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On the other hand, one of the big dangers of run-off from agriculture is eutrophication of nearby lakes, rivers, tributaries, etc, caused by all the fertilizer sprayed on crops.

Except as GM crops expand, the Deadzone in the Gulf of Mexico is also growing.

Falcon

Perhaps you haven't heard of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone?

http://www.smm.org/deadzone/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)

Not saying that this is doing it any favors... but we were already kind of on a roll there.

Science Museum of Minnesota is a remarkable place, esp if you want to learn about the earth's surface. They have teamed up with the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics to create some pretty amazing exhibits, including the Big Back Yard (mini-golf that teaches you about rivers) and Science on a Sphere (just go see it to see what I mean). California Academy of Science in the Golden Gate Park of San Francisco has just reopened in a remarkable new building. Its a green design with an entire tropical ecosystem contained in a 3 story tall glass sphere.

I think the private aquarium in the basement of Mall of America deserves some credit. To compare it to the old National Aquarium in the basement of Labor on the D.C. Mall I think would be an insult to Underwater World, but it obviously doesn't have space like the Shedd. Lot of sharks, many species and many displays but it doesn't do something like a dolphin show. The main attraction is one of those acrylic walk-through designs for better or worse. Mostly better because it's a lot of fun and reasonably long.

Science Museum of Minnesota. Dunno. They all look alike to me. Floors of demos and interactive projects for kids, dinosaur bones, theaters and a marine emphasis with the tugboat and Mississippi River education. Plan for good weather and the veranda on the St. Paul Mississippi River bluffs is superb.

Couple specialties:

The Pavek Museum of Broadcasting, 12,000 sq. feet of antique equipment display, training, restoration, etc.

Mill City Museum. Postmodern in the sense of a modern tech history museum built within the fire-ravished ruins of a national heritage site they didn't care enough about quickly enough to preserve intact. Technology of flour milling back when Minneapolis/St. Paul was where Great Plains wheat went to become flour for the country.

Then go see the Science Museum of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I've been there numerous times ever since I was a kid, all the way through adulthood. Loved it every time.

> Check out Catal Huyuk as one example. 9,000 B.C, Turkey, population 10,000 http://www.smm.org/catal/introduction/

Catal Huyuk is generally thought to be one of the first human settlements in Anatolia. Also, real archaeologists date its habitation no earlier than 6500 BCE, and give its population as probably no more than 6,000 (by the way, your "for children" website agrees with me). So no, they weren't going to be fighting any wars or sinking any continents off the coast of Spain. Oh, did they have ships?

Humans didn't practice agriculture (meaning no towns, no villages, no nothing) until ca. 12,000 BCE, and they didn't live in communities with complex economies involving more than grain, livestock, and women until perhaps 7,000 BCE. Period.

> There are probably a dozen ways to answer this, but I'll just mention a few.

Please repeat after me: Plato didn't speak Egyptian. Plato didn't ever visit Egypt. Plato had exactly zero access to any Egyptian knowledge beyond what traders brought to Athens. Plato wasn't L. Ron Hubbard.

I love, by the way, how you've managed to turn the single worst practice of the Egyptian priests, systematic exclusion of nearly everyone from free access to information, into some kind of argument for their possession of knowledge going back thousands of years before the First Dynasty. In the West, it was the Greeks and Romans who built free-access libraries and made knowledge collaborative. You might almost think of it as the first open-source movement. As a result we have at least some idea of most of the major events in the Mediterranean starting from about 500 BCE down to the present day.

One last point: the Library of Alexandria contained mostly Greek books. It was kept by Greek scholars, of whom the most famous are Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius (author of the Argonautica) and Zenodotus (one of the first editors of the Iliad). By its time Egypt was run by Macedonian kings using Greek administrators and soldiers.

> floods, etc.

Just because there's a big natural disaster mentioned in ancient texts doesn't mean you get to point to any prehistoric period of increased rainfall and say "that's what they were talking about." You have to make a colorable argument to connect the two using more than just correlation/causation, for instance some unusual feature of the disaster that is also mentioned in *all* of the ancient sources. If you made these claims in a paper it would never be published and even if it were it would destroy your academic reputation. We demand more proof than what your imagination can provide.

You can start fuming about how evil academics are now.

I really have no idea how you were modded +5 insightful. I suppose I can chalk that up to most people's history lessons only going as far back as the Greeks.

