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Actually, it's more like a quarter of the landmass...
https://www.learner.org/course...

[citation needed]

You see population growth is rapidly decelerating, albeit still positive. Hence our impact is likely to be decelerating too.

Population is one factor, the other is per capita emissions and resource usage. It's the latter that's increasing. A common theme in the news recently has been the alarm expressed by scientists at the rapidity with which changes are happening. Nobody is saying that things are progressing at lower than expected rates. They're all shocked at how fast it's hitting home. People can make cute comments about Malthus to imply that there's nothing to worry about, but that's not what we're seeing. Just because Malthus wasn't right in his lifetime, that doesn't make him wrong. Malthus died in 1834: that's really not that long ago.

Barring all those futurists who are, er, scared to death of death being correct and assuming immortality isn't just around the corner (always seems to be conveniently within their lifetime), isn't 2 children per woman a replacement rate? I believe it also takes a man to make those 2 babies :) (For now... or at least you're still going to get 50/50 boy/girl even if you just throw the boys in an incinerator, but despite some cynical comments here and there I don't see that happening so we must assume that it's 2 children, not two girls per woman.) It sounds like they're saying 2045 is when humanity stops growing. (Also barring some horrendous planet-wide extinction event level disaster.)

That's still not really fun to think about. There was another graph that showed 2045 being roughly 9 billion. So, not as zomg overcrowded as I was first thinking, but it's definitely time to think about the engineering problem of living sustainably (locally grown food, water sources, power, etc) in Siberia or Antarctica or the Sahara or on the ocean surface.

Personally while I think the WWF isn't necessarily wrong about what they're trying to say, they tend to ignore that this is really an engineering problem, not a resources problem.

I remember a PSA on the TV when I was a kid. Some guy turns on the water in his bathroom and a pond in the background drains completely dry and the water stops in the bathroom. The problem with environmentalists is that even if they have a very sophisticated model of how this happens, water doesn't simply disappear. Food production simply isn't finite. We don't even live on 100% of the land on this planet, and there's still 2/3s of it covered by water we've just started thinking about utilizing directly with new desalinization technologies or just floating small city-states on. I don't think this planet is anywhere close to "full" or "overcrowded," not really. Yeah, it's overcrowded and more than full if technology stops in 1950, but technology doesn't stop.

I think we can get to 9 or 10 billion just fine, even without sacrificing places like Yellowstone (you wouldn't want to build there anyway!) or the Painted Desert or Grand Canyon just to name North American features that should continue to be preserved in addition to all the state and national parks I love having.

Probably preaching to the choir. I'll get some popcorn and return for the AGW flamewar below.

our negative impact on the planet is substantial and that this is accelerating.

[citation needed]

You see population growth is rapidly decelerating, albeit still positive. Hence our impact is likely to be decelerating too.

Perhaps we will get bigger population. However, history shows, that once electricity, television and contraceptives are introduced, population growth slows down significantly. Once population becomes richer population growth turns negative.

People have been parroting that to me my whole life. People who want to make more babies, or maybe they just want to parrot something so they do not have to have uncomfortable thoughts.
Lets sanity check this.
1. Population grows VERY quickly. Close to doubling over my short lifetime (less than 4 billion to close to 8 billion). https://www.learner.org/course...
We are now growing at more than a billion a decade.
So if you would like a heaping helping of citations about eating all the big fish in the sea, dead spots in the sea, and climate change caused by this growth, no more farmable land, the fuel that grows and moves the food running out at some point, killing our species via over population, just ask and we will help.

But wait what about this?:
2. "Education, women's rights, a higher standard of living, and magic make population growth go negative."? The problem is that is a VERY slow process compared to population growth.

Do you see the problem now and why you should drop parroting things along that line?

If you don't, just remember this: Very slow solutions for explosively growing problems.. are not solutions!!!!!
No one tries to put out a forest fire with one stream of pee.

Once population becomes richer population growth turns negative.

Just to make absolutely sure you now understand: YOU HAVE JUST HANDED US 'TRICKLE DOWN' BIRTH CONTROL!
I am so deeply embarrassed for you.

You may well be right in this case. Probably you are. I don't know much about this specific issue. But I have heard or read from history similar reassurances saying about other things (cocaine in Coca Cola, lead in gasoline, trans fats, smoking, PCBs, MTBE, mercury, etc.) which we have now reconsidered as human health risks. Fracking was supposedly harmless; now it turns out it can cause earthquakes and pollute the groundwater...

