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TeX4ht renders TeX as HTML.

MathTeX is a CGI that renders TeX embedded in a webpage as an image.

The Techexplorer plugin, originally by IBM, will directly render TeX embedded in HTML.

Multichannel audio setup for ALSA. OSS 4x supports multichannel out of the box without any configuration needed. To be fair though OSS was removed from the mainline kernel before OSS 4 was released, and hasn't been the default for any of the mainline distros. However, it is still the sound system for FreeBSD and was available before PulseAudio for any Linux users who wanted to install it.

Yes, because there's obviously only one way of applying socialism, and there's obviously no such thing as a mixed economy. That's why Germany failed about as badly as the Soviet Union, and there are bread queues in front of every shop in Scandinavia... hold on.

The irony of the matter is that those red states where the Tea Parties mass are actually heavily subsidized by the blue states. Farm subsidies are just one example; military spending, another.

"Indeed, the United States is building the world's largest virtual network lab across 14 college campuses and two nationwide backbone networks so that it can engage thousands – perhaps millions – of end users in its experiments."

Gosh now, China seems to only have a measly 22 NBCLs involved at the moment....and there's nothing 'perhaps' about the millions it can engage.

And those are just the ones that are already built. Who knows have many are in the 'is building' stage...

the basic conclusions are very similar, save for extreme circumstances. {Newtonian Mechanics} works fine at human-experienced scales, speeds and distances.

It's fun you mention Einstein's and Darwin's theory in the same post, because they share some other characteristics :
They are hard to prove experimentally in a lab (due to energy, mass or time constrains), and we have to rely on observing-the-universe-as-a-lab to find the necessary data to prove/disprove them.

Although some human-made experiments can be designed to test some manifestation of Einstein's theories, like the distortion of time and GPS sattelites, we just don't have the technology yet to create some high energy or high mass effects like gravitational lenses and have to rely on observing them in the universe around instead of experimentally recreating them.

Same happens with Evolution : some kind of speciation has been reproduced in laboratory, or has been man-caused in industrial countries. Nonetheless we can't currently "evolve an eye in a lab"(due to obvious problems of time scale and necessary space). For lots of larger-scale models, instead, we have to rely on what we learn from our planet trough fossils records. (Fossil and planet Earth are to evolution, what telescopes and the universe is to extreme-range physics).

Curiously though, Creationist are only complaining that "Evolution can't be tested" and are only pushing for Intelligent Design. None of them is pushing for Intelligent Falling although the same argument could be used for Physics~ And although IF is similarly valid (read: silly) as ID~

Well, since you asked...

Assuming one heavy waste atom per neutron converted to energy, and for the sake of argument let's say these atoms have an atomic weight of about 300:

1 neutron x c^2 = 1.67e-27 kg x 9e16 = 1.5 e-10 J/atom =

1.5 e-10 / (300*1.67e-27 kg) = 3e14 J / kg pure waste

Now, granted the efficiency with which we can extract pure waste from the rest of the spent fuel rod knocks down by a few orders of magnitude that figure. I don't know that number, but let's call it a thousand. So we have 3e14 J / metric ton waste. That's 3e5 GJ/metric ton.

For reference, total electricity produced per year in the US (source: DOE, http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html) is about 1.5e19 J / year = 1.5e10 GJ / year. If we're going to use all nukes, that would amount to 50,000 metric tons per year of the contaminated stuff, assuming 1 kg pure waste pollutes 1 metric ton of spent fuel.

Now, for coal:
1/2 of our electric output is coal right now. That's 0.75e19 J/year of coal. Coal uses a chemical reaction, not a nuclear reaction, so the mass of hydrocarbons is far greater than the number quoted above. For simplicity (and since I never took organic chem in college), let's approximate it by saying it's all clean-burning methane gas. ie CH4 + 2O2 = CO2 + 2H2O. The internets tell me (at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/energy/Companion/E06.1.pdf.xpdf) that this reaction yields 55 GJ/ metric ton methane.

Dividing through,

7.5e18J/year / 5.5e10 J/ton = 1.4e8 ton methane burned per year. Coal has higher energy content, but I'm going to make the unfounded guess that the inefficiency of the generator will balance out my assumption of using methane.(Corrections from chemists are welcomed.)

