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The Chicago area already has a magnet school focused on math and science: the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. It's funded by the state, and has a great record of students that go on and become leaders in their fields.

This already exists, it's called the Illinois Math and Science Academy.

IMHO the father screwed up by waiting until the kid was a teenager. I started programming computers when I was five; I would have killed to have a parent that could have mentored me instead of having to teach myself from books and magazines (no Internet back then, but there was RAINBOW and some Apple(?) rag that I can't recall the name to, I just remember they had an issue about computer graphics that talked about the Don Bluth games and Tron).

I got my start with computers in my school district's gifted program (Illinois district #66 FTW); this was back in 1982 and Apple had donated a bunch of equipment (thank you!!!). My Mom was a teacher so she was able to bring a computer home for the summer. I spent a lot of my early years working on the computers at the local library during the school year and then working at home over the summer. I got some pirated games from the high schoolers that also used the library's lab and I spent a lot of time going through some BASIC programming texts (up through peek/poke IIRC). I also played with LOGO quite a bit. At about the same time, my Dad picked up a TRS-80 from Radio Shack and I learned how to operate that system as well (gotta love the cassette tapes).

At the time I was really into video games since my Mom had bought me an Atari 2600 for Christmas (and later, the 5200); don't ask me how a five year-old knows to ask for an Atari. I was also into those choose your own adventure books and started writing my own (admittedly primitive) text adventure games.

I attended high school at the Illinois Math and Science Academy. Once again fortune smiled upon me and the school had a UNIX lab (SunOS) and access to the Internet(!). I got turned on to news groups and discovered Phrack Magazine; that taught me some cool things, but also got me in some trouble. I eventually moved on to the University where I studied CS in the department of Engineering with a focus on computer architecture and operating systems. I had pretty much known from an early age that I wanted to program computers for a living and it was more than a little strange to realize that not everyone at college knew absolutely what they wanted to do.

Now that you know how I got excited about computers, I suppose my advice would be to focus on encouraging your son to keep at it and not focus on the fact that they might not yet have the background/ability to take on some of the projects that they want to do. Also, try to find some non-computer interest that can be expanded to include computers.

Here are links to relevant sites:

Appendix A: Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects

http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/45cfr46.htm

Appendix B: The Belmont Report

http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/belmont.htm

Do we know this? I'm no astronomer, so I don't. Just how much can an orbit be altered by a collision? (Or at least, one that doesn't pulverize both objects).

I'm no astronomer either, but we can run some numbers found a la Google and give ourselves some reasonable estimates. Anybody who IS an astronomer is free to correct my numbers, but my intention is merely a "back of the napkin" class estimate.

How fast does an asteroid travel? The average speed of an asteroid is 25km/second. Since I'm am American, to me that's about 15 miles per SECOND.

Earth is 7,926 Miles across. For these figures I'll use 8,000 miles.

Asteroids are somewhere between 1.8 and 4.5 AU from the sun. The earth is 1 AU from the son. Since both orbit the sun, and the average distance of earth from the sun is 0 AU (orbit being roughly circular) let's say that the average distance of an asteroid from Earth is about 2.2 AU. Since earth is 1 AU and that is 93 Million miles, we'll say that the average asteroid is about 93 million * 2.2 miles from the Earth. That's 204.6 million miles from the Earth.

So let's assume that two rocks hit. What are the odds that the asteroid goes out and whacks the Earth, straight away? Well, we'd end up with a 204.6 MILLION MILE RADIUS on the inside of a very large sphere. Using the formula for calculating the surface of a sphere, we get 261,348,480,000,000,000 square miles of area that the asteroid could potentially hit. Compare that to the actual area of Earth to hit (a circle 2*pi*r) =~ 50,000 miles.

In short, you have a 50,000 in 261,348,480,000,000,000, or 1 in 5,226,969,600,000. (one in about 5 trillion)

These are very VERY VERY small odds, even if my back-of-the-napkin calculations are off by several orders of magnitude. Let's give you some idea just how BIG 5 trillion is. There have been about 1 billion seconds since Jan 1, 1972. To wait 1 trillion seconds is to wait about 30,000 years. If asteroids were to collide every SINGLE SECOND it would STILL take over 30,000 YEARS for one to hit the Earth directly.

Now, these figures are rough. They do not take into account orbital mechanics, etc. But even so, the numbers are very small (large as odds against?) indeed.

> it's probably not worth the effort

It's definitely worth the effort. My school (not exactly private; IMSA) kicked out a number of students for supposed thought crimes. Writing a song about a teacher they didn't like; posting "racist" comments on a private message board from home; etc. I wish someone had the balls to sue them -- I'm sure they would have lost big time.

