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In >>99% of all cases, a 2-year degree from a community college does not knock off anywhere near 2 years from a 4-year bachelor's degree.

In my case it knocked off three years.

http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

Here's a description of the program:

http://yavapai.nau.edu/blog/Th...

Basically you do all of the meaningless community organizer liberal arts classes at community college, and you do your core degree classes at university. If you do 15 credits per semester, then you only need two semesters. In my case I did one of the hard classes during the summer, making one semester 12 credits and the other 15.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/35moll.jpg (taken from http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/mollglobe.html ) is probably the more accurate map of the period. Interestingly there seems to be a lot of (shallow?) water separating Africa and Asia.

According to these maps the land-bridge only developed later, when the Arabian peninsula emerged and connected both continents.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/35moll.jpg (taken from http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/mollglobe.html ) is probably the more accurate map of the period. Interestingly there seems to be a lot of (shallow?) water separating Africa and Asia.

According to these maps the land-bridge only developed later, when the Arabian peninsula emerged and connected both continents.

I'm curious, in what ways is the French system better than the American one? Is it just cost, cost/quality of care, or some other factor?

A high quality of care, delivered to everyone, at a per-capita cost of nearly half of what the US taxpayer spends:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/pvd/Primer.htm

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/08/11/frances_model_healthcare_system/

for instance, if you look here , you'll see three groups, each of which has a strong case for being said to be the inevntor of the modern computer (Konrad Zuse, who built a programmable electro-mechanical computer in 1936, Anastoff and Berry who build a digital computer -- that was not general purpose or programmable in 1942, and Eckert and Mauchley, who built a vacuum tube base, programmable, general purpose computer in 1946). I won't get into the details, but it becomes a religious thing at some point -- I once fell out with a friend because I refused to accept Anastoff as the sole inventor of the computer. (My friend was from Iowa).

But what of the Thirteenth Step: Relapse?

Where is your god now!?

Planting trees in cold climates would increase warming not decrease or slow it.

Hmmm... hadn't thought of that. Are tundra areas typically covered with snow most of the time?

It depends on where the tundra is I guess. Arizona has tundra, approximately five square kilometers of alpine tundra exist above 3,500 meters on Mt. Humphreys in the San Francisco Peaks, yet I somehow don't think it's covered with snow most of the tyme.

I just had a look in wikipedia and a lot of the examples were more rocky than snowy, and also with grasses and small plants.

Also check the Google image search results for tundra biome. I may be wrong but I wouldn't think the rocks would adsorb as much heat as trees and the grass and small plants don't have the mass a tree does.

It also depends on how much difference a few trees would make to the albedo of the earth at that latitube vs the lower carbon footprint of the data center (due to less cooling requirements)

Actually the heat generated in the server rooms could be used to heat the rest of the buildings.

and the carbon that the trees themselves are sucking out of the air.

The effects o CO2 levels on tree growth appears to be varied, some research is showing some trees grow slower in CO2 rich environs while others show some plants grow faster. Poison Ivy is one of the plants that grows faster, ready to be itchier and have more rashes?

http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/~sa276/vamp.htm Confirmed. And that is why graves tend to be covered with a lot of pebbles sometimes.

There's quite a bit of variation in environment in the rocks of that part of Utah. There are intervals when it was fairly arid (e.g., in much of the Jurassic period, there are huge sand dune deposits, indications of desert-like soil development, and seasonally intermittent rivers and ponds). By the Late Cretaceous Period, the time when this dinosaur died, the conditions were wetter, because there are a large number of coal deposits that represent swamp conditions in river delta systems. These rivers were flowing from mountains in the west, across a coastal plain, and emptied into a seaway that ran from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean during most of the Late Cretaceous (it was only intermittently connected in the Early Cretaceous, and dried up towards the very end).

Refer to these paleogeographic maps of the southwestern USA by Ron Blakey. The most relevant one is for the Late Cretaceous at 75Ma.

