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Every fall, the freshman engineering class at Queen's University is sent on a scavenger hunt. Over the years, in addition to thunder mugs many "large" items were turned in, but even a the great lakes lake freighter that someone moored near campus isn't the biggest. The greatest bit of scavenge ever turned in was the United States of America. Apparently one of the frosh had a parent with connections to the Carter administration and they got the White House to send a document handing over the USA for one hour to the Queen's Engineering Society. The year was 1978 or 1979. My memory's a little hazy; I was in Clark Hall working on that week's issue of Golden Words when I heard the news.

Every fall, the freshman engineering class at Queen's University is sent on a scavenger hunt. Over the years, in addition to thunder mugs many "large" items were turned in, but even a the great lakes lake freighter that someone moored near campus isn't the biggest. The greatest bit of scavenge ever turned in was the United States of America. Apparently one of the frosh had a parent with connections to the Carter administration and they got the White House to send a document handing over the USA for one hour to the Queen's Engineering Society. The year was 1978 or 1979. My memory's a little hazy; I was in Clark Hall working on that week's issue of Golden Words when I heard the news.

[ooze wrote]: Wait. How are you supposed to have a beer when playing, when you need both hands? I think the Revolution with it's controller will be the perfect fit if you want your beer while playing ;)

One of my professors was part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/) and wrote a "Neutrino Oscillations for Dummies" (http://www.physics.ubc.ca/~waltham/sno_talks/dumm y.htm)

SNO Detector.

You don't need "subspace carrier waves", you can just use a beam of neutrinos. Communicate at lightspeed with none of that routing-packets-around-the-Earth crap - neutrinos go direct.

You just need a linear accelerator (with a steerable beam) or nuclear reactor to generate them and one of these to detect them.

It's a bit more than I'd be willing to spend on my gaming PC, but they could probably get some Alienware customers to preorder.

Packman offers a good alternative to locking down students' computers or even requiring a standard PC/laptop that everyone has to buy. Basically, the tool allows administrators to put a set of standard applications on a server, and performs idiot-proof internet-based installation of those applications on the students' computers.

WAV does not store ID3 tags.

RIFF files such as .wav files and .avi files certainly can store the information of ID3 tags and more. If your ripper or encoder doesn't support RIFF tags in .wav files, bug the developer.

For example, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers has the Go Eng Girl program that is supposed to reach out to girls in grades 7 - 10. One of the big things they want to do is lower math and science requirements because most women don't seem to like math and science (not my words, don't flame). Girls can then swap out a course they don't like for another, more 'softer' course when applying for university.

In my experience (I'm a guy), every girl I've talked to who's applying to university doesn't want to go into engineering. They'd rather save the world by going into life science or take hybrid programs like biomedical computing.

Still, it would be nice to have some major shakeup in physics... there really haven't been any in my lifetime.

How old are you?
Inflation as a solution to cosmic microwave anisotropy

Problems with General Relativity: Dark Matter?

Dark Energy. 90% of everything.

Pioneer anomaly.

Every year, in every field, we answer more and more questions. However, every answer raises many more questions. We are still exploring our ignorance, but we know more about it every day. What are you doing to help?

That's not a fair comparison at all. Here is a gray scale 16-level version of the original image. To change topics, here's what I found strange about the article: They say:

The contrast ratio is at a low 10:1 and the display can show 4 levels of grey. While this seems low, it is more than adequate for reading in well lighted conditions. Keep in mind that most printed books are at 2 levels (black and white).

The point about books being printed in 2 levels is silly, because they are printed at very high resolution (at least 2400 dpi instead of 100dpi, and you square that because it's a 2D surface, so it's a difference between 5760000 dots per in^2 vs 10000 dpi^2, or 576 times as many dots on the same size screen.

They also say ...keep in mind that thin materials can warp and melt quickly. Well, it's a flexible display. It's supposed to bend. Or when they say warp, are they talking about stretching?