At the end of the excellent 1980s video series "The World of Chemisty" (in the last or second to last episode) Nobel-prize winner Roald Hoffman talks in passing about the wonders and great value of a new plastic called BPA (bisphenol A).
http://www.learner.org/resourc...

We now know that BPA can affect developing human brains:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/heal...
"Some research has shown that BPA can seep into food or beverages from containers that are made with BPA. Exposure to BPA is a concern because of possible health effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children. "

See also:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
"The number of chemicals known to be toxic to children's developing brains has doubled over the last seven years, researchers said. Dr. Philip Landrigan at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Dr. Philippe Grandjean from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, authors of the review published Friday in The Lancet Neurology journal say the news is so troubling they are calling for a worldwide overhaul of the regulatory process in order to protect children's brains. 'We know from clinical information on poisoned adult patients that these chemicals can enter the brain through the blood brain barrier and cause neurological symptoms,' said Grandjean. 'When this happens in children or during pregnancy, those chemicals are extremely toxic, because we now know that the developing brain is a uniquely vulnerable organ. Also, the effects are permanent.'"

Unless people actually look for these materials in human brains directly, it is hard to be 100% sure there is no way they could get into the brain somehow. Although even if they get there, to be fair, then "the dose makes the poison" and what is the effect relative to the benefits? While Roald Hoffman was not more cautious about BPA, nonetheless, modern chemistry has produced all sorts of modern wonders, and it is hard to imagine modern life without it (including safe food storage against insects and bacteria).

Even (life saving) antibiotics are now seen as having a down side that suggests they be used more precisely and also in the context of pro-biotics and/or fermented bacteria-rich foods etc. For example:
"How Your Gut Flora Influences Your Health"
http://articles.mercola.com/si...

A link from a comment there:
"The microbiome-gut-brain axis during early life regulates the hippocampal serotonergic system in a sex-dependent manner."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
"Bacterial colonisation of the intestine has a major role in the post-natal development and maturation of the immune and endocrine systems. These processes are key factors underpinning central nervous system (CNS) signalling. Regulation of the microbiome-gut-brain axis is essential for maintaining homeostasis, including that of the CNS. However, there is a paucity of data pertaining to the influence of microbiome on the serotonergic system. Germ-free (GF) animals represent an effective preclinical tool to investigate such phenomena. Here we show that male GF animals have a significant elevation

The Mechanical Universe video series is a great learning tool for physics. http://www.learner.org/resourc... Or, check out the courses at www.edx.org some free, some paid if you want a certificate.

Television, in addition to carrying on the benefit of radio, shows students the world rather than simply referring to points on a map. Different cultures and environments can be described in full color with fluid video, rather than hoping the student understands a short text description that too often seems absurd due to its foreign context.

Really?

Yes, really. There's much more, but you can find that for yourself. No, it doesn't replace classroom learning, but it can be an excellent adjunct to it.

The Mechanical Universe: http://www.learner.org/resourc...
The World of Chemistry : http://www.learner.org/resourc...

Not sure how they look on a cell phone screen, but they were both informative on regular TV and laptop screens. I watched both for fun twenty years ago (post college), and also the one on chemistry with my kid a few years back (the physics one was not as engaging though). I liked being able to rewind them to review some complex issue several times. They are not the same as doing hands-on lab exercises though.

There is also the Khan Academy now, which also has a supportive community and online problem sets in some areas. So, I'd say good things are possible. Of course, so much of schooling is boring if it is not what you want to be doing at the time. That's part of why I prefer learned-directed education as much as possible, including via homeschooling/unschooling.

The Mechanical Universe: http://www.learner.org/resourc...
The World of Chemistry : http://www.learner.org/resourc...

Not sure how they look on a cell phone screen, but they were both informative on regular TV and laptop screens. I watched both for fun twenty years ago (post college), and also the one on chemistry with my kid a few years back (the physics one was not as engaging though). I liked being able to rewind them to review some complex issue several times. They are not the same as doing hands-on lab exercises though.

There is also the Khan Academy now, which also has a supportive community and online problem sets in some areas. So, I'd say good things are possible. Of course, so much of schooling is boring if it is not what you want to be doing at the time. That's part of why I prefer learned-directed education as much as possible, including via homeschooling/unschooling.

Planets are just clumps of dust.

