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You are thinking of World of Chemistry! However, based on his other post, that wasn't what the grandparent was looking for.

World of Chemistry was the best.

"IA-odin... Po-TAZ-zium" "Wow, look at that!"

Don Showalter was the host for most of the show, and Noble Prize winner Roald Hoffman did some of the other stuff. That was one of the best chem shows around, especially with all the sexual innuendoes. I'll never forget: "pv=nrt; which you can remember as pervnert..." "Excuse me Miss" "Ahhhh!" The pervnert flasher. There was another one where he was making rubbing a glass rod to make it statically charged, and then he stuck it between two balls wrapped in tin foil. It reminded me of something from the Ambiguously Gay Duo.

Great show. You can buy all 26 episodes on VHS for $199.

For a real treat, check out the VOD course The Western Tradition. It is composed of 52 half-hour lessons that cover the ancient world through the age of technology. Prof. Eugen Weber is amazing!

For a real treat, check out the VOD course The Western Tradition. It is composed of 52 half-hour lessons that cover the ancient world through the age of technology. Prof. Eugen Weber is amazing!

For a real treat, check out the VOD course The Western Tradition. It is composed of 52 half-hour lessons that cover the ancient world through the age of technology. Prof. Eugen Weber is amazing!

For a real treat, check out the VOD course The Western Tradition. It is composed of 52 half-hour lessons that cover the ancient world through the age of technology. Prof. Eugen Weber is amazing!

For a real treat, check out the VOD course The Western Tradition. It is composed of 52 half-hour lessons that cover the ancient world through the age of technology. Prof. Eugen Weber is amazing!

Here is a website that discusses the middle ages. It's from the Annenberg foundation. Taken verbatim from it's front page:

In this "feudal" system, the king awarded land grants or "fiefs" to his most important nobles, his barons, and his bishops, in return for their contribution of soldiers for the king's armies. At the lowest echelon of society were the peasants, also called "serfs" or "villeins." In exchange for living and working on his land, known as the "demesne," the lord offered his peasants protection.

So even though the nobles got the food "last," they were the ones who owned the land, collected tribute, and did not work the land themselves. You can bet your ass they were the last to go hungry. So I fail to see how this is more or less moral than any other economy. The peasants exchanged their labor for protection and land to farm. Asserting that they were compensated more "justly" for their labor than todays workers is dicey at best.

Your protests regarding production are just a matter of perspective. To calculate Gross Domestic Product, I just have to sum up the value of the goods and services produced for sale during a given time period. I could calculate the amount spent for goods and services produced domestically. Alternatively, I could calculate the amount earned for goods and services produced domestically. Those two numbers have to be the same AND they have to equal GDP. In other words, Gross Domestic Product = Gross Domestic Expenditures = Gross Domestic Income by definition. Go ahead...google it.

BTW, an equation to calculate GDP is not invalid because it does not include the term "product" in it's calculation. To believe so is so concrete it's almost child-like. The expenditure method of assessing the GDP is basically like calculating the number of human brainstems in the country to get at the census. You're gonna get one brainstem per person, so the number of living people = the number of functioning brainstems. Consequently, I could say that the living population of the country = the number of functioning human brainstems and be correct without ever putting the term "person" in the equation.

I agree with you. Here's a free online video on demand series called "For All Practical Purposes" meant to address the issue with 26 half-hour programs (Episode 14, "Zero Sum Games" is pretty neat) from the Annenberg Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the accompanying textbook. That was the easy part. Now, how're we going to get the kids to watch it?

= 9J =

Try this: http://www.learner.org/. It's what you're looking for without the bittorrenting.

The BBC is planning to launch something much bigger for UK residents in the near future.

The bee is such an insect. But there might be things like ants starting to attack beehives as an food source. Extreme severe colds could suddenly kill a lot of bees which means that the next season might suffer diminished crop yield. This in turn mean less food supply and thus even greater competition by insects and us to it. Imagine a small grain yield, attacked by grasshoppers. Do you think we can really win that one.

This doesn't include the secondary affects by people. I mean once that crap hits the fan society collapse. An easy way to notice that is simply to notice how people change in a large power blackout. If you can't get diesel or poison to fight the insects, the yields go down further. If people want something bad enough they'll take it, once city dwellers goes to occupy farmland we have real big problems. The infrastructure is simply not there to support it, also those people don't have the experience to produce food in large enough quantities let alone in the "new" environment.

