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People start off being able to reason, school stomps it out of most of them:
http://www.alisongopnik.com/TheScientistInTheCrib.htm

Well-rounded (or rather, healthy, which does not always mean being perfectly rounded) human beings are more likely to come out of healthy communities and healthy families...

Some other links;

"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

"State Controlled Consciousness" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by
Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20060710145531/www.universitysecrets.com/table.htm

"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm

"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm

"Teach Your Own" by John Holt (and other books)
http://www.holtgws.com/

"The Teenage Liberation Handbook" by Grace Llewellyn (and other books)
http://gracellewellyn.com/

"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance" By Matt Hern
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm

"Sustainable Education" by Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1

"Federated Learning Communities"
http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-1/learning.html
http://www.

That would be a very inefficient brain. Here, I found couple pictures for you: http://www.strokecolorado.org/Graphics/brain-side.jpg http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/biobk/brain.gif

FYI: That's exactly what "speaking in order of magnitude" means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

http://www2.pvc.maricopa.edu/tutor/chem/chem151/metric/magnitude.html

"On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school."

I should have caught that as a problem too. Someday, public schools may be much more like public libraries open to anyone to use than day prisons for children of working parents, but until then, consider:

"Links about alternative peer-oriented education"
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education

"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

"State Controlled Consciousness" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm

"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm

"Teach Your Own" by John Holt (and other books)
http://www.holtgws.com/

"The Teenage Liberation Handbook" by Grace Llewellyn (and other books)
http://gracellewellyn.com/

"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and ... Resistance" By Matt Hern
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

"Sustainable Education" by Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1

"Federated Learning Communities"
http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-1/learning.html
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ilc/models.html

"The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to
Life/Work Planning" by Richard N. Bolles (also writes "What Color is Your
Parachute")
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583

General related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me

If all of these were true, the total amount of water on earth would be constantly decreasing, and would have been for billions of years. This is not the case - the amount of water on earth is relatively constant. As far as I remember from my university chemistry and biology classes, organics don't, for the most part, break down water ever.

Some biology class! :-)

Photosynthesis:

6H2O + 6CO2 ----------> C6H12O6+ 6O2

http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/BIOBK/BioBookPS.html

If all of these were true, the total amount of water on earth would be constantly decreasing, and would have been for billions of years.

Perhaps there's not much life relative to the vast amounts of water on the earth.

Yes humans do. Do you feel the need to eat? Why that's instinct! Just because we have elaborate strategies for satisfying our basic drives doesn't mean that we don't have instincts. What we lack is innate unlearned procedures for doing things (babies have to learn to walk, focus their eyes, acquire food, speak...). We do have basic drives to: Sleep, Eat, Engage in Sexuality, Speak, Be Social. I'm probably missing a few, but the list is small.

Why do you find women attractive - assuming you're heterosexual? It doesn't make sense. Why should you want to stick your penis in a hole? It's an instinct. We now know there are good macroscopic reasons involving recursion and culling of entities. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the primary instinct is to stimulate a bundle of nerves by any means necessary and that getting aroused by the opposite sex is achieved by operant and classical conditioning. Of course, there are probably some instinctual predispositions.

For instance an experiment )showed that you can smell people who have different genes than you. The test IIRC had men and women wear a tshirt for a few days without showering and then asking them to smell each other's shirts in a double blind test. I think it was only smelling the opposite sex's shirt, but the ones people said smelled the best tended to have the most different genomes and I believe it was speculated that they were selecting for divergent Major Histocompatibility Complexes (MHC genes).

As many people have stated previously, there is a lot of history of people and animals engaging in homosexual and interspecies relationships. This seems to indicate to me that the only thing we have a large disposition for is finding warm tight wet holes (at least for guys) or other means of stimulating ourselves. If you put a bunch of one sex on an island from a young age, and they managed to survive, they would find ways of stimulating each other.

The major prohibitions in modern societies against homosexuality is probably an emergent behavior of natural selection. Since humans reproduce best in societies, the societies pick people that reproduce best in a positive feedback loop. If you lived in a tribe where it's continued existence depended on people having babies to continue hunter gathering or farming and two guys (or even worse two girls as the are a more important rate limiting step in the baby production cycle) were being gay and not doing their part, you'd likely get pissed off at them. After all, them not screwing girls would be putting YOUR ass on the line as the tribe might not have enough of a labor force to produce above a viable threshold.

