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Send the World's Biggest Magnet to orbit round the Earth! (Remember to attatch some politicians to it in order to clean both Earth and near Space)

Imagine that you are a biotech company, and you've successfully created a line of engineered pigs. Maybe they are suitable for organ transplantation into humans, maybe they eat lawyers and sh*t nickles... they're really valuable for whatever reason. How do you keep somebody from just hijacking a shipment of your WonderPigs(tm) and claiming they invented an unrelated line of pigs that do the same thing as yours?

Easy! Create an artificial gene that makes a do-nothing protein with a novel, specific, unique sequence that you select. Insert that gene along with the action gene cluster (EatLawyer + ShtNickles) and the marker gene (Green Fluorescent Protein). Then, everytime the pig's cells express the action genes, they also express the marker (GFP) and your non-obvious marker protein.

When their SuperPigs(tm) hit the marketplace two years after your WonderPigs(tm), you just take a tissue sample and look for the telltale protein. Even if they silcenced the GFP and replaced it with Red, Yellow or Magenta, they wouldn't know to look for your hidden gene. You could even set it up so that it's only expressed under certain conditions, like an Easter Egg. That particular proetin sequence isn't found in nature, so if it's there, this must be a pirated pig.

It's like the funny pictures that chip manufacturers hide on processing chips... copy this layout and we'll know where to look for our signature.

I think you're talking about the NHMFL - it's in Tallahassee, at the Seminary West of the Suwannee.

I think you're talking about the NHMFL - it's in Tallahassee, at the Seminary West of the Suwannee.

Interesting that you should make the reference to cheating on taxes Neuorbots.

One of the founders and principal owners of wadnd Howard Neu a Florida lawyer most certainly pays his taxes, although not with his OWN money!

Appears as though Mr. Neu was disqualified from practicing law for a period of time due to sanctions imposed upon him by the florida bar association for using monies from his clients trust account to pay his personal expenses which included failed investments and a debt to the IRS.

http://www.law.fsu.edu/library/flsupct/76158/op-76 158.pdf

Who better to take on the crooks at ICANN and Verisign than a sleazy pornographer and cybersquatter like shwartz and a slimy scuzzball lawyer like Neu.

But a silicon laser? Physically impossible

Diode lasers use silicon, or at least compounds of silicon. Some details here and here.

Pretty cool, though that this is the "the first directly pumped silicon laser."

I have looked at 3 online degree programs in recent years: Florida State, University of Hawaii, and New Jersey Institute of Technology. The downsides to these programs :

1. FSU had a requirement that you MUST take Florida government classes. At the time I inquired, they would not substitute these classes for something else (like government classes from your own state).

2. U Hawaii required that you take final exams on site. If you can afford 2 trips a year to Hawaii, then this is a great option. Oh damn, you MUST go to Hawaii twice a year! What a HORRIBLE degree plan!

3. NJIT seems to have pulled back what they now offer for someone seeking a CS degree. In addition, NJIT had the highest tuition of these 3 programs.

Ultimately, here is my take. A degree is a degree. Obviously the more recognized the name the better, but don't fret over that too much. Try to avoid programs that give "life credit" for working in a real job, or offer things like "Bachelor's Degree in Computer Studies". These things look funky on a resume, especially if you apply at a prestigious company or university. You may also look at local schools in your area if you live some place with choice. Here in Dallas, The University of Texas at Dallas offers many of their CS classes at night, and if you take your basics at night at a local junior college you can get through while still working. This is obviously a tough path, and one that will take many years of hard work.

Good luck to you!

Ah, then you might be interested in this particular chip:
http://microscopy.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/kestrel. html

Don't worry. This chip etching had the foresight of a legal disclaimer. So, everything's okay. Plus, with the right microscope you, too, can know who owns the Unix trademark (see bottom of the inset circle).

Triple point of water is 273.16K, water is unusual in that the liquid form is denser than the solid, so the triple point (gas / liquid / solid in equilibrium) is the highest temperature for the solid form.

See here for a simple explanation with phase diagram

I went to grad school with a FSU CS prof, Dave Banks. Really smart guy. He does research in computer graphics and scientific visualization. His dissertation was on visualizing 4-d surfaces, IIRC. Also funny in a strange way. He tends to look at the world from a slightly askew viewpoint.