The "Grand Staircase" an an eroded series of cliffs that formed long afterwards by erosion of these rocks.

Will this do?

Hello jonfr,

The Royal Center fault, our candidate fault for the earthquake, is a deep crustal fault that is probably similar in character, though NOT in size or 'genetic affinity' to the huge crustal faults responsible for the present day Rocky Mountains. The examples you list in your post are indeed subduction zone related tectonics and the plate shifting up or down is a result of that close proximity.

The Royal Center would have been an intra-plate earthquake perhaps in a fashion similar to the New Madrid earthquakes of recent historical fame. (google New Madrid earthquake for a pleathora of interesting links!) As to the scale of our proposed earthquake, I'll readily admit to not knowing enough to intelligently speculate on exact magnitude, but to drop an area like this multiple feet at once, it probably wasn't small!

An excellent website on paleogeographic reconstructions and continental plates through time is Dr. Ron Blakey's (of Northern Arizona University) page here:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/nam.html

In fact, check out his reconstruction for 300 million years ago here:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/namPP300.jpg

Notice that this reconstruction shows all of Illinois to be covered by water. This is well supported in the geologic record here in Illinois. A repeating pattern of sea-level rise and fall, (we think caused by global glaciation taking up water to ice form and then melting away) has lead to the also repeated cycle of sea level fall, exposure of the land surface, colonization by land plants, then rise of sea level and covering with sediment. Repeat again and again. The geologic record shows this as a repeating rock pattern called a 'cyclothem'. Cyclothems being viewed throughout much of the Pennsylvanian period and much of the midcontinent of the U.S. (the Mississippian has a glacial overprint as well, though few coal measures)

In short, I just wanted to point out that showing a sea covering Illinois at 300 million years ago is not a mistake, the 300 million year time indicator in Dr. Blakey's image is a generalized one and shouldn't be taken to mean an absolute rigid date.

Thanks for the link to your earthquake page! I'll be sure to check it out!

Hello jonfr,

The Royal Center fault, our candidate fault for the earthquake, is a deep crustal fault that is probably similar in character, though NOT in size or 'genetic affinity' to the huge crustal faults responsible for the present day Rocky Mountains. The examples you list in your post are indeed subduction zone related tectonics and the plate shifting up or down is a result of that close proximity.

The Royal Center would have been an intra-plate earthquake perhaps in a fashion similar to the New Madrid earthquakes of recent historical fame. (google New Madrid earthquake for a pleathora of interesting links!) As to the scale of our proposed earthquake, I'll readily admit to not knowing enough to intelligently speculate on exact magnitude, but to drop an area like this multiple feet at once, it probably wasn't small!

An excellent website on paleogeographic reconstructions and continental plates through time is Dr. Ron Blakey's (of Northern Arizona University) page here:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/nam.html

In fact, check out his reconstruction for 300 million years ago here:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/namPP300.jpg

Notice that this reconstruction shows all of Illinois to be covered by water. This is well supported in the geologic record here in Illinois. A repeating pattern of sea-level rise and fall, (we think caused by global glaciation taking up water to ice form and then melting away) has lead to the also repeated cycle of sea level fall, exposure of the land surface, colonization by land plants, then rise of sea level and covering with sediment. Repeat again and again. The geologic record shows this as a repeating rock pattern called a 'cyclothem'. Cyclothems being viewed throughout much of the Pennsylvanian period and much of the midcontinent of the U.S. (the Mississippian has a glacial overprint as well, though few coal measures)

In short, I just wanted to point out that showing a sea covering Illinois at 300 million years ago is not a mistake, the 300 million year time indicator in Dr. Blakey's image is a generalized one and shouldn't be taken to mean an absolute rigid date.

Thanks for the link to your earthquake page! I'll be sure to check it out!

If you want surreal, visit this site with paleogeographic maps by Ron Blakey. The maps depict the globe in several different projections and styles. The time relevant for the Illinois fossil forest is the Pennsylvanian (=Late Carboniferous, ~300 million years ago). Illinois, the rest of North America, and Europe were near the equator; and southern Africa, southern South America, India, and Australia were near the south pole (where there is evidence for glaciation at this time).