Look at what is happening in Zimbabwe due to Robert Mugabe's farm resettlements. Basically people without skills are given farmland, they simply cannot produce food on a large scale. As soon as that happens, you end up with people dieing from hunger. Or basically you diminish the population's immunity to diseases, then suddenly plagues start to spread much easier. Imagine a new out break of the Bird Flu with not enough resources to "manage" it and a population more susceptible to disease. There is one out now as I am writing this.

These are all things that no "modern human" has experienced before, maybe that is what happened to the people from Atlantis or the Mayans. Are we prepared, do we even have enough time still left to prepare ?

Face it people, all this surveillance is going to happen. The government is going to have complete information about you and contrl over you in a few short years. The Internet can be a great tool for communication and education, just like television could have been. It can also be a tool for control, just like television is.

America is in the hands of the bad guys, and within our lifetimes we will have a totalitarian government ruling a flock of consumer/workers who generate wealth for the top 2%. Just like in the good old days, only with HDTV. It's pretty much that way now, but in the future it won't be a secret, and people won't really care as long as the can buy cheap gas, eat Big Macs and watch American Idol on a 42-incher.

I've come to the conclusion that it's just the way the human race works. Some people take charge because the rest let them. Unless you are one of those take-charge types, the best thing you can hope to do is take care of yourself, your family and other people you care about, stay under the radar and live as well as possible. Democracy is like every other good thing that survives until They Who Must Own Everything figure out how to hack it.

Large tall glass buildings are particularly bad because they're (1) large, (2) tall, (3) glass, and definitely (4) illuminated at night. This site talks about the problem and programs (like FLAP) to turn off lights at night, especially during migration and rescue the not-dead-yet injured birds.

That's not entirely true - otherwise we wouldn't have any use for ECC or parity. Computers can make "mistakes" in as much as data can be corrupted by physical processes that having nothing to do with the intended or programmed operation.

Technicalities aside, none of the election problems are about counting accuracy, neither human, nor mechanical, nor electronic. That's not the point. All measurements have an associated accuracy. It's how we deal with it that counts. If the margin of the election is of a size that given the error rate of the system there's a "reasonable" probability that the outcome is in error (1 sigma, 13% probability of error, say, given the error rate of the technology used) then a run-off election should be automatic, even if there's only two candidates in both elections. No matter what the voting technology. A 5% threashold would be statistically supportable.

All sampling systems have a margin of error. It's a 9th grade science mistake to get an F for submitting a graph of plant growth or whatever without any error bars. We seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance in refusing to admit there's an inescapable margin of error, and thereby not accommodating for it.

In 2000, FL and several other states should have held run-off elections between W and G after the first election found them at a "statistical tie". It's not clear which way it would have gone after that, but whoever thereby won would actually have been a democratically elected president, rather than one technically appointed by a divisive judicial coup.

Anyway, the critical failure regarding DREs is the lack of recognition that they are fallible. How do we deal with critical systems that might fail? We create an audit trail so if something goes wrong, we have a chance of undoing the error, or at least figuring out what failed and fixing it, and at the very least knowing that something did in fact go wrong so we can try again.

The systems shipped by Diebold and ESS etc are both intrinsically fallible and intrinsically inauditable, which is intolerable. Further, if a voter has reason to doubt the impartiality of a company that has, for example, pledged to deliver it's electoral votes to the republican in the next election to be run on it's own vote counting equipment, they might have some reason to doubt the veracity of the black-box tallying process and that undermines the authority of democracy. It is important, therefore, even if it were proven technically unnecessary, to provide voters with the familiar indicator of fairness provided by a human-readable, authoritative, tangible ballot.

We've gone through a lot of effort convincing ourselves, and by force much of the world, that having a brainwashed electorate choose one or the other corporate flack as titular head of the country is the best and fairest form of government on the planet (and it may well be, alas); at the very least we can apply basic 9th grade science to finding out whether tweedle dee or tweedle dum won the popularity contest.