To review, we can spew out 1.4e8 ton of carbon (roughly), or 5e4 ton of dilute (factor of 1000) radioactive waste. So now the question is, how much radiation in that 1.4e8 tons of carbon. (http://www.docstoc.com/docs/4991532/radioactive-elements) tells me this is on the order of 10 ppm for thorium. So that's about 1.4e3 tons/year of pure thorium vs 5e1 tons/year of pure radioactive waste.

Again, corrections to false assumptions and math mistakes are most welcome from people who actually know what they're talking about more than I do (I'm an EE/software guy from 9-5).

Let's see, we're supposed to spend literally trillions of dollars to fix global warming, yet we can't see the raw data the hysteria is based on?

WTF!?!?!

This is a big problem, and in the science community in general (not just climate scientists!). The data is safeguarded for some length of time while the researcher(s) publish their findings, personal gain, or simply because the research itself was a very expensive process and the institution wants to "get its money's worth". I work at a climate research center and we've actually had to take hard copies of data and run them through an OCR program like ABBYY because the original scientist wouldn't send us digital versions of the data or even processed maps.

Along the same lines, when is the source code used for the climate models going to be published and thoroughly reviewed?

If AGW is in fact true, it can withstand the scrutiny.

But it is:
http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/download/get_source2.html
http://aom.giss.nasa.gov/code4x3.html
http://www.caps.ou.edu/ARPS/
http://polarmet.mps.ohio-state.edu/PolarMet/pwrf.html

and someone made a nice list of models used in the recent IPCC report and if source code is available here:
http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=667

LaTex doesn't translate easily or cleanly into HTML, or vice-versa

LaTeX converts very well to [X]HTML using tex4ht. I know one person who has written his entire web site in LaTeX and compiled it with tex4ht. Lots of people use it for online copies of papers and they look good.

If you've taken the time to learn a language that doesn't, necessarily, "believe in" sentences as a grammatical structure, then I suspect you would find your opinions dramatically altered; at least, you would find it more reasonable to hold multiple concepts and ideas in your mind at the same time, much like is required to understand grammar such as, to provide an example, the Chinese "ba pattern", where the verb of a sentence could be a hundred words away from the subject, although the longest sentences are generally limited to scholarly works, which tend to be both excessively lengthy, but also quite eloquent in their use of idiom. Newspapers and novels have short sentences for the ADD public.

So true. There are a lot of mindblowing things we don't even think about either. My work shirts and pants are truly cheap ($15-20) yet have nanoparticle treatments that make small spills and sprays of water bead up and roll off them, resisting stains. Drill bits and other machine parts are coated in films of titanium nitride or titanium carbon nitride, which is insanely hard and chemical and wear resistant.

With any decent modern camera you can shoot and shoot all day, come home, and offload hundreds or possibly thousands of pics from it - and they're already "developed," but if you want to, you can run off passably professional copies on a home printer. ...we have dirt cheap tiny wristwatches that keep time within seconds per month, and can be dunked in water or slammed around to no ill effect! I've been reading about mechanical watches lately, and a handful off seconds per day, give or take, is quite acceptable for them. In fact, with timepieces as accurate as GPS satellites, we've even proven Einstein's theory of relativity by observation!

When I was a kid, LEDs were red, green, and amber, never very bright. Now we have blue and white high intensity ones used for flashlights and even headlights!

Japanese sportbikes are typically limited by an onboard chip to restrict the maximum speed to no more than 300kph... ...and so on. I could keep brainstorming examples but people just tend to get used to these things quickly as they become commonplace. I'm easily impressed by things like this because I don't take them for granted. Of course technology isn't going to deliver us all to a utopia - it's made and used by mankind, so it'll see uses for great good and great evil - but I think the age we're living in has gone a long way to live up to the dreams of sci fi writers of decades past. The iPod Touch/iPhone makes Star Trek TNG/DS9's PDAs look clunky and anachronistic and those shows aren't even that old... and who here has less than a 32" TV? A lot of people now seem to buy TVs based more on what the most optimal size is for them rather than getting as much as they can afford because you could well buy one that's TOO big. Arg... high tech examples still flooding in. Gotta stop!