But clumps of dust with a really low surface area for the mass involved. For example, Jupiter has a density of 1,330 kg per square meter and an average radius of almost 70,000 km (7*10^7 meters), a third more than water at STP. If instead, Jupiter were broken up into many equally sized balls of a smaller radius, then the mass stays the same, but the increase in surface area is inversely proportional to the decrease in radius.

For example a Jupiter-mass cloud of micron sized spheres, each with the density of Jupiter, would have a surface area 7*10^13 larger than Jupiter. That surface area incidentally happens to be roughly a twentieth of a square light year (roughly 4*10^30 square meters by my calculation) meaning at the right densities, such a cloud could intercept and radiate a lot more energy than Jupiter could, perhaps even be visible in small amateur telescopes at a few lightyears.

My point here is that some baryonic matter is a lot more visible, many orders of magnitude more visible, than other baryonic matter. And planet-sized objects are going to interact mostly by gravity as well meeting most of the desired characteristics of dark matter.

My take is having a significantly higher than expected fraction of the mass of your galaxies in rogue planets and similar things would be a way to account for dark matter.

But then there's the early universe observations. For example, the most damning evidence against dark matter hiding in planets and such, is observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is effectively the study of the period of the universe in which it started to become transparent to photons (about 400k years after the big bang according to the above link). That period of time is not a lot of time in which to create massive objects. And the fluctuations of the CMB yield dark to visible mass of roughly 5 to 1 (again according to claims in the above link).

So that indicates to me that there probably some sort of exotic matter out there which we haven't discovered yet.

As the years progress, an ever increasing majority of people are forced, through various agencies, into a state of poverty which becomes a self perpetuating cycle of ignorance and...well, stupidity.

I know, things were much better in the middle ages when 98% of people were kings and philosophers. Oh wait, they were all dirt-farming serfs, and it's only modern society that's produced a middle class of people free from the constant threat of starvation and able to afford the free time to learn and think.

Wrong. There has been a "middle class" in just about every civilization since there's been civilization. Sigh. Study a little history and maybe you won't come off as this dumb!

Maybe you can start here

http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html
"A video instructional series for college and high school classrooms and adult learners; 26 half-hour video programs and coordinated books"

I've watched it twice, once in my twenties, and once with my kid. It is hosted by a Nobel prize winning chemist (Roald Hoffman) with demos by Don Showalter. Holds up pretty well for something from 1990 as far as the basics, except maybe for touting the wonders of Bisphenol A in the last episode or so.

And such relationships can work both ways.

You've made an excellent argument for learning from knowledgeable other people with hands on experience about some area of interest, but, sadly, such people can only rarely be found in conventional schools...
    http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
    http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

And you ignore the other baggage professional teachers come with:
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
    http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/

Why not just watch a video series instead, and ask questions online?
    http://www.learner.org/
    http://www.khanacademy.org/
    http://www.explorelearning.com/

Of find some other alternative arrangement, including knowledgeable mentors among family, friends, or in the community?
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling

Is that really going to be that much worse than trying to learn from most "teachers" (who if you've ever been aroudn teacher training programs, you would see generally know little about math, science, and technology), as well meaning as most of them may be? The first thing most schools do is destroy a child's natural ability to learn and natural creativity:
    http://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Crib-Early-Learning-Tells/dp/0688177883
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=related

Here is an alternative funding model for hiring private tutors or having neighborhoods again where people have time to share their knowledge freely, based on just giving public school funds directly to the parents:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
   

Sure, you got me there. :-) Thanks.

And also a lot of great math comes from great physics, and is easier to understand that way. My young kid really liked the "derivative machine" cartoon in this series, as well as other animations connecting physics with the math (especially calculus) it inspired:
    "The Mechanical Universe... and Beyond"
    http://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html

With so many great resources, learning both math and physics can be a lot more fun at an early age than slogging through a lot of paperwork:
    http://www.fun-motion.com/list-of-physics-games/

Other sciences are part of that too, from chemistry through psychology and zoology, etc.

A great resource on chemistry, and how it connects with various logical and practical challenges:
    "The World of Chemistry"
    http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html

Even if at the end, Nobel Laurette Roald Hoffman extols the wonders of Bisphenol-A. :-)
    http://www.chemicalsubstanceschimiques.gc.ca/challenge-defi/batch-lot-2/bisphenol-a/index-eng.php
"Canada is the first country in the world to take action on bisphenol A, thanks to our Chemicals Management Plan. This Plan was introduced in 2006 to review the safety of widely-used chemicals that have been in the marketplace for many years, and to update our knowledge and understanding of these chemicals."

