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Those videos are interesting, but it's not quite taking pictures of light itself. Light's still too fast (and technology too slow) for that. What you see is a composite shot, of many repeats of the same experiment, with very high precision pictures taken of each particular instant.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/

They repeat the experiment every dozen nanoseconds. It takes an hour to take a picture of a nanosecond process. The inventors refer to it as "the world's slowest fastest camera".

Scratch, visual multimedia programming system from MIT. http://scratch.mit.edu/

I'm going to repeat my post from above. If they like Scratch, consider Stencyl. It's a game engine that uses something like Scratch as the programming language. Caveat: my nephew couldn't work through the tutorial on his own and, unfortunately, too much distance has prevented me from working through it with him (there are minor omissions in the tutorial). Caveat 2: their downloadable code modules are a bit buggy. The ones I tried weren't completely broken though, so it's good for someone who's eager to learn to code and debug.

Or you could use MIT's Scratch programming environment and not get yourself icky with MS.

Also, if they like Scratch, they can try Stencyl. It's a game engine that uses Scratch as the programming language. Caveat: my nephew couldn't work through the tutorial on his own and, unfortunately, too much distance has prevented me from working through it with him. Caveat 2: their downloadable code modules are a bit buggy. The ones I tried weren't completely broken though, so it's good for someone who's eager to learn to code and debug.

My 10 year old loves The Scratch programming environment from the MIT Media Lab. It's free from http://scratch.mit.edu/ -- there's an online community that lets kids post their projects, and my kid was highly motivated to enter and win several little community competitions. The graphical coding interface is easy to tweak and allows clever kids to push things a bit more than you might expect. One essential aspect of the experience is that you can download the source scripts for the projects, which is a fantastic way to speed learning (one of my favorite ways to improve my code is to see how others tackle similar problems).

Or you could use MIT's Scratch programming environment and not get yourself icky with MS.

Check out: Scratch
My 9 y.o. daughter loves it. It gets through a LOT of programing basics in a fun way.

http://scratch.mit.edu/

It is what has gotten my 5 year old engaged.

Scratch, visual multimedia programming system from MIT. http://scratch.mit.edu/

make games with him, with scratch
http://scratch.mit.edu/

"duh, of course the universe is tuned such that life can exist, if it *wasn't*, we wouldn't be here". - You forgot the part where it conflicts with anything I said. Yes, the universe is tuned for life. Now what fine-tuned it if not God?

Well, people have come up with a bunch of ideas over time [wikipedia.org]. Or maybe it's whoever who set up the simulation in which we live [simulation-argument.com], and maybe he/she/it/they live in another simulation, etc....

"The anthropic principle" is not a valid answer: it is an observation, not a cause.

...or maybe it just is. There is no inherent reason why there has to be an Answer(TM). Some people may want to hear an Answer, but that's another matter.

lolwut? A complete lack of an answer. And if you don't want to search for or provide answers then get out of my scientific discussion.

http://www.evolutionfaq.com/articles/probability-life

A link to someone with an actual argument! If only you had formulated it and it wasn't based on erroneous assumptions I would be impressed. Here's why the argument doesn't stand: "the same non-random forces which propel biological evolution also propelled abiogenesis. Specifically, Natural Selection. " - Assumes that Natural Selection can drive evolution and abiogenesis. It cannot. "Natural selection is the gradual, non-random process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers." (Wikipedia, emphasis mine). In other words, Natural Selection takes helpful traits that already exist and spreads them. It does NOT create new traits. It CANNOT. Only random chance can create new traits when you deny intelligent intervention, and random chance isn't up to the job of generating life. "For example, the simplest theorized self-replicating peptide is only 32 amino acids long." To the best I can tell the peptide he's referring to is "A self-replicating peptide." which, while interesting, is not actually self replicating. It merely binds the two halves of itself together, so to replicate it must be supplied with a constant supply of duplicates of its halves. To replicate just once it needs 64 specified amino acids (iself and two halves), for the second generation it needs another 64 (four more halves) and so on. Interesting, but absolutely useless for the origin of life. No real self-replicating entity smaller than a cell has ever been discovered, and if it has it is no doubt much larger than 32 amino acids. So everything that rests on his 32-acid estimate is complete nonsense.

Assuming that he exists and is pissy about people not believing in him.

