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I personally disagree. Not with what you said, so much, but what you implied by it: “take discrete structures”.

I had been programming for fun the better part of a decade before I took either Discrete Structures or the more traditional maths in college (vectors, matrices, calculus, etc.). Yes, discrete math, proofs, sets, algorithms and graph theory are more useful to a programmer. However, if you’re a programmer, they’ll be ridiculously easy, because you’re basically already using them.

My Discrete Structures class had four exams. I got perfect scores on all of them. You’ll see interesting problems, to be sure, but no challenging ones. For example:

How many ways are there to choose a valid password on a computer system? What is the probability of winning a lottery? Is there a link between two computers in a network? What is the shortest path between two cities using a transportation system? How many steps are required to sort a set of numbers?

If you could come up with a formula or algorithm to determine any/all of those, Discrete Structures will bore you. The other maths, on the other hand, will certainly be harder, but you’ll at least be actually learning something new.

Then again, maybe you want the easy class.

• GHCN v.2 (Global Historical Climate Network: weather station records from around the world, temperature and precipitation)
• USHCN US. Historical Climate Network (v.1 and v.2)
• Antarctic weather stations
• European weather stations (ECA)
• Satellite feeds (AMSU, SORCE (Solar irradiance), NASA A-train)
• Tide Gauges (Proudman Oceanographic Lab)
• World Glacier Monitoring Service
• Argo float data
• International Comprehensive Ocean/Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) (Oceanic in situ observations)
• AERONET Aerosol information

You can follow the original link to realclimate.org to find many other links to data sources. I have posted the data sources above only because many critics of AGW won't even bother with realclimate.org as they are thought to be part of the conspiracy. The data exists and is public as is the source code.

The short answer is no. p16 would help stop a virus from causing cancer but it would not prevent the virus from infecting the cell. If you're curious about some of the research being done on the phenomena of viruses causing cancer then I'll direct your attention here. The HTLV-1 provirus hijacks p300 and CREB and uses them to reproduce its self. p300 is a transcriptional co-activator which basically means that it greatly increases the rate of transcription of a gene. p16 wouldn't stop the infection of the cell nor would it stop the virus from hijacking these cellular proteins. However, it would help keep cell division relatively under control.

What SMB problems? My MBP connects just fine to all te shared drives around, and when I connect to a new network, it shows all the available shares very quickly.

Compare that to a XP install that repeatedly tells me that "I don't have the necessary permissions" to view the public, no password share.

There are many types of shares and SMB. There are many definitions of "no password".

You can set permissions so that anyone can access the share, but the definition of anyone is client computers that are part of the domain.

Your server might be configured to require NTLMv2 authentication (it should be, all the other methods are very weak and easy to crack). BUT, the out-of-the-box default for winXP is to only use LM and NTLM authentication, so you can't connect to a NTLMv2 share at all.

You have to enable NTLMv2 manually. One of the few good things about Vista is that Microsoft finally changed the default to require the use NTLMv2.

Other common causes for false alarms include:

1. Roads on rising terrain, tend to look like a gust front that never moves
2. Interference from other radars

I work on a research radar that typically has all the filters turned off, and yes, it can be quite a mess

Other common causes for false alarms include:

1. Roads on rising terrain, tend to look like a gust front that never moves
2. Interference from other radars

I work on a research radar that typically has all the filters turned off, and yes, it can be quite a mess

organic farming is NOT simply throwing other kinds of poison on our food

That's a lie, whether you realize it or not. Citation, from the very Wikipedia article you provided. Note, the pesticides listed are precisely the ones described in that article I provided.

but you CAN hear when something in the environment rectifies it and low pass filters the signal envelope

You forgot to mention "amplifies". Without that, the effect is quite imperceptible.

