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We are currently at around seven billion people, starvation we see currently is from political, not technical issues. We do not have too many people, we have some people that suffer needlessly - an entirely different problem.

The upper growth is around 10 billion people, after that the population will remain fairly stable. There's no reason to think that with technological improvements in obtaining food we could not support that population indefinitely, assuming some vast plague does not take us down a lot...

Ironically, current warming trends would help us with more arable land, if scared fools would allow climate change to proceed normally.

Obligatory TED links, that might actually be a bit more insightful than TFA.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html

While I am skeptical that we'll have enough resources either way, I think that humans are going to have to adapt hard or the entire race will just fade away. This won't necessarily be a problem for a few generations, but there is very little left in this world that is untouched, or that we can leave untouched. Solutions to the energy crisis aside, food and water are still major concerns, and we can't infinitely increase the amount of farming, because we'll also need to increase our living spaces; however, this is unless we go full Tokyo and build above and below ourselves and learn to live in cramped situations. Even still, it will be an incredibly difficult feat to convince most Westerners that they aren't allowed cars anymore and that they need to walk or use trains to go to work. I don't mind myself, since I'm a student who uses trains and busing all the time, but few people want to give up the luxury of driving to work in favour of using a subway system (similar to how most east asian countries operate).

In the meantime, I'm going to be developing my zombie formula so that I can do my part to end overpopulation. Call me if you can help, I'm trying to put a patent together so I can sue others who want to destroy the Earth while the zombies and lawyers (?difference) take over.

Obligatory TED links, that might actually be a bit more insightful than TFA.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html

While I am skeptical that we'll have enough resources either way, I think that humans are going to have to adapt hard or the entire race will just fade away. This won't necessarily be a problem for a few generations, but there is very little left in this world that is untouched, or that we can leave untouched. Solutions to the energy crisis aside, food and water are still major concerns, and we can't infinitely increase the amount of farming, because we'll also need to increase our living spaces; however, this is unless we go full Tokyo and build above and below ourselves and learn to live in cramped situations. Even still, it will be an incredibly difficult feat to convince most Westerners that they aren't allowed cars anymore and that they need to walk or use trains to go to work. I don't mind myself, since I'm a student who uses trains and busing all the time, but few people want to give up the luxury of driving to work in favour of using a subway system (similar to how most east asian countries operate).

In the meantime, I'm going to be developing my zombie formula so that I can do my part to end overpopulation. Call me if you can help, I'm trying to put a patent together so I can sue others who want to destroy the Earth while the zombies and lawyers (?difference) take over.

per Hans Rosling in http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html we have already peaked the world population.. worth a watch.

It turns out that making the process as difficult and expensive as possible for the patent troll is very effective. They don't have a clicks and mortar business generating cashflow or profit, so each lawsuit has to end up with positive cash.

If you start demanding that they spend time and money, they can rapidly disappear.

http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_troll.html

Researcher Sean Gourley discussed "the mathematics of war"on TED already. Not a new phenomenon, but an interesting extension.

In doing some quick research, I couldn't find an energy input vs output ratio for a CAES system, given an assumption that a large amount of energy in the form of heat will be lost to the surrounding earth. I would assume that theoretically it is 100% in perfect thermal isolation, and that in this situation, the energy lost is equal to the amount of energy required to heat the resulting volume of air at the resulting pressure by the difference of the heat of the gas after compression and its original temperature. I can't be bothered doing the math to get a theoretical percentage, and I didn't see the expected volume of this project nor the expected pressure.

I would, however, be interested to know if there's research out there that compares the actual efficiency of a CAES system (like the one originally built in Germany) against modern methods of obtaining hydrogen from water and compressing that into an easily stored liquid. Last I heard, there were new advances in that field and likely more promising results to be had in the future, so to me it would appear that hydrogen would've been a better bet. Or maybe these liquid metal batteries?

http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html

Posner's suggestion of having different patent terms for different industries is not news, that idea has been circulating for decades, and probably longer. It's something that he's actually endorsing it in public, I guess.