The evidence that he exists is precisely what I'm arguing, and "pissy" isn't exactly the right word here. More like righteous wrath. Say you created a robot and made it self-aware (That's not possible, but for the sake of analogy assume it is). Instead of being grateful and giving you a good name, it spits oil in your face and runs around doing evil. It denies your role in its creation, saying that it was inevitable. Now, if you truly love your creation like God loves us you'd allow it to have a second chance and return to being good, but if it refuses you'll destroy it before it can bring yet more shame upon you and do yet more evil. It's not that God gets "pissy," it's that we completely defy his purpose for us and thus we deserve to be destroyed.

May I add:

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Abelson and Sussman.

It's available online (completely free) here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html. I had been programming for 5 years when I read it for the first time, and it completely changed the way I think about programming.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander. This changed the way I experienced being in buildings, neighborhoods, and cities, where I spend most of my time. One idea I liked is that you can structure the environment to bring pleasure to people (see also "Thermal delight in architecture"). Another is that you can understand the problem by looked at the ways people have used to solve it. It was fun to see this idea played out a few years later in the software realm.

I'm not an architect, if that matters.

It sounds like this 'test' hack was just that, a 'test' of the system. Whoever's behind this will one day execute the real deal. Expect carnage and chaos in the stock markets to ensue.

Reminds me of the MIT barber pole hack http://alum.mit.edu/news/WhatMatters/Archive/200304

Buy a barber pole
Walk around town getting stopped until the cops figure out to ignore you.
Steal all the barber poles in town
Laughter

Replace Laughter with Profit in the stock market case.

It is cool. Might turn a satellite into a cloud of debris, not a slower solid satellite.
But is it obvious, if you know astronomy, read manga, or just live in space for a while and try to stop debris with what you have on hand?

1. From the DARPA zero robotics challenge, "RetroSPHERES satellites launched into a polar orbit to deploy micro dust clouds that can deorbit small pieces of space debris with high velocity collisions (ablation)."
   A "micro dust cloud" sounds similar to Boeing's cloud of heavy gas (a "nano dust cloud").
   http://zerorobotics.mit.edu/ZRHS2012/RetroSPHERES.pdf
2. 
   Also recent news, but "The US Naval Research Laboratory is proposing to encircle the Earth with tungsten dust in an attempt to bring down dangerous space junk"
   http://www.technologyreview.com/view/423629/orbiting-dust-storm-could-remove-space-junk/
   IANAP but "Their scheme is to release some 20 tons of tungsten dust at an altitude of 1100km, creating a thin shell of particles that will entirely envelop the Earth," that sounds like a baaaad idea!
3. 
   ARXIV black hole paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9512101.pdf
   In 1995 these researchers modelled collisions of supersonic gas streams and found they are efficient at circularizing debris orbits.
4. Coronal Ejection. Basically a gas cloud, IIRC it is known to affect satellites but not sure if effect is primarily electrical or is here also a physical deflection of orbital path?
5. In PLANETES a space debris cleanup team deorbits junk in LEO, not by shooting it with gas but by pushing, sometimes with a gloved hand, onto a terminal vector. But their guns and bikes are gas propelled.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
6. In Moonlight Mile, which covers exploitation of the Moon, there are a number of scenes in which clouds of debris moving at orbital speeds cause tremendous damage. Not exactly the Boeing invention though.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_Mile_(manga)

Some of these concerns have already been addressed and solved. Check out Tonika which uses crypto front-to-back, for example. They've already solved problems I'd never even understood to be present.

I was under the impression that the manufacturing processes to make the power plant / batteries for *POPULAR BRAND OF HYBRID VEHICLE* released the equivalent quantity of CO2 into the atmosphere as would be saved by the reduced CO2 released by the hybrid drive over it's serviceable life.

That's neo-con disinformation, operating at several levels, that is being distributed by marketing organizations like CNW. Not only is it factually incorrect, it also implies CO2 is the most significant car exhaust pollution issue, which it certainly isn't, and ignores the fact that auto batteries are recycled (in the USA) at a rate exceeding 95%.