I work at a weather radar facility, and shortly after I joined, I used to complain to my co-workers that I could "hear the radar PRF" (approx 1 kHz). They laughed and said I must be dreaming. It turned out that one of them is a volunteer at the local fire department, and had his emergency radio tuned in and running all the time (squelched). When the radar antenna swung by the office building, the radio would get just enough power to break out of the squelch, and buzz at the 1 kHz pulse rate of the radar. This is what I heard, from down the hall. For reference, this is an S-band system (2.7 GHz), peak power ~1 MW, with a 46 dBi antenna. ERPs are far higher than any WiFi system or cell phone.

I beg to differ:

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/internat.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-118736013.html

Meanwhile wolfram alpha doesn't know WTF the metric system is, never mind who uses it.
http://www79.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=metric+system

Initially, I was quite surprised he could squeeze enough stuff to build a computer capable of running a BASIC interpreter on a single Augat board, given his claim of only using 7400 logic.

Scroll down to the Board Layout on his blog, you'll find that many of the supposed "7400" logic chips are actually 20V8 and 22V10 PALs. Programmable logic heresy, I tell you!

The actual 7400 logic chips I found so far are: 74LS74 (Flip flops), 74LS139 (dual 1:4 decoder), 74LS161 (dual 4-bit counter), 74LS163 (dual 4-bit counter), 74LS181 (ALU), 74LS244 (Bus transceiver), 74LS377 (octal D flip flop).

Given that mix, I would say this falls somewhere in the MicroVAX era, which had a similar mix of low-density PALs and 7400 logic. My colleague at work used to make stuff on similar boards. Some examples include a color display driver (for a VAX) and an antenna positioner (again, for a VAX). The display driver has long been replaced by Linux boxes, but the antenna positioner (and VAX) still lives on.

Steve, if you're reading this, we still have lots of Augat boards kicking around, along with lots of boxes of 7400 logic (sorry, no 22V10s!)

Several problems with it:

1) Homoeopathy may be bad in that it may be ineffective.

I will be a devils advocate in that I would expect to add to the comfort of a patients illness. Perhaps, though not making much contribution in correcting the condition.

But, if this is hoaxism...consider what we have now:

2) Medical science covered with patents, for treatments for the super wealthy and the rich.

For example, right NOW, 5 million people are leaving the middle class in the country. Another 8 million are expected to leave next year, as 2009 becomes the BIG CRASH. America is quickly becoming a developing nation. Bridges, roads all failing and killing people in the news everyday. If the ambulance arrives it could kill you just on the roads it has to drive over or bridges, to get you to the hospital.

Furthermore, medical science and treatment is for profit here. Cures are the WORSE type of medical research for American companies, preferring medications that locks in that nice monthly refill fee.

Nobody funds cures anymore, only continuous research into various ways to make last years patent run out drug, different enough so they can jack the price up for another 20 years with a new patent application.

Personally I hope most of the research establishment in the USA, is the target of the social unrest that is going to hit this country, just like it has hit Greece in recent days.

These people take blood money and grow wealthy off of the misery of others and I hope they get EXACTLY what is coming to them.

4) Finally as a devils advocate, herbalism is NOT entirely all bunk. My fathers Lung Cancer was cured by taxol.

http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Entomology/courses/en570/papers_1996/hill.html

Unfortunately, he died of liver cancer because it spread to the liver and the cancer mutated to a form immune to taxols effects. :-(

People who practice herbalism probably could help.

knowledge of plants that specifically seem to inhibit or make people's conditions more comfortable to deal with could be holding great secrets in the fight to improve the human condition.

-hackus

Personally I'd be in favour of changing to all metric, but road signs are the major problem. Changing mph to kph and miles to kilometres across the whole country, then educating everyone about the change would be crazily hard.

Here in America, they tried that during the '70s and some in the '80s but it never caught on.

Just think, trying to change a whole nation like the US when just my state is about the same size as England (not UK). Talk about crazily hard.

Here's an interesting history of metrication in countries around the world:
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/internat.htm

The problem with metric in the US isn't population (India and China are both metric), nor geographic size (Canada, Russia, China), or education (when India started metrication, barely 30% of its people could read or write), I'm convinced it's an unconscious determination to be "unique" and NOT conform with the rest of the world. You're caught in a chicken and egg problem--the public doesn't want to change because it's "inconvenient," and politicians won't force the issue because the inconvenience and other costs will bite them in the ass next election.