I made something like this poem up once before (maybe I heard it before, too?). Here is another try at it:

The circle of knowledge, a poem by Paul D. Fernhout

    All philosophy is anthropology;
    All anthropology is psychology;
    All psychology is biology;
    All biology is chemistry;
    All chemistry is physics;
    All physics is math;
    All math is philosophy. :-)

Sure, you got me there. :-) Thanks.

And also a lot of great math comes from great physics, and is easier to understand that way. My young kid really liked the "derivative machine" cartoon in this series, as well as other animations connecting physics with the math (especially calculus) it inspired:
    "The Mechanical Universe... and Beyond"
    http://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html

With so many great resources, learning both math and physics can be a lot more fun at an early age than slogging through a lot of paperwork:
    http://www.fun-motion.com/list-of-physics-games/

Other sciences are part of that too, from chemistry through psychology and zoology, etc.

A great resource on chemistry, and how it connects with various logical and practical challenges:
    "The World of Chemistry"
    http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html

Even if at the end, Nobel Laurette Roald Hoffman extols the wonders of Bisphenol-A. :-)
    http://www.chemicalsubstanceschimiques.gc.ca/challenge-defi/batch-lot-2/bisphenol-a/index-eng.php
"Canada is the first country in the world to take action on bisphenol A, thanks to our Chemicals Management Plan. This Plan was introduced in 2006 to review the safety of widely-used chemicals that have been in the marketplace for many years, and to update our knowledge and understanding of these chemicals."

I made something like this poem up once before (maybe I heard it before, too?). Here is another try at it:

The circle of knowledge, a poem by Paul D. Fernhout

    All philosophy is anthropology;
    All anthropology is psychology;
    All psychology is biology;
    All biology is chemistry;
    All chemistry is physics;
    All physics is math;
    All math is philosophy. :-)

The "Mechanical Universe" includes an animation of rocket with velocity and acceleration graphs: http://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html

Nearly all the value of nearly all copyrighted works comes from ideas that the author learned from people who came before and who the author didn't pay...

I agree with you, but I think you should've focused a little more on the fact that *all* human work is based in part on ideas and work from other people. One example I often give is that farmers plant crops using seeds that were selectively bred for thousands of years. This doesn't mean we can deprive farmers of their work -- even if we can legitimately make the claim that the majority of a harvest is due to our "common cultural heritage" of high-yield seeds. (If you look at the natural versions of our crops, they're pathetically small and barely edible. For example, here's where corn came from: http://www.learner.org/courses/biology/archive/images/1290.html )

I stumbled across the Khan lectures a couple of months ago and I think they're great. Many thanks to Salman Khan.

Another series of lectures that appeared on television about 30 years ago is a show called The Mechanical Universe. They're not as deep as some of the Khan lectures but a bit more polished (not that it matters a lot). The Mechanical Universe lectures are available online at:
http://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html

Too bad there isn't more of this kind of material on television. Maybe one of the cable companies could buy the Khan lectures and make them available as an on-demand feature.

Except for the point that if families had that much money, the parents would not have to work that much (not even one job), and so would have time to homeschool. If you had three kids, and lived in NYS where US$20,000 is spent per kid per year, a working class family with three kids would have US$60,000 a year just to stay home with the kids and homeschool. And, at this point, there are lots of free educational materials on the internet; examples:
    http://www.khanacademy.org/
    http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html

Maybe I'm presenting "puppies and rainbows", but it is a lot better than the dystopia outlined here (given that the value of all human labor is rapidly declining from automation, better design, and voluntary social networks):
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

If you trust kids to learn, and trust parents to usually have their kids' best interests at heart, then you can see that parents of older children can hire tutors, acquire learning materials, visit homeschool resources centers, and so on, to create good learning experiences. Here is a labor of love by Salman Khan over the past few years to create 1000 educational videos that step-by-step cover most of the information about math and science most kids would ever learn in high school:
http://www.khanacademy.org/

The fact is, as John Holt or John Taylor Gatto have said (both celebrated teachers with decades of classroom experience), most of what teachers know is how to manage a classroom of twenty children of roughly the same age and background and how to maintain discipline in the room. That's it. That is 90% of what most teachers have been taught. And they do it in all sorts of ways (including things like cutting sarcasm). Some teachers know more, like Jaime Escalante. Most do no.