The technology does sound promising, but this article seems to be written by a spin doctor.

100dpi = FAX resolution (low-quality)

Umm... no... Fax machines have crummy quality scanners and lossy compression techniques so they do not represent 100dpi well. Go scan a quality pic at 100dpi on a good scanner and let me know what you think of the quality.

Here's a sample at 100dpi.

So graphical tools are good for this problem-space, depending upon your needs.

Here're two projects inspired by Microsoft Journal:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/jarnal/

http://www.adebenham.com/gournal/

Depending on your needs, you might find a drawing program of use --- I use Futurewave SmartSketch (old PenPoint program ported to Mac OS and Windows which morphed into Flash) on my Stylistic 2300

So look at

http://www.cenon.info/

or use GIMP for bitmaps

If you do a lot of math, you may find the Freehand Formula Entry System (FFES) of use:

http://www.cs.queensu.ca/drl/ffes/

William

Andy Warhol would be in a lot of trouble.

W

Here's a link to the main university website: http://www.queensu.ca/ For those not familiar with it, Queen's is one of the top engineering schools in Canada. It is located in Kingston, Ontario (on Lake Ontario in fact).

So you went to Dr. Skillicorn's site and read the technical report? You will find your concerns and more addressed quite nicely. "Crap" is an opinion on research based solely on the interpretation of an article written by a reporter who is clearly not a subject matter expert.

Better yet, there's an interesting site called Citeseer. Intelligent types in computer science use it to look for papers and check out the credentials of the authors. Dr. Skillicorn is ranked 2999 of 767319 in the site's list of most cited authors. Do you really think he attained that (peer reviewed) stature by publishing tripe?

One hopes and prays that you are in no way involved in any kind of academic or technical pursuit. Your uninformed and flawed knee-jerk opinions will blind you to so much and keep you from producing anything of quality.

Insightful?! As if.

If you want to criticize what Skillcorn is doing on a technical basis, try reading the actual technical report that he wrote on the subject, rather than basing your conclusions on a news article. Heck, you might even learn something.

Skillcorn's papers, including this one, can be found on his Queen's U. website.

The various manufacturer-specific Perl modules in the ExifTool package are also an excellent source of documentation for RAW file metadata. Reading this (rather well-commented) code can help make the more cryptic dcraw source much more comprehensible.

Reminds me of the theft of the U of T goalposts by Queen's University engineers.

Ooooooh... they put a big bulletin board on the wall in front of his door. How innovative!

Puleeeez. Aren't these guys supposed to be engineers?

On April 1, 1997 Sci'97 successfully staged one of the funniest and most memorable Year Pranks on record. The preparations for this event had begun two years earlier. However, the plans were not executed until the wee hours that night at the end of fourth year when elite battalions of Sci'97s dispersed across campus. By dawn, everything was in place. Among the most visible pranks were:

• A 5-foot high digital clock, blinking "12:00", placed on the picturesque Grant Hall clock tower. At regular intervals an extraordinarily loud alarm would ring across campus. Unless the "snooze" button attached at the bottom of Grant Hall was pressed the alarm would continue.
• Closure of the Faculty of Applied Science in Ellis Hall. The office was boarded up and a note was attached to the new "wall" stating that the Queen's engineering program had been terminated due to financial cutbacks. Only Sci'97 would be allowed to graduate.
• A letter to all the engineering frosh advising them that the Faculty of Applied Science had lost its accreditation, and they must transfer into Arts and Science.
• A much needed obstacle in the JDUC. The vital passage between the Info Bank and copy centre was completely sealed.
• A new "tree" on campus. Last year, a tree in front of the JDUC was removed so a new electronic billboard display could be built. Sci'97 covered the sign in paper mache to make it look like a tree.
• Purple snow on University Avenue.
• Banners in Stauffer Library that remembered patrons that all library fines were payable to Sci'97.