Just beacuse you're under 18 doesn't mean you deserve to be considered too dumb / young to have a voice. "First they came for those under 18, then they came for "the terrorists", now they're here for me and nobody is left to speak out." Don't put up with them.

OTOH, if the OP did something stupid, then they might have a case. Not telling us the details just hurts you in the end.

"Many public key cryptosystems, such as RSA, will become obsolete if Shor's algorithm is ever implemented in a practical quantum computer."

Hi. I host with dreamhost (www.dreamhost.com). Even on their cheapest plans they include unlimited Mailman lists, so it is a pretty good deal. I run about 8 domains with them and they are quite reliable. Their tech support is also quite good. Note, I wrote the Mailman list admin documentation, so I consider myself experienced on this topic.

If you are not averse to referral credits, use this link (and thanks). --chris

Not an (i|Power)Book owner (yet!!) but AFAIK there is no Airport Express support in YDL. So if you have an iBook or PB12" you will have to get a USB WiFi adapter, or get another PCMCIA WiFi card for the rest of the PBs. I recommend anything based on the PrismII chipset (use wlan, orinoco_cs, or hostap drivers). Btw, if you are going to buy a Linksys WPC11 - get v.3. AVOID WPC11 v.4 - its based around some obscure Realtek chipset and the drivers suck (and are x86 only, and crash on anything older than 2.4.18). http://alumni.imsa.edu/~andyw/projects/wpc11v4.htm l

Simple (your idea is put to use by GIMP to export to html) - but it doesn't work as expected on way to many browsers... For example Firefox didn't display's GIMP's HTML export correctly.

Another problem is that you wind up with a giant file, which takes forever to download and tends to expose a lot of bugs in browsers, since they don't expect large files.

I made a variation on this idea where instead of using tables+gif I used CSS. Essentially I created bazilions of 1px-by-1px regions... Here is a proof-of-concept program that will convert any image supported by ImageMagick into CSS+XHTML - http://alumni.imsa.edu/~andyw/projects/image2xhtml .html Here is a result of a conversion of a tiny image - http://alumni.imsa.edu/~andyw/projects/me.html. This is as bad (worse actually) than tables, since the output file becomes astronomical in size even for medium-sized pix.

Simple (your idea is put to use by GIMP to export to html) - but it doesn't work as expected on way to many browsers... For example Firefox didn't display's GIMP's HTML export correctly.

Another problem is that you wind up with a giant file, which takes forever to download and tends to expose a lot of bugs in browsers, since they don't expect large files.

I made a variation on this idea where instead of using tables+gif I used CSS. Essentially I created bazilions of 1px-by-1px regions... Here is a proof-of-concept program that will convert any image supported by ImageMagick into CSS+XHTML - http://alumni.imsa.edu/~andyw/projects/image2xhtml .html Here is a result of a conversion of a tiny image - http://alumni.imsa.edu/~andyw/projects/me.html. This is as bad (worse actually) than tables, since the output file becomes astronomical in size even for medium-sized pix.

Funny, my senior year (last year) at IMSA (http://www.imsa.edu/) we literally had a section of the Old Caf corded off with hazmat dudes hunting down mercury that dripped from a turned-over barometer. So dumb... its mercury salts that are poisonous... (hence the "mad hatters"), not mercury, *sigh*

My high school, IMSA, did this sort of thing. They had a certain section of one of the physics classes designated as female only. I haven't read any of the write-ups, but I believe that, in general, the females found the class to be more satisfying than their mixed-sex classes.

At the time this was occurring, some male students were complaining about this female only section because of scheduling reasons (the only section they could take was female-only). I was a bit upset that they didn't have a male only section; It's possible that we would have seen similar effects/benefits.

My high school used the Schlage RFID system for access to the dorm^H^Hresidence halls. The readers were sensitive enough that you could put the card in your wallet and then just put your butt up against the black box reader. Some gullible people actually believed the boxes scanned your bottom for access.

Check it out :)

Benjamin Frankin was the person who decided which pole was the positive one of the two and which was the negative because he was the first to recognize in terminology that they were opposites rather than fundamentally different kinds of electricity (vitreous and resinous)... and that items without electrical properties were in balance rather than lacking electricity. From a letter in 1747:

'Hence have arisen some new terms among us; we say B (and other bodies alike circumstanced) are electrized positively; A negatively. Or rather B is electrized plus and A minus.'

If you have the vision of an average human (20/20), you can pronounce "DEFPOTEC" coming from almost any Latin-alphabet background. Below that line, would most of the Snellen eye chart's consonant clusters be valid even in cluster-loving Slavic languages such as Polish?