Someone on slashdot recently linked a great TED talk about the general lack of IP protection in the fashion industry, and how it has actually worked out really well for them. Trademarks protect your profit margin, but you can't prevent anyone from making a shoe.

I see software as being somewhat similar. I should be able to make an online store without violating someone's IP, but I shouldn't be able to call it "Amazon".

http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Apr 2012 TED Talk: Melinda Gates: Let's put birth control back on the agenda.

this TED talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

I think it's time to start calling technology utilitarian and start removing protections before this sector crashes...

Johanna Blakley's TED talk

Can you imagine if someone had patented the layout of the pedals in a car? You'd have to relearn driving every time you got into a different brand car.

That's why Cars and Clothes aren't allowed Copyright or Design Patents. They're too utilitarian.

I'm having a hard time classifying portable general purpose computers as non utilitarian, this being the Information Age and all. I mean, in the Stone Age, were not Stone Tools "utilitarian"?

Here's a nice TED talk dispelling the FUD that removing Copyrights and Patents removes the drive to innovate:
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

One would think, after seeing Bill Gates' TED talk, he would be spending his money in projects that would ultimately help to ... kill most of us.. no kidding. He blatantly said so. http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html 3:57 - 4:50

Watch this TED talk by Melinda Gates.

I may not like some of what they do, but I loved this talk because she's absolutely right.

Ross Lovegrove might have some designs for that future.

Michael Pritchard presented a filter device at TED in 2009 which used a similar concept to filter water. The video explains why bacteria and viruses are filtered out, and he demonstrates the process and drinks the resulting filtered water (taken from a sewage bath he concocts). Perhaps graphene's physical strength will make it a more sturdy water filter, which would be a particularly important criteria for use in the third world, but there is at least already a working prototype using a non-graphene material. http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pritchard_invents_a_water_filter.html

That said, "things cost money" is not really a great argument for or against patents (or copyrights), but rather a simple statement of economics: would consumers and companies save money if they never had to pay for copies or licenses? Yes. Is that a reasonable argument for abolishing IP protection? No.

According to the RIAA/MPAA, your iPod is worth $8 billion. So their math is somewhat bunk, to put it mildly... Is that reasonable argument for abolishing IP protection? Not really indeed.

That said, it may be worth reminding that IP protection was introduced to protect publishers rather than authors. Before Gutenberg, it was dubious for anyone to claim a cut when a monk spent days or weeks manually copying a work so the original could move on to the next monastery. Movable type turned this process over its head. The nascent publishing industry, following the footsteps of Bossius in Venice (in 1492), lobbied hard to obtain artificial monopolies on whichever works they published. (Which, btw, publishers didn't necessarily own back then, since everything was deemed public domain the instant it ever got published.)

As for patent protection, it might have been useful from the Renaissance when it first appeared, to around when they nearly shut down the patent office on grounds that "everything that can be invented has been invented" (Duell, 1899). It's one thing to patent the wireless telegraph or the telephone, in a time where a fraction of the population has the skillset needed to understand how either works. It's another to patent algorithms, genes or -- the worst offenders of all -- processes and concepts as broad as one-click buying or designs, in a time where everyone and his dog can competently discuss the very same processes and concepts around a beer at the local pub.

A very subjective test is missing as part of the patent application process. As in, if it's trivial or obvious or easy enough to reverse-engineer for someone in the field, then it's arguably not patent-worthy. If I hypothetically come up with an algorithm that implements peer-to-peer contact sharing, I should not be entitled to patent the whole concept, and deny competition to come up with their own implementation. I should not even be entitled to a patent on my own implementation, since it would at best be laying down a thought process that no one but the most self-important prick would ever think he's the only person to be able to ever come up with it. On the contrary, good on them if they come up with their own version of the same thing or the exact same thing with a few mild differences -- I could then feed on their own ideas, for everyone's benefit.

Is that reasonable argument for strongly reforming if not abolishing IP protection? I would think so, except to the above-mentioned self-important prick.

