 3 times.

Every profession the worker pays for the privilege not to be minimum wage which is why they are willing to go in debt to get their degrees. It is up to the employee to be prepared and not the employer. THe employer just serves the customers and customers are not paying you to learn they are paying to get something done. Doctors pay $300,000 in debt to work, accountants pay $60,000 for the CPA and the masters degree, and $90,000 to be a teacher with college costs these days. The employer always pays jack shit as it is not their problem.

I am just the messenger and I would feel guilty and paranoid doing such things on the job as it is not customer driven and I need to be providing the maximum value in order to keep my job. Maybe I am scarred from my past here but, my ethic I learned in that as well as my undergrad in Business Admin teaches these concepts. Bosses demand it and if I were a boss I would demand it too. Work supposed to be miserable so you do not starve and you are there to make someone else money.

Your employer did that presentation probably because he would get a return. Not because he is a nice guy (he might actually be). The point is unless it is work related you need to be responsible. Especially if millions of out of work people would be happy to do your job. There are many who have holes on their resumes but can't get past HR for that reason. When things get less hectic it is always important to do the boring things like maintaince, QA, and patching. IT is the right thing to do.

California University Launches Book Opposing Use of Electric Cars

Maybe your submission was rejected because the linked article is pretty anemic and doesn't really support your proposed headline. Maybe you can find a better link (heck, the Amazon page and the promo site are both more informative). And a better headline would be "Berkeley Academic Argues that the Market Nullifies Green Technology" or perhaps "Berkeley Academic: Social Causes Do More Good for Environment than Green Tech".

PTSD is reassuring for me in a way - if humans were truly naturally murderous beasts, as some would like to insist, PTSD would be very rare or non-existant.

Read On Killing. Only psychopaths can kill without emotional consequences. People are naturally opposed to killing when it comes to dealing with members of the same species. Men can hunt and kill a deer. That's instinct. When confronting other humans, the instinct is to posture or submit. Same applies to most other mammals.

You don't need drugs to do this. It's called the Science of Compassion.

http://www.amazon.com/Walking-Between-Worlds-Science-Compassion/dp/1889071056

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsGl-XIWM5Y

Looks like crazy shit until you give it a chance and realize that it is not about the messenger and his crazy hair, but about a more rational and evolved way of treating life in one's mind.

Just sayin'

Madefire, a new startup in Emeryville, CA, is working to change that with the release today of its new iPad reader and comic-book authoring tool.

I could swear I heard of this before ... Oh wait, I have.

Well, to be fair, this is for the iPad which makes it COMPLETELY different and a whole NEW paradigm as opposed the software that I linked to - that 's for the PC and therefore is completely different.

*Sorry, my tech hype is a bit dated from the 90's. I just haven't really felt the need to keep up with all the buzzwords and hoopla to sell old concepts again as being new.

Monster? You haven't heard of Denon have you?

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t

Monster is a saint compared to that.

Been there, done that, no need for monstrous rack, just laptop and some Arduino-ish electronics. It's even available commercially if you don't mind the "niche tech" price premium: http://www.amazon.com/beyerdynamic-Headzone-Home-Head-Tracking/dp/B001BAJ09A/ -- it's still an inappropriate solution for watching movies with the family, though.

As long as you connect it with this http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM

Serial. USB has variable latency.

I use this receiver, which is quite reasonably priced. The wiring diagram at this site makes it quite easy to assemble.

Rather than driving the PPS LED directly from the PPS line, I used an NPN transistor to switch the LED on and off with each pulse. The transistor draws a negligible current from the PPS line.

I got the whole setup wired in less than an hour. Works quite well.

Some quick searching shows one can get a USB GPS receiver for $27 and the comments say it works with linux/gpsd, showing up as /dev/ttyUSB0.

Somebody could make a simple OS image that would narrow the scope of the problem to the availability of ~$60 and an available public IP address.

Maybe it's JavaScipt, keeping only The Good Parts(tm)?

BTW check out the page count:
JS The Good Parts (O'Reilly) = 176 pages
JS The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly) = 1100 pages

Maybe it's JavaScipt, keeping only The Good Parts(tm)?