The Earth moves. Give it long enough, and a few cm/yr really adds up.

If you want surreal, visit this site with paleogeographic maps by Ron Blakey. The maps depict the globe in several different projections and styles. The time relevant for the Illinois fossil forest is the Pennsylvanian (=Late Carboniferous, ~300 million years ago). Illinois, the rest of North America, and Europe were near the equator; and southern Africa, southern South America, India, and Australia were near the south pole (where there is evidence for glaciation at this time).

The Earth moves. Give it long enough, and a few cm/yr really adds up.

I mean, picking on Microsoft for stuff like this is like adding a Windows computer to your botnet. Kind of fun, but gets boring after awhile.

On the other hand, Oracle can write crappy code with the best of them. I'll see you and raise you again.

We need this ice to melt so we can have more water for the 6.5 billion people on the planet.

All kidding aside, so what. The Earth evolves with us or without us. If we kill ourselves then we probably deserve it. The Earth won't care in the least bit. There will be a balance somewhere as the law of nature dictates it as much as the law of nature dictates that an apple will fall from a tree if it's stem breaks.

I care more about economic stability (not that I don't care about this but any change is beyond me) because our society, community, and personal comfort demands it.
The world has always been screwed up for a snapshot of any generation. Anybody thinking that they shouldn't continue to have children because of the screwed up world is more concerned with influences outside of their circle of control and probably shouldn't have kids anyway because of the indoctrination that Earth is a bad place to live (but usually those kids are better adjusted because they know they have screwed up parents).

If you want to see some cool North American Paleogeographic maps, check out this link, it might put some things into perspective:
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/nam.html

that reminded me of an article by Sapolsky in the Scientific American of March 2003 called "bugs in the brain". a pdf version is here. which then led me to read "a primates memoire". haven't looked at other animals/organisms the same since.

...and use CSS to reposition the sidebar/navbar content below it. Half the point to using CSS for accessibility is to avoid going through navlinks at the beginning of every page. I hear these guys managed it across their site without compromising performance in IE 6 or spectacular hacks (and yes, it was tested in IE, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Konqueror).

For the curious, the left and right navbars are absolutely positioned and the central content has left/right margins which mimic their width, to achieve the same liquid layout.

The HTML4.0 thing is bullshit, plain and simple. Authoring tools like Dreamweaver work better when working within XHTML spec, just lose the XML prolog until The Brave New World of XML-parsing UAs is here and we can stop serving text/html. XHTML1.0 Transitional plays nice with every UA I've tested, from Netscape 4.7 up.

Metafilter carried a pretty fun discussion on this recently. This Scientific American article (pdf) by Robert Sapolsky is a good introduction to parasite brain control.

I remember a story that came out a few years ago about a crab parasite that would attach to a crabs genitals, sterilize it, and then secrete hormones that would make the crab think it was a female fanning it's eggs. ( But the crab would be nurturning the parasite instead. ) Here's a link to a short essay that's full of more examples: http://www2.nau.edu/~bah/BIO471/Reader/Sapolsky_20 03.pdf

Submitting this not to be offtopic but to try and add to this algae->biofuel info.

There was a discovery a while back that found that algae can lead to the formation of clouds.
http://www.nau.edu/~soc-p/ecrc/cloud%20formation.h tml

The reason I bring this up is because of the balance of the ecosystem thing. If we add new and many organisms to the mix -- ones which already have an important purpose--for the sole purpose of destroying them are we potentially throwing the environment out of whack? Unintended consequences and all...

The same theme of building up tension or pressure behind a latch or spring (though not necessarily the exact same implementation as in the flytrap) is at work in the tongues of some frogs and lizards, in the legs of crickets and grasshoppers, and in click beetle flipping, to name a few.

Here, this process will help you out in most cases!