[Link]

I can't find pictures of the Grant Hall alarm clock, but here's Grant Hall to give you some idea of the scale of the alarm clock.

And that wall built in the JDUC (John Deutsch University Centre) was a full-scale drywall wall, painted to match the surroundings, hung with posters and other things, and generally made to look exactly like the walls next to it.

This is on top of individual departments doing their own thing. The physics department (i.e. me and some buds) made the physics lounge (a little sitting room) into a real lounge. We "borrowed" all kinds of fun things from the labs upstairs, physics labs and dance clubs having so much in common: lasers, strobe lights, clouds of liquid nitrogen vapours, etc.

Other years did similar fun things, like taking apart a car and rebuilding it around a light post, or rebuilding it inside a building on a second floor balcony.

Compared to that, putting a bulletin board in front of a guy's office is rather lame.

But much of the time, the mutation is harmless. Part of this is built into the genetic code. Amino acids with similar properties (acidic, basic, polar, nonpolar) have similar codons, meaning that the result of any mutation is more likely to yield a functional protein. From the wikipedia article, notice that all the nonpolar amino acids have a U (T for DNA) in the middle of the codon? Additionally, DNA sequences yielding malformed proteins often just don't get expressed. And most of the time there's enough redundancy so that single protein doesn't matter. We know that from gene-knockdown studies with mice.

The willingness of private investors to put up capital to service such markets shouldn't be underestimated. This is an exciting area of endeavour, just as is space transportation as witnessed by the recent investments in that field by adventurous angel investors.

Indeed, historically there has been a pattern of private financing of cutting edge telescopes without even a promise of any return at all. We can expect the private sector to step up to the plate if the government will stop pretending it is the source of innovation in technology and instead the source of funding for public-domain scientific research.

From a brief history of private endowment of telescopes:

In this stage, which lasted (roughly speaking) from the late 1800's to the middle of the 1900's, rich benefactors donated the money to establish observatories although they themselves were not practising astronomers. I gave some examples and anecdotal histories in class. For instance:

(i) James Lick made his fortune by funding "gold rush" hopefuls in San Francisco. He provided them a grubstake by buying up their land cheaply, and wound up owning most of what is now downtown San Francisco. He wanted to build an enormous pyramid in the city to commemorate himself, but was persuaded by the Regents of the University of California to build an observatory instead: Lick Observatory, just east of San Jose.

(ii) A man named Yerkes made his fortune building street car systems, and donated the money for the Yerkes 40-inch refractor, still the largest such telescope in the world. It is at Williams Bay, north of Chicago, and is operated by the University of Chicago. Yerkes was apparently quite an unscrupulous businessmen, by all accounts, and was never favoured with the respect which he hoped his endowment might buy for him.

(iii) David Dunlap made his fortune in Ontario silver mines, and was interested in astronomy. After his death, his widow donated a lot of money to the University of Toronto, who built the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill. When it opened in 1935, it was the second-largest telescope in the world.

(iv) The Carnegie Foundation, established by the Scotsman Andrew Carnegie, funds many philanthropic endeavours, including public libraries. It provided the money for the famous 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar, which saw first light in 1950.

Amazingly, the days of such generosity are not completely gone: the new Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea are being provided by a Mr. Keck, the head of Standard Oil (I believe). The total cost is in the region of 200 million dollars; the telescopes are operated by the University of California.

They've patented the standard way of doing online cross-game friends detection, but With an IM client. I see they've found up my patented "Way of patenting things with superficial addition X, with a browser" Since they already know it, I'd like to share it with you all.

Remember that this way of patenting things (with a browser) is patented, and is available for a nominal lawsuit when I catch you.

First take an everyday concept, like buying dogfood or raking your lawn. Explain this in excruiciatingly exacting language, carefully crafted to be as broad and unintelligible as possible. If necessary, run it through an obfuscation program to get the broadest possible interpretation bork. Then, and this is key, to the end of the patent add the words "with an X" where X is something the patent clerk doesn't really understand with a browser.