BTW check out the page count:
JS The Good Parts (O'Reilly) = 176 pages
JS The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly) = 1100 pages

Federal Law says that if you access their servers and you were not authorized to do so, then you have committed a computer crime, no matter what analogy you come up with.

Right, but I think the point is that it's a stupid law. (And therefore nobody respects it or obeys it, and therefore nobody expects anyone else to obey it, and therefore that law is useless to (and probably even contrary to) the cause of justice.) In a thread titled "strange sense of morals" that's not irrelevant.

Are you authorized to read the data at http://amazon.com/? How do you know? Who authorized you? When? What evidence do you have that you were authorized to request that page? What evidence do you have that you were authorized to receive the reply after you request that page?

I know those are all stupid questions, but only because you have not been authorized to read Amazon's page, or if you have, it was done secretly inside Amazon and was never communicated to you. That is why it is a stupid law.

It reminds me of how nobody has ever actually been prosecuted for playing a CSS-protected DVD on a DVDCCA-approved DVD player. Every time you descramble the CSS on a DVD, that's "circumvention" and illegal per DMCA, unless you have authorization by the movie's copyright holder, to do that. But of course, nobody has ever gotten authorization to do that. (Disagree? Prove it, or at least show some modest indirect evidence. This is harder than you think. Hint: purchasing the DVD does not imply permission to descramble the CSS, or else 2600 would have won their DeCSS case.) Every time anyone played a commercial DVD or BluRay, they were breaking the law, and the player manufacturer and the retail store who sold the player, broke the law too. That is, unless there's some sort of secret and uncommunicated authorization.

So how do you know if you're authorized? You don't. You never know, until you moment you die without ever having been called to court.

Same for public web servers. Everyone just assumes that information left in public, and without any notices it shouldnt' be accessed, nor with any even half-hearted ineffective attempts to limit access, is .. well .. publically accessible. But then fuckwits come along with a law saying you need authorization -- something that no one ever has, or at least can never show or demonstrate they have. The only authorization is hidden within the mind of whoever owns the server. It is never revealed, and it's lack is also never revealed, until the moment you get a letter from a lawyer or are confronted by a cop.

They can retroactively say you didn't have authorization, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Any arguments they make which happen to get applied to clearly valuable or sensitive information (situations where common sense tells you the owner wouldn't want the information to be public -- situations the law was ostensibly intended to cover) apply just as logically to Amazon's home page. It's just that if Amazon prosecuted you for shopping at their store, the judge wouth laugh them out of court despite the technical wording of the law, simply because it's so absurd. Common sense would prevail if Amazon sued you for being a customer -- in defiance of what Congress wrote.

But in between these two extreme examples, is a shitload of gray area. (Nearly everything you did on the web today was technically illegal.) The written law doesn't distinguish between any two points along this spectrum, just as DMCA doesn't distinguish between pirates and people merely playing their DRMed movies on Sony players. It must necessarily comes down to a judge needing to pull an arbitrary decision out of their ass, every single time.

Not that I have any sympathy for the bad guys in this case. The extortion is illegal in itself, and shows some clearly malicious intent. If

Knuckel-balls are not as simple as "a tube .... that follows a smooth curve." That is a wobbling knuckle-ball, and is generally what people think of. This is usually the first pitch knuckle-ball, does not really move much but you can control it better to get that first strike. But if that is all you have got, then you are going to hit around a bit. That is not the strike-out knuckle-ball. By making minor changes in the grip, you can produce more movement that can cause it to dive, cut-in, and break-away. One of the guys that taught me had a knuckle-ball that he could snake in almost at will, much more movement than the smooth curved tube. If first broke slightly left to appear to be wide of the strike zone but then broke hard right to fall back in for a strike. The problem is that good hitters can anticipate it after seeing it a few times.