In modern society, the fact simply is that we don't care so much if a bunch of individuals cannot produce children as our food supply is amazingly big. I suppose it does reduce the workforce, but it's rather evil of someone to impose conditions on other people simply because they want a bigger iPod. Since we are all Google Fanboi's here, I say, don't be evil and let other people have their fun with warm wet holes.

One unit in, 16 out, wow, I think it's source of free energy!

The better educated managers not only use positive reinforcement ("good job Codie, here's a donut"), and punishment ("bad job Codie, stay all night till you fix it"), but also negative reinforcement ("that Codie is doing better, I'm going to quit yelling at him") and extinction ("Codie never submits any useful patches, let's ignore him")
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/proj/nru/opcond. html/
Really, it won't be that blatant, and they might not even realize it, but they'll treat you that way.

What will it take for us to recognize that the animals who share the planet with us deserve much better treatment than we have shown them? Just because we do not understand them we label them as unintelligent. Marginalize them. Enslave them and call them 'pets' or 'service animals'. If human beings were referred to as such the offenders would be rounded up and jailed. Elevating all animals to the same legal status that personhood confers would be the mark of a truly enlightened society and show that we are indeed as intelligent as we think.

The arguments against legal personhood for animals are numerous. They usually revolve around such disproved notions that animals are not intelligent enough, despite the animals numerous catalogued attempts to demonstrate otherwise. We have tool using chimps and dolphins who speak a language every bit as complex and nuanced as our own. Every day new studies are published that prove that the animal friends we think of as 'dumb' possess intelligence that we can only begin to understand. We deny them justice only because we and they do not communicate well.

Before we consider whether robots may one day demand legal rights, let us do what is right and recognize the rights of animals. It is long past time to face the shameful atrocities we have foisted upon them.

Most small company sysadmins need to at least occasionally deal with Windows. I prefer to do so without leaving my desk. I also ensure cygwin and sshd are on Windows boxes, so that I don't always need rdesktop or vnc. ...

My windows list would look something like

• uptime.exe
• cygwin with sshd, exim, and cron installed as services
• PuTTYcyg, which is PuTTY with the ability to run bash shells locally (i.e. xterm)
• SysInternals Junction, directory symlinks in NTFS
• StartupCPL, monitor everything that starts up when Windows does
• 7-zip
• WinSCP
• KNOPPIX for when shit hits the fan
• Debian for when it won't come off the fan
• One antivirus (any, I prefer PC-Cillin) and two anti-spyware agents (any two with different engines)

Didn't he already do this?

evolution isn't just change, it's adaptive change.

Sorry, that is just not correct. Evolution is NOT defined in modern biology as adaptive change. Your basic premise is wrong, making your arguments specious.

Funny, I feel the same way about your argument. A quick google shows about a 50/50 split in the definitions which specify "adaptive change" (in some form or another) as opposed to the ones such as you site. To give just a few examples:

• a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage)
• The change in life over time by adaptation, variation, over-reproduction, and differential survival/reproduction, a process referred to by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace as natural selection.
• The long-term process through which a population of organisms accumulates genetic changes that enable its members to successfully adapt to environmental conditions and to better exploit food resources
• In Darwinian terms a gradual change in phenotypic frequencies in a population that results in individuals with improved reproductive success.

But, as I pointed out, this isn't a problem that can be solved with dueling citations; even starting down that path misses the fundamental point that genetic drift alone can't explain any of the key observations about life:

• It is very diverse
• The diversity is (to a good first approximation) perfectly adaptive
• When you drill down to a more detailed accounting it is still adaptive, but at the level of genes, not individuals or populations (e.g. see Dawkins "Extended Phenotype")
• It is optimal, in the sense that permuting the diversity in any way (e.g. hanging giraffes from cave roofs) would destroy one or more of the points above.

For example, suppose a new school of "economic biologists" broadened the definition of evolution still further, to include (say) a change in the average market value of a member of the species or the number of books in which it is mentioned. What good would that do? Now there would be a whole bunch more things that could cause "evolution" but they would have done nothing to clarify the question--instead, they would have confused things horribly.