They were planning on studying the effects of starvation in space, but the Russians managed to screw up the experiment.

Well, they already did some great research on the Effects Of Weightlessness On Mortal Terror, which is a pretty good result. Don't play them down so much!

Considering that we didn't start measuring the biggest hole, over Antartica, until 1970, that's a huge jump to say that we know for certain the hole was man-made.

We also have excellent models for the mechanisms of ozone destruction, including laboratory verification of catalysis on the surfaces of droplets and ice crystals. If you don't think that this meets the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, let alone a preponderance of the evidence, is there anything that could possibly convince you? Anything?

I accept something as a fact when the evidence in its favor is such that it is unreasonable not to. Ozone depletion is one of those things.

I suggest you read this page first.

He may even write to mislead. Looking at that page, I notice a hugely incorrect graph about halfway down. It's titled "Atmospheric sources of chlorine", which is misleading for two reasons:

1. What gets into the atmosphere is irrelevant; what matters is what gets to the stratosphere.
2. Most of those sources emit chloride, not CFCs or even elemental chlorine.

Don't believe me? Here's the graph of CFC-11 concentration, (see the bottom of the page) and this page (tables 4, 5 and 6) details the reasons why the statements made by Hogan are wrong.

But hey, if you want to follow an ozone-depletion denialist or a platygean I can't stop you. But I will point at you and laugh at every opportunity.

Gotta tell ya, Zap2It actually has had _better_ listings, at certain times, than my Dish Netowork reciver. For instance, the Universityhouse Channel has "Univeristyhouse Channel" as the "program" listed in the Dish Network official program guide. Not too useful. Zap2it breaks down the listing into individual classes and shows.

Oh, yeah, and I love my MythTV. 385GB of love. Watching shows over 802.11b network on Windows 2000 (my girlfriend's PC) and Linux works great using the MythWeb interface. Great quality with the Hauppague PVR-350 and the ivtv drivers. No DRM, great commercial skips, good community support, and no end in sight to new and improved features and capabilities (hopefully easy DVD authoring will be added soon). And runs great on Gentoo, no less.

I think that was possibly an allusion to the Jarkov Mammoth found in '99? Sounds like the scientists are getting slightly annoyed with all the cloning questions, tho.

Does this work for everyone who has vision? Or will it only work for some, like traditional 3D, or those few who could actually play the Nintendo Virtual Boy without getting a headache?

Here's NAU's copyright policy - note that if the university makes money off of an author's work that it has rights to, it's supposed to split the royalties. I'm sure turnItIn isn't paying out royalties to Universities for student work, but maybe it should be. Student's are right to demand a copyright agreement with the University using turnItIn - if work is contributing to the profit of any entity because the school or student provided that entity with the material, students should have the right to claim royalties. I don't believe distributing/publishing materials through turnItIn and similar companies should fall under the University's right to exercise its "irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to reproduce and use such material for its purposes including public distribution".

hmmm... You're absolutely right. If you can't observe the phenomenon then the simulation is both simple and intrinsically correct and should be accepted as Holy Writ(tm).

Seriously, the law of gravity is a model that has been observed and checked against experimental results. Just because it is accepted now, doesn't mean that it didn't go through the scientific process.
Remedial Link

Notice how there is a big process between observation and 'Scientific Theory' that involves making a hypothesis (ie I think that this formula will accurately model this phenomenon.)? A computer model must go through the same verification and in this case that verification will involve looking deeply into the universe and carefully counting wet, rocky planets. Doing it this way isn't easy, but, as you so insightfully pointed out, it's really really hard to directly observe the creation of our solar system.

Oh, yeah... if you think it's 'pretty easy' to model the creation of the solar system then give these guys a call. I'm positive they would love to hear from you.

The Research Channel, University of California, The University of Washington channel, HealthTV, University House, Educating Everyone.

The Research Channel in particular has some great lectures, and is available for free on Galaxy 10 Ku band with a 1 meter dish.