The full text of the research paper is available at-- http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/marchalant/pdf/marchalantetalneurobiolaging2008.pdf on the co-author's Departmental website. Might be helpful since TFA is an article out of the University's student newspaper which tends to be a little light on details (speaking as an alumni).

http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/david/David.htm

They do. I know a person who works for the news department and they do regular updates of many people. Things can go online almost imidiatly.

And let us not foget that each and every country will bend the truth a little bit to look better to the rest of the world.

I may or may not be using the proper terminology, as it has been a while. From reading up here, yeah, I am.

http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~p616/safety/fatal_current.html might be a good reference though. Basically as it says and I had meant to say, its the low powered shocks that are potentially more dangerous than the higher powered.

> It takes even more to assume that you can explain the success of a man like Steve Jobs...
> and even more to assume that you can draw transferrable lessons that will enable others
> to replicate that success.

Well, either Jobs is successful because he's lucky, or he's successful because he consistently does things to produce a good result. If the latter, you can observe what he's doing and look for patterns. You can even run some experiments (theoretically) to figure out if what you think is responsible for his success really is. In fact, Jim Collins something like this with Built to Last and Good to Great. He looked at lots of successful companies and found commonalities. And he looked at lots of almost successful companies and found the lack of those commonalities. Great books; I highly recommend them. (You can read a short summary of Good to Great at my web site: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~prewett/writings/BookReviews/GoodToGreat.html)

It might also be worthwhile to ask what "success" means. Jobs is successful in the now, but if he doesn't build up a successor with his same characteristics, Apple will fail as soon as he leaves. Does success mean building a wonderful company that disappears when you die? Does success mean building a company that lasts forever? Does success mean building just enough of a company to get bought out and make a fortune? Does success mean people like you? That you have a great family? Jobs is only successful by some of those metrics...

Let's see.... what I'm working on....

Pure pareto multiobjective genetic algorithms (just submitted a paper to IEEE TEVC)
Hinge-loss function discriminative training of neural nets as classifiers
Computer vision as a KNOWLEDGE problem (i.e. not just mostly signal processing and statistics)
Persistent surveillance (entity tracking)
Sensor asset allocation (using a GA)
Various things involving abductive inference

http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti/

Split the property into two separate concepts and re-assess your statements. ...
I think the land and natural resources need to be divvied up differently.

Ever hear of the Tragedy of the Commons?

Of course. I don't see how it is relevant to this discussion. I'm not proposing common ownership and neither did Henry George. What was your point?

Google Henry George for one practical and tested method of doing this.

Wiki's article on him says he was anti Chinese immigrant. Besides newspapers, that's some he shared with William Randolph Hearst. During WWII besides the Japanese Hearst wanted to put the Chinese and all other Asian into internment camps. He pressed his "yellow peril".

An understandable concern. His opposition to bringing in immigrants was similar to some of the opposition to illegal immigration today. I think it is probably true that wages will be pushed down by immigration. Again, I'm not sure how that is relevant to this thread. Are you saying the guy was a jerk so we should reject his ideas? An aside: I think the population of the US has reached a point where further growth will push down quality of life. I'd personally like to see a ZPG policy, either on a state by state basis or for the country as a whole but I accept the fact that ZPG is not a popular idea.

From wiki "George preferred taxing unimproved land value". That misses all the services land offers. For instance wetlands purify water and recharge aquifers. By taxing those lands he'd encourage people to build on that land thus depriving people of fresh water.

A good point. As with any solution to a problem there are corner cases that will require special attention. Where land has special environmental character (wetlands, national or state parks unique habitat etc.) the land should be set aside and taxing it would be a silly case of the government paying itself.

It is the land ownership that **created** the poverty in the first place.

Cite please. Actually land ownership allows people to improve their economic lot in life. Even those immigrants Henry George opposed.

It is just an opinion based on the observation that where there are ample natural resources and not excessive population that poverty only seems to be found where there the land or natural resources is in the hands of a few.

By the way if we opened the border to Mexico I'm sure that those who chose to come to the States would experience a big improvement in their quality of life. Do you support substantial immigration to the US? I'm convinced that a major root cause of poverty in both the US and Mexico is the fact that a lot of the land is kept out of useful production by owners and that the problem would be reduced or even eliminated if income taxes were replace with land tax. Here are some interesting summaries of various "land instead of income or property" taxes: Tax Reform Success Stories

Split the property into two separate concepts and re-assess your statements.
...
I think the land and natural resources need to be divvied up differently.