A good Knuckle-ball has a slight rotation. Somewhere between half a turn and a turn and a half on it's way to the plate. This slow rotation slightly changes how the seam are presented to the high pressure area in the front thereby changing the disruption of the airflow around the ball. Just like an airfoil will cause low pressure on the top of a wing creating lift and moving the plane up, these changing disruptions cause temporary low pressure areas on the ball and cause a small amount of "lift" in a vectored direction from the center of the mass of the baseball. If these happen rapidly and evenly over the front surface, you get the wobbling knuckle-ball like he describes. If they appear mostly on one side, it will move in that direction. With practice, you can begin to throw the wobbler when you want a strike and a hard breaking knuckler when you want to get them to chase a pitch out of the zone by slightly changing your grip and orientation.

As an aside, and interesting read is The Physics of Baseball by Robert Adair
http://www.amazon.com/The-Physics-Baseball-3rd-Edition/dp/0060084367
(Though, I have to disagree with his opinion on the effect of ball rotation on a batted ball. If I remember correctly, he states that the effect is negligible. IMO and experience, I believe it is noticeable and sometimes determines fair/foul as some batted balls hook much more than others.)

Arthritis sufferers that I have talked with have described rheumatologist reactions to AP (Antibiotic Protocol) ranging from "Couldn't hurt, might help" to actively hostile to the idea. In my family, the rheumatologist we're working with is (fortunately) in the former camp.

I've done some research on this AP treatment and I don't see how it could hurt - at all. One of the things they suggest is Minocycline (which is used for teenagers to treat acne (excerpt: "This antibiotic has been in use since the 1970's and is a great acne therapy")

Anyway, check out what people say about it (check the reviews on Amazon), or this site: roadback.org for some more background info (roadback.org's discussion forum is pretty good).
The thing of it is, mainstream medicine doesn't have an arthritis cure. Their conventional arthritis "treatments" are just about symptom management and do nothing to deal with the underlying
I just can't think of much good to say about things like gold salts, plaquenil, prednisone, methotrexate.

One last thing to consider, if grandfather's arthritis isn't cripplingly bad (yet), why not try to get the jump on it?

(Ok, one more last-last thing: if your grandfather is on prednisone be hugely careful if he decides to stop taking it; it is really important to taper at a reasonable (slow) pace to give his adrenal glands time to come back online, cutting off suddenly from larger doses can be fatal. If this applies to his situation, his health care advocate needs to do some research before starting to cut back).

Try Walter Miller's translations: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=Walter%20Miller&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3AWalter%20Miller%2Cp_lbr_one_browse-bin%3AJules%20Verne&page=1

The Time Cavern
This is much lighter than a lot of the suggestions I've seen here, that I think are more appropriate for a pre-teen than pre-ten.

http://www.amazon.com/John-Bellairs/e/B000APZTO2/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1340223614&sr=1-1

I was probably in the 8 - 12 range when Bellairs was my favorite author EVER; I loved these books: creepy gothic fantasy, with a little sci-fi twist (IIRC).

Also, books about kids building things--like the Mad Scientists' Club books:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Scientists'_Club

Totally inspirational for a young "life hacker." The books are from the 60s (?) but they were still amazing in the late 80s / early 90s, so I can't imagine they've lost it since then.

For fantasy:
The Chronicles of Narnia (the books, not the movies)
A Wrinkle in Time
The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny
Changeling and Madwand by Roger Zelazny

For sci-fi, try Alan Dean Foster's "Flinx" series and Heinlein's Juveniles

I disagree. If you show an interest, and do it well they will definitely be interested, although you do need to let them have some input into what is chosen.

My wife and I homeschool (private school is an option, but researching homeschool, we've realized one pace or method does not work for every student). I strongly recommend the Thomas Jefferson Education principles for literature. Thomas Jefferson is a framework where the parents pick the materials and curriculum to match the student, and as such, the principles can be used by any parent, even with a child in school.