I've seen thermal batteries that could produce insane amounts of power for short periods of time. They are popular for applications like tactical missiles, where their characteristics are ideal.

Secret Worlds: The Universe Within

Other smiles

Just a nit, but the LM was more popularly known as the Lunar Excursion Module.

Wait ... they performed no Excursions on this trip? >>>Never mind. >;-)

My sig is immuin to spel-cheks

At least, not liquid water at anything near 1 atmosphere. Theoretically, you could do it with water vapor at a low enough pressure, but I doubt it's remotely practical.

You know, nuclear reactors move liquid, non-boiling water around at well over 100 degrees Celsius, but it's at much more than 1 atmosphere.

e-TeX is specifically designed to be a successor to TeX. It is currently the default engine in MikTeX, a commonly used TeX package on Windows.

Is it TeX? No, it's a successor: "The aims of the project are to perpetuate and develop the spirit and philosophy of TeX, whilst respecting Knuth's wish that TeX should remain frozen."

Eh? Antitrust laws do not simply protect against monopolies/cartels, but instead protect against anything that intentionally restrains trade (as vague as that is). There are several solid pages on vertical integration/antitrust (one, two ). Isn't payola a clear case of vertical integration? If you can control the channels of production, it doesn't matter if you have lots of competitors who will sell at a lower price than you; the customer doesn't have access to their product.

Given that our planet has gone through several climate changes in the past two million years, I would suggest natural adjustment. However, I'm certain we're slightly speeding the process this time around with our pollutants. Of course (and IANOS), it's probably as minimal as the amount of time lost in a year cause by the recent tsunami.

Here in my department at FSU we are fortunate enough to have the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, which develops the stongest magnets on the planet. Couple this with a professor with a sense of humor and you get .... That right! A Frog floating in a magnetic field! Along with golf balls, dice, and other things. When we asked him why he says, because you can. :) Check out the movies:

http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/science/levitation/

Here in my department at FSU we are fortunate enough to have the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, which develops the stongest magnets on the planet. Couple this with a professor with a sense of humor and you get .... That right! A Frog floating in a magnetic field! Along with golf balls, dice, and other things. When we asked him why he says, because you can. :) Check out the movies:

http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/science/levitation/

Here in my department at FSU we are fortunate enough to have the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, which develops the stongest magnets on the planet. Couple this with a professor with a sense of humor and you get .... That right! A Frog floating in a magnetic field! Along with golf balls, dice, and other things. When we asked him why he says, because you can. :) Check out the movies:

http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/science/levitation/

The green/amber part you were looking at may have been a protective coating applied when the microprocessor was packaged. Regardless, microfabricated chips can indeed be technicolored marvels.

Most materials used in microfabrication are either transparent (insulating layers) or grey (metallization), but resulting devices can appear coloured due to optical interference. Colours present in structures of a microfabricated device are related to the thickness and composition of the patterned thin-film coatings that form the device. For a single thin film, thickness can be determined from, for example, the Michel-Lévy interference colour chart if the birefringence of the thin film material is known. Variations in colour across a film indicate non-uniform thickness. The colour resulting from several layers of patterned thin-films is more complex to predict, but the same basic principles apply.

• Today's high efficiency solar cells can convert about 17% of the energy that hits them to electricity. That 2 trillion kWh becomes 3.4 million kWh in a hurry.

The best efficiencies that I have found that solar plants can achieve is 30%.

• Power is generated only during daylight hours. When the sun goes down, the lights go out. Some means of energy storage (batteries, etc.) must be implemented in order to keep the lights on.

Most solar plants have a large thermal reservoir underground that stores heat generated during the day. This reservoir can be tapped (just as efficiently as during sunny days) on cloudy days and at night.

• System inefficiencies can decrease the amount of available power by as much as 50%. Battery storage and power inverters aren't terribly efficient. I'll be optimistic and figure that we can cap the system losses at 25%, leaving us with 255 million kWh delivered to the transmission lines.

Not applicable in the case of a solar plant.

• A good BOE number for household energy consumption is 100 kWh per day. So using my best case estimates above, and assuming no transmission line losses (which usually are around 30 to 40 percent and would be more if the transmission lines reached across the entire country), covering the entire state of Arizona with solar cells would provide electricity to 2.55 million households. You couldn't even power California.