There is an interesting talk by Arther Benjamin arguing that for most students stats are for more valuable than calculus as an end point as they are more relevant to everyday life.

I disagree wholeheartedly with most of what you wrote.

The thing you get right is that it no longer is possible to know every fact about everything. The last known person to have done so was Pic de la Morandière and that was over 150 years ago.

With respect to fields involving increasing specialized knowledge nowadays, however, I simply beg to differ. The real issue is an inflation of know-how that adds little if anything to the pool of relevant knowledge. It occurs because, for all of history since the ancient Greeks including today, there have always been more scientists alive in any given year than there have been in recorded history. Chew on this fact for a moment, and consider how to train their higher level peers, we require them to come up with an original research thesis.

Most published work and research are simply rehashing obvious consequences of things long known. Rare indeed, is the study that pops out because it identifies an edge case where the results contradict what is expected. Recall, as an example, the study that suggested neutrinos might go faster than light. Physicists the world over instantly heard of it. Subsequent refinements eventually debunked the initial results as a measurement error. Sum of additional knowledge? Big fat zero: nothing goes faster than light. The same, boring and century old theory of relativity.

It's not all bad, mind you: something interesting occasionally does comes out of this farce. For instance, a study on how an erection works can lead to insights in how to engineer structures. This makes the whole process tolerable and, in a sense, interesting for the curious.

To argue that every little fact counts, however, is lunacy. You need to discriminate, synthesize, retain key elements, and off you go. You're a specialist. And to hell with the bozo who is so neck deep studying eye retina that he forgets it is a brain outlet. He has nothing interesting to tell you beyond implementation details.

Now, I've absolutely no clue whether the next 10 years will yield a strong AI. I haven't followed AI in a while, preferring good old history. I do know two things, however. Firstly, that a strong AI is around the corner since about 1950. Secondly, that mathematicians stormed the field of cognitive science and linguistics roughly 20 years ago, ignoring the established quacks such as Chomsky and turning the field upside down. Fast forward 10 years, and we were training robots to train other robots to do tasks. This was inconceivable 10 years earlier. Who knows... Not you, nor I.

Sadly it's something that probably has to be done at the policy level, short of a grass-roots political movement there's not a whole lot that can be done by normal citizens - to make the system appealing for a large number of people you need regular service that is fast and convenient, which means significant up-front and ongoing expenses, likely including a heavy PR push and/or disincentivizing private vehicle use. That's one of the reasons I like the bus lane strategy - congestion increases for private vehicles and everyone stuck in traffic has to watch the buses constantly zooming past them. Plus it has no up-front costs beyond buses and lane demarcation.

Perhaps you could get your mayor and/or some city council members interested? This talk has some interesting bits, but I know I've seen much better.
http://blog.ted.com/2008/02/04/with_maverick_f/

I agree. Let's ditch the patent system. It's the only rational, logical thing to do. I mean, if you think that the Patent System is good, then I call bullshit until you test the damn hypothesis already. It's not like we can't re-enact whatever crap laws we want.

I can hear it now: "If you get rid of copyrights and patents NO ONE WILL INNOVATE"... Well, please explain how the fashion and car industries are doing so well without these protections?
FUDsters gonna FUD...

It's time we did the damned experiment, abolish patents AND copyrights. Times have changed! We're in the INFORMATION AGE now. I fear most people grossly underestimate the power of reverse engineers... Besides: "May the Best Copier Win!" has been the battle cry of life itself for billions of years. Only now we place restrictions on the flow of information? Look, as much as I liked that Planet of the Apes movie, I don't want it to come true.

Pay for performance is a world-wide metric.

Please stop perpetuating lies. It's an old wives tale that has absolutely no scientific backing. Evidence shows the opposite: high compensation has a detrimental effect on productivity of creative white collar employees. (This does not apply to manual labor workers)

http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/31/dan_ariely_asks/

So yeah, I would like the guy getting paid $100k instead, and use the remaining $700k to add new fiber infrastructure.