And that, pretty much, is what "population genetics" has done. The questions are murky enough at the level of the individual organisms, but by considering populations you effectively average out all the interesting questions and wind up making vacuous statements such as "genetic drift causes evolution" where "genetic drift" is defined (again from your source) as what happens when, by chance "the frequency of an allele may begin to drift toward higher or lower values."

Combining this with your definition of evolution, we have:

The frequency of an allele drifting toward higher or lower values causes changes in the statistics of the presence of genes in a population over time.

Which, as I hope you can see, has no explanatory value whatsoever and makes no testable predictions to speak of (though the converse would be world shaking news).

--MarkusQ

There is a public radio station in Arizona that reads Science News articles on the air / internet.

Caveat: they don't read the entire thing cover to cover, just selected articles.

The show is called Science of our Times

http://sunsounds.rio.maricopa.edu/schedules/sunday look at 5 pm

I have a program, Replay Radio, which is a basic TiVo for internet radio. I just tell it to tape "Science of our Times", and it knows what to do and when to do it.

Thank you for this link. This is very interesting. I was always thinking that the periodic table is more suitable as a 3-D image, and lo and behold, it is there already.
However, for simplicity, re-producability and the amount of info, I think the current periodic table will be with us for a long time.

Others have posted links to many periodic tables but this one in particular I think is very good, and a useful learning tool for those who are very visual learners (2 variations of the same thing, the second is a program that can be purchased):
http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/stowetable .html
http://www.qivx.com/ispt/ptw_qn.php

A much better chart for physicists and physical chemists is Stowe's 3-D periodic table. http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/stowetable .html which arranges things according to the principal quantum numbers. It comes out completely symmetric.

If we're talking about non-traditional layouts, I prefer Stowe's.

I've never seen the Stowe table before, but I wish I had. It's really elegant and captures a lot of information efficiently. It also clearly illustrates the symmetry and structure of the table--in my opinion, much more clearly than the Stewart table that is the focus of the article. Does anyone more knowledgable about chemistry or physics know of any drawbacks to the the Stowe table, other than relatively superficial things like the size or spacing of text?

whats the question marks at the right edge about?

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others but they haven't been discovered.

There's a good collection of periodic tables here. Also note that the periodic table referred to in the article is similar to one produced by Thoedor Benfey.

Nerd 1: Come on, Mr. Simpson, you'll never pass this course if you don't know the periodic table.
Homer: Ehh, I'll write it on my hand.
Nerd 1: Ho! Including all known lanthanides and actinides? Ha, ha! Good luck.

The first application that leaps to mind is that regenerated cells could be used to replace damanged or aged cells somehow, but is that really possible?

Nope, neurons and glial cells can't be readily replaced. As shown by this webpage, the nervous system . Each neuron may have dozens synaptic connections via dendrites and axons to other neurons and humans have 100 billion neurons in thier brains. What happens is that each meuron sends out a number of dendrites that then can connect to a number of axons of other neurons. A new neuron may be able to "replace" another neuron but then it will have to make synaptic connections on it's own. These connections aren't exactly hardwired. Then as these connections are made new "learning" is required by the brain.

I'm in no way knowledgable about the whole thing, everything that's involved, but because I suffer from a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury, the field is of interest to me.

When will Firefox implement a graphical representation of the history for the user?

Let me answer you with a graphical representation.

Here's the whole section..

Fourth, the ratio of C-14 to C-12 in the atmosphere is not constant. Although it was originally thought that there has always been about the same ratio, radiocarbon samples taken and cross dated using other techniques like dendrochronology have shown that the ratio of C-14 to C-12 has varied significantly during the history of the Earth. This variation is due to changes in the intensity of the cosmic radation bombardment of the Earth, and changes in the effectiveness of the Van Allen belts and the upper atmosphere to deflect that bombardment. For example, because of the recent depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere, we can expect there to be more C-14 in the atmosphere today than there was 20-30 years ago. To compensate for this variation, dates obtained from radiocarbon laboratories are now corrected using standard calibration tables developed in the past 15-20 years. When reading archaeological reports, be sure to check if the carbon-14 dates reported have been calibrated or not.