Here are some examples of things that you can get away with, err, add to the end of everyday activities, to get your own shiny new patent.

With the internet
With a CPU (whatever that would mean)
With an IM client
With XML
Live
With one click
With a shared data management paradigm arrangement
With multiple people at once
With an electronic circuit
With a cellular data network*
With a frick'in laser beam
With an open-source environment
With a closed-source environment
With a plug-in
With metadata
Automatically
With subdomains
With an encryption layer (cover all of your bases and encrypt this patent)

If you are still having trouble thinking up things to patent, see also this helpful list. No idea is too obvious or too widely in practice to slip by the patent office with a browser. Yes, for just 20 million dollars in theoretical damages awarded by a judge who also didn't know what they were doing, you too could sue the pants off of anyone mowing their lawn in a closed-source environment. I guarentee it!**

*Note that while "With a multiuser telephonic networking connection" is acceptable, "over the phone" is not.

**Not an express or implied guarentee.

From what I read in the article this discovery does not answer the galaxy rotation velocity curve problem. Meaning maybe there is a different type of mass in between the stars in all galaxies. Or Baryons cannot be detected in these areas by Chandra?

Galaxy rotation velocity curve Java applet explains this problem.

The files date string on my flash cards are all Jan 1 2002 not when I took the shot.

I know the meta data exists but I want to reduce the amount of post processing I need to do.

The [some string]_[number].[format] format may be a standard but it certainly does not mean anything to a human. Do I care that it is the nth picture I have taken +100023? The standard could have easily have been a date stamp if anyone would have actually thought about it. The nice thing about this is would be the chances of a duplicate file name would be greatly reduced provided there was seconds and fractions of seconds.

Maybe I am missing something but renaming based on the exact time I took the shot is not as easy as you make it out to be. You got me itching for a solution though.

Here is a meta data extraction tool. http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
Unfortunatly my olympus 5050 does not seem to record the metadata for the time. WTF, it gives me everthing else

I'll have to do some more digging on this. This shit drives me batty.

thanks for the info and thoughts.

On what evidence do you base your conclusion that this is an absurd question?

Considering that sex hormones affect neural growth in humans and other higher-order animals - link1 link2 link3 link4 link5 - your insistence that examining male/female neural differences is "arbitrary" is ill-informed at best, and deceptive at worst.

The brains of men and women are - in general - different; that much is (to the best of current knowledge) simple fact. What is not known is what cognitive differences those structural differences create, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

What is also not known is the level of sheer stupidity that would drive someone to over-ride information about an individual with information about a population. If 90% of women are better at math than 90% of men, that's only useful information if I'm I'm hiring someone at random. If I have aptitude scores for each candidate in front of me, it doesn't really matter whether the man is in the 98th percentile of all men but only the 91st percentile of all people; if he's the best candidate, he gets the job.

That is why "but I know lots of women who are good at math!" anecdotes are completely useless; each person is an individual, and population-level statistics like "men are better at math" do no more than tell you about the distribution of those individuals. When you've actually got one of those individuals in hand, distributional information is meaningless.

There are population-level differences; that's not the point. The point is that population-level differences are meaningless when talking about a single person; that, I believe, is where you'll get the most effective combatting of sexism. Think of someone as an individual and suddenly they're not a stereotype anymore, regardless of what the stereotype in question was; cut the problem off at the root.

I first heard about The Watchmen through my g/f this year as it is on the required readings list for one of her English courses at Queen's University in Ontario. I'm looking to reading it during the Christmas break this year, as she really enjoys the book. Thought it was kinda cool to be doing literary analysis of a comic in a university English course. Also great seeing more comic books come to life on screen.. lets hope this one will be better than some of the latest ones that have come out--I won't mention any names as to hold back the flames.

If you've got a reference for the mountain fog lights, I'd love to learn more about them.