I remember last year for the mid-year intercession at my high school> , there was a whole week long class devoted to showing the FLAKEYNESS and INCORRECTNESS of comic book physics. Hell - even my Calc-Based Physics Book by Halliday and Resnick from last year had an exercise on p=mv, proving that superman wouldn't be able to just stand there and deflect bullets.

I have a high-end PC, and will pay $50 for ut2004. I've NEVER had a windows install in my life. I ran MacOS up until Linux/PPC came out (and then Debian), then I converted to Debian/x86 this summer.

So, yes, I like games (actually only UT. That's all I play); and no,I don't do windows. Sorry :)

I'm not a hardcore gamer. I just like blowing people away in UT. Good stress relief (and good test of my speaker system :)

Speaking of which, I hope the UT2004 people put the proper OpenAL in this time. If not, I'll have to patch it again.

Here is another XOR algorithm.

Microsoft Word is the best product ever. It's the only text format that can carry viruses, and now it isn't even secure. Can anyone say digital signature?

You can't forge those without a supercomputer or two. Geez.

It really looks like M$ goes out of their way to be stupid. I mean I could come up with a better document encryption scheme, and I'm still in high school.

Here it is: digitally sign the document if you don't want people modifying it. If you do modify it, digitally sign the diffs. Easy. To prevent people from reading it, encrypt it. It's simple, really. We have tools available for this, anyway. Just type your quote "I'll give you 3000 of model xyz for $31337. OK?" and feed it to gpg. Done. No need for proprietary formats, no need to shell out $500 for Office. It's done more securely, simply, and cost-effectively. I don't understand why people use M$ garbage!

(And I know I'm going to get a reply like "How do you write papers without Word, smartass." LaTeX. Look at this essay for an example. :)

A lot of spare computers, anyway. I got to attend a small class that he taught at Chiba University this summer. I implemented his algorithm in scheme here.

While I was in Japan I did all my software development on my clie. You can take a look at what I generated at my site. There's some good CS stuff and a very nice (IMHO) puzzle program.

Actually, it did everything I needed. I could edit programs and listen to music at the same time. Needless to say, however, it's nice to have my Athlon 3000+ too :)

He got very upset and angrily announced that a scientist's only responsibility is to science. The possible uses of a discovery should not even be considered by the researchers -- that is someone elses business. And because of this, he did not feel even the slightest bit of remorse for his work on the bomb.

He gave a presentation at my high school several years ago during which he claimed the same thing.

Granted other people were working on the bomb, but I find it reprehensible that one would try to claim that they aren't at all responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of people; that they had no duty to consider this when doing their research. Especially when they were directly responsible for the creation of the weapon used. It's akin to me putting a web-page up with links to applications that can be used to do DDOS, shutdown 911 networks, disrupt the power grids, etc. and then disclaim responsibility when someone actually uses them.

I should also point out that my school had a Science, Society and the Future class that specifically included discussions on the moral considerations and implications to society of scientific research.

That would be Karma Whore. Not to be confused with with any of the following :

Crack Whore, Assistant Crack Whore, Crack Whores Who Remember 9/11, A little known band called the Absolute Whores, Media Whores, or even Evil Lesbian Media Whores

• Manapouri Power station (Underground hydro-power station). Quite a cool place to visit, drive down a long tunnel to get to it.
• Tiwai Point Comalco Aluminium Smelter (near Bluff) has guided tours. See where a good fraction of NZ's electricity gets used.
• Wairakei Geothermal power station near Rotorua. (The world's first geothermal power station - you can request tours)
• Waihopai Echelon listening station (Nothing much to see but a listening station for NSA's Echelon network)

That price would assume that I am always uploading or downloading something (at 12MB/s, the connection is usually not very busy, obviously).

My job requires me to live on campus and gives me the Internet connection.
Network map (the map is a few years old and a few things have changed in the halls, epsecially with RC apartment connections)

The network topology looks like this:
100Base-T connection to a 100Base-T switch (shared with three other computers)
Swtich, via 100mbs copper, to Cisco Catalyst 3000 switch.
Catalyst 3000, via 200mbs fiber connection, to Cisco Catalyst 5000 switch
Catalyst 5000 to DS3 (45mbs) fiber internet connection.

The important thing (and very nice thing) is that the traffic is separate from student traffic until the Catalyst 3000 switch.