"1. How can the Athenians have fought a war against another civilization at a time when all good archaeology and paleontology tells us humans didn't yet live in developed cities or fight wars?"

This point is confusing. Which war, exactly, are you referring to? Are you referring to a time period in which the Athenians were Athenians (in which case, large city states existed)... or are you referring to a point in time in which they were perhaps pre-Athenians? As if, prior to the Greek Athenians, their ancestors fought a war?

At any rate, I suppose that what you are getting at, is that prior to the Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians, no civilizations existed? That is absurdly false. There is STRONG evidence of large city states all over Asia and Europe going back well beyond what most people are taught in history/pre-history courses.

Check out Catal Huyuk as one example. 9,000 B.C, Turkey, population 10,000 http://www.smm.org/catal/introduction/

"2. How can Plato's source have known about Atlantis? It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians."

There are probably a dozen ways to answer this, but I'll just mention a few.
a) The Egyptians were extremely self-centered. Very little of their translated writings talk about external cultures. Some yes, but the vast majority no.
b) The Egyptian priesthood kept most of their knowledge secret. What little was written down, was often, for lack of a better word, encrypted symbolically.
c) There were no libraries, knowledge was orally transmitted or symbolically encoding. If you wished to learn it, you needed to become a priest. Knowledge was not stored in an accessible format. The single counter-example to this is the Libraries of Alexander, which were destroyed.

"3. How can knowledge of this so-called war and apocalypse have survived until ca. 350 BCE when the Greeks didn't have reliable information about their own history going back before 1000 BCE? Hint: if you say "but the Iliad...""

Learn a bit about the world pre-Greek. Learning, civilization, and knowledge did not begin with the Greeks.

here is one example of knowledge persisting through vast amounts of time:

The single most common myth across all cultures is of a great deluge (and by common, I mean over 2,000 tales of a flood, all across the world). Good, solid, scientific evidence, is now emerging that several floods (most likely caused by comet impacts) occurred in the last 10,000 years or so.

As today, past civilizations most likely lived on coastal encampments. Given that the most common myth in the world is of a flood (and therefore supposing that massive flooding really did occur), guess what probably happened to most of the civilized world? It was destroyed.

I suspect that as our sonar/mapping/etc.. gets better, we will discover that civilized, modern man, has existed for a lot longer than we know believe.

If you want to learn/read about some interesting discoveries of very old civilizations that are now under water, I would start by exploring archaeology in India. There have been some really great discoveries there lately.

http://www.smm.org/race/about/

I'm with the guy who goes Dwarf for warriors and Elf for mages.

Suspended from the Atrium of the New Science Museum of Minnesota, within a 45-foot ceiling, the Seismofone is a large musical sculpture that brings us sight and sound experiences of geologic events - seismic activities or earthquakes - at nearly the moment that they occur around the globe.

The Science on a Sphere exhibit is also on display in the lower level of the Science Museum of Minnesota in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA.

They have it running a canned series of displays similar to what is talked about in the article, but a saw a staff member demonstrating it for the local astronomy club and he was able to grab the image and spin it with the trackball. It was neat, and he was looking for suggestions of other datasets to display.

http://www.smm.org/buzz/node/267
http://www.weeklyreader.com/featurezone/article_08 192005.asp
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050813/fob3. asp
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/11/14/new.lemu rs/
http://monkeydaynews.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_monke ydaynews_archive.html

Alot of medical imaging, chemistry software for Linux exists, and also alot of proprietary animation/modelling software, like Maya, which can exploit stereo imaging. The freely available Blender can also exploit it, as part of the render chain:

http://ltc2.smm.org/visualize/node/64

The real question is not what Linux software uses it, but why and when you'd want to use it in the first place. I remember a few years ago a man tried to sell me a pair of USB stereoscopic glasses at a game development conference. He just couldn't believe it when I told him that immersion doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being inside the medium.

I see this laptop will be marketed at imaging professionals needing a mobile presentation device that serves a larger audience than the standard LCD; Polarisation/blacking distortion is annoying when you're trying to sell your good-looking wares.

I really like this muesuem, it's a good asset to my state. The exhibits are usually pretty nice.

It does have corporate benefactors as well as individual memberships. The whole thing was started by business. As far as I know it doesn't use much public funds.