I guess Qt is OK, but your missing my point when you talk about "power". The problem with C++ is precisely it's "power" -- it's so feature bloated, that it's really hard to deal with. That's why newer languages, including Java and C#, deliberately back away from all the weird syntactic gimmickry of C++.

When I document an API, I usually spend a lot of time reading the code for the functions and objects I'm explaining. It takes 10 times as much work to read and understand code in C++ as does equivalent Delphi code. That's because you never know what obscure language feature a C++ programmer is going to use. I haven't done much API writing for Java (none for C#), but the level of difficulty for simple reading (and thus for maintenance and debugging) is pretty similar. That's why these alternatives to C++ exist.

In any case, Qt is hardly a testimony to the power of C++. Qt is based on an object model that C++ does not directly support. Which is why you have to run your Qt code through a pre-processor before you can compile it.

When supernova 1987A went off, the KAMIOKA detector in japan detected a burst (I think it was ~10) neutrinos. With new detectors online to detect different neutrino flavors, it will be interesting to see if there's any new physics to be found.

here is a homepage of an author of the project which also includes a picture of a robot.

Pete Seeger of "The Weavers" (friend to Woodie Guthrie and fellow folk musician) talks about the Folk Process here.

There's another discussion here:

Pete Seeger, at the time, was referring to Woody Guthrie's habit of using the tunes of spirituals as the framework for his own writing, as well as the "folk process" of borrowing and modifying melodies or words as songs got passed from one person to another. (There are certain traditional songs which exist in literally dozens of distinct variations. Pete Seeger himself is notorious for making slight changes to the words of other songwriters; you can often tell when someone has learned a song from a Pete Seeger recording instead of the original songwriter....)

More here.

I also read an interview a few days ago with Pete Seeger in some weekly magazine, and in the article there was an interesting description of how "This Land Is Your Land" was written. Apparently it was written over a few years, and the line "this land was made for you and me" was changed from something else, although I can't remember what the original line was (something less universal). Anyone involved in this lawsuit might want to consult Seeger.

W

This is a side-bit, but I recommend y'all check out this 1955 transcript of an interview/interrogation between Pete Seeger and the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

This is exactly why cars with anti-lock brakes are more dangerous than cars without them---drivers overcompensate for the added safety of the ABS system. This phenomenon has been well-documented and is known in the field as "risk homeostasis."

This is exactly why cars with anti-lock brakes are more dangerous than cars without them---drivers overcompensate for the added safety of the ABS system. This phenomenon has been well-documented and is known in the field as "risk homeostasis."

I don't think Queens University is suffering for bandwidth. And just FYI, unless the files you're linking to are over 5MB, Freecache will simply pass the link to the original server anyways.

If you poke around the images on the site you'll see that they have already implemented what you're speaking about. TV, and phones being devices that they have shown being controlled by attention/visual focus.

If you poke around the images on the site you'll see that they have already implemented what you're speaking about. TV, and phones being devices that they have shown being controlled by attention/visual focus.

"mostly due to the half-assed case presented by the CRIA"

In fact the judge ultimately held that the Copyright Act permitted the behaviour. Apparently unlike the CRIA, the judge read the Copyright Act.

The real question is whether you and other Canadians will write to your MP's to ensure that the ratification of WIPO Copyright Treaty includes a section exhausting the right to "make available" under Article 6, for any "non commercial distribution" made "after the first sale or other transfer of ownership of the original or a copy of the work with the authorization of the author" .

IF not, the latest Court ruling will be nullified by new copyright legistlation, thanks to our Liberal task master, and this committee.

If you want to learn more, I highly recommend this page by Laura J. Murray.

This is a myth. Here in Canada everyone, government included, was against the war, and we are not involved in Oil for Food.