There's also the issue of "service life". We all heard the stories of how buying a new Prius battery would cost more than the car, and we'd have to do it every three years - yet I have 130,000+ miles on my ten year old battery pack and it has had zero maintenance and zero problems. Other people have gone 300,000 miles with no issues. Good quality electric motors, such as the traction motors in Japanese hybrids, have a 40 year service life before rebuilding - and if the bearings are replaced at the first sign of heat or noise brushless motors can last over a hundred years. I have an 80 year old electric fan in my house (it has hand-wound coils and hand-cut steel gears in the oscillating mechanism) and it works better than modern plastic chinese-made fans - pushes more air and uses less energy, because it's extremely well made. Service life estimates based on worst-case fantasies of hybrid haters are clearly not realistic.

The net being a loss to society, as the process for making the batteries released toxic elements not used in making regular combustion engine cars.

Again, this is factually incorrect. Even if you accept the ridiculous definitions of pollution and service life, it's still just plain not true, and has been repeatedly debunked in peer-reviewed literature and in journals. Of course the Wall Street Journal and Fox News will keep repeating absurd anti-environment propaganda forever, but those are not reality-based news sources.

I agree with your sentiments, but the sad reality is that there's zero chance that you will sell 50,000 tickets at $150 a pop to any science fair or astrophysics lecture.

That's why you charge $50,000 for 150 tickets!

I've seen this MIT project before, but just like that product you linked, they all seem to be about "regular" arrays or arrangements.

I'm thinking more along the lines of ad-hoc arrangements of microphones, which is more like what Photosynth does -- it arranges arbitrary photos together to make a 3D scene, instead of taking specific, precisely aligned photos.

One interesting bit about the MIT project is that they have 1,020 microphones -- a world record -- generating 50MB/sec of data. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation verifies that this represents 44.1Khz at 8 bits per sample. If you think about it, this amount of data is peanuts to a modern PC. Just one high-end GPU might have 200GB/sec of memory bandwidth and over 2 teraflops of processing power! This translates to about 38,000 operations per sound sample, in real time, at 32-bit precision. That should be enough to track moving sound sources, figure out what's an echo and what isn't, correlate sounds across multiple microphones, perform doppler-shift analysis, etc...

Going to higher numbers of microphones ought to be easy, and could allow some fantastic applications, as well as some scary ones. There would be enough redundancy in the data to build a 3D scene with tracking of both moving sound sources and moving microphones. It may even be possible to determine room geometry, and the movement of large objects could be tracked based on their interaction with the sound field.

One application I can think of would be for capturing sound during movie filming. Often, studios have to discard the recorded sound and re-dub everything because of background noises, but this kind of technology would allow the director to perform arbitrary filtering after-the-fact, comparable to the light-field cameras that allow "refocusing" after an image has been captured. An actors voice could be picked out and made louder, everything with a source "behind the camera" could be edited out, and surround sound effects could be generated from any scene setup.

OK, now you get to try defending that. And we get to laugh at your efforts.

No, as you don't understand logic, we won't try to make you believe she was 20. We'll ban your dirty companies/products on our soil, and for sure those who spread hatred, understand money clearly. Remember The Merchant of Venice.

We? What this "we"?

What the fuck does logic have to do lying about Aisha's age in a lame attempt to excuse some old fart from having his way with her when she was seven?

Logic?

That must be why we're communicating in the language of the kaffirs.

BWWWAAA HAHAHAHAAAA!!

Does it hurt that you have to speak English to be able to make the money it takes to feed yourself?

How "dirty" do you feel now? Does it hurt to have to admit that when you're with those who you included in that "we"?

I hope so.

BWAAA HAHAHHAHA!!!!

Mohammed was an utterly depraved medieval L. Ron Hubbard. At least Hubbard only wants his follower's money. Mohammed was a two-bit desert bandit who contrived a a literally irrational religion that would make his followers willing to not only give him all their money, but also to actually die for him.

How many Islamic scientists have won a Nobel Prize? Zero? Who got to draw all the national boundaries in the Middle East? The ENGLISH! What currency does the Middle East use to sell oil? Dollars! Where do all the oil field workers come from? Not the Middle East!

Yeah, the irrationality of Islam comes at a price.

Oh goodie. Now you and your "we" are going to kill everyone who doesn't agree with you and drag us all back to the 7th century. Woo hoo.

Or, maybe, Islam will grow up and join the rest of humanity.