Hope that this is of some interest. --chris

Hope that this is of some interest. --chris

Hope that this is of some interest. --chris

Do I qualify?
To qualify for the "X for Teachers" program you must be a K-12 teacher at a recognized school (Public, Private, Catholic, Bureau of Indian Affairs) and you must agree to have software delivered to your school address.

You may be correct, but you're sending the wrong kind of message here. It has been shown that every classical algorithm can be performed on a quantum computer (quick note here, but there are better sources) Sure, some may be slower, because of the quirks of quantum interaction, the necessity of error correction, or simply because an efficient algorithm hasn't yet been formulated.

On the other hand, a fairly large body of problems have been shown to solvable exponentially faster using QC's. That, combined with the fact that QC/QInformation can be so fun to work with/theorize has contributed to the rapid growth of this field. It's like the Chaos Theory of the 00's.

Our high school has a program called Real Science where some students volunteer to work on an interacive cd with movies on an area of science. The project is student run and is of fairly high quality.

The .edu domains are reserved for four-year degree-granting institutions. (That restriction either wasn't in place or was not enforced until around 1992, so you will find the occasional high schools and community colleges with edu domains.)

# Make less behave more pleasantly:
export LESS=FMqai

# Control behavior of all incarnations of make without command line arguments (convenient for multiprocessors):
export MAKEFLAGS='-j 2 -l 2.5'

# Start lynx with the freshmeat.net search for the given string:
fm() {
lynx "http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=${1} useful for scripting languages:
vw() {
vim `which $1`
}

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Here's a (probably too-long) Perl script to manipulate my command history. It filters out all but the most-recent duplicates; this means I get to keep more of my elaborate commands for later.
use File::Copy;
my $origfilename = shift;
my $infilename = "$origfilename";
while (-e $infilename) { $infilename .= ".old" }
move($origfilename, $infilename);
open IN, $infilename;
open OUT, ">$origfilename";
my %inlines;
my $whichline = 0;
while () { $inlines{$_} = $whichline++; }
foreach (sort { $inlines{$a} $inlines{$b} } keys %inlines) { print OUT; }
close OUT;
close IN;

#!/usr/bin/perl
# This one is nice; you give a regex argument and a replacement argument, and a list of files.
# For each file in the list, rename the file to the result of the regex substitution.
# e.g., sedmv 'NIN' 'Nine_Inch_Nails' NIN*.mp3
use File::Copy;
my $pat = shift;
my $repl = shift;
my @files = @ARGV;
foreach my $f (@files) {
my $newf = $f;
$newf =~ s{$pat}{$repl}g;
move($f, $newf) if $f ne $newf;
}


And of course there's my user-monitoring program.
It alerts you to logins, logouts, idle time, 'mesg' status, and 'w'hat people are doing, as things happen, for a specified buddy list or all users, in color, with very little load on the system.

She doesn't. Because of the way quantum cryptography works (and believe me, you don't want to get into the math behind it), reading the message destroys it. So here's an example of what happens: Bob wants to send Alice a secure message; she needs to get the message and be sure that nobody else can read it. Perfect security is obtained by a 1-time pad, as described above. (If I transmit the string AOSTJSDOFKEOSJ using a one-time pad, it could be any string 14 characters long including "this is a code", "attack at dawn", "remember steak", etc). The difficulty lies in exchanging the 1-time pad without meeting. So, Bob generates a random sequence and sents it off to Alice, a bit at a time. If nobody interferes, Alice and Bob can use those bits to create a 1-time pad for secure communication. However, if Eve intercepts the communication, that destroys the values; she can send new bits to Alice, but because she can't create exactly what Bob sent, Alice and Bob will be able to tell that the communication was not secure, so they won't use those bits. They just try again until Eve gives up. (This is a simplification, of course; if you're interested in a detailed look at the math behind quantum computing, I recommend this website)

Mmm...weak arguments.

First of all, there's a lot more than a one in a billion chance of earth being hit by an asteroid (see this also)...some kind of defence mechanism will have to be implemented at some time, when it is technically feasible to do so. In any case, part of the NASA budget (as well as other space agencies around the world) is being used for NEO monitoring. The risk is taken seriously, even though we're pretty sure that it is not an immediate risk.

As far as the SDI - or, as it is now know, the NMD - the analogy is even less accurate. First, I'll point out that we were talking about probabilities of a catastrophy occuring, while you talk about the probability of a defense system being effective. Already, this is a completely different argument, so you're way off-mark. But let's assumed you talked about the probability of a missile attack on the United States, against which National Missile Defence would be used. Again, note that the NMD is not designed to prevent against an environmental catastrophy (whether natural or man-made), but against a military threat, so you're talking about apples and oranges. The question is: how effective would the NMD be, and how real is the threat it addresses. Nobody in their right mind believes that North Korea or another so-called "rogue" state would try to attack the U.S. with nuclear arms (they'd be vaporized within the next half-hour, and good ol' Kim isn't that delirious!). At the same time, NMD wouldn't protect against fanatics hijacking commercial airplanes, or from terrorist bombs being planted on U.S. soil. Finally, most military threats are dealt with through diplomacy and foreign policy, things which - unlike asteroids - can be influenced. So your arguments don't hold...sorry.