You're the one who's propogating a myth. According to a CBC poll 65% of Canadians supported the war if it had gotten UN approval while 25% would still have supported the war if the US went in just with major allies. Even thought most Canadians didn't support the war, nearly 50% of Canadians had wanted Canada to support the US in the war. In Alberta, 56% wanted Canada to join the Coalition even without UN approval. As for the Canadian-Iraqi oil connection: Chretien's son-in-law, Andre Desmarais, is the biggest shareholder in Total Fina Elf, the French oil company that would have profited the most if there had been no war.

No, they cared about the eleven thousand people who are now dead who woulnd't be dead right now but for the war.

But they were perfectly OK with Saddam killing an average of 20,000 per year since he's been in power. (1 million Iraqis in the Iraq-Iran war. 30,000 Iraqis in the Kuwait invasion. 1 million Iraqis in Iraq killed off to maintain power his 20+ year grip on power). That figure doesn't even include the millions he's tortured. Over 6 million Iraqis fled their country and now live outside of Iraq. I didn't see any protests over those dead, tortured and displaced so "the _people_ of the world" should spare me the sanctamonious 'what about the children' type claptrap. Those protests were because people think America is too powerful. They could give a rat's ass about some dead Iraqis. I haven't seen any protests over the hundreds of thousands killed by Russia in Chechnya. Now, I'll grant you that Bush and company could give a rat's ass about the Iraqis either but in acting for the security of the US, they're doing what they mistakenly think is best for their country.

Those "pseudo-elected politicrats" were bribed and Saddam got what he paid for. Newspapers in foreign countries are totally devoid of any sort of factual reporting (if they ever had it in the first place). Take France as an example. The papers in that country are in bed with the politicians and each covers for the other. There were no reports about Saddam's atrocities and all the worst possible outcomes of the war and casualty figures were highly exaggerated. The French papers were also reporting that the US was indiscriminately killing massive numbers of civilians.

According to Gallup's poll of Iraqis, 71% think they will be better off now with Saddam gone. The people that think they will be worse off were probably the ones who benefited the most under Saddam. I'll trust the Iraqi's opinions about what's best for them over the rest of the world's.

I was born in Iran and now live in Vancouver.

As for TD oil playing a larger role as oil prices rise, I completely agree. I have done some reading on it and I feel completely down with its "cool" factor. It solves an entire grip of environmental problems and some consumptive problems. But as for providing all of our energy, I have to disagree with you.

Lets look at the US We have a quick look at the animal waste side. Animal waste accounts for 130 times the amount of waste compared to a human. So the human component to the bio-waste system seems negligible. (But let's get these TD toilets installed asap. It sure beats a septic tank!!!!)

• The US animal industry produced 1.4 billion tons(us)[5] of waste.
• Oil makes 45 GJ/ton roughly[6,7].
• 8.9% of mass can get extacted as oil. [8,4]
• The system boasts a 15% inefficiency.[4]
• So we have 1,270,417,422waste*ton_us * .089oil/waste[8,4] * .9(ton/ton_us)* 45GJ/ton * .85 Efficient [4] =
• 3892336657GJ(10^9J) or 3.89EJ (10^18J)

(and does this include the inefficiencies for central processing and removal of solid wastes?)

Take this against a US energy requirement of 100EJ[2] of which about 35EJ(10^18J)[9] of which absolutely has to be in the form of oil. (90% of all transportation is oil, oil is needed for fertilizers, you only get 10th as much energy from the natural gas, etc)

Needs vs Production by TD
35000000000000000000 J == 35EJ
3892336657000000000 J == 3.9EJ

So it could cover perhaps 1/10 of our oil requirements. So we will have to turn to marginal lands, forests, and perhaps even replace arable land that produces human food with gas food. And we have no data to show that this amount of conversion into oil and burning of our ecosystem will not irreparably harm it. Nor do we have any data to show that we can get 10 times as much out of Agriculture solutions than our horribly inefficient livestock industry. (All non agricultural conversions work as non-renewable resources, so I'll leave that out of the discussion.) So we still don't have enough energy and we have to convert the environment into oil to make up any losses. And if we only begin building this infrastructure after oil prices rise to dangerously high levels, we have no assurance that we can build it fast enough to prevent systematic collapse of economies, especially given the inefficiencies outlined above. And we would have to start making food for oil instead of people.