You don't need a course to be a "MOOC". In America many Universities offer videos of their lectures and some offer notes and exercises too. Buy the textbook - secondhand, show some gritm put aside the time and you can learn anything. If you get stuck there are forums like 'mad scientists' where people will help you. Connect with others interested in learning the same thing. If you get stuck on a particular concept, check another textbook for an alternate explanation or check out Kahn Academy. Many tutors post short clips explaining concepts on Youtube too.

Some people ask if you get credit for these. Of course you don't, and I question the motives of those people: If you're more interested in buying a piece of paper, then buy the piece of paper. But if you want to learn, yes, it can be done.

http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
http://ocw.uci.edu/
http://www.youtube.com/education?category=University
Some universities only make the podcasts available only on ITunes, but there are alternatives to Apple's walled garden: http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager.php


Can I add: A Pox on Australian degree factories (also known as 'Universities') who won't make their content available online because they are more interested in squeezing every last cent out of their students. The idea of accidentally helping someone terrifies them.

It depends on what you mean by "sexism."

Back in 1999, MIT ran thorough study on gender differences among the faculty. It's an interesting read. One of the striking findings was the consensus that "this is not what we expected gender bias to look like."

Put another way, women's concerns in 2012 are not the same as what they were in 1970 or 1920. It could be your working definition of sexism doesn't describe the problems of women in science.

OK, now you get to try defending that. And we get to laugh at your efforts.

No, as you don't understand logic, we won't try to make you believe she was 20. We'll ban your dirty companies/products on our soil, and for sure those who spread hatred, understand money clearly. Remember The Merchant of Venice.

I don't actually have a big problem with the waiting period, although I prefer the 6-month policy of the other agencies to the 12-month policy of NIH. It's not true that year-old publications are "hardly of use to scientists"; e.g., looking at the reference list on a paper I submitted just last month, I find that out of 38 papers referred to, only 6 were published in 2011 or 2012, and half of those were published in OA journals. YMMV, of course, but I don't consider this an undue burden. I admit that I may be biased by being in academia, and thus having access to the newest stuff if I need it.

Ideally I'd like to see all journals run like JMLR, or like the BE Press journals were before they were sold to de Gruyter, but we're not there yet, and I'm not at all sanguine that this approach will move us in that direction. We'll see.

Exactly. Make a distribution that boots directly into Scratch or [[insert name of your favorite programming language IDE here]].

You ask, the Internet answers: http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html

How about giving away a free voltmeter to any student from a 3rd world nation who passes the edX course "Circuits and Electronics"?

6002x "Circuits and Electronics", an online version of the MIT introductory electronics course. This was an exact copy of the MIT course, taught by an MIT professor, and was just as hard as the original course. Same material, same difficulty, online format.

Some of the 7,000 graduates were from 3rd world nations. For example, this article talks about a class of high-school students in Mongolia:

I'm reminded of William Kamkwamba, who built a wind-powered generator and was able to bring electricity to his village. His Ted talk is pretty interesting.

Mr. Kamkwamba had nothing. He built his windmill from scratch after learning the principles of electricity from books in the local library. He built his own circuit breaker by winding wire onto nails driven into wood.

His task would have been so much easier if he could have measured continuity, or the output voltage of his generator.

Most of the modern world is based on electronics - measurements, actions, communications, and so on. Having the tools and understanding would allow people to repair broken equipment and machinery, to take pieces from ewaste and hook them together in new ways, and generally have better life opportunities.

Supplying 5,000 students (a generous estimate) would cost only $10,000.

Here is the contact page for edX.

How about giving away a free voltmeter to any student from a 3rd world nation who passes the edX course "Circuits and Electronics"?

6002x "Circuits and Electronics", an online version of the MIT introductory electronics course. This was an exact copy of the MIT course, taught by an MIT professor, and was just as hard as the original course. Same material, same difficulty, online format.

Some of the 7,000 graduates were from 3rd world nations. For example, this article talks about a class of high-school students in Mongolia:

I'm reminded of William Kamkwamba, who built a wind-powered generator and was able to bring electricity to his village. His Ted talk is pretty interesting.

Mr. Kamkwamba had nothing. He built his windmill from scratch after learning the principles of electricity from books in the local library. He built his own circuit breaker by winding wire onto nails driven into wood.