Here is a study that shows that not only do most elementary school teachers know next-to-nothing about math, but the less math kids are taught in school, the better they are at it:
"When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools"
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools

Kids should be learning because they want to, not because they are forced to. For example, a person of any age can learn to read in about 50 contact hours if they really want to, or a school system can spend thousands of hours trying to pound literacy into a child and still produce functional illiterates (as is the case with many US high school graduates). The same goes for many other subjects.

The fact is, when someone learns math or chemistry, especially today with so many great video resources,
http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html
almost all of the learning is done by kids themselves. Plus, parents can learn together with kids. And kids can learn together with other kids at the local library or through the internet. And old school buildings could be repurposed as learning centers.

Can this all be better? Sure. Let's put learning resource centers (or just better libraries) on every street corner, where anyone can go there at any time to get help learning whatever they want to learn about, whether reading, chemistry, carpentry, or cooking.

So, let's say that some parents send their kids to the cheapest private school and "keep the change". Are most kids going to be much worse off than they are now? About half of all kids in the USA can't even graduate from high school for one reason or another. Could it be that much worse?

Also, see my other comment in this thread.

One thing to watch out for. Like most people in the USA (myself included), you've been exposed to decades of propaganda by schools that schools are the solution (and the only solution) to making society work. What if some of that was self-serving?

Also, even assuming what you said was true, that you need some "specialist" to teach you chemistry (my kid and I just watched entire "The World of Chemistry" series at Learner.org, essentially with a Nobel Prize winning society as our chemistry "teacher"), what other lessons are teachers teaching that you don't want your kid to learn?
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training fo

Please see this book (and my other previous comment here):
    http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X

I wrote a review of it here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html

Other related books about general issues and about what has been done to girls via media (and poor nutrition):
    http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
    http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

And something every caregiver should know now that kids spend a lot of time indoors and have become vitamin D deficient:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

We got rid of broadcast TV long ago too (we do use DVDs like Mr. Rogers and nature videos, and selected YouTube).

While I don't recommend any screen media for younger kids if you can avoid it, this site is pretty good for age four:
    http://www.poissonrouge.com/

As is this:
    http://www.starfall.com/

For older ages, some good things are:
    http://www.learner.org/
    http://www.khanacademy.org/
    http://www.cosmolearning.com/

A caregiver needs to create a safe nurturing environment within a child's needs and abilities. You are doing the right thing.

Other useful links:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles
    http://www.motherstyles.com/

I live in Belgium where the highway is lighted at night, so don't come here.
http://www.learner.org/jnorth/images/graphics/s/songbird_migration_lights01.jpg might help you to tell you where to go.

Lots Online.

Also, Depending on their age. The western Tradition

And apparently (from the summary, because who reads the articles), it's 5,000 Hz which is within the range of human hearing.

Anyone want to try an experiment? This page - http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/spring/PicturingSound.html has an audio file of a 5,000 Hz signal. See if you either explode like these rocket or crap your pants.

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/sounds/Tone5000Hz.wav

Layne

And apparently (from the summary, because who reads the articles), it's 5,000 Hz which is within the range of human hearing.

Anyone want to try an experiment? This page - http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/spring/PicturingSound.html has an audio file of a 5,000 Hz signal. See if you either explode like these rocket or crap your pants.

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/sounds/Tone5000Hz.wav

Layne

Rumors were right. His ca. 1985 lectures, augmented with voiceovers, live actors, animations, etc., became a classic video series "The Mechanical Universe", that covered Newtonian mechanics, and later augmented to an "... And Beyond" version that added electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum theory.

By now, millions of college and high school students (my students among them) have seen David L. Goodstein, and are still groaning at his puns, and chuckling at the 1980's college "fashions" seen in the lecture hall.

You can view the series at the Annenberg website: http://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html.

That sounds like the documentary film A Private Universe. It's worth watching, to see how even bright students can have difficulty with basic science concepts.