At the very least you need metric visibly percolating throughout everyday life to help people with the transition. Here in Canada, in the 80s and 90s the weather would still be told in Celsius first, with handy "or x degrees Fahrenheit" tacked on as a reminder. None of the US channels I get report weather in Celsius. Your most well-known scientific publication, National Geographic, still did everything in Imperial units last I saw.

About the only major exception to this were the Star Trek series, which used metric units from The Next Generation onward. As popular as TNG was though, most didn't consciously run into it every day. Neither are microprocessors, measured in nanometers.

Granted, Canada isn't 100% metric either. Grocery ads use pounds since they can show lower unit prices, but the receipt shows the price per kilo. Construction is a major holdout. Screen sizes are in inches.

The blame for Canada's mess goes largely to the Mulroney Conservative government, which nixed the legal requirement to metricate certain things. In the US, I believe the big push for metric came with President Carter, and nixed by Reagan. It doesn't help that Carter is one of the least popular presidents in the US.

I wasn't intending to be funny, that was just the first link I found. Try this one for size. Slow down the framing and you'll find some definite geometric shapes occurring.

They're on the metric system, so clearly they're not going to be able to interface with the rest of country, as we all use foot-volts and hertz per yard.

No, you are just ignorant like vast majority of people. It is called "RELATIVE HUMIDITY", NOT humidity.

100% saturated air at 0C is dry when heated to 20C = about 26% @ 20C.

http://einstein.atmos.colostate.edu/~mcnoldy/Humidity.html

100% humid air at -30C, raised temperature to 20C gives you humidity of 2% @ 20C. That is DANGEROUSLY TOO LOW for data centers. You want about 30% AFAIK otherwise you risks static charge problems with people zapping servers and servers even zapping themselves.

Umm are you not familiar with the hundreds upon hundreds of articles dating from the 1950s to today explaining why statistical testing is unscientific and harmful to psychology? Here's a list of 402 of them fMRI research is often (although clearly not always) conducted by people using the same statistical techniques. Sure the actual generation of images involves a lot of complicated math, but the analysis does not. In many cases, they simply perform a significance test by voxel to determine whether two images are "different". Here's a PDF of a paper that appeared in Science where they do this: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-et-al-Science-9-01.pdf

What is the response to the criticisms? These points are ignored. The Association for Psychological Science (APS), one of the two main psychology associations recently defined a replication as anything that obtains a non-zero effect in the same direction. Why? Because it allows psychologists to make a simple transformation of the p-value without actually changing standard operating practice.

You greatly overestimate the extent to which psychologists care how much they are wasting grant money conducting bad research.

Collection is not necessarily too pleasant.

Heck, you wouldn't believe the background checks I went through for the FBI.

Yes, I would. Having worked in a similar environment (to the JPL folks) for the federal government, I am quiet familiar with the background checks that you went through. The issue is that since 9/11, our government has gone "secret happy". NASA is a civilian agency and most NASA missions are unclassified and in the public domain, like this one (CloudSat). There is quite simply no good reason that the scientists and engineers working on that mission (and others like it) need to be cleared. More importantly, science not directly related to defense belongs in the public domain. To remove it stifles innovation, creativity, and education.

Where would you draw the line? Would you start requiring background checks to go to college? Perhaps a basic background check for Physics 101 and a full secret clearance for Nuclear Physics? Following that train of thought, in the name of defense, would we start doing background checks (and clearing) workers in the financial industry? After all, an attack on that sector could cripple the country as well. As a quick aside, the baby background checks we all already go through to get jobs (criminal history, credit, etc.) are childsplay compared to what is required for a clearance. As such, there is no comparison. Back to my point, though. Following in the same vein, would we then require extensive background checks for all public sector IT workers/software engineers, in the name of security?