Using your starting estimate of 2 trillion kWh per day (which, while optimistic, is correct given your assumptions) and using a system efficiency of 30% and a transmission loss of 30%, and your assumption of 100kWh of power per houshold per day, it looks like Arizona would produce enough power to serve 4.2 million households. Enough to power about 1/3 of California. But more than enough for Arizona.

• At retail, the cost of photovoltaic modules is about $5 per watt. The literature doesn't really say if that's per watt delivered, or per watt generated (i.e. before system losses or after). If we assume that it's after system losses and that government could work a miracle and actually pay less than retail (say $1 per watt) then for our fictional 255 million kilowatt system, that'd be a paltry $255 billion for the solar cells.
• The photovoltaic cells make up only 25 to 50 percent of the entire cost of a system. Taking that into consideration, cost of the entire system would be between $750 billion and $1 trillion.

I don't have any references of the costs per watt for solar plants, but I'm sure it is substantially less than solar cells. The best I could find is that some sites claim that California uses the most cheaply produced energy from solar power in the world (using solar plants of course). Nearly the entire cost would be up front since the plants need very little maintenance and no fuel.

• Manufacturing photovoltaic cells involves the use of many hazardous chemicals (mostly the same as used by the semiconductor industry).

Not applicable to mirrors which are just coated with melted sand (basically).

• Energy storage systems have many toxic materials, are prone to leakage, have limited duty life, and are expensive to dispose of safely.

Not if the energy storage system is a thermal reservoir of hot water or molten sand.

• Manufacturing photovoltaics requires a lot of energy. Payback time (i.e. the cell generating as much energy as it cost to produce) is from six months to ten years, depending on the cell's efficiency and where it's deployed.
• Photovoltaics have a limited lifecycle, and become less efficient as they get older. The entire array would have to be replaced in 20 years or less. Batteries would have to be rep

Maybe it's not the first trojan targeted at Linux users, but together with the official sounding domain, it could trick some users into downloading and running the binary.

This is an unfortunate reality today. Back in my day, the only way to be a real Linux guru was to compile and build your system from scratch using a dev box.

Nowadays, any average person can easily install Linux and instantly become "31337". Today's typical Linux user has no idea what half the files on his system do, or where they came from. Unforunately, the majority of you with moderator points fall into this category so my post is doomed!

I would advise those who are new to Linux to visit the Linux From Scratch website and set aside a weekend of learning. There is no better method for gaining useful knowledge regarding the reduction of hard drive clutter and increasiong optimization, and security.

My 94 year-old grandfather is too proud to use a wheelchair, yet too fragile to walk.

Segways is too complicated, might I suggest a better solution?

First Ever South Atlantic Hurricane Hits Brazil. (March of 2004)

South American Glaciers Melting Faster, Changing Sea Level.

Alaskan Glaciers Melting Faster.

desertification in China.

desertification in Africa.

Heck, even the rest of the solar system is acting funny. Remember the. . .

Blue Band on Jupiter this past March of 2004?

and

the Huge X-class solar flares of last year?

Interestingly, the evidence of past hurricanes categorized by decade suggests that there have been big hurricanes to make US landfall before. Indeed, the worst decade, from 1950-1959 saw a total of nine storms between category 3 and 4, (though none of category 5) during that ten year period. Sure. But we've just had four in just one summer. Nobody can say that this is par for any course.

Now, I am not claiming that this has anything to do with global warming. But anybody who tells me that everything is normal probably swore up and down that The Phantom Menace was a good film for a whole year after it came out.

-FL

The problem with breathing is something called "partial pressure". Partial pressure is the pressure exerted by an individual gas in the atmosphere. You have to have a bare minimum oxygen partial pressure of around 2.4in Hg in order to push enough oxygen through the lining of your lungs and into the bloodstream. That's the pressure at about 2 miles up. 6" Hg is about normal partial pressure at sea level.

Here's the first hit off of Google for partial pressure:
http://wine1.sb.fsu.edu/chm1045/notes/Gases/Mixtur es/Gases06.htm

You also have to have enough air pressure to keep water from boiling at room or body temperature, whichever is higher. Say, about 3" Hg, which is about 10% of normal. That's not much margin of error. Plus, an extremely dry atmosphere will suck the water right out of you.

You also need a small amount of CO2 to help regulate breathing. Too little and you tend to hyperventilate.