It just doesn't seem reasonable to estimate its ability to produce more than 100 EJ of energy on a global level. So it at maximum has the ability to delay the inevitable for a very short time. Especially given that world energy use will rise to 800EJ by 2020[8]. You may have found security in thinking TD will save the human race, but the numbers don't seem to back you up.

And please note, the efficiencies I quoted were from studies done of real biomater TD [8], not the hypothetical human conversion rate of 21% oil.

References

1. http://www.changingworldtech.com/
2. http://www.cpast.org/Articles/fetch.adp?topicnum=1 3
3. http://www.uce-uu.nl/showproject.php?id=3
4. http://forums.biodieselnow.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID= 829
5. http://lists.justnet.info/pipermail/asc-media/2003 -August/000391.html
6. http://me.queensu.ca/courses/MECH430/Assets/Files/ Recommended%20Reading/Power%20Table%20.pdf

In my Dept this year marks the first time that there are more first-years in our Biomedical Computing program than straight CompSci. It's not clear whether there will be better job prospects for them*, although the press (and funding!) bioinformatics has been getting lately may be a factor. Supposedly a lot of the students think that they'll have more opportunity to help people in BioMed, and as a result the program has way more women than CompSci. The Dept believes that all future growth will be in interdisciplinary programs, so that's probably where a lot of the missing students mentioned in the article are ending up.

* Most of the development in Canada that could be done remotely was already being outsourced to US firms, so offshoring isn't effecting the industry up here very much.

<a href="http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/37 53.html">Near-Earth Asteroid 3753 Cruithne</a>

Seems like it would be a lot easier to move it into a stable orbit that to destroy it.

It would be a great way to build an interplanetary ISP without all the expense of hauling materials up from the gravity well.

Also, it would make a swell military base to be used against those sneaky aliens.

My school's campus bookstore is actually pretty reasonable for textbooks. It's online listings show their price as well as the price at Amazon.ca and Chapters.ca, and a link to the library's database entry for it. Generally books are cheaper at our bookstore than online (without taking shipping into account).

Furthermore, many of our courses have custom "course notes" that basically cover in detail everything we're doing, and they tend to only cost $5-15 (CAD).

Of course, it helps that our bookstore is owned by our Engineering Society -- it's non-profit.

I went to the Open House for the mining engineering program at my university (Queen's) and one of the professors showed us how they use computer simulations to model rock interactions. The simulations modelled the behaviour and interactions of thousands of sample rock particles. Really interesting stuff. I guess this kind of test is where they get the raw data to develop these computer models.

Mining engineering is also cool because there is a required explosives and blasting course in second year.

Neither baseballs nor ballistic missiles follow a parabolic path. They follow an eliptical path, an orbit that intersects the Earth's surface (barring atmospheric effects, of course). In order to get a parabolic path, the object needs to be moving at exactly the escape velocity (See here for details.)

Solar car challenegs showcase and advance the state of high efficiency photovoltaic (PV) cells and bugger the price.

You can follow the progress of the Queen's University Team here. The Queen's team came 7th in this year's American Solar Challenge and is looking to finish in the top 3 in this competition. One of the unique features of the Queen's car is that it is a two-seater, one of the few in the world.

There's a lot of technical information about the Queen's car here (Pages 4 and 5)

You can follow the progress of the Queen's University Team here. The Queen's team came 7th in this year's American Solar Challenge and is looking to finish in the top 3 in this competition. One of the unique features of the Queen's car is that it is a two-seater, one of the few in the world.

There's a lot of technical information about the Queen's car here (Pages 4 and 5)

According to this site it's a bug in the F-16 autopilot software.