The reason the government can get away with the invasion of privacy is because smaller groups are targeted. That is, its fairly easy for someone to say "Yes, but since they work for the feds, they have no privacy...". However, it is not that simple. The government should be critically looking at the projects and missions of the organizations that they are requiring to go through these investigations. If it is REALLY needed, as it would be for the creation of defensive capabilities and intelligence gathering, by all means - require an investigation and clearance. If it is NOT really needed, as is likely the case with the JPL engineers in question, all the government is doing is expanding its powers and wasting your tax dollars (as getting cleared is an expensive proposition).

There's more Soviet space art here and here.

Which makes me wonder, what other coolness have the Russians been hiding behind their backs?

Yes.

And after they place the condemnation notice on your front door, they'll kick your dog.

Seriously, what makes you think that the engineers building this thing are so incompetent that they haven't considered the possibility of hail falling on your roof? They actually do run tests like that. Second to last paragraph here.

I also find it very interesting that you didn't mention the dangers of actually living in a poison-dusted home, but only the danger that the EPA might deny you your God-given right to live in said death trap.

Tell you what, when serious people who actually know about the toxicity and regulatory requirements of cadmium telluride start telling me that this solar technology may present problems, then maybe I'll start worrying.

According to this article, they expect the things to last about twenty years, but they're still running stress tests. Same program, but a little over a year ago.

Netscape Communicator 4.5-4.8 had roaming profiles which sync'ed your bookmarks with a LDAP server and your address book, cookies too. This feature kept me using Netscape long after it was really dead, for some reason people seem to have forgotten about this great feature. http://www.acns.colostate.edu/aspx/www.acns/bulls/ nsroaming_whatsroaming.html http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/1411/LWD990901netsca pe/ http://www.geocities.com/petru2/netscape_roaming.h tml

What are you talking about. The USA has been using the Metric System since 1866 ;-)

Kasson Act of 1866

Funny thing, though, the USA has officially defined the inch, pound, etc. in terms of metric measurements for years.
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/laws/

Ah well, wit is wasted on the young, and America chooses to be perennially young. I was referring, of course, to the origins of the metric system.

According to Colorado State University Cooperative Extension, the saturated fat in chocolate is in the form of stearic acid; which does not raise cholesterol levels.

http://www.ext.colostate.edu/Pubs/HealthyHeart/040 1-02c.html

"Hell, the US government couldn't convert its citizens to the metric system and they're the ones that control the measurements"

In the US, the inch is defined as 2.54 centimeters.

In that sense, the US has been on the metric system since about 1865 +/-. At that time, the US scrapped the traditional, inaccurate, British definitions of distance, mass, etc. and redefined them in terms of meters, kilograms, etc.
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/laws/metric-ac t.html

And, by the way, the citizens are supposed to control, not "the government".

'The studies show that the genetically superior corn protects against rootworm'

Won't the rootworm beetle acquire resistance to this trait in the long run. According to this, you have to plant a ring of non-GM corn in order to prevent such a thing, and you still have to use insecticide.

'allowing farmers to produce more grain from the same amount of land'

Can the farmers reuse seeds from their own crop or must they buy new seeds every year. Will non-GM corm be banned as 'uncertified'.

'And what if the studies do show that the corn is harmful to rats if they're fed it exclusively?'

Well it means that feeding them GM corn for 90 days caused organ damage. A human eating lower doses for years is highly likely to get the same results. Assuming my Googling skills are up to scratch, it's to do with the toxin Cry3Bb1 protein introduced into the corn to kill rootworm beetle. It's supposed to be safe for mammals. According to this it is an artificial form of Bacillus thuringiensis also used as an insecticide.

'Neither humans nor cows are raised exclusively on corn, so rat studies have to show a big difference in rat health before any action is taken on them'

Ok, lets feed you exclusivly on GM corn for 90 days and get back to us. Why not include your whole family as well. Ask the family across the street to eat non GM corn as a control

was: Greepeace values rats over humans

Part of the PEAR project's problem was their use of statistics. A classical p-test is guaranteed to eventually reject the null hypothesis (no ESP) if enough data is collected. This is related to the famous Lindley's paradox. A criticism of a particular PEAR analysis on these grounds may be found here from astrostatistician Bill Jefferys. There was a response from the study's author, which I don't have a link to, and a counterresponse here.

