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I know this comment thread is dead, but I thought you might be interested.

The length of time that cattle spend in feedlots on high grain diets is variable. A calf typically starts life in March to May and remains with the cow on pasture or range until October or November. The calf may then be moved to a feedlot or may be maintained on a forage feeding program until a year later when it is moved to a feedlot as a yearling. Thus, beef cattle generally enter feedlots at weights of 450 to 650 pounds (calves), or 650 to 900 pounds (yearlings). For example, calves may enter the feedlot at 500 pounds and be marketed at about 1,100 pounds. Yearlings may enter the feedlot at 750 pounds and be marketed at about 1,200 pounds, while heavy yearlings enter at about 900 pounds and are marketed at about 1,200 pounds.

How much grain and protein supplement are required to produce a pound of retail beef?

        * 1,200-pound beef cows marketed at 7 years of age have consumed a total of 840 pounds of protein supplement (120 pounds per year).
        * 500-pound feedlot calves fed to 1,100 pounds consume 6.5 pounds of total feed (80 percent grain and protein supplement) per pound of gain.
        * 750-pound feedlot yearlings fed to 1,200 pounds consume 7.2 pounds of total feed (90 percent grain and protein supplement) per pound of gain.
        * Yield of retail beef per pound of live weight is .45 pound (.35 pound for cows).

Thus, it takes 2 pounds of grain and protein supplement to produce a pound of retail beef from beef cows and 3.6 pounds for heavy yearlings. For lighter weight yearlings and calves, the figures are 5.4 pounds and 6.3 pounds. These calculations do not consider the fertilizer value of the manure and urine provided by cattle during grazing and finishing.

Contrary to some published claims, it does not take 16 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef (Robbins 1987). Since beef cows are a major source of ground beef, a value between 3 and 4 pounds of grain and protein supplement to produce a pound of ground beef would be appropriate. Only by assuming that beef animals are fed diets composed largely of grains from birth to market weight could a value as great as 16 pounds be obtained. Those familiar with the beef industry know that this does not occur. In fact, cattle do not require any grain for the production of meat; the microbes in the rumen manufacture high-quality protein from nonprotein nitrogen.

From http://ars.sdstate.edu/animaliss/beef.html

Most farmers I have talked to don't send the cows to feedlot until they are at least yearlings. I have no idea if that is representative of other parts of the country, but it seems to be fairly standard here.

Also note that this is beef cattle only - the breeding herd and milk cows are not sent to a feedlot. I know the story was about beef cattle, but it is a likely that since cows are selected for beef or breeding after they are born, it would be impossible to have your breeding herd cattle feel pain while your feedlot cattle do not.

My secretary uses a macintosh. It's pretty neat. Every time she's asks me to fix it I laugh to myself a little. It is a Fischer Price PC.

As a student, I've seen this quite a bit. At SDSU, wifi is still fairly limited. Only a few specific majors require (or use it to the point where it's almost a requirement) a network connection, so students play single-player games during class on their laptops if they don't want to pay attention.

In my smaller CS classes where I take notes, I tend to sit in the back or at an angle against the wall to avoid distracting everyone else. In one of the larger rooms on campus, which seats somewhere in the neighborhood of 415 people, students sometimes bring a laptop to take notes (or view them, if they're PPT or PDF). The problem is, the room's usually dimly lit and incredibly crowded; one little laptop can attract the attention of so many students.

To "only" replace 3% of the farmland in the U.S. would require an area equivalent to the State of Louisiana or Pennsylvania. Rather than relocate all of those people, you could also place the windmill farm in half of Kansas.

Remember that photo of a windmill farm above? Now imagine driving 180 miles and seeing nothing but windmills. That would look awful even with landscaping in between the windmills. Also, what a maintenance nightmare that would be. Imagine the resources required to take care of all those windmills.

And it wouldn't make sense to plant crops between the windmills. At least not for commercial use. This is what commercial farm equipment looks like: http://sdces.sdstate.edu/lyman/images/whtharv.jpg It's way too big to efficiently harvest crops in a windmill farm. Maybe all of the maintenance workers could grow gardens in that space instead.

As an alternative, you could place one windmill every 9 miles in a grid like pattern across the US. That includes Alaska and Hawaii. Minimal impact to the environment. And every neighborhood must deal with a windmill in their backyard.

I've seen this statement before, about a significant fraction of classes being taught by grad students, and wonder where in the world it's true. I recently graduated from a good-sized Midwestern state university with a degree in agricultural engineering. In classes I attended that applied to my field of study, every single instructor had his or her PhD in an appropriate subject for their class, the few foreign-born profs were easy to understand, and most had worked outside of academia for a while. And the profs had to have a reasonable amount of office hours when one could go ask questions about homework or course material, even the ones who were appointed to positions more oriented toward research than instruction.

I've seen this statement before, about a significant fraction of classes being taught by grad students, and wonder where in the world it's true. I recently graduated from a good-sized Midwestern state university with a degree in agricultural engineering. In classes I attended that applied to my field of study, every single instructor had his or her PhD in an appropriate subject for their class, the few foreign-born profs were easy to understand, and most had worked outside of academia for a while. And the profs had to have a reasonable amount of office hours when one could go ask questions about homework or course material, even the ones who were appointed to positions more oriented toward research than instruction.

Yeah, it looks like you had better professors. I have a feeling that the professors I had used the '4 pages' (or whatever) guideline as a quick way to grade the papers. Probably something crazy like, "Proper length - check. No outrageous mark-outs with a pen - check. No running into page boundries - check. Used a nice color of ink - check. No big words - check." Etc. It's not my fault that I had thuroughly exhaused the topic he specified for the essay to be on though conceiseness.

I have no doubt in my mind that the professor I speak of used such an approach (in a 2nd level composition course). Many of the people in that class that I know to be quite lacking in the literary field aced the course, while I - someone who has always excelled at such things - got a low B.

Granted, it could have something to do with the stellar educational institution that I was attending at the time. Damn them.

No kidding, it seems to appear and disappear. Here's a picture of it. That fucker is a monster.