I'd like more, though, and if Cosmos Studios gets behind it, perhaps they will retransmit the Cosmos series for all to see.

I just took a look at the site.. It appears he can go up to 200 feet without permits, unless he's near an airport.. But, they have the handy-dandy "do I need a permit" calculator to figure it out for him. :)

A quick search found that Microsoft has a way to find your coordinates.

"
1. Go to Microsoft's terra server
2. Click on 'Advanced Find'
3. Click on 'Address Search'
4. Enter the address and click 'go'
5. Click on the 'USGS arieal photograph' link
6. Verify where on the photo the house or address is
7. Click on the 'Image Info' link
8. The page will have the latitude and longitude of the borders of each photo labeled. Use these to estimate the latitude and longitude of that address.
"

Pretty much, bounce over to Terraserver, put in your address, find your coordinates, then punch them it the FCC's converter, and then put those results into their check page, and it'll tell you what you can do.

Searching my old address in suburban Tampa (approx 10 miles North of TIA), with a 200 foot freestanding tower (tower and guywires), I could be ok.

Of course, I doubt the homeowners group or planning and zoning would approve of a 200' tower in the back yard. :) If that 200' tower fell over, probably land on 3 houses there. :) One guy did have a flimsy 50' antenna on his roof with guywires to the extreme corners of his roof, next door, which probably gave him an overall height of 65'. It was more than enough to clear the trees.. Some cable company was broadcasting cable over it.. I never did find out who though. $25/mo for all the stations with the antenna. They must save an absolute fortune on physical cables.

We tried to do wireless service for a temporary location once. It was a one-night event. Time Warner wouldn't provide a cablemodem, even though they were nice enough to tell me, "if you were across the street, we'd service you." {sigh} We couldn't do it though, because the tall downtown Tampa buildings were in the way, and we didn't have any additional hardware to bounce around (or over) them.

We ended up with 2 56k dialup connections directo to our office to do live webcams over. That really sucked. Even the phone lines sucked there.

Who cares if she can't act? What do you want to do in a dark theatre for two hours - watch a woman who studied acting or one who studied stairmaster?

The earth's atmosphere contains 350 parts per million of CO2. That's a lot less than 1%. If CO2 really rose to 2%, this would be about a 60-fold increase, and would represent twice as much CO2 as the earth has ever seen.

The concentration of CO2 never exceeded 1% in earth's history. Oxygen concentration started to increase and carbon dioxide to decrease about 2.75 billion years ago, and by 2 billion years ago, the concentrations were quite close to today's levels. You can find a nice account of this here. See, in particular, the last slide, which shows a graph of CO2 and O2 concentrations over the last 4 billion years.

But it is no longer in production and it is patended.

Works with any software as it is attached at the front of the screen. Surface mirrors and the idea of doing the view-master 'on screen'

I'll keep mine for a long time.

A description and pictures of it here

Patent here with description.

Oh btw, just like 640k was sooo enough for everyone; and the world market only had demand for about a thousand (or a hundred, i forget which) computers (some IBM head-huncho back in the 60s) retinal scans are very difficult to replicate.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

funny stuff.

I'm taking a course at Northern Arizona University, which focuses on team design and implementation skills. For evaluation, we use peer reviews. Team members contribute to an average factor which is multiplied by the team grade. The faculty member supervising that team gets an offset he can add (or subtract) from the raw score. Seems to work, assuming you don't piss off your team or teacher (which seems pretty much like RL).

Used IBM drives for reliability. Using Anything else seemed a bit of a risk. Hardware raid 5 in the chassis connected to a Fireport 40 on the server. ReiserFS is finally stable enough in 2.4.5 and 2.4.6 to make this useable. We do streaming video so this should hold a semester or two depending on the number of classes we serve. NAU Webcast

It is perhaps a little dense on the music front, although I love music anyway.

The Art of Fugue is a complex work. It sounds great if you don't know a iota from a gigue; but the more you listen to it and learn about it, the more you discover. It is the Mandelbrot Set of music.