For young children of this age, they recommend focusing on the old three R's as the foundation of the rest of their education. For the literacy portion, they recommend reading classic works that have been recognized by previous generations as great works. Now, I personally love fantasy and science fiction, but you need more variety than just science fiction and fantasy, but if you are just looking for some from this category to use, I would definitely recommend Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Asimov, Bradbury, and other names considered among the best of those around a generation ago or longer. A good friend turned me on to Andre Norton and Anne McCaffrey late in elementary. I loved the Xanth novels, and I'm sure there are other series out there. Peter Pan is a classic that is geared more toward that age level. Check this Amazon list or a genre list and look through the list for names you recognize since they are probably some of the more widely read and therefore worth reading.

For works outside this genre, you might consider the 3 Musketeers, Treasure Island, Sherlock Holmes, or the books of Howard Pyle. While not specifically of your genre, they are great stories that might catch the interest of young boys.

Reading with a child is extremely important. But don't make it drudgery, or it will make them think reading is a chore. But if you pick fun stuff, they will probably like it and be interested in it and realize that there are wonderful things to be found in books, and you will have plenty of material to work with. Also make it a point to interact with them after the time of reading, and discuss what's been read. This will help them to learn how to think and talk about what they've read.

This was the first science fiction book I ever read, and it still has an important place in my heart. It's out of print, but trust me, it's worth finding a used copy and buying it. It's probably worth it to buy a hardcover; the mass-market paperback (from "Scholastic Book Services") was printed on very cheap paper that is turning brown these days.

The story: a family of three (father, mother, son) has been living on Ganymede, but will now move to Earth. The son grew up on Ganymede with a robot, Rex, as a nanny/companion. Since shipping is expensive, they plan to sell Rex and leave him behind. Hating to leave Rex, the boy gets off the space liner just before it departs, and runs away; the boy and the robot have adventures as they try to get to Earth together. It's a tale of adventure and loyalty and love. The story is narrated by Rex in the first person.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Runaway-Robot-Lester-Del/dp/B000DZDQD0

I believe I was 8 when I read this. I loved it then and I still love it today.

steveha

When I was a kid my mom got me into the "Silver John" series by Manly Wade Wellman. They're kinda spooky fantasy (but not scary) southern folk lore style short stories set in the Appalachias in the early 20th century, mixing Cherokee myths with pioneer-era American magic.

Lots of cool monsters (like the Behinder that "no on can rightly say what it looks like ...for it's alway behind the man or woman it wants to grab" or the Gardinel, a kind of living house where "...the few that's lucky enough to have gone into a gardinel and win out again... tell that inside it's pinky-walled and dippy-floored, with on the floor all the skulls and bones of those who never did win-out... and all at once you know that inside a gradinel is like a stomach") and magic guitars strung with silver strings make these a lot of fun. Wellman had an amazing ability to convey local dialect effectively (which can make for a fun read-- practicing regional accents!) and a real feel for the landscape in which he sets the action.

He also did a lot of sci-fi as well, but the Silver John books are where it's at.

I recommend anything by Patricia McKillip, especially the book "Forgotten Beasts of Eld": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0152055363/patriciamckillip

A Short Guide to a Happy Marriage: The Essentials for Long-Lasting Togetherness

I'm pretty sure this was one of the first SF series I read. Highly recommended.
http://www.amazon.com/Tripods-Trilogy-White-Mountains-City/dp/0020425716

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bug-Wars-Robert-Asprin/dp/0441073735

Simple story and the kicker is there isn't a human mentioned in the book. It's from the perspective of an alien race fighting an alien race. Great way in my opinion to get a child to take another look at the world.

Additional shameless plug: A friend recently self-published his book, Marlowe and the Spacewoman. I've read about half of it and got to a point with a tense action scene. There's a decent amount of social commentary, but I found it very enjoyable and a relatively easy read, perhaps comparable to the reading level of Hunger Games.

These were my favourites when I was that age:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Neil+Ardley+World+of+Tomorrow

OK, so it's a set of picturebooks without any real story. But I'd like to find something modern and similar for my kids.

Also finding myself showing them old reruns of ST (TOS and TNG), since there are no other Sci Fi worlds I've seen that have a somewhat positive view of the future.