Still, all you really need in an intra-cabin pressure suit is a nominally airtight body-glove with an airtight helmet and constricted joints so that in-suit air pressure doesn't inflate it into a spread eagle balloon and render you immobile. Mechanical counter-pressure does wonders for that, as well as limiting air loss due to suit punctures. In fact the only reasons to make the body suit itself airtight is to limit leakage from the helmet and reduce outgassing from the skin, which might cause problems over the long term, and will certainly contribute to dehydration and probably form ice crystals in the suit material which could lead to real problems.

On the other hand comfort could be a real issue, I don't know that we have the materials yet to make a suit that can apply 1atm (or really 0.5atm or less would be fine) of mechanical compression without rapidly becoming very uncomfortable, even assuming regular full-body waxing. Thermal underwear is bad enough, and I doubt that comes anywhere close to 1atm of pressure. Plus you have the issues of thermal regulation and moisture wicking, which are both greatly simplified by air circulation.

It's also worth noting that these are primarily an emergency backup to be worn during launch and reentry - in which case any decompression would likely be explosive, which puts much higher demands on the suit's integrity.

Oh, and to anyone out there designing a body-glove style pressure suit - be sure to align the material so that the fibers are 45 degrees away from axial alignment (finger-trap style) to maximize flexibility when inflated. Virtually all hydrostatic skeletal systems on earth use this mechanism. The one exception is reproductive organs, which not coincidentally require rigidity: http://www.ted.com/talks/diane_kelly_what_we_didn_t_know_about_penis_anatomy.html

Religious people tend to have more babies

The statistics seem to indicate that might not be true.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html

I believe baseball and basketball differ greatly if relation to how statistics can be applied. Basketball success is much more reliant on a greater number of teammates being "up for the game", and performing physically and mentally at a high level for longer periods. Baseball IS statistics and situational probability. As far as communicating data, this guy gets it done: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

I used to think that way -- but I've been following the technology for a long time, and things are really starting to move. Here is some food for thought...

The missing link in renewable energy (cheap scalable batteries).
solar reaching price parity soon
Wind at a crossroads. The power output increases as a square of tower height -- so people are thinking about enormous off-shore towers, or towers in the great lakes.


There is really a lot more going on, including 20% of the US economy being under a revenue neutral carbon cap-and-trade for 10 years. (Bet you didn't know that.) This part of the US economy has seen the slowest growth in energy prices, and experienced more economic growth than the rest of the country. (Follow the link for reports.)

Renewable energy isn't just about the environment, or energy security -- it's also about growing the economy. Alas for the political discourse. The oil/coal lobby is well funded and very active, and the chief cronies in crony-capitalism.

Agreed. In fact there's very promising research underway in the use of electric fields to kill cancer - since cancer cells divide far more often than most other cells an aggressive "kill field" can be applied to an area making cell division a fatal process, thus damaging the cancer far more severely than the surrounding tissue, without the unpleasant side effects of radiation or chemotherapy. Potential side effects of the electric fields are still unknown.
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_doyle_treating_cancer_with_electric_fields.html

The point of course is that we know for a fact that at least some electric fields can cause severe cellular trauma, it stands to reason that there are much larger number of field characteristics that would result in less obvious damage. In the face of that just assuming that all electric fields are safe is foolish. It's also worth noting that the nature of the transmissions has changed - in '96 analogue transmission was the norm, these days almost everything has gone digital, and that makes a considerable difference in the physical properties of the signal - assuming it will continue to interfere with cellular processes in the exact same (probably mostly harmless) manner is unfounded.

More to the point - while *nothing* is completely safe, it just makes good sense to reexamine the regulations governing fast-changing fields on a regular basis, if only to make sure there are no new developments that cast doubt on the wisdom of existing policy. 90's era cell phones were probably reasonably safe - today we have far more mobile devices in operation, so the level of background radiation generated is considerably higher with different spectral properties. Is that a problem? Probably not, but I'd just as soon have the question asked officially from time to time.

Nice to see more people fighting against the legal trolls.GIVE THEM NOTHING!