For those who want to get an entertaining but substantial overview of chemistry rather than 5-minute gee-whiz demonstrations or music videos, I recommend the learner.org's The World of Chemistry 1/2 hour videos. These are very well done. I particularly find the simulations in the "The Genetic Code" amazing, even mesmerizing; it is mind-boggling how an arrangement of mere atoms can perform such extremely complex and organized behavior that we call "life". Makes the Linux kernel seem like kindergarten stuff. :)

That was a great site you mentioned with all sorts of fun activities:
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
If a younger kid is going to play video games, those are probably the best sorts of them. So too with the other one you mentioned (though it is more about reading):
http://www.starfall.com/

And certainly YouTube offers access to lots of interesting stuff for young kids (buildings being demolished, tornadoes, firetrucks, bagger 288, visualization of new ideas, etc.). Example:
"Take a seat concept: a library seat that follows you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dgaz6NIUFk
And for slightly older kids there is lots of educational video online like from the Annenberg CPB project like "The World of Chemistry"
http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html
or for younger kids stuff on energy:
http://www.learner.org/resources/series160.html

The late Fred Rogers' "Family Communications" non-profit has lots of good resources too both for kids and parents (CDs, DVDs, web pages, and books):
http://www.fci.org/parenting.asp

Kids can also learn a lot from Rokenbok and other RC toys (even at age four or so).
http://www.rokenbok.com/
The benefits of RC over video games is that the physical RC vehicles can also be pushed around by hand or used with other toys. And a child's eye site continues to develop normally instead of being used at a common fixed distance to the screen.

But there remains a lot to be said for learning from the real world. See:
"Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/202
"Nature deficit disorder"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_deficit_disorder

The Greeks suggests a good life involves "moderation in all things, including moderation". Or in other words, balance. Might kids grow healthiest at a certain pace? Perhaps too much of one thing (video games, broadcast tv) can mean too little of something else (health, creativity)? See:
http://www.openwaldorf.com/media.html
It's certainly a complex topic, but again, if kids are going to use video games, then the links you pointed to are fantastic ones, and much more likely to promote creativity than staring at less engaging and less interactive fare than advertisement and fear/sarcasm driven broadcast TV.

Also, now that you've gone and helped your kid get smarter than average, :-) why dump him into the day-prison euphemistically called "school"? :-) "Schooling" has only a tangential relationship to "Educating" in practice.

See John Taylor Gatto:
"The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm

John Holt:
"Teach your own"
http://www.holtgws.com/

Unschooling:
http://www.unschooling.info/articles.htm

_Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Batteri

That was a great site you mentioned with all sorts of fun activities:
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
If a younger kid is going to play video games, those are probably the best sorts of them. So too with the other one you mentioned (though it is more about reading):
http://www.starfall.com/

And certainly YouTube offers access to lots of interesting stuff for young kids (buildings being demolished, tornadoes, firetrucks, bagger 288, visualization of new ideas, etc.). Example:
"Take a seat concept: a library seat that follows you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dgaz6NIUFk
And for slightly older kids there is lots of educational video online like from the Annenberg CPB project like "The World of Chemistry"
http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html
or for younger kids stuff on energy:
http://www.learner.org/resources/series160.html

The late Fred Rogers' "Family Communications" non-profit has lots of good resources too both for kids and parents (CDs, DVDs, web pages, and books):
http://www.fci.org/parenting.asp

Kids can also learn a lot from Rokenbok and other RC toys (even at age four or so).
http://www.rokenbok.com/
The benefits of RC over video games is that the physical RC vehicles can also be pushed around by hand or used with other toys. And a child's eye site continues to develop normally instead of being used at a common fixed distance to the screen.

But there remains a lot to be said for learning from the real world. See:
"Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/202
"Nature deficit disorder"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_deficit_disorder

The Greeks suggests a good life involves "moderation in all things, including moderation". Or in other words, balance. Might kids grow healthiest at a certain pace? Perhaps too much of one thing (video games, broadcast tv) can mean too little of something else (health, creativity)? See:
http://www.openwaldorf.com/media.html
It's certainly a complex topic, but again, if kids are going to use video games, then the links you pointed to are fantastic ones, and much more likely to promote creativity than staring at less engaging and less interactive fare than advertisement and fear/sarcasm driven broadcast TV.

Also, now that you've gone and helped your kid get smarter than average, :-) why dump him into the day-prison euphemistically called "school"? :-) "Schooling" has only a tangential relationship to "Educating" in practice.

See John Taylor Gatto:
"The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm

John Holt:
"Teach your own"
http://www.holtgws.com/

Unschooling:
http://www.unschooling.info/articles.htm

_Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Batteri

The moon has about 13 days a year.

• Leela: Our car broke down and we're low on oxygen. Can we borrow some?
  Moon farmer: Borry? Listen here, city girl. You can't just borry oxygen. Oxygen doesn't grow on trees. You'll have to work it off doing chores on my hydroponic farm. You can return to your precious park at sun-up.
  Fry: I guess we can do chores for a few hours.
  Leela: Night lasts two weeks on the moon.
  Moon farmer: Yep, goes down to minus-173 degrees.
  Fry: Celsius or Fahrenheit?
  Moon farmer: First one, then the other.