Ever hear of the Tragedy of the Commons?

Google Henry George for one practical and tested method of doing this.

Wiki's article on him says he was anti Chinese immigrant. Besides newspapers, that's some he shared with William Randolph Hearst. During WWII besides the Japanese Hearst wanted to put the Chinese and all other Asian into internment camps. He pressed his "yellow peril".

From wiki "George preferred taxing unimproved land value". That misses all the services land offers. For instance wetlands purify water and recharge aquifers. By taxing those lands he'd encourage people to build on that land thus depriving people of fresh water.

It is the land ownership that **created** the poverty in the first place.

Cite please. Actually land ownership allows people to improve their economic lot in life. Even those immigrants Henry George opposed.

"The DSM is usually reluctant to pathologize something unless it's really bothering the person themselves, or makes it impossible for them to live a normal life."

As a counter-example I call to your attention: Social Anxiety Disorder.

Not to be confused with "Seasonal Affective Disorder" (another real winner). The definition is vague, the symptoms can describe anyone who is uncomfortable in crowds, and yes, there is a pill. It's "Paxil" which is habit forming and has quite a colorful history: faked clinical trials, numerous lawsuits, all the way to a recent snafu where they dumped a batch on the market that was Ooops! missing the active ingredient...Did I mention it's habit forming? Lot of SAD people going into withdrawal while taking their pills. It's also another one where they marketed it agressively to kids, and, if you read the DSM definition of SAD, you'll find that kids who suffer it sometimes lack some of the vague-ass symptoms.

I don't trust the DSM anymore, frankly. The number of anxiety-style disorders that they've added in the last 20 years is staggering and obscene, and none of them have hard physical causes, and yet all of them respond to chemical treatment. That is extremely suspicious.

LaTeX is restricted to certain types of print output.

Last time I needed multi format output, LaTeX provided PDF, Postscript, DVI (the more or less "native" output of current LaTeX-compilers) and with minimal work HTML, Text, RTF and Palm-Doc.

It emphatically cannot output HTML easily.

That's just wrong.

TeX4ht does this with "htlatex file.tex".

Additionally it supports outputting DocBook and ODF.

While away a useful few hours with Google Tech Talks
http://research.google.com/video.html

Then do some searching for podcasts, both audio and video. A quick sample of a hundred feeds or so:

http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/podcast/podcast.xml

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AiBquicktime

http://www.archaeologychannel.org/rss/TACfeed.xml

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/rss/archive.php?seriesid=1906978378

http://aaweekly.blip.tv/?skin=rss

http://www.techonline.mtu.edu/iTunes_Media/astronomy_rss.xml

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Audio/Podcast.xml

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Audio/Podcast.xml

http://astronomy.libsyn.com/rss

http://www.astronomy.com/asy/podcasts

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/groks.rss

Pick your own subjects!

While away a useful few hours with Google Tech Talks
http://research.google.com/video.html

Then do some searching for podcasts, both audio and video. A quick sample of a hundred feeds or so:

http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/podcast/podcast.xml

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AiBquicktime

http://www.archaeologychannel.org/rss/TACfeed.xml

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/rss/archive.php?seriesid=1906978378

http://aaweekly.blip.tv/?skin=rss

http://www.techonline.mtu.edu/iTunes_Media/astronomy_rss.xml

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Audio/Podcast.xml

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Audio/Podcast.xml

http://astronomy.libsyn.com/rss

http://www.astronomy.com/asy/podcasts

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/groks.rss

Pick your own subjects!

I know Java fairly well, but I started with C++ in high school. Then when I got to college, Ohio State, sorry, THE Ohio State University, the introductory computer science curriculum taught using a modified version of C++ called Resolve C++. In Resolve they mostly added keywords to the language that help explain things better to beginners, and included extended versions of the primitive types, eg int became Integer, and double became Real. It was a pain in the ass for me since I already knew C++, but it helped a lot of students I think. They also encouraged in-depth planning before coding, I won't go into the details. So I think OSU isn't one of the schools TFA is talking about.

What about in 10 years time, or 100 years time then the W3C spec have changed, or your HTML files on the census of people in NY for the year 2007 don't display correctly anymore.