Jefferys advocates the Bayesian approach as an alternative to their p-value test (as do I), but even non-Bayesians admit such problems with p-values can happen (they just think the alternatives are worse); see here for some references, and here for some criticisms of and non-Bayesian alternatives to classical accept/reject significance testing. This paper (PDF) is an opinion piece which reviews the issue from a medical research perspective.

Throughout much of the Rocky Mountain states, sugar beets were *the* cash crop from the late 1800's until the 1960's. Every small town in northern Colorado had or still has an old broken-down sugar refinery, originally owned by Great Western Sugar. (like the GW Sugar in the blue and white package at the supermarket.) Here are some pics of old sugar mills in Nebraska and Colorado. Some details on sugar beet agriculture.
To sum up: cane sugar and corn syrup-derived sugar has lower production costs and drove sugar beet production out of business.

(I grew up in a sugar beet town and remember the Great Western railway running steam engines in the 1970's. A lot of my friends' parents were sugar chemists in the processing plants, and my family would ride our bikes at harvest time and find sugar beets that had fallen off the trucks, take them home, and bake them for very odd meals.)

Methane gas is utterly renewable. You can make it from shit, literally, and without any special equipment. The only special thing you need is a way to compress it to store it... say 200 psi tops? The only thing I can't find is a small compressor suitable for this purpose on a household scale. You can actually just run your waste into the bottom of a pond along with a steady flow of water, tent it, and capture methane - you bubble it through water to purify it. The compressing is the only issue left...

Side note: While searching for goodies I found this url which attempted to root my computer. No idea how successful it was, I'm off to go run defender and spybot.

Democrats tend to try to push us to metric and Republicans squash it. There are two events I remember.

1. In the late 70s, Democrat Congress and Carter passed something to encourage metrification. Some gas stations around here started switching to liters and soft drink makers switched from two quart bottles to two liter bottles (which still exist). When Reagan got elected, he basically put an end to it. Didn't legislate against it, left it up to businesses. The public whined so businesses stopped converting.
2. Around the early 90s Democratic Congress again tried and there was a brief law that all new roads built would have to be in metric. I'm not sure it was ever passed, but anticipated to do so, so Delaware made it's new north-south limited-access toll road metric. That law didn't pass or was repealed by Republican congress in 95 so Delaware switched the road back to English, however the exit numbers are still spaced apart in kilometers.

One reference I found to support last point

This is another good site: http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/. They post a lot of abstracts and links to papers.

The main question put forth right now is what is the dominate forcing for global warming. Initially CO2 was the sole blame, but there could be more to it. What role does the Sun play? What role has cleaning up particulates (from burning coal, wood, and cars) changed global temp? What about water? Land use (e.g. megacities -- Los Angeles, etc)?

With some models, significantly decreasing man-made CO2 levels will only change the outcome fractions of a degree over a 50 year period.

I'm not an expert, but my understanding was that sugar absorption primarily takes place in the small intestine; the enzymatic action that breaks down sucrose keeps up with the glucose and fructose transport mechanisms, which are specific to those molecules. The proportions of glucose and fructose in hfcs are pretty close to the 50/50 found in table sugar. A naive analysis of those facts indicates that it is pretty unlikely that your body even notices what kind of sugar you put in your mouth. To me, that makes it a good deal more likely that the problem is how many calories and how little activity, not what kind of calories.

For the most part, digestion is a really smart process, it breaks food down into small components that it understands, sucks them up, and rejects stuff it doesn't understand. That's a huge over generalization, but it works for sugars and starches.

This:

http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/dige stion/index.html

might be glossing over things, but it pretty much backs me up.

It will be interesting to see what epigenics has to say about parental(and grand parental) diet and exercise, obesity and the transition from farm to industry.