Nitrogen for plants. Actually, most plants don't use free nitrogen in the atmosphere, but fixed nitrogen (nitrates) in soil. The plants that fix the nitrogen do need the gas.

And then you have to have some protection from solar radiation.

I did this seat-of-the-pants, probably got some of it wrong, but the numbers should be somewhere in the ballpark. Anyway, the simple answer is that it's not that simple.

Yeah, its interesting/amusing what gets classified as an epidemic. AIDS is an epidemic where there are ~ 42 million people living with it (tested positive for the HIV virus, not necessarily sick or whatever), and ~ 3.1 million people die from it annually.

TB is _not_ an epidemic, but it infects an estimated 8.7 million people a year and kills 2 million a year despite widespread control efforts.

Some 6600 people have contracted SARS worldwide, and that _is_ an epidemic.

Influenza (flu) is said to be a seasonally epidemic kinda thing where about 20,000 people die a year, but thats not scary enough for the news (although they pushed it last winter in the US a little). Its not too exciting, because most (90%) of the people that die are over 65. It was a "big epidemic" in 1918 when 500,000 people died from it.

AIDS is the best. Its an untreatable/uncurable disease that is supposedly spread by contact with fluids such as blood or sex goo. We've all been told that "AIDS does not discrimiate", but it does! In the US, its mostly black gay men (and some IV drug users) that get it, whereas in Africa its black heterosexual women that get it. After 20 years and I'm guessing millions if not billions of dollars in research have not even provided any kind of explanation of AIDS nor has the virus even been isolated.

here is some more causes of death info, here is more death info. Its interesting because the last link because it puts wars, random human-to-human violence, drowning, traffic accidents, and diarrhea above AIDS.

Also, I belive that suicide is somewhere in the top 20 causes of death _across all age groups_ in the US, but noone cares about that.

If you want queueing and batch control, I suggest that you check out DQS, the original clustering software for Unix. DQS is actually a job processing system, it certainly doesn't provide a single-image system, and it can only take batches and has no means to manage IPC. I suspect, however, that DQS would admirably provide your batching system, while Mosix did clustering.

Seven Justices of the Court agree that there are constitutional problems with the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court that demand a remedy. See post, at 6 (Souter, J., dissenting); post, at 2, 15 (Breyer, J., dissenting). The only disagreement is as to the remedy. Because the Florida Supreme Court has said that the Florida Legislature intended to obtain the safe-harbor benefits of 3 U.S.C. 5 Justice Breyer's proposed remedy-remanding to the Florida Supreme Court for its ordering of a constitutionally proper contest until December 18-contemplates action in violation of the Florida election code, and hence could not be part of an "appropriate" order authorized by Fla. Stat. 102.168(8) (2000).

I can conceive of no legitimate state interest served by these differing treatments of the expressions of voters' fundamental rights. The differences appear wholly arbitrary.

Toxic Lucille Pane Sunflow R.I.S.E. RenderPark Radiance and of course. POV-Ray

I don't know who 'they' are, but consider this: pharmeceutical companies still need to convince people to take the drugs they produce. This drug, if it has very negative cognative effects, will be a hard sell. We're still pretty far from the point where people can be forced to take drugs against their will. Maybe some day, but they'll probably have far more sinister drugs by the time that day arrives.

I'm not sure when it was written, but DQS (the distributed queueing system) was around in 1996, and I don't believe it was especially new then. this document alleges that the whole clustering thing began at NASA in 1994. Apparently FSU developed DQS starting in 1992 but I don't know when the first release was.

I used to work for a company called silicon engineering in scotts valley, ca - formerly sequoia semiconductor and last I heard they were part of creative labs called creative silicon or something. We used DQS to schedule jobs for IC simulation for testing.

Of course, DQS doesn't work on DOS, it's a Unix-type program. For anything that can be batched (like rendering frames in POVray) it can be amazingly slick and it takes relatively little configuration. It has a keen little program that watches when your system is idle and signals the queue master to feed it jobs, which is an X client. Using DQS and the berkeley automounter it was possible to easily submit jobs and not care where they ran, for instance we had the paths set up such that the same commands worked on SunOS4 and SunOS5 so verilog was always in the same place, et cetera.