That is very true. It is unlikely a web document written today will render well, even in as little as 10 years.

However, if in a 100% open well defined (no fuzziness) specification, there will be relatively lossless converters that can be run over the data to convert it with minimal effort.

If in a spec like MOOXML, there is sufficiently enough ambiguity and latitude for undocumented proprietary use to make simple mass bulk conversions impossible. Someone else in this thread said it right, you would be better of in the long term using .TXT (US ascii) formats than MOOXML. Are not all platforms and browser able to read the original RFC-0001? You can try with the next link, RFC0001 from 1969 and still readable unaltered.

Now I am not proposing to use TXT, but any "standard" for long term data archival better be a whole lot better defined than MOOXML. MOOXML lacks the precision required of it's definition and will simple be a farcical exercise in futility to preserve documents if adopted.

http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/safety/MSDS/CLOROX%20LIQUID%20BLEACH.htm

Well, http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.g ov/19980223621_1998381731.pdf (a link from wikipedia entry on G-force) says that untrained humans are able to stand 17 g's for a prolonged time without any harm. With some cushioning/dampening/special suits passengers should survive 20 g's easily, since research like http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/voshell/gforce.pdf says that 40 g's are reasonable for rapid deceleration.

I'd guess that it is highly likely that well in excess of 95% of the general computer-buying public is similarly ignorant.

If I read one more "no christian ever persucuted anyone evar" post, it'll be the millionth too many.

Where did I claim that? I was simply pointing out that Christianity is not inherently opposed to science and the given examples were poor.

Copernicus: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/ Unit3/response.html

The web page clearly shows that his ideas were taken seriously and that he himself considered his work to be in the service of God.

Leonardo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4289204.stm

The church didn't like him cutting up dead bodies. That's hardly an attack on science; it's simply a position on how to respect the dead.

The churches stood in the way of science throughout their histories, that's a fact, and your attempted whitewashing of history won't change it.

If you calm down long enough to read my post rationally, you'll see that I was pointing out that Christians are not fundamentally opposed to science. Members of the church have opposed certain scientific theories and methods of gathering evidence in the past, but that does not equate to a fundamental opposition to science. Indeed the Bible praises God as Creator, encourages the examination of his Creation in order to praise him and declares him to be a God of order, meaning that his Creation is one which can be studied.

3) Haven't we figured out by now religion and science don't mix? Copernicus, Galileo, Da Vinci, and who knows who else?

Copernicus was a Roman Catholic who was encouraged by his bishop to spread his research about heliocentrism. Galileo ran into trouble because of remarks he made about the hope - politics was the problem, not science. I don't recall Da Vinci running into any problems re: science and religion

It's "viruses". This isn't Latin, we don't pluralize with "i"s.

When you're using Latin (even in English) you do with Second Declension nouns, fuckhead. Singular: -us/-er; Plural: -i.
Not that this applies to virus, since it's NOT a second declension noun, but it its own plural, like data. The plural of virus, is virus.
So you're wrong in English AND in Latin.

(Boy this argument never gets old.)

The sun won't go nova (I think?). It'll just get bigger and burn off the oceans and kill everything in about 3.5 billion years, and eventually'll shrink into a white dwarf. Earth will still be orbiting, and it'll take trillions of years for the white dwarf to cool off. http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Lecture s/vistas97.html

From here: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~aubrecht/coalvs nucMarcon.pdf

" The conclusion was that Americans living
near coal-fired power plants are exposed to higher
radiation doses, particularly bone doses, than those
living near nuclear power plants that meet government
regulations."

I actually work in the nuclear industry and understand the ramifications of what is being talked about here. While it is a "big deal" to the nuclear industry the danger we're talking about is minimal.

Is this an electric car ( I don't know much about different makes and models)? If so, how do you charge it? And where is the energy comming from? I don't want to bash you, that's definatly not my intention. I was just reading about electric cars today. If electric vehicles are charged by 100% coal fired energy, electric vehicles would emit 150% more carbon dioxide, 250% more nitrogen oxides, and 2400% more sulfur oxides than a comparable internal combustion engine vehicle. http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/writing /Samples/policy/voytishlong.html Raising the question for me. Would replacing suv's with electric vehicles solve the issue? I don't drive an suv, I don't drive at all really, I only have to walk 2 blocks to get to work. I think the solution COULD be electric cars and not suvs, but only if we can come up with cleaner ways to make the energy to charge these cars.