His task would have been so much easier if he could have measured continuity, or the output voltage of his generator.

Most of the modern world is based on electronics - measurements, actions, communications, and so on. Having the tools and understanding would allow people to repair broken equipment and machinery, to take pieces from ewaste and hook them together in new ways, and generally have better life opportunities.

Supplying 5,000 students (a generous estimate) would cost only $10,000.

Here is the contact page for edX.

MIT Open Courseware is a good project.

And everyone knows the Wikimedia Foundation, but they can use more help.

"The real inflation in USA has not been reported since Nixon either"

Look - verifying the accuracy of government statistics is great, but this has been proven wrong over and over. Conspiracy theories on inflation serve nobody's best interest, how do these zombie rumors never die? Are you going to accuse MIT of being in on the conspiracy too? Check out their billion price index - http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ and compare it with the CPI, MIT offers handy graphs already doing that. There are good sound reasons for why the inflation tracking methodology has been updated over time, and while it will always be slightly off like all estimates, gross exaggerations like GP's 11-15% are just absurb. While oil and food may have been getting more expensive, clothing, consumer electronics, and natural gas prices have been falling, you have to look at the overall picture.

Definitely one of the timeless ones (they do need to freshen the paint on the bridge though, it's been fading recently).

I always love visiting the MIT campus, you'll never know what you might find. I try not to gawk at the students, although sometimes they gawk at me since I look like a 40 year old student of MIT.

You can see more hacks in the gallery.
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/

All of the states near me have laws which state that the left lane is for passing only (with certain special case exceptions).

I firmly believe you're mistaken. Looking at the MAP, I don't see more than two adjacent green states anywhere:

http://cache.jalopnik.com/assets/images/12/2012/01/ea322ffba38e281e28da19cf0114502b.jpg

Also:

http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

I got into computers through games, and the fact that my C64 had a built-in programming language.

When you power on a Raspberry Pi the desktop icons aren't Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader, they're "Scratch" and Python.

(With the official OS, obviously....)

Hmm; I'll admit that this law is not as common as I had expected. But still, in most states, you must at a minimum stay in the right lane if you are not keeping up with the current flow of traffic -- even if that traffic is exceeding the posted limit. Which would still make it potentially illegal to sit in the left lane at the speed limit.

Arkansas and South Dakota seems to be the only states that never require you to stay in the right lane (unless you are 'obstructing traffic' or 'slow moving'); and only Alaska, Maryland, North Dakota, and Ohio permit driving in the left lane, irregardless of surrounding traffic, if you are driving at the posted limit.
(According to http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html)

Yes! Instead of two month forced labor, the Chinese students can return to the grand times of famine and poverty, but it's OK since at least your conscience is clean, right?

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

(And no, I DO NOT own an iPhone)

The OLPC's, meant for schools, included Scratch (and turtleart and pypy, but for me the the star is that one), so in more countries could had been introducing programming to children for years. It could be a good tool to introduce small childrens to it, as is very visual, almost a toy, but you can dig a lot on it. Not sure in which language or environment will be done in Estonia, but that could be a good approach.

Newman needs to spend less time showing herself off wearing mockups and playing celebrity space cadet - and more time actually working on the practical problems. A significant amount of sweat is generated by the body even under light exertion. Moderate exertion is even worse. For example, when cycling in comfortable summer temperatures, it's easy to go through a litre of water or more every hour.

There's also the problem of insulation from temperatures ranging from as high as 31 degrees below freezing, to -161 degrees F. That's roughly the temperature where carbon dioxide precipitates into a solid, folks.

This is old news, but there are better images out there. The designer tends to model it herself - if you've got it, flaunt it, I suppose.

Her own design page, including some photos of the construction process: http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/

What looks to be a hapless grad student modeling it (but that's just a guess on my part): http://alumweb.mit.edu/groups/amita.old/images/people/Newman.jpg

Cnet slideshow: http://news.cnet.com/2300-11397_3-6197224.html

This is old news, but there are better images out there. The designer tends to model it herself - if you've got it, flaunt it, I suppose.

