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No, you're confusing youself. The lux measurement is the perceptual one, you know, the one that ignores wavelengths that humans can't see, and weights the wavelengths that we can see with peaks at the idealized human visual response. The actual radiant intensity at any given moment is going to be much greater. Measuring light levels in lux is completely useless unless you're a lighting director. It is a statement about human eyeballs, and should not be used when talking about things that are not human eyeballs.

Not that it matters to the point, but in fact they are pretty darn close

As it turns out, human visual response looks nothing likethe response of solar panels. Do note that, consistent with our other conclusions, the absorbed spectrum and peak are wider and differently located respectively. As far as I am aware, there isn't really a reason why we would expect people to try to build a solar cell that is less efficient than the human eye, especially since, as you say, clouds happen.

This was an easy mistake to make. Easy to the point where it's a little suspect why you're repeating it. The appropriate units would be watts per square meter, which is standard across the solar energy industry. I hope you are not using one cherry-picked (wrong) factoid as the basis for your anti-solar-energy stance. For anyone interested in some actual numbers, this calculator given an equation and computes the effective solar insolation (in W/m^2) for a given lat/long/percent cloud cover. Here's a calculator from NASA with many more parameters.

How about Shodor's Math Flyer? Perhaps a little too advanced, but then again, maybe not.

I used to work for an organization whose entire goal is to bring math and science into the classroom via computational means. Check out several of their projects:

Interactivate
CSERD
Petascale
MASTER

I used to work for an organization whose entire goal is to bring math and science into the classroom via computational means. Check out several of their projects:

Interactivate
CSERD
Petascale
MASTER

I used to work for an organization whose entire goal is to bring math and science into the classroom via computational means. Check out several of their projects:

Interactivate
CSERD
Petascale
MASTER

I used to work for an organization whose entire goal is to bring math and science into the classroom via computational means. Check out several of their projects:

Interactivate
CSERD
Petascale
MASTER

You mean like this? http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/Fun ctionFlyer/

Every good chem student should try to remember, the product of an acid and a base is a salt... and we don't want to be rubbing/injecting salt into a wound now do we ???

;)

Damn you and your improper nomenclature! You don't enumerate singular atoms in inorganic molecules. The proper term is dihydrogen oxide.

Um, carbon monoxide?

Roughly half the population has below median intelligence.

The site http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/ by a group called Shodor has lessons and software (Java applets) for high-school students that covers things such as trig and probability.

No, and it is unfortunate. I work with a web cataloguing effort in computational science education (The Computational Science Education Reference Desk) and I spend a lot of time trying to define standard metadata for pages on the web.

The job of building digital libraries will be much easier and will better reflect the intention of people who create web content when web content creators put, at a minimum, title, description, and keyword metadata into their pages (and preferably much much more.

The more that meta-spam is used to beat search engines, the less that people will put metadata into their pages, and as a result, the less time that people will spend actually thinking about and creating good metadata.

I have no idea what impact this law will have, if any, but I would like to see more search engines that use metatags, but include some sort of "meta-spam" filter, perhaps a penalty on excessive use of keywords.

Fertilizer. Once it is harmless, neutralize the base, and compost it. In a few months spread it on a field and improve the soil.

Are YOU going to want to eat something grown in Mad Cow fertilizer? I sure as hell won't.

I'm not willing to bank on no rogue prions having survived the processing.

Note, what and how to neutralize a base needs to be carefull understood. The technology is easy enough (just pour in some acid), but doing it safely (for workers), and safely (so the byproducts don't render the soil unable to grow plants) is something that needs to be planed for in advance.

If you neutralize a base with acid, you get salt. You can't fertilize anything with salt.

• CO2, CH4, etc., do trap longwave radiation (the greenhouse effect)
• Atmospheric concentrations of these gases are increasing due to human activity

It's also not noted very often that, as much of our emitted CO2 ends up in the oceans (by increasing atmospheric concentrations we introduce an imbalance in the carbon cycle), we are lowering the pH of the ocean (CO2 + H20 -> H2CO3 -> HCO3- + H+. Expect it to drop by 0.5pH or so over the next century or so (that figure is from memory, I may be off, but not by a lot). That scares the crap out of me.

One of the things I would like to see more of is having students use computers to compute. We run a series of summer camp programs for middle and high school students, as well as design educational software centered around computational science and engineering education (available for free on the internet) and train faculty in undergraduate science and teacher training progams in how to use computing effectively in middle, high school, and undergraduate science, technology, and math education (www.shodor.org).