Doesn't that infer the moon's rotation is 365.25 days?

No. If you thing of the earth and moon as orbiting each other, the earth could be considered in geostationary orbit. The earth and moon as they circle each other has the same side of the moon facing the earth at all times.

http://www.learner.org/channel/courses/essential/earthspace/session7/closer1.html
Orbital period (days) 27.32166
Rotational period (days) 27.32166
http://www.solarviews.com/eng/moon.htm

The moon has about 13 days a year.

If you just want a neat writing activity involving writing and any subject at all (I've seen it done in geography and science, and I used it myself in an art/social studies lesson), you might want to try a GRASPS activity. Here is a page that describes how to think up a GRASPS activity. I learned it from a guy who uses these activities as performance assessments in 8th grade Geography. I'm going to try to incorporate one into a math activity this year. If you need suggestions, or if that link isn't very helpful, let me know.

By far the best science-related television show I ever saw was "The Mechanical Universe ... and Beyond". It's university freshman-level physics, but intelligent and interested high school kids would get much out of it too. At 52 episodes, you'd probably not be able to get through all of it in a semester, but you could selectively pick which areas to cover.

I was interested in learning more about (like Calculus) on Wikipedia and found that I couldn't even understand the description of the subject!

http://www.learner.org/.

Ok, OffTopic but here ya go.

http://www.learner.org/resources/series58.html Excellent Series on Civilization mostly Western, but a good primer.

I'd like more video based learning resources, mainly dealing with the physical sciences, targeted at adult learners and college students.

For example:
http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html?disci pline=0&grade=5&imageField2.x=10&imageField2.y=13

Watch 'Algebra: In Simplest Terms' hosted by Sol Garfunkel, PhD.:
http://www.learner.org/resources/series66.html

26 half-hour videos covering all topics of Intermediate and College Algebra. The webcast videos are free (registration required), just click on the VoD symbol to watch them. If you use SDP ( http://sdp.ppona.com/ ) you can download the ASF steams for repeat viewing. BTW... I got an A+ in my College Algebra class... It's absolutely critical that you fully understand advanced topics of Algebra before starting a Calculus class.

I was watching French in Action a few years ago, and thought that this might be a good way to introduce an alien species to humanity and a particular culture. It's a foreign language telecourse that's produced entirely in the target language of French, so in order to be effective, it needs to demonstrate the usage of the language, as well as every concept a human being needs to talk about. The only problem is that this approach would inevitably focus on one culture, no matter which language you choose.

I do agree that it's completely pointless to send out a single one-time message. It seriously needs to repeat many times, for a long time. Who would pay for that?

Undoubtedly, some of you may have seen the short film "A Private Universe." It begins with footage shot on graduation day on the campus of Harvard University. In these opening scenes, a number of Harvard graduates and faculty members are interviewed and asked some basic questions about science and astronomy. If you haven't seen it, you can watch it online at http://www.learner.org/resources/series28.html

The first question posed to the graduates is why seasons occur on Earth. The overwhelmingly most frequent answer? These graduates from one of the finest institutions of higher education, many with extensive course work in physics and astronomy, say that seasons happen on Earth because its orbit about the sun is profoundly elliptical. When the Earth is farther away from the sun, the Earth has winter. When it is closer, we get summer. Isolated case of misunderstanding? Twenty-one of 23 randomly selected students and faculty members interviewed on the Harvard campus that day offered almost-identical, erroneous explanations for the seasonal changes.

On another question about the phases of the moon, most graduates responded that the moon's phases observed on Earth are caused by the Earth's shadow routinely obscuring the light from the sun from reaching some portion of the moon's surface.

You need to change your sig. Infinity and Infinity+1 are the same thing.

From: http://www.learner.org/channel/courses/biology/tex tbook/genom/genom_7.html

A biological approach to determining the function of a gene is to create a mutation and then observe the effect of the mutation on the organism. This is called a knockout study. While it is not ethical to create knockout mutants in humans, many such mutants are already known, especially those that cause disease. One advantage of having a genome sequence is that it greatly facilitates the identification of genes in which mutations lead to a particular disease.