If you want to see a sample calculator policy you can find one here.

(Yes, if you have 10,000 students passing through the math department every year, you need a department-wide "calculator policy" :-).)

It's funny... Alien lifeforms are always thought of as highly advanced compared to us. I think it's worth considering just how complex this world is (just think of how we --- apparently without too much effort --- get from an idea to communicating that idea to others. Then try to describe exactly what an idea is, that is, a generic idea --- nothing specific (and a headache with pictures doesn't count.)

I think it's pretty darn impressive that we ever managed to invent any higher means of communication! (If you're going to start arguing that "animals have language too", take a look at Hockett's Design Features of Language and think about it.)

Probably the most hilarious scenario would be, if it turned out that there was actually life somewhere else in the Milky Way, but it hadn't even advanced to the state of making fire yet. I mean, seriously, that'd be a kick in the nuts of every sci-fi fan out there (not that I particularly dislike them or anything, I quite like some sci-fi myself).

The "company" was actually the University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill back in 2001:

http://www.chemistry.ohio-state.edu/compsupp/Newsl etter/news_36.html

Can't help but think of The Gambler after reading the posts in the blog...

# Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering (BS CSE).
# Bachelor of Science in Computer and Information Science (BS CIS).
# Bachelor of Arts in Computer and Information Science (BA CIS).

http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/ugrad/index.shtml

The BS CSE is the uberGeek degree I have. It is from the college of engineering. The other two degrees are from the college of arts and sciences. Personally, I don't think art and science belongs in the same college, but many schools do it that way for historical reasons.

Most people who want to write software probably should be looking for a degree from a college of engineering with a name like "BS Software Engineering" or "BS Computer Engineering with specialization in Software Systems." Unfortunately, the universities of the world tend to be a good bit behind the actual job market with it comes to high-tech.

I love how these press releases from universities pretend as if no one had ever even contemplated such an idea before the ground-breaking work mentioned in the press release. People have been doing mathematical modeling of tumors for years. Avner Friedman has been doing work since the late 1990's at least (see http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/node/22077, for example).

Better Yet:

How to become a *successful* rocket scientist *with rockets that don't explode*:

1. Apply to The Ohio State University (College of Engineering)
2. Take lots of calc and physics
3. Declare aerospace as your major
4. Graduate
5. Profit and not kill people!!!!

Better Yet:

How to become a *successful* rocket scientist *with rockets that don't explode*:

1. Apply to The Ohio State University (College of Engineering)
2. Take lots of calc and physics
3. Declare aerospace as your major
4. Graduate
5. Profit and not kill people!!!!

There have been three developments in apiculture in the last 30 years or so that have driven down the availability of honey, thus driving up the price.

First, DDT got banned. Ever hear the Joni Mitchell song that goes, "Hey farmer farmer, take away the DDT now. Give me spots on apples, but leave me the birds and the bees, please." Unfortunately, the opposite happened: without DDT, honeybee competitors thrived, and stronger pesticides that actually did harm the bee were introduced.

The next problem was the spread of African or "killer" bees, which came to us via South America. These bees are basically the same as the European ones we've historically had, except for one trait: if they perceive hive attack, they don't stop attacking once the immediate threat is past, but follow the attacker until it is taught a lesson. They're somewhat more agressive in other ways, too, but it's been some years since I dealt with that.

Lastly, and possibly related to DDT removal, is a tracheal mite, Acarapis woodi, that kills off entire colonies. I don't think they've found any bees with defenses against the mites, nor against varroa jacobsoni, another deadly mite.

These threats have basically wiped out the cottage beekeeping industry. It got to be expensive, and no fun.

But if genetic alterations can be engineered to make the "attack until dead" gene recessive, the mite problem would be tolerable, even for hobbyists. The mites can be warded off -- that's a solvable problem, but having the hive attack you isn't. It's unlikely that genetics or DDT could do much to counter the mites directly, but you never know.

(My group did a content based image search engine at OSU: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~hakan/CIS772/index. html)

The interesting thing about color is that it is good enough ("Voxel 4" was our best if you find our website) to find images that have been resized, run through *some* effects filters, or rotated.