Her own design page, including some photos of the construction process: http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/

What looks to be a hapless grad student modeling it (but that's just a guess on my part): http://alumweb.mit.edu/groups/amita.old/images/people/Newman.jpg

Cnet slideshow: http://news.cnet.com/2300-11397_3-6197224.html

Krugman wrote a similar prediction back in the y2k special issue of the NYT:

Here again, there were straws in the wind. At the beginning of the 1990s, there was much speculation about which region would become the center of the burgeoning multimedia industry. Would it be Silicon Valley? Los Angeles? By 1996 the answer was clear; the winner was ... Manhattan, whose urban density favored the kind of close, face-to-face interaction that turned out to be essential.

http://mit.edu/krugman/www/BACKWRD2.html

Something like the MIT junkyard jumbotron then?
http://jumbotron.media.mit.edu/

Damn, my mod points just expired. +11, Awesome. I've got a bunch of tablets and old laptops. I definitely need to try this.

I can't think of an example from something that everyone should know, but I'll attempt to answer this.

1) There are two tides each day, one when the moon is directly overhead, and one when the moon is directly underneath. Since the gravitational attraction of the moon causes tides, can you explain why there is a tide when the moon is directly underneath?

2) The fourier transform converts from time domain to frequency domain; ie - it takes an audio WAV file of amplitudes over time and converts it to a list of frequencies over time. To do this you multiply by a complex exponential and integrate. Can you explain why this works? In other words, why does multiplying by the exponential and integrating convert from time domain to frequency domain? (Don't look at the answer until you can explain it yourself.)

3) In economics it is well known that a little inflation is good, a lot of inflation is bad, and negative inflation is very bad. Can you tell me what the correct value is? Can you tell me how important it is to hit the correct value exactly (ie - is the good/bad measure relatively flat or sharply peaked)? Can you tell me how to measure inflation in such a way that all economists would agree?

You've heard wrong. Jets actually fly quite a bit slower than they used to back in the 70s (when ticket prices were high), specifically to save fuel. They save further costs by packing more people into smaller seats, and cutting out all the extras.(meals) and adding extra charges for other things (luggage fees, optional in-flight movies, optional in-flight WiFi, extra charges for "premium economy" seats (that are slightly more desirable than bottom-barrel economy seats), etc. So yes, fuel savings DO help that much. Staff costs are low anyway. Flight attendants only make around $20k/year or so. Compared to the cost of 60,000 gallons of fuel for one flight, the cost of flight attendants is pretty tiny. Pilot salaries are pretty low too, maybe $80-100k or so for the most experienced, and more like $20k for the new guys. People don't go into aviation for the money.

Here's an article from MIT about the issue:
http://engineering.mit.edu/live/news/188-why-hasnt-commercial-air-travel-gotten-any-faster

A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).
By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

It's unfortunate that the world has offered him a free living by lavishing him with monetary awards for his so-called contributions to free software. The rest of us have to live in the real world where organizations are NOT throwing money at our feet. In other words: Richard Stallman can blow me because he doesn't live in the real world.

There is still no finer introduction to computer science than Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman. Also, be sure to watch the videos.

Computer science is about processes and structures, not computers, and not programs. LISP is still the ideal vehicle for learning about the important parts.

On a personal note, a friend of mine had a CS 101 intro course some years ago that was Javascript based. It was absolutely terrible. I know that it was terrible, because I ended up re-teaching him each of the concepts using random old textbooks that I had lying around. He had no problem learning concepts in other languages (Fortran, BASIC, C, even some MIX when I used Knuth) and then applying them to back to the Javascript that he had to do the problems in.

I know that Javascript wasn't entirely to blame there, but it sure didn't help. But why try to polish that particular turd?

There is still no finer introduction to computer science than Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman. Also, be sure to watch the videos.

Computer science is about processes and structures, not computers, and not programs. LISP is still the ideal vehicle for learning about the important parts.

On a personal note, a friend of mine had a CS 101 intro course some years ago that was Javascript based. It was absolutely terrible. I know that it was terrible, because I ended up re-teaching him each of the concepts using random old textbooks that I had lying around. He had no problem learning concepts in other languages (Fortran, BASIC, C, even some MIX when I used Knuth) and then applying them to back to the Javascript that he had to do the problems in.