50 years? Try 141 years! The Kasson Metric Act of 1866 (that's the year eighteen sixty six) legalized the metric system in the United States and established an official conversion table. It specifically stated that no contract or law shall be deemed invalid because of the use of metric units. See http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/laws/metric-ac t.html.

I wish everyone in the US had switched to metric before I was born

1975
        The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 (Public Law 94-168) passed by Congress. The Metric Act established the U.S. Metric Board to coordinate and plan the increasing use and voluntary conversion to the metric system. However, the Metric Act was devoid of any target dates for metric conversion.

I wish everyone in the US had switched to metric before I was born

1975
        The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 (Public Law 94-168) passed by Congress. The Metric Act established the U.S. Metric Board to coordinate and plan the increasing use and voluntary conversion to the metric system. However, the Metric Act was devoid of any target dates for metric conversion.

Actually, the phrase "rife with claims and counter-claims" is making more of the counter-claims then they are; the vast body of the evidence indicates climate change is real; Lomborg is the only serious counter-claimaint that I am aware of.

Chr0me.

Colorado State University was/is doing some work with EEG. Their project website lists the products they use, which seem to be in your price range.

According to the Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group at the University of Colorado has stated that CO2 forcings contribute a maximum of 28% of global warming. He also pointed to a paper on his site that stated:

"We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45-50% of the 1900-2000 global warming, and 25-35% of the 1980-2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted."

Further:
"For all of the human-caused warming radiative forcings, which includes the 0.5 Watts per meter squared value for the shortwave albedo change, and estimating tropospheric ozone as 0.3 Watts per meter squared, the aerosol black carbon direct effect as 0.2 Watts per meter squared, the black carbon on snow and ice as 0.3 Watts per meter squared, the semidirect indirect effect as 0.1 Watt per meter squared, and the glaciation indirect effect as 0.1 Watt per meter squared (with the latter two forcings using a nominal value, since these forcings are very poorly known), the contribution due to CO2 will fall to about 28%."

According to the Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group at the University of Colorado has stated that CO2 forcings contribute a maximum of 28% of global warming. He also pointed to a paper on his site that stated:

"We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45-50% of the 1900-2000 global warming, and 25-35% of the 1980-2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted."

Further:
"For all of the human-caused warming radiative forcings, which includes the 0.5 Watts per meter squared value for the shortwave albedo change, and estimating tropospheric ozone as 0.3 Watts per meter squared, the aerosol black carbon direct effect as 0.2 Watts per meter squared, the black carbon on snow and ice as 0.3 Watts per meter squared, the semidirect indirect effect as 0.1 Watt per meter squared, and the glaciation indirect effect as 0.1 Watt per meter squared (with the latter two forcings using a nominal value, since these forcings are very poorly known), the contribution due to CO2 will fall to about 28%."

I remain skeptical, so I looked up 'sucrose digestion' on teh google. Check it out. These articles are early and good enough for me:

http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/dige stion/smallgut/absorb_sugars.html
http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Time%201-2/CarbChem1.h tm#Adsorption%20of%20sugars%20in%20the%20intestine

The first one talks about the independance of glucose and fructose absorbtion. The second one goes further and also talks about the activity of sucrase in the small intestine, and says

"activity of sucrase does not normally limit the rate of absorption of the monosaccharides that result from cleavage of sucrose (glucose and fructose). There is ample enzymatic activity to digest the amounts of sucrose usually consumed by adults. "

And then goes on to list several situations where the absorbtion might not be complete(Disease, over consumption).

The takeaway for me is that pretty much all the sugar you eat ends up in your blood in reasonably quick order, whether it came in as sucrose or already split into glucose and fructose. The notion that metabolic regulation is dependant upon the presence of glucose is interesting, and would explain the issues caused by fructose only diets, but hfcs has pretty much the same ratio of gluctose/fructose as sucrose, so it isn't causing some sort of mysterious fructose loading problem.