It even built a very nice new facility in 1999. This museum does more than earn the cost of upkeep.

I work for a group called the Learning Technology Center at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

We use Microworlds to teach 9-12 year olds how to make some pretty fun video games. Microworlds is built on top of Logo, which I still think is one of the best ways to learn programing.

But at a younger age just teaching kids how to mouse and click it pretty important. The same company that makes Microworlds also makes My Make Beleive Castle which is a great little pre-programing introduction to controlable actions.

I work for a group called the Learning Technology Center at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

We use Microworlds to teach 9-12 year olds how to make some pretty fun video games. Microworlds is built on top of Logo, which I still think is one of the best ways to learn programing.

But at a younger age just teaching kids how to mouse and click it pretty important. The same company that makes Microworlds also makes My Make Beleive Castle which is a great little pre-programing introduction to controlable actions.

The Science Museum or Minnesota is currently showing an exhibit "Robots + Us". Part of the exhibit is the Robot cafe, which seemed mostly to be a home for AI press clippings and a very old counter-top juke box controller. But they did have a framed sign titled "Rules". The first three were what you'd expect. The fourth was "a robot must bus his own dishes".
I laughed. My eight-year-old didn't get it. Time to start him on the Caves of Steel, I think.

The Science Museum or Minnesota is currently showing an exhibit "Robots + Us". Part of the exhibit is the Robot cafe, which seemed mostly to be a home for AI press clippings and a very old counter-top juke box controller. But they did have a framed sign titled "Rules". The first three were what you'd expect. The fourth was "a robot must bus his own dishes".
I laughed. My eight-year-old didn't get it. Time to start him on the Caves of Steel, I think.

Located in the Science Museum of Minnesota, it features quack medical devices throughout the decades that have been marketed to fools and skeptics alike. A neat collection. You'd be amazed what people would ingest or put their bodies through. (the vaccum-operated breast enlargement machine is interesting, as well as the sticks of radium that people would carry in their pockets).

Link Here. Creator's website is Here

Tree we did up in Philly
a clock tower- the hands are the antenna
ooh, ooh... that aint what you think it is are we good or what?
this was a government job

As you can see, I am not impressed. When something that people just havent noticed over years and years becomes news of the day, it's evident that people are just a bit too egocentrical to notice anything outside of their own little worlds. Sheesh. Hidden antennas.

Getting kids involved with something "real" (insert "tangible" or "active" if you like) is one of the best ways I've found to get them interested (as a student and an instructor). Here's some stuff I did while teaching at summer day camps at the Capital Children's Museum a couple of years ago:

• Baking muffins to learn why breads have holes, and figuring out why one recipe used baking soda and one used baking powder (kitchen chemistry, as well as some acid-base stuff);
  
• Figuring out whether normal, dried or soaked popcorn kernels pop best (including taste-testing), and freezing ice cream using baggies, rock salt and ice (solids/liquids/gases)
  
• Making three kinds of "slime" (or gak or flubber) and explaining what non-Newtonian fluids are (my second-graders showed up some adults!)
  

Try these sites to get some ideas:

• The JASON project was started by Dr. Robert Ballard (the guy who discovered the Titanic and other sunken ships)
  
• Local colleges and high schools often present chemistry shows (or physics/science shows). Here's a plug for my alma mater: Lawrence University). I swear the show is more entertaining than the description on that page.
  
• PBS is full of things, including a show called ZOOM!, the ever-popular Newton's Apple, and wacky Bill Nye the Science Guy.
  
• At the U of W Madison, Prof. Shakhashiri created THE definitive books of demonstrations (Caution: he's kind of dry, but the demos are great!)
  
• Science museums also often have some sort of hands-on stuff. Go ahead and "borrow" from them! Here's the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and the Science Museum of Minnesota
  

Good luck!

This is a major find because it is a fairly complete skeleton, including the skull. Previous titanosaur finds have been only fragmentary. Now they can compare the partial remains with something more or less complete, which makes for tasty science. A fine day for paleontology.

Congrats to the Science Museum of Minnesota and Kristi Curry Rogers.

This is a major find because it is a fairly complete skeleton, including the skull. Previous titanosaur finds have been only fragmentary. Now they can compare the partial remains with something more or less complete, which makes for tasty science. A fine day for paleontology.

Congrats to the Science Museum of Minnesota and Kristi Curry Rogers.