While perhaps not the most exciting stuff out there, one of the few online simulcasts I know of is the Annenberg/CPB Satellite channel -- which largely broadcasts educational programs (eg: telecourses for distance learning initiatives and teacher professional development):

channel info: http://learner.org/channel/channel.html

simulcast link: http://learner.org/channel/broadband/video.html

While perhaps not the most exciting stuff out there, one of the few online simulcasts I know of is the Annenberg/CPB Satellite channel -- which largely broadcasts educational programs (eg: telecourses for distance learning initiatives and teacher professional development):

channel info: http://learner.org/channel/channel.html

simulcast link: http://learner.org/channel/broadband/video.html

Here you go.

A classic video made at a Harvard University graduation illustrates what I mean ( Private Universe Project, 1989). In the video, young graduates and faculty--still in their caps and gowns-- answer this question: Why is it warm in the summer and cold in the winter? Twenty-two out of 25 got the answer wrong. The typical answer was that it's warmer in the summer because the earth is closer to the sun. (The correct answer is that it's warmer then because the tilt of the earth, which remains constant as the earth orbits the sun, puts each hemisphere at an angle to receive maximum sunlight during the summer. The distance from the earth to the sun varies very little--actually, the earth is a little closer to the sun in January.)

More than half of the US population doesn't know that the earth orbits the sun or how scientists figured out that it does. Almost no one can explain what the phrase "orbits the sun" even means. Worse still, few can distinguish between an evidence-based explanation of how the physical world works and an opinion-based one.

there are some places in Texas where you need winshieldwipers just to deal with all of the bugs going splat on the windshield

HA!

In parts of the country in spring, we have so many bugs that animals migrate further north TOWARDS the tundra to get away from them...

Anyways, at least we don't have thunderwood, or fireants, or killer bees. (My current roommate's parents live in houston, I get to hear ALL the stories...)

As for the Monarch, the gold color on its chrysalis "comes from cardenolides in the milkweed that larvae eat." Sorry.

More physics than math, but a great place to start. If you buy the series (or tape it off PBS), you can watch it again and again until you finally learn the concepts. It opens a whole new world in math and physics. It was recorded and animated (by Pr. Blinn, no less!) in the mid-80s, and is still relevant.

-S

Think before you mod: is it really offtopic..?

How about The Mechanical Universe? If you missed it the first time around, Real-player clips are available here. If nothing else, look for the early-eighties animation; stay for the fun of it.

Or how about Powers of Ten? (Both the rough sketch, with the cool relativity clock, and the final in color, with SEM photos, instead of drawings, are great.)

For a change, consider Why Man Creates. This thing did win the Academy, and it deserved it. Darned funny, trenchant, moving, and scary.

If you want to go further back, how about all the Bell Science films, including Hemo the Magnificent. Darned patronizing in places, but they got many of us kidniks started in science.

And then there's the film that got away... My husband remembers the one he saw at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1978 or 1979. His pupils still dilate as he laughs about the use of student volunteers to model ADP/ATP cycles, complete with CO2 fire extinguishers to show energy being given off. Titles gratefully accepted.

How about The Mechanical Universe? If you missed it the first time around, Real-player clips are available here. If nothing else, look for the early-eighties animation; stay for the fun of it.

Or how about Powers of Ten? (Both the rough sketch, with the cool relativity clock, and the final in color, with SEM photos, instead of drawings, are great.)

For a change, consider Why Man Creates. This thing did win the Academy, and it deserved it. Darned funny, trenchant, moving, and scary.

If you want to go further back, how about all the Bell Science films, including Hemo the Magnificent. Darned patronizing in places, but they got many of us kidniks started in science.

And then there's the film that got away... My husband remembers the one he saw at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1978 or 1979. His pupils still dilate as he laughs about the use of student volunteers to model ADP/ATP cycles, complete with CO2 fire extinguishers to show energy being given off. Titles gratefully accepted.

Also DDT is an estrogenic drug - it can mimic the effects of female sex hormones in males. Estrogenics cause many problems, including falling sperm counts in humans.

This, along with a story about a patent on Y2K 'windowing' I heard last night on NPR (which was also reported earlier here on Slashdot) has got me completely disgusted.

It's about time we get together as an angry mob with pitchforks and torches, and knock over and burn that damn patent office. Why hasn't there been any congressional lobbying or attention on this yet? (Because companies like being able to fence off almost brainlessly obvious solutions and hold other companies hostage? Hello Amazon? Hello Yahoo? Hello-- oh hell, just search for 'patent' on Slashdot!)

I'd rather see no patents whatsoever on anything than this garbage!