The mouse, where one can make and characterize knockout mutants, is an excellent model system for studying genetic diseases of humans; its genome is remarkably similar to a human's. Nearly all human genes have homologs in mice, and large regions of the chromosomes are very well conserved between the two species. In fact, human chromosomes can be (figuratively) cut into about 150 pieces, mixed and matched, and then reassembled into the 21 chromosomes of a mouse. Thus, it is possible to create mutants in mice to determine the probable function of the same genes in humans. Genetic stocks of mutant mice have been developed and maintained since the 1940s.

One goal of the mouse genome project is to make and characterize mutations in order to determine the function of every mouse gene. After a particular gene mutation has been linked to a particular disorder, the normal function of the gene may be determined. An example of this approach is the mutated gene that resulted in cleft palates in mice. The researchers found that the gene's normal function is to close the embryo's palate. An understanding of the genetics behind cleft palate in mice may one day be used to help prevent this common birth defect in humans.

But light is effected by things such as gravity. It bends around planets, and other stellar objects. Light exhists as both a particle and a wave. I think that is how I read it several years ago. Light is however just a photon.

"# Light acts like particles--little light bullets--that stream from the source. This explains how shadows work.

# Light also acts like waves--ripples in space--instead of bullets. This explains how rainbows work. In fact, light is both. This "wave-particle duality" is one of the most confusing--and wonderful--principles of physics. "

The Above was taken from a site that I think is built for the much younger crowd. You can take a look here : http://www.learner.org/teacherslab/science/light/

Greene's Elegant Universe

The Mechanical Universe

Last book I enjoyed, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by L. Smolin... ya, ya, I know, nothing fits, is, isn't, yo momma... no yo momma... can, can't... I'm not touching you!

@ Learner.org
Science in Focus: Energy

This video workshop for K-6 teachers explores the scientific meaning of energy and examines the role it plays in motion, machines, the body, and the universe. http://learner.org/resources/series160.html

A Private Universe This video documentary for grade 5-12 educators explores why students from early grades to Ivy League graduates don't really grasp basic science concepts.http://learner.org/resources/series28.htm l

EduMUcate Yourself man. http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/index.htm

Take a good look around those last two sites.

@ Learner.org
Science in Focus: Energy

This video workshop for K-6 teachers explores the scientific meaning of energy and examines the role it plays in motion, machines, the body, and the universe. http://learner.org/resources/series160.html

A Private Universe This video documentary for grade 5-12 educators explores why students from early grades to Ivy League graduates don't really grasp basic science concepts.http://learner.org/resources/series28.htm l

EduMUcate Yourself man. http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/index.htm

Take a good look around those last two sites.

"I Can READ That!" is a gentle introduction to reading Chinese characters, focused on stuff you'd see while traveling in China. Won't really teach you how to say anything, though.

For self-paced learning of conversational Mandarin, nothing beats the Pimsleur language programs. I can say from personal experience that after listening to just the first-level program, you will be able to ask for stuff in restaurants (and drop a few jaws in the process if you don't look Asian!), hold simple conversations with Chinese speakers, and start to make a little sense of the dialogue in Chinese movies and TV shows. There are three levels, each with about 15 hours of material.

If you have a Palm handheld, PlecoDict absolutely rocks for building up your vocabulary of both spoken and written Mandarin. It has a great graduated-interval flashcard mode.

The New Practical Chinese Reader is the latest edition of the textbook that's been used in just about every introductory Chinese language course in the English-speaking world in the last couple of decades. It is available with cassette tapes to help with pronunciation.

For more vocabulary, both spoken and written, Rosetta Stone is good. Its major weakness is that it uses the same vocabulary words for all the languages it covers, and the word list is based on some Western assumptions; some things that take just one word in a typical western language take several in Mandarin, and you find yourself getting a small flood of new words with no clear idea of exactly what each one means on its own. But once you've learned the basic conjunctions and so on, that's not a big deal.

For actually learning how to write (stroke order) there's Easy Chinese Tutor, not a great piece of software but the material is decent and it even comes with a bunch of character tracing sheets you can print out and practice on.

Zhongwen.com has a bunch of good resources.

What I really want, though, is for someone to do the equivalent of Destinos for Mandarin. Maybe in the form of a historical kung-fu soap opera comedy drama fantasy like the awesome Tian Xia Di Yi. I'd pay good money for that!

Sure, since 50 years ago (1955), it was pretty much like it is today...well, except for the Internet, the Cold War and Globalization

Globalization has been happening for several hundred years. Start with China's and Spain's silver trade for one. Nothing new, just no one noticed it until recently.