Working with middle school students what we have found is that computing, when placed in the context of doing science (and by doing science I mean answering the question "how do we know if it is right", not just memorizing facts) can help students learn the science. Science and Math are done differently today by many of its practitioners than 40 years ago. The "using a theory to make a prediction" part of the scientific method is a much larger piece of the puzzle. In addition, solving a single simple problem over and over again really quickly can turn the process of graphing into exploring fucntions (see Function Flyer). And while there is a extra hurdle in finding, analyzing, and verifying the information that can be found on the web, there is a lot more data out there to mine and sort through.

In addition, we have seen a different demographic by incorporating computational science in education as early as 6th grade. We are seeing students in traditionally underrepresented groups being exposed to computing, while learning something they were already curious about. What we get as a result is a lot of minorities and women interested in computing at a young age, without ever limiting programs to a single group. (www.shodor.org/succeed)

Technology can be used extremely poorly, but it can also be used well. "Change is inevitable, improvement is by design."

One of the things I would like to see more of is having students use computers to compute. We run a series of summer camp programs for middle and high school students, as well as design educational software centered around computational science and engineering education (available for free on the internet) and train faculty in undergraduate science and teacher training progams in how to use computing effectively in middle, high school, and undergraduate science, technology, and math education (www.shodor.org).

Working with middle school students what we have found is that computing, when placed in the context of doing science (and by doing science I mean answering the question "how do we know if it is right", not just memorizing facts) can help students learn the science. Science and Math are done differently today by many of its practitioners than 40 years ago. The "using a theory to make a prediction" part of the scientific method is a much larger piece of the puzzle. In addition, solving a single simple problem over and over again really quickly can turn the process of graphing into exploring fucntions (see Function Flyer). And while there is a extra hurdle in finding, analyzing, and verifying the information that can be found on the web, there is a lot more data out there to mine and sort through.

In addition, we have seen a different demographic by incorporating computational science in education as early as 6th grade. We are seeing students in traditionally underrepresented groups being exposed to computing, while learning something they were already curious about. What we get as a result is a lot of minorities and women interested in computing at a young age, without ever limiting programs to a single group. (www.shodor.org/succeed)

Technology can be used extremely poorly, but it can also be used well. "Change is inevitable, improvement is by design."

One of the things I would like to see more of is having students use computers to compute. We run a series of summer camp programs for middle and high school students, as well as design educational software centered around computational science and engineering education (available for free on the internet) and train faculty in undergraduate science and teacher training progams in how to use computing effectively in middle, high school, and undergraduate science, technology, and math education (www.shodor.org).

Working with middle school students what we have found is that computing, when placed in the context of doing science (and by doing science I mean answering the question "how do we know if it is right", not just memorizing facts) can help students learn the science. Science and Math are done differently today by many of its practitioners than 40 years ago. The "using a theory to make a prediction" part of the scientific method is a much larger piece of the puzzle. In addition, solving a single simple problem over and over again really quickly can turn the process of graphing into exploring fucntions (see Function Flyer). And while there is a extra hurdle in finding, analyzing, and verifying the information that can be found on the web, there is a lot more data out there to mine and sort through.

In addition, we have seen a different demographic by incorporating computational science in education as early as 6th grade. We are seeing students in traditionally underrepresented groups being exposed to computing, while learning something they were already curious about. What we get as a result is a lot of minorities and women interested in computing at a young age, without ever limiting programs to a single group. (www.shodor.org/succeed)

Technology can be used extremely poorly, but it can also be used well. "Change is inevitable, improvement is by design."

www.shodor.org

hmmm... imagine letting a 6 year old absorb some complex math by making pretty pictures!

http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/tes sellate/

There is another very important point to recognize here. The HST Key project results (based upon Cepheid variable stars) is independent of the measurement/modeling of the ages of the oldest stars of Milky Way halo stars and clusters. Sure, both measurements each have significant systematic errors, but their uncertainties come from entirely different things! So the fact that they agree is quite reassuring. It also means that the measurements can be combined, at least to some degree.

With the newest generation of instruments and telescopes observing the Universe from radio waves to gamma rays, there will be new, independent methods of measuring the age and fate of the Universe. Already measurements from Type 1a supernovae are narrowing the uncertainties in some cosmological parameters. Other methods that currently yield very large error bars, but will be pivotal in the next few years are gravitational lensing (a detailed description here) and the Senyaev-Zeldovich effect (some details here).

When and if we get to the point where all methods yield the same result, we'll have our answer. In the meantime, if you just quote the formal results from just a single group, from a single type of argument/measurement, the systematic errors are going to be large, particularly when you're dealing with anything on cosmological scales!