So if you use the same usericon etc, resized, on unconnected websites, that could be used to correlate your identities once this feature is in a global search engine. Also, the clustering of related images, for efficiency, restricts your results to the same cluster (for our implementation), which may not be apparent at first.

p.s. Thanks #Wikipedia for the gigabytes of images URL.

What people need to know about divorce...

The industry that has evolved from people wanting divorces is a huge cash cow machine for states' social services and often shabby lawyers who really care more about having a job and lining their pockets than the welfare of our citizens or our children. The biggest lie in divorces involving custody is that the court tries to make decisions "in the child's best interest". This is of course an entirely subjective definition which while in theory sounds like what we all want, in practice it runs completely afoul of the United States Constitution in violating multiple constitutional rights, particularly: the right to protection from unreasonable seizure, the right to due process, the right to equal protection under the law. Remember that our laws are not meant to be - nor should they be - the highest of moral standards but rather minimal standards in order to best protect everyone while still keeping people as free as possible.

No doubt many people will just simply not believe me when I tell you that men are routinely and commonly and unjustly denied their constitutional rights in divorce proceedings. Ignorance is bliss after all but then complacency is no virtue either. Meanwhile others will cry about how abused women are while others will say but women are just naturally better parents. If you don't believe me read what the other people say:

In a 66 page legal article in Volume 25, No. 4 (Summer 1998) Florida State University Law Review at http://www.law.fsu.edu/Journals/lawreview/download s/254/mcneely.pdf, Cynthia A. McNeely very clearly lays out the unconstitutionality of current divorce practices from its historical basis to its societal impact.

In a 32 page article published in Volume 1, Number 2 (1999) pp 123-150 University of Utah School of Law, Journal of Law & Family Studies at http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/hubin1/Researc h/PRDP.PDF, Donald Hubin rights about Parental Rights and Due Process that specifically describes the failure of the courts to recognize that the standard of "child's best interest" fails to meet our right to due process that should require the courts to recognize that sole custody to one parent means taking away the other parent's custodial rights and that this should not be allowed to be done without proof beyond reasonable doubt that the parent is unfit to share in that right. Imagine if the same standard of "child's best interest" were applied to your family where no divorce was going on and your children were taken from you because in the judge's opinion your faith (or anything else) wasn't in your child's best interest. That's an aweful lot of latitude for subjectively taking your kids away unless we demand nothing less than our due process right. In the context of divorce and custody that means nothing less than a presumption of continued shared custody unless a parent can be shown unfit to the same standards as is done in showing guilt in criminal cases.

In an ongoing battle to protect the virtues of justice and equality are folks like Glenn Sacks who runs a great website on many of the abuses suffered at the hands of the courts in regards to divorce which folks should also check out at http://www.glennsacks.com/. And the list of references can easily go on.

If you get through at least these three references, you'll hopefully be at least dispelled of any blissful ignorances you too may have once had.

Let me guess it was this state college that wants to act like they arent.

Liquids is the reason why high G forces is bad in the first place. Say in an aircraft, the solid parts of your body (brain, organs) want to move forward, while the liquids dont (another way to look at it .. the liquids want to go backwards) .. this causes internal injuries and makes it hard for the heart to pump blood to vital organs .. leading to blackouts. Refer: http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/voshell/gforce.pdf

I think if you are breathing liquid, the liquids in your lung will push against the back wall of your lung pretty hard. Since liquids are heavier than air .. this would probably cause all kinds of damage. On the other hand, it may prevent the front of your lung from collapsing inward.

Eric Fossler Lussier. He didn't really talk about lucent stuff other than to say generally what kinds of systems he worked on and relay that anecdote about swearing. In other words, if I thought he'd violated an nda or anything I wouldn't give his name. His CV says he was with Bell Labs / Lucent Technologies from 2000-2002.

It is a little newsworthy.

No it's not for fuck's sake, Goldberg's What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic was published more than 15 years ago, anyone who's in charge of coding anything and hasn't read it by now should be shot on the spot, nailed to a wall and shot again before having his corpse desecrated by rabid bears.

Even though it's stuff that matters this is definitely not "news for nerds", because there's no way to call youself a nerd or an IT geek if you don't know that.