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/brownridge.htm l

Guidelines for correct use (and common mistakes)

      1. Write symbols exactly as shown in the tables. Do not change the case, or add an "s" for the plural, or use abbreviations, or write a period after a symbol (unless it ends a sentence). Units named for a person have capitalized symbols. So does the liter (L), because a lowercase el (l) is easily confused with the numeral 1.* All other units have lowercase symbols, even when the surrounding text is capitalize

Correct Incorrect
kg [kilogram] Kg KG kgs. kg. KG.
km [kilometer] Km KM KM. km. Kms. kms.
mm [millimeter] MM mm. Mm

also, the the symbol for kilometres per hour is km/h , not kms/hr.

this is nothing new: it started before the WWI and now there are dozens of companies, universities or hobbyist doing it. It is called: "content analysis", "data mining", "discourse analysis" etc. There is a legend that sais that British intelligence managed to predict quite acurately airstrikes on England based on content analysis of Goebels' radio speeches. Take a look at this links if you are interested. Bibliography of Content Analysis Listings from Communication Abstracts, 1990-1997 Content Analysis Resources web site Text Analysis Info Page - all on text analysis and related topics The discourse analysis page of AI Topics Centre d'analyse des politiques publiques (CAPP) Département de science politique, Université Laval The Center for Social Research Methods: not necesarily content analysis, but it's good to take a look at Research Methods Knowledge Base The Annenberg School for Communication Web Concordances at the English Department of the University of Dundee Companion Website for the book Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus Journal: Language Awareness; has some free issues/articles. The General Inquirer Home Page Journal of Second Language Writing Writing Guides: Conducting Content Analysis at Colorado State University; with a nice adnotated bibliography The Content Analysis Guidebook Online, An Accompaniament to The Content Analysis Guidebook by Kimberley A. Neuendorf. The Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Literary and Linguistic Computing eximancer - Practical Text Mining and Concept Mapping Journal Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation: some online articles Content Analysis News and Discussion mailing list archives some Resources related to content analysis and text analysis; updated quite recently: June 30, 2005;

this is nothing new: it started before the WWI and now there are dozens of companies, universities or hobbyist doing it. It is called: "content analysis", "data mining", "discourse analysis" etc. There is a legend that sais that British intelligence managed to predict quite acurately airstrikes on England based on content analysis of Goebels' radio speeches. Take a look at this links if you are interested. Bibliography of Content Analysis Listings from Communication Abstracts, 1990-1997 Content Analysis Resources web site Text Analysis Info Page - all on text analysis and related topics The discourse analysis page of AI Topics Centre d'analyse des politiques publiques (CAPP) Département de science politique, Université Laval The Center for Social Research Methods: not necesarily content analysis, but it's good to take a look at Research Methods Knowledge Base The Annenberg School for Communication Web Concordances at the English Department of the University of Dundee Companion Website for the book Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus Journal: Language Awareness; has some free issues/articles. The General Inquirer Home Page Journal of Second Language Writing Writing Guides: Conducting Content Analysis at Colorado State University; with a nice adnotated bibliography The Content Analysis Guidebook Online, An Accompaniament to The Content Analysis Guidebook by Kimberley A. Neuendorf. The Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Literary and Linguistic Computing eximancer - Practical Text Mining and Concept Mapping Journal Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation: some online articles Content Analysis News and Discussion mailing list archives some Resources related to content analysis and text analysis; updated quite recently: June 30, 2005;

It sounds to me more like it's rheopectic.

I was helping in an elementary school physics program: we made crazy things and took them to the local elementary schools to get kids involved in science. One of the coolest demos we did was to dump about 4 pounds of cornstarch (which IS dilatantic) and the appropriate amount of water into a giant Tupperware and then lifted up a kid and told him "stomp your feet as fast as you can!" and he could stand on the surface. As soon as he stopped he sank -- and when we grabbed him and tried to lift him out rapidly the tupperware came up with him and we could wave him and it around for a moment before it dropped off again. Pretty visual demo.

It's a little sad to know that 'rheopectic' is a word because it's the opposite of thixotropy and I've always secretly called that 'thinotropy' coz it seemed appropriate.