DQS also has a parallel make utility, which I never used, because I hardly ever compiled anything. :)

I'm not sure when it was written, but DQS (the distributed queueing system) was around in 1996, and I don't believe it was especially new then. this document alleges that the whole clustering thing began at NASA in 1994. Apparently FSU developed DQS starting in 1992 but I don't know when the first release was.

I used to work for a company called silicon engineering in scotts valley, ca - formerly sequoia semiconductor and last I heard they were part of creative labs called creative silicon or something. We used DQS to schedule jobs for IC simulation for testing.

Of course, DQS doesn't work on DOS, it's a Unix-type program. For anything that can be batched (like rendering frames in POVray) it can be amazingly slick and it takes relatively little configuration. It has a keen little program that watches when your system is idle and signals the queue master to feed it jobs, which is an X client. Using DQS and the berkeley automounter it was possible to easily submit jobs and not care where they ran, for instance we had the paths set up such that the same commands worked on SunOS4 and SunOS5 so verilog was always in the same place, et cetera.

DQS also has a parallel make utility, which I never used, because I hardly ever compiled anything. :)

This has been around for a while, but I'm still impressed by it.

These days, you could use OpenMOSIX on your Linux systems, provided you were happy with a 2.4 kernel. It provides a distributed filesystem and transparent process relocation throughout the cluster. However, it deals with relocating processes, so unless you're running lots of isolated processes, it won't help you.

AFAIK there is no transparent clustering system for Windows, although some people have been known to speculate that Microsoft is working on it. They'd be idiots not to be thinking heavily about it...

Yep, polar orbits are useful when you need global coverage. Think about one of those basketball-things and imagine in spinning like the Earth. Now use your finger as the satellite. Equatorial orbits will only cover a thin horizontal stripe of area (remember that LEO spacecraft don't have a huge footprint because they're not too high above hte planet.)

If you now move the satellite in a polar orbit, you'll see that the footprint will cover the entire basketball-earth in a series of vertical stripes.

Why is this useful? Consider remote data collection anywhere on the planet. If you're observing weather in Peru, or ice flows in the North Atlantic shipping channels, and want to convey that information to your university research center in the Bahamas, then you need global coverage for the transponders (especially for the ice flows - you can't determine where they're going to go.) Polar orbit spacecraft like NOAA7 and NOAA9 performed store-and-forward functions for jobs like these. I built sonar-buoy hardware for tracking conditions in the North Atlantic shipping lanes waaaay back. Here's a decent summary of some of the NOAA satellites that used polar LEO orbits.

fool, its not the image thats shrunk, its the wavelengths of the photos, because the speed of light is slower in a water substance, but then its frequency cant change ie stays the same, so its wavelengths do shrink while it slows down. Basic high school physics, why they didnt think of this 20 years ago is funny though, its like "Doh!!! h20"

Here is an excellent JAVA demonstation of refraction thats interactive.

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/refraction /refractionangles/

I wonder why the SF Giants chose not to go one (two at most) phased array panel(s)?

We know there is life at least several kilometers down in solid rock. This is proven from core samples taken to that depth. We don't know how the organisms got that deep or whether some as yet undiscovered strain creates hydrocarbon chains from whatever raw materials are in the water in the cavities of that rock. We know of some organisms that can live on sulphur which may have seeped down in the cracks but how do you make oil from sulpher? Also the metabolism of such an organism has to be extremely slow or it would run out of food and die before fresh nutrients filtered down to it. However, IANAG nor am I a biologist so I'll wait for the experts to find proof.

I wonder though if Tom Gold has thought about this: the kudzu plant was brought to the Southern US states from Japan I believe to stop erosion. However its native environment was cold and not as hospitable. Now kudzu grows like mad in most southern states. It can grow 1-2 feet in a single day! It's literally out of control. Now imagine bringing up a microbe which is used to living in an anemic environment. It uses every iota of chemical energy it can derive from its surroundings to multiply at least once before it dies or its species would have died out eons ago. Its waste is hydrocarbons. What would happen if it got loose on the surface? Our world might seem like a never-ending banquet to it. It could be the bacterial kudzu from Hell. I'm not too worried about it, but it would make a good sci-fi novel, eh?