This should be 'easy' to measure, as should nuclear explosions.

are you sure that the The ultraviolet rays blocked by ozone are far too anemic to create or destroy C-14', they give you cancer so I assume they can produce free radicals and create carbon-14.
Ultraviolet light is responsible for initiating chemical reactions through a process called photodissociation. Molecules are torn apart by the energy of the ultraviolet photon. Once the atoms are separated they can then come back together again; possibly, the atoms can form different combinations, thus allowing new molecules to be produced. Ozone is produced in this way, it is produced by the photodissociation of Oxygen. Oxygen is produced from the photodissociation of water. Some have judged that as much as 25% of the Oxygen in our world could come from reactions occurring in the upper atmosphere.

Another link says.....

These beryllium isotopes are created in the stratosphere when cosmic rays strike nitrogen atoms. AMS researchers are studying the concentration of these isotopes in falling snow and in air samples collected by high-altitude aircraft. Since beryllium isotopes attach readily to aerosols, they are helping scientists to understand aerosol movement in the upper atmosphere. Aerosol particles serve as host sites for chemical reactions which create the forms of chlorine that destroy ozone.

My bogosity meter is mid-scale
Well, some people still think the earth is flat.

I expect their project should have an Alpha release, soon...

Hee hee ... the radioactive isotopes of aluminum are all beta emitters, not alpha emitters.

Cool periodic table with isotopes and stuff

There is Cygterm, that allows you to use almost any native Windows terminal emulator to connect to a Cygwin shell instead of the default "DOS" box.
I know that TeraTerm works well under Cygterm, because I use it myself. And it appears that PuTTY does as well.

Here's a PDF of the oath, it's Section E, 5th line.

If you use cygwin, make sure to get a better terminal for it. Puttycyg uses Putty's great terminal emulator for cygwin, and it works rather well.

The GP is not completely off base - I learned similar things in an ecological history course. I'm not sure about living longer, but hunter-gatherers were definitely healthier than farmers. For one thing, the much higher population density meant communicable diseases could flourish. They were also undernourished. Skeletal studies show that average heights dropped when agriculture introduced. And so on. See, eg, this essay by Jared Diamond. (In fact, this even backs up the GP's claim that hunter-gatherers lived longer.) On the other hand, hunter-gatherers had more violent lives, I think.

All the tedium of canvassing in one flash game. And they wonder why voters are so cynical? ;)

What would be more interesting is if they'd avoided the obvious arcade-style game and created something that made the player think about the consequences of voting yea or nay on a particular issue. There's an old edutainment (yuk) title called Hidden Agenda that puts you in the role of a newly-elected president of a South American country, giving you the chance to appoint your own cabinet, influence policy and make decisions affecting your country. The game is exceedingly difficult, and is thought-provoking precisely because it's nigh-impossible to "win" - every decision angers someone.

In the same vein, the old Yes Prime Minister game showed how policy can be distorted and seemingly innocuous decisions could become controversial in a much more thoughtful manner than these Flash efforts.

Okay, so the games are probably a gimmick to increase site hits more than anything, but I'm disappointed they didn't see the scope for doing something different.

It's not violating any laws of thermodynamics, it's violating the law of conservation of energy.

If you attended college, I'd ask for a refund. The first law of thermodynamics *IS* conservation of energy. Check out this.

That being said, this device definitately violates it.

Cheers,
Justin

Um, no.

"Negative Reinforcement strengthens a behavior because a negative condition is stopped or avoided as a consequence of the behavior."

The "negative condition" would be the ticket, which you avoid by slowing down.

Back to school for you, Dr.!

No - for the love of Kibo, people, lets not worry about naming. Let's start building infrastructure that will make use of it. If it proves useful, people will use it. And yes, most people talk about web pages (or internet pages, or the interweb or whatever), but the important point is that an infrastructure was built to the point where it became useful to people outside the technology field. SNMP, FTP, and DNS may not be the most pithily named standards, but they allow developers to build the infrastructure we need. If end users want to call it biff, let them go ahead.

(My apologies to Alan Levine if his site gets /.ed)

And (donning asbestos underwear) let's stop multiplying standards for no apparent reason other than personality conflicts with the originator of a standard.

Thats a security risk you insensitive clod!

1. "in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state."

Tom Lehrer, as I recall, set them to music.

I prefer this one.

This page requires flash shockwave viewer? Oh please. You can find a much better periodic table, which also doesn't need shockwave, here.