There is an analysis of Bach's Fugues and Canons at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/bachindex.html, with scores (they are incredible: you just see the patterns in the music: the transpositions, the oppositions, the contrary motions) and commentary; you can pop your favorite version on your MP3 playlist (my favorite is Gustav Leonhardt's rendition on Deutsches Harmonia Mundi, but I'd trust Kenneth Gilbert's, Ton Koopman's or Rinaldo Alessandrini's (here are the details: http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/cds/hmu1169.htm), all of them top-notch harpsichordists. As long as it's not on the piano, and especially not by Glenn Gould, I guess it's OK) and read the analysis.

I'm a Junior now at Northern Arizona University, where they offer a CSE degree. Recently they added a CE degree also, but I think I still prefer the CSE.

This CSE degree is doubly accredited by abet and the other accredidation board (can't remember the name). I am learning both hardware and software concepts and aspects through this degree program.

The only thing I wish was different is that our school offered a wider variety of upper level CS courses for us to choose from. If you ask me, a person who just loves to learn new things, CSE is the way to go. It gives you a great background to both fields, and you can always pursue further education in any field that you wish to refine.

Don't wait to declare unless you want to spend more than 4 years! They have it all planned out...

I'm a Junior now at Northern Arizona University, where they offer a CSE degree. Recently they added a CE degree also, but I think I still prefer the CSE.

This CSE degree is doubly accredited by abet and the other accredidation board (can't remember the name). I am learning both hardware and software concepts and aspects through this degree program.

The only thing I wish was different is that our school offered a wider variety of upper level CS courses for us to choose from. If you ask me, a person who just loves to learn new things, CSE is the way to go. It gives you a great background to both fields, and you can always pursue further education in any field that you wish to refine.

Don't wait to declare unless you want to spend more than 4 years! They have it all planned out...

I'm a student at Northern Arizona University, and the distance learning program here is highly regarded (at least locally). We have systems all through Arizona, and some through California as I understand it.
Try looking around at www.nau.edu. If you can get ahold of somebody, I'm sure they'll be willing to talk with you.

This article is being modded up to 4-5?

Damn, I can remember when geeks had some hint of a clue about math or science.

The author opens with a claim that Shell Oil has a competition where cars run on "standard petroleum" -- maybe a diesel could run on pure petroleum, but that's the stuff that comes out of the ground, not out of fuel pumps. That's a hint that he's clueless.

Further he claims 10K+ miles/per gallon (40K+ kilometers per liter) That's 200x most production high economy cars, and 100x the target for the ultra economy cars. In order for this to even be thermodynamically possible, the efficiency of today's cars would have to be under 1%.

Don't we even have some intuitive sense of the general amount of energy in burning gasoline? And the amount of work involved in moving things on Earth. Think!!! Halfway around the Earth on a gallon? Do you really believe that? (10K mpg is trivial in space, of course) Think of the amount of enrgy required to lift a car over even a modest hill.

Well the guys working on Society of Automotive Engineers competitions sure haven't seemed to have heard of it. Even their most highly compromised, highly optimized vehicles don't come close. Ultralight, ultrafragile shells on bicycle/tricycle frames with a total vehicle weight in the *tens* of pounds (see some pictures) can achieve many hundreds of mpg -- at 15 mpg on a track with no uphills greater than 1%.

Actually, if you read the SAE competition rules, you'll see that these vehicles are not capable of cruising most campuses. They are too underpowered to climb any hill that you can't coast over at 15-16 mpg. (a modest speed on an ordinary bicycle)

While the quotes may not be totally appropriate for a geneticist, please note that Agenbroad is identified as a geologist in the article. This is not to disparage geologists. However, it was clear to me that one should not necessarily believe nor take seriously the words of a non-expert when it comes to cloning. Agenbroad probably knows mammoths out his wazoo (he is a paleontologist) but he is not a geneticist.
If one wants more info about Agenbroad, go to the NAU web site and do a search.