Computer simulations are now commonplace, and seem like a much more efficent conceptual instigator. If you haven't already seen it, check out this (slightly) related web site: PowersOf10

Its an issue because of the absurdity. Absurdity is news in case you havent heard. ;)

But are they *that* hard up for money that they cannot refund her for purchasing stolen goods from them? (NO) I would say stolen goods count as a fair 30-day return policy, but I'm not familiar with their return policies. Then, after refund, they could return the stolen goods, or whats left of them, to (her) the rightful owner or at least the police. Aside from them breaking state law, why is this so hard? Even if their return policy does not include a clause for stolen goods, its good for PR and karma just to take them back since she's obviously not satisfied with her purchase.

By insisting that her purchase was legit, they have not only broken the 15-day hold law, but have also ripped her off. And now they KNOW they did and yet they still maintain this. Although, considering the issues surrounding Florida's 1996 Pawnbroking Act, it would seem this kind of thing happens often in Florida and/or the "pawn shops" strike a fine line near anarchy. If there is a strong correlation between the increase in pawn shops disobeying proper protocol (or "communication breakdown", as one EB spokesman puts it) and theft, then this should be issue, indeed. The burglar, who was just trying to pay the rent, even said he chose EB because of their lazy procedures.....hmm.

We are bipeds solely because the body plan from which we evolved only had four limbs with which to work.

No. That idea is amusing as an argument against Creationism... but even if humans had been intelligently designed (or if we someday master genetic engineering to the point where extra legs are possible), they wouldn't want to be centaur-like.

A configuration with 2 arms and 4+ legs creates more problems than it solves. Your claim about "better able to navigate rough terrain" is completely backwards. For the epitomy of rough terrain, look at an armed-forces obstacle course, and just imagine how far a horse could progress through it. The hypothetical centaurs cannot climb trees, mountains, or ropes. They cannot crawl through holes. They probably couldn't even swim.

Moving the torso to the center of "the table" would worsen things further, as then you wouldn't be able to lift objects near your center of mass, or even tie your own shoelace! (front or rear)

So being quadruped brings on those many disadvantages, and actually reduces the ability to cross rough terrain. You might retort that it reduces the time needed to cross smooth terrain by a factor of 2-5, and this is true. But humans already can gain the travel-abilities of a horse: they simple sit on top of a horse and nudge it in the right direction.

The flexibility to ride an assortment of mounts or vehicles far outweighs anything we might've "lost" by not growing six limbs.

Of course there are natural sources of CO2. (And BTW, it's not vegetation, but animals, that produces CO2. Plants convert CO2 into O2, (very) roughly speaking.) The point is that there's a natural balance of CO2 sources and sinks. Humans are adding CO2 without providing for anything that removes it. You'd expect that biological CO2 sinks would prosper and make up for the glut of CO2, but humans are turning land that was rich with vegetation into land for human development. So we're reducing CO2 absorbtion and increasing CO2 production.

Look at the rise of CO2 in our atmosphere and tell me again that it's all to be blamed on volcanoes.

As someone coming from behind the Iron Curtain, I can assure you that the -3/ is actually correct. The soviet engineers cloned processors down to the microscopic scale. There have even been clones of Intel processors with the (c) Intel part right on the silicon! You can bet that the pipeline system was cloned down to the single valve.

This assumes that we are using current techniques to farm the corn and ferment and distill it. If the farm machinery can use biodiesel instead of fossil diesel then that part is taken out. If the the still can be heated using solar heating (direct solar heating, not using inefficient solar cells), some use of wind, etc. then it may be possible to make the equation go positive for us.

As long as the input is fossil fuels or ethanol or hydrogen (perpetual motion machine, anyone?), efficiency means we'll come out behind. As plants learned long ago, you need outside input of power for it to be worthwhile which is why some researchers are looking at bacterial catylists among other things to split out the hydrogen from water. Plants left hydrogen behind a long time ago so perhaps we're going down a dead end.

You can see some info here, I have had these things for years. It's cool to see more info, it looks like the Guinness Stout would make a wild tie, if they don't already have one.

I currently have Scotch, Vodka and Light beer and since I haven't had to wear a tie on a daily basis in 5 years I probably wont be getting any more.

As far as the ties go, the Light Beer looks cool, but if it's time for drinks it Vodka, Scotch then Light Beer (not all in the same night).

I'd start with what I expect in an image and build a system from there. If you just want to take simple pictures of things close up you might also consider dumping your current microscope and going with this.