In other words, I think a asteroid defence mechanism is something we should look in the future, global warming is a risk we shouldn't take now and in the future, despite initial costs (which would appear small if global warming turned out to be as catastrophic as predicted) while NMD is just a colossal waste of money (or rather, a disguised subsidy of several key industries which are close to the current administration).

Okay, I've looked into some IC's to get this thing to work.

First, you need to convert analog to digital. I found what looks to be a decent A/D converter (12 bits, so with 0-+5V input, you get resolution of ~.001V) at DigiKey. This also has a "MicroWire" interface which is what the USB controller speaks.

Then, you'll need some way to talk to the USB bus, where the National Semiconductor USBN604 would work. I have no idea how to program this thing, but after reading the docs I know how to get a circut working between this and the A/D converter (I think).

On the analog lines, you'll want a (big) transistor to transpose the input voltage on a regulated 5v line. You might want a bargraph display on this 5v line, and a potentiometer to adjust input to fit a nice range.

I imagine that it would easy to create a frequency generator using a D/A converter connected to the USB chip. Here the IC would output 5v, so you'd want to connect an external power source and drive that with some transistors (+ and ground). You might want some sort of buffer to do constant waves; thus saving USB bandwidth.

Okay, those are pretty much my ideas for now. Time to do more research and draw some diagrams with xfig. I'll probably post some stuff on my site shortly. (How helpful, huh... now I'm obligated!)

Don't these dorms have private bathrooms in their rooms?

We've got private bathrooms at IMSA, but we're a high school. Still though, I would not be too happy sharing a bathroom with my wing-mates :)

There are no real specialized, technical, PUBLIC schools in America.

Not true. I went to a great one(NCSSM), and there are others:

IMSA

Bronx High

And I am sure there are others. There aren't many, but there are some.

don't forget NCSSM and IMSA. There really are a lot of high schools that got their .edu's early. I think I remember hearing that sometime after '95 or something that .edu would only be given to colleges and universites, and the high schools that already had .edu registrants would be grandfathered and could keep them.

You are on the way to destruction.

Basically the same here at IMSA. You're also guilty until proven innocent. And the RCs are computer illeterate "you can't send e-mail from off-campus", "is that a mouse or a CD-ROM?", etc. How fun to live there :-)

If it crushs the people who use windows, then the msn collective will just brainwash new ones. We should make it land on redmond so we can kill the fungus were it starts. Oh wait, you ment the ignorant massess of voters. In that case, is it possible to make it go back in time and kill all the colonists? Only if they succesfully manuver mir through the four dimensional maze

Personally, I kinda like the Automated Windows Technical Support script from the maker of the 4D maze that can solve any problem with any version of windows! Try it, it's magical!

The maze is a Java applet.

If there's a time element, it's the wait for your browser to support Java =)

But not to worry, the source code is available.

Well this bloke thinks there's no problem and this bloke thinks there is a danger.

Make up your own mind.

You can try this link http://www.imsa.edu/~matth/cs299/. This is introductory stuff - which equates to 'nearly incomprehensible' for us normal humans. I think I've made it through 3 sections.

www.imsa.edu

While perhaps not everyone here is aware of it, I remember your involvement with the early history of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

[For those who don't know, IMSA is a state-wide, residential magnet school for grades 10-12, with less than 1000 total students. It requires an application, recommendations, and the SAT to gain admittance. While math and science take a prominent place in its name, it also has excellent humanities and social studies programs. The idea was to provide a better educational environment for gifted high school students.]

IMSA, which first opened in 1986, is now halfway through it's thirteenth year. It was an experiment when it was first created. Over the years, it has changed and adapted on a number of levels. Now it's more a fixture of the Illinois educational system.

Certainly, improving the education of future generations is as important and controversial a topic today as it was then. Do you feel that the IMSA experiment was a success? Would you now advocate starting more programs like it in other states? Would you say that, over its 13 year history, the institution has maintained the correct focus, or have they perhaps lost sight of their original goals in order to ensure their own survival and continued funding?

In any case, thanks. I felt it helped me.

--K. Schalk, IMSA calss of 1990