Freeh needs to find a whipping boy for the failures of correlating the various peices intelligence datum, which occurred on his watch. Restricting legal access to crypto will only assist in the illicit observation of constitutionally protected speech by private individuals, and destroy what little competitive advantage is enjoyed by U.S. software industries over their counterparts in Israel and India.

The algorithms and the source will not go "back in the can."

Louis Freeh is responsible, in a large part, for the biggest intelligence failure in modern recollection. None of the failure in this effort was for lack of access to encrypted communications, but from standard failures of organization and communications within the concerned agencies.

The Heritage Foundation - not normally critical of the FBI's mission - has this to say:

But what if FBI intelligence fails to collect, analyze and share this information? This could happen, the commission found, because "the guidelines under which FBI agents operate ... are badly written and confusing. These are guidelines that set out the terms under which the FBI can open a preliminary inquiry against somebody who may be suspected of being a terrorist. All of us read them (they run to about 42 pages) and we had a number of current and former FBI agents testify that they found them confusing."

The commission recommended that then Attorney General Janet Reno and former FBI Director Louis Freeh rewrite the guidelines into "more easily understood English."

Moreover, the FBI had no procedure for disseminating useful information for analysis within the agency or sharing it with other government agencies.

Information which was obtained, in Los Angeles, for example, but did not immediately apply to the case at hand, would simply not leave the regional office, even though it might provide important clues for another investigation, says Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, Ambassador at Large for Counterintelligence during the Reagan Administration and former Managing Director of Kissinger Associates.

(You'll have to do your own google searches to find them.)

ChemVix (chemistry visualization) was a project where you could submit datasets to a supercomputer (at the time I think they ran on the Crays at NCSA) and have it give you back a visualization of a molecule or energy levels therein or something.

Hands-On Universe was something that had kids taking real astronomical data and doing stuff like supernova searches (look at the data from now, put it on top of the data from then, see if there is anything new). (A couple of kids actually did find a supernova while doing this project.) There were other things that were done with real data as well.

Various projects at the Shodor Education Foundation are aimed at helping kids understand how scientists really do science, often with computational modeling, etc.

It's really not that hard to come up with ways for kids to participate in actual scientific research. What's hard is convincing people with an already-huge list of demands on them, a curriculum to "cover", and standardized tests to teach to that they should buck all that to do this stuff with their kids.

My first thought was the Schrodinger equation - it can be solved for Hydrogen.

Question 1 : Are hydrinos possible according to the Schrodinger equation?

Question 2 : If not, what changes to Schrodinger are needed to explain hydrinos and are these changes consistent with the rest of physics?

(Question 0 : Or am I smoking crack again?)

The only hits on Schrodinger and Hydrino were from the blacklight people and they seemed to skirt around the question.

For one thing, there are a lot of reasons to have computers in schools, and a lot of reasons for them to be laptops. Take science, for instance. Most science these days involves computer simulation or computer analysis. If you really want the kids to be able to see and do the kinds of things real scientists do, you need some way to access modeling and simulation.

You say that they should be learning geometry--don't you think that Geometer's sketchpad (or kseg) could help in that? Personally I see a huge amount of potential for just that one application.

One project that I helped conceive and started working on at Shodor is Project Interactivate. There is a lot of potential there for getting kids to have a strong conceptual understanding of various mathematical ideas that would otehrwise be lost on most kids.

Why laptops?

• mobile lab--you can wheel a case into your classroom for one activity that you might not otherwise bother going to the lab for

• in the lab, you can say "lower screen" and get the kids attention on the board. otherwise the screen is a constant distraction.

• Any number of other things relating to the fact that you can easily move it around (obviously there's a theft issue related to that too, I suppose)

For one thing, there are a lot of reasons to have computers in schools, and a lot of reasons for them to be laptops. Take science, for instance. Most science these days involves computer simulation or computer analysis. If you really want the kids to be able to see and do the kinds of things real scientists do, you need some way to access modeling and simulation.

You say that they should be learning geometry--don't you think that Geometer's sketchpad (or kseg) could help in that? Personally I see a huge amount of potential for just that one application.

One project that I helped conceive and started working on at Shodor is Project Interactivate. There is a lot of potential there for getting kids to have a strong conceptual understanding of various mathematical ideas that would otehrwise be lost on most kids.

Why laptops?

• mobile lab--you can wheel a case into your classroom for one activity that you might not otherwise bother going to the lab for

• in the lab, you can say "lower screen" and get the kids attention on the board. otherwise the screen is a constant distraction.

• Any number of other things relating to the fact that you can easily move it around (obviously there's a theft issue related to that too, I suppose)