I know that Javascript wasn't entirely to blame there, but it sure didn't help. But why try to polish that particular turd?

iTunes U has a whole series of videos on Introduction to Algorithms from MIT OpenCourseWare. The videos can also be found from MIT here.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/end-of-life-financial-study-0803.html

Most Americans die with less than $10,000 in assets. Typical life insurance pays less than $250,000 and hardly anything outside of government employees get pensions anymore. Even then, pensions aren't safe as several have been wiped out due to the 2008 stock market crash or through bankruptcy. 401k personal retirement funds are the norm or most people and they have tax benefits along with 25% - 100% matching funds from your employer but more and more people either cannot afford to pay into them or are actively borrowing against them. After 2 years of unemployment, my 401k is empty.

I am 40, employed with a very shaky job at $35k less than I was making before and no retirement, no health care, and am racking up debt to pay for more college as I try to get a masters degree to be more employable. My plan is to GTFO of the US and go some place where quality of life is the focus and not on corporate profits... Mars, maybe?

Garbage Collection, which kills User Experience due to unpredictable freezing of the whole program

Note that this is a product of a crappy garbage collector in the Java runtime, not intrinsic to garbage collection per se--there are plenty of well-known real time GCs that allow you to set a maximum latency on the collector.

See, for instance:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.4550
http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Lieberary/GC/Realtime/Realtime.html
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=604155

Most of this planet is covered by water. We simply need to learn how to use it instead of our ground water. There are plenty of reasonable nascent technologies to provide that ability. There just needs to be an economic incentive to invest. Either it comes earlier through government/corporate sponsorship through policy and investment, or it comes later when ground water becomes economically unviable relative to the alternatives.

Fact one: Syria has substantial oil production.

Eh... In 2009, they were 31st in the world, behind North Dakota. They were producing about 400k bbl/day, or 0.48% of the world's production. (More on this later.)

Fact two: the "king" in question is the head of state for an unstable, authoritarian government.

There's been, more or less, a civil war in the country for about 17 months. And by their own reports, production is down to 200k bbl/day or less. The instability of Syria should be already priced in to a rational market.

Fact three: a country in full blown civil war, which is what could happen with the death of Assad, won't be producing much oil for sale. A lot of infrastructure would be broken as well, depressing Syria's future oil production.

Discussed immediately above, but to repeat, production is already depressed to less than one quarter of one percent of the world's production. Due to sanctions, they are (basically) only able to sell to Russia and China. While such sales would affect the price (by alleviating the need for Russia to buy from elsewhere), it is hard to argue that the lack of that supply should affect prices in any meaningful way given how small the volume is relative to the total market.

Fact four: In the event of a civil war, the fun and games could extend to other countries with greater oil production, leading possibly to other drops in oil production. After all, the current Arab Spring tensions originated in Tunisia a country with half the population of Syria.

And the Arab Spring is almost 2 years old, and there has not been any appreciable protests in the top 14 oil producers (only 5 of which are in the region: Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE, Kuwait and Iraq*). These 14 countries account for about 70% of the worlds production (see wikipedia link above).

*Iraq has had it's own problems, of course, but those are long standing and we can assume they are priced in to the market. There may be an argument to be made that a power vacuum in Syria could cause problems in Iraq, but if we leave Iraq out of the equation there is still a lot of oil.

What is the elasticity of supply and demand? My take is that there's some problems somewhere, if prices can jump up so easily.

That's because you assume that price is only affected by real supply and demand, and not by speculation, fear, assumptions, etc. The fact that there is so much money (pdf) involved in oil derivatives - it rose from $6.2B in mid-1995 to about $180B in mid-2008 (see page 6 of the pdf), and this is only counting activity on NYMEX - mean that the speculators began to outweigh the bone fide hedgers.

There are two types of traders in the commodities market: hedgers are those who actually produce or consume the commodity (in this case oil); and speculators are those who buy and sell futures contracts, but don't ever deliver or take delivery of the commodity. The speculators are necessary so that there is a fluid market and there is someone available to make a trade. Historically, the speculators have been limited as to the size of a position they can take - that is, how much of the market they can corner - so that they don't gain undue influence on the market. Hedgers (pig farmers if we're talking pork bellies, corn farmers if we're talking corn, oil companies if we're talking oil) never had that restriction. Sometime in the 2000's, I'm not sure exactly when, the did away with that restriction on speculators. Around the same time, Goldman Sachs and others convinced their institutional clients (pension funds, etc.) to invest in commodity indexes and this fueled the explosion of money into the market. All this money