I heartily recommend Hidden Agenda, a game from the early 90s which puts you in the role of newly elected president of a little Central American banana republic. A surprisingly tense and thoughtful game for its time.

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/proj/sw/games/hi dden-agenda.html

Actually in McBride's case, I'm waiting for them to find a way to reconstruct what's inside his skull

Jeez buddy, I can tell you that right now! :)

That's essentially the gist of it. #==pound is a USism. The aforementioned long definition explains exactly the problem you describe: US keyboards do not have the £ symbol, so people with typewriters often used # since it was used as a shorthand for the Imperial ("English") Pound. (The story of how the US came to use units which it called English units when the English did not use these units is another tale...)

It's definitely not pound, not hash maybe sharp but really, it is octothorp.

Here's the link:
Tom Lehrer's song of The Elements

There is a QuickTime recording of one of Tom's early performances of it, as well as the lyrics.

Wow, that brings back memories.

Lyrics and all can be found here:
lyrics and quicktime versions of Tom Lehrer's Elements song /ex

They can be made easily enough, its delevering them to the right place thats the problem.

Not only would you have to get these massive proteins through the Plasma Membrane but also into the nucleus where the DNA you want to protect is stored. This is hard enough to do with normal drugs which are typically about 500-1000 times smaller than proteins....

They can be made easily enough, its delevering them to the right place thats the problem.

Not only would you have to get these massive proteins through the Plasma Membrane but also into the nucleus where the DNA you want to protect is stored. This is hard enough to do with normal drugs which are typically about 500-1000 times smaller than proteins....

For a biped...why couldn't they employ technology like in Segway. Use the gyroscopes to autobalance the unit but instead of rotating wheels just have muscle like control over a foot where the whole body is pulled forward (Tibialis anterior) or back (Gastrocnemius) by the stable foot against the ground.

Any problems with this idea? You would need some side to side stabilization too. For Standing still you would use both feet to stabilize but when walking you would have to only use one (pick up and lean the unit forward).

Just a thought

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/dan.coughlin

For a biped...why couldn't they employ technology like in Segway. Use the gyroscopes to autobalance the unit but instead of rotating wheels just have muscle like control over a foot where the whole body is pulled forward (Tibialis anterior) or back (Gastrocnemius) by the stable foot against the ground.

Any problems with this idea? You would need some side to side stabilization too. For Standing still you would use both feet to stabilize but when walking you would have to only use one (pick up and lean the unit forward).

Just a thought

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/dan.coughlin

I understand the concept of harvesting braking to push a flywheel to greater speeds, therefore storing the energy, but I have a couple of questions:

Aren't flywheels tremendously heavy? Wouldn't the additional weight cause longer stopping distances, especially under emergency braking?

I do understand that the braking would be assisted by the flywheel itself (spinning it up), but you never get anything for free (See The First Law of Thermodynamics.). When spinning up the wheels, you'd have heat loss, and loss again when they are spun down. Secondly, again, because of the 1st Law, wouldn't the heat generated by all of those flywheels spinning up and down exactly equal the heat savings? Moreover, thinking of emergency braking - What is the top speed of the flywheels? How strong do the gears need to be to spin up the flywheel to top speed very quickly? And at what tremendous gear ratio?

Don't think that I'm against it, cause I'm not. I think the electricity savings alone make it worth the effort and expense, but I'm not convinced that the trains would be as safe as the existing ones, and that there would be any heat savings. That said, CA needs to convert the BART next....

Even if the hydrino theory is bogus, let's use valid arguments.

A small point, but negative reinforcement is *not* the same thing as punishment. This is a very common misconception. Negative reinforcement is a concept relating to operant conditioning and learning theory.

Examples?

Positive reinforcement: If a mother gives her child candy for being good, this is positive reinforcement. By rewarding the child, she is reinforceing the child behaving well.

Negative reinforcement: Your car is filthy and it drives you crazy. You decide to clean it out, and it feels great to have a clean car. Cleaning the car removed the adversive stimulus, making you more likely to clean it next time. This mechanism is theorized to be involved in many forms of drug addiction. (Life is difficult, drugs remove anxiety, more likely to use drugs later.)

See the following pages for more details:
What is Negative Reinforcement
Negative Reinforcement, Escape, and Advoidance Learning