Book by Dr Raghuram Rajan, Boothe School of Economcs, University of Chicago: http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Capitalism-Capitalists-Unleashing-Opportunity/dp/0609610708 Basically the winners of the moment will do everything in their power to maintain their edge, and unless we as a Democracy fight them and make the playing field level, we will end up in a medieval feudal system.

I'm guessing the people who thought relativity and quantuam mechanics were bupkis probably used similar lines of reasoning.

You might want to try reading Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe". It a fairly approachable book on superstring theory and hidden dimensions for laymen.

The theories are very elegant and well thought out but are inherently difficult to prove since the sizes of the things that need to be seen are so small that they are currently unseeable, or energies required are so huge we can't produce them, so there is currently no way to experimentally prove the theories. The main superstring theories suggest 10, 11 or 26 dimensions of which we can actually see only four.

No one is advocating embracing superstring theory, hidden dimensions or multiverses as fact, since even their advocates know they are only theories, but neither should they be discarded as "bupkis" until they are disproved since they may be a way forward in understanding and resolving unresolved conflicts in quantum mechanics in particular. They are regrettably as difficult to disprove as they are to prove.

I'm of the opinion if smart people want to keep thinking about these things they probably should. Just because they are very hard problems doesn't mean they should be given up on. If smart people like the people that wrote this paper can figure out novel ways to test these hard problems, more power to them.

inconclusive

That's merely clinical-speak for "we know you drank incredible amounts of water to dilute your urine to fool the test." Next time, try adding fruit pectin (found in all grocery stores, ironically enough, in the baking aisle) to all the water you are drinking. This doesn't mask anything but will make diluted urine appear like normal urine, avoiding the ignominy of having to supply them with more urine.

I dig what you're saying and I do not disagree. I was not saying that my finger-in-the-wind example of the increase in shallow media is a good economic measure, rather that it is a symptom that suggests overfunding that can be readily observed. A red flag that begs a more substantive analysis.

Your suggestions for other and more accurate measures are good ones. Those and more should be explored. Like any public cost when we are far over budget -- particularly one which has increased so rapidly -- we should be able to show that our spending is justifiable. I do not think it is impossible to measure the value of cultural production -- anything that has value can be measured. It may be difficult, and have some confidence intervals that are subject to debate, but we can at least collect the data, publish it, and have the discussion about the formulae. We may not agree on the exact figures, but if we are to continue investing public funds and inhibiting individual freedom to act, it behooves us as a rational society to explore the empirical evidence.

If we are not willing to at least attempt those steps, any conjecture about whether we are spending the right amount -- or that we should continue to invest public resources when our coffers are empty -- is unfounded.

http://www.amazon.com/Sane-Society-Erich-Fromm/dp/B000HDOTG6/
http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Freedom-Erich-Fromm/dp/0805031499/

They're to the OP like the theory of Relativity is to Newtonian physics or worse.

http://www.amazon.com/Sane-Society-Erich-Fromm/dp/B000HDOTG6/
http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Freedom-Erich-Fromm/dp/0805031499/

They're to the OP like the theory of Relativity is to Newtonian physics or worse.

http://www.amazon.com/Hank-Greens-2D-Glasses-Headaches-Discomfort/dp/B004X4L1UC 8 bucks at amazon. Nice if you are someone like my mom who can't handle 3D but would still like to attend the same showing with people who like it.

These species are under threat due to an overabused land which is farmed with chemicals which destroy the natural immunity that a fully natural ecosytem (organic) would provide. The plants are chemically fed and chemically protected and as a result are weak and prone to catching diseases, once they take root, the now strongly growing diseases can jump to stronger plants. The answer is to abandon the chemical route and respect the plethora of benefits that an organic growing system provides. Read the book "Empty Harvest" for more info http://www.amazon.com/Empty-Harvest-Bernard-Jensen/dp/089529558X.

It already exists:

http://www.amazon.com/Hank-Greens-2D-Glasses-Headaches-Discomfort/dp/B004X4L1UC/

A friend who gets headaches loves these.

http://www.amazon.com/Biopunk-Scientists-Hack-Software-Life/dp/B007HW1ZRG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340044835&sr=8-1&keywords=biopunk