Nations with increased education, wealth, and equality ( and access to birth control ) have lower birth rates.

The world population is expected to level off at around 10 billion, not to grow forever. Watch this talk by Hans Rosling

Unless, of course, you folks keep doing it today.

Part of the reason there are so many folks who still believe in these things is just as threads above stated. Experts and professionals still only possess limited fallible reason and one tends to follow what they know or believe to be true first and foremost. Other compelling reasons likely happen at the genetic level. Tearing ourselves from disciplines of Astronomy and Physics for a second and focusing on the bit of Anthropology atheists prefer to ignore; man has ALWAYS believed in a higher power. We have scientific evidence of this. We know that abilities and quirks that we EVOLVE with are there for a reason. We can only theorize and therefore fork, but not discount at this point, Creationism as a possibility.

We evolved to be overly optimistic, for good reason, otherwise we would just give up and die. http://www.ted.com/talks/tali_sharot_the_optimism_bias.html, There may be other reason that we evolved religion, (e.g. religion allows control and organisation, which may be beneficial ) they may not require a higher power to actually exist.

Where I live you are about as likely to win the lottery as you are to be murdered but I am sure that much more people are sitting there thinking they may win the lottery each week than be murdered.

Just because it would be nice to be true, doesn't make it so for a scientific theory need more than you can't prove me wrong. You need at evidence to support your claim. Sure evolution may be wrong too, people are wrong all the time. But evolution can be disproved where as God cannot since you can say well God doesn't want to be found out (to test your faith). That is what make makes evolution a theory and creationism religion.

But when you are publicly charitable, you get to do this. And that is why Gates does it like that (and yes, it does encourage others to get involved).

Before I begin, I'll repeat this for context: "Large parts of the modern mobile touchscreen user interface, however, *were* seen integrated together for the first time when the iPhone was introduced and live-demo'ed in January 2007. Some people trot out the LG Prada as a touchscreen phone that was announced before the iPhone, but only by a month, and it was obviously in no way an inspiration for the latter."

Notes: 1) "large parts of", not "all of" the modern mobile UI; and 2) "LG Prada [...] was obviously in no way an inspiration for [iPhone]."

The Prada had no virtual keyboard (text input via T9)

The Nokia 770, introduced in 2006 did, however.

Some Windows PDAs seem to have had virtual keyboards before the Nokia 770. And as you note later on, its input was via stylus, not finger-touch. I shouldn't have to say that by "touchscreen", in this context I mean direct-finger, and excludes anything requiring stylus input. Otherwise, we'll go at least as far back as the Apple Newton in the early 90s.

Anyway I'm not saying a v-keyboard was an iPhone first (a claim that'd be as ridiculous as the "rows of colourful icons"), just that the lack of one is one reason the Prada can't be claimed as an iPhone-level smartphone that came before the iPhone was announced.

There was no swipe to scroll (they used desktop-style scrollbars that a reviewer had a hell of a time using), or multitouch, or pinch-zoom

These are all cool, but they were first demoed in a TED talk around 2001. Small, cheap, capacitive touchscreens made them possible.

After a quick search on TED the closest demo I could find was this: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html

That was presented Feb 2006, though, not 2001. And although 11 months after this demo might have been enough for Apple to copy Hans' work, this patent application for a multi-point touchscreen, filed in May 2004 by Apple, shows that they were working on it for years before Hans' demo. And in 2005 Apple also bought Fingerworks, acquiring all of its multi-touch patents too.

Can you source the TED talk you're referring to? Video preferable; if they weren't recorded back then, then at least a write-up that shows the speaker *actually demo'ed* those features.

The traditional contacts and other phone programs looked like they'd been transplanted from a traditional candybar phone, and didn't take advantage of the larger screen space at all.

That's probably a valid criticism, and the current Android phone and contact programs certainly don't make me disagree that there's some very poor UI going on there. I'm not sure what iOS does in this regard, but if Android is copying it then it's nothing to be proud of, and if Android isn't copying it then Android isn't copying it.

This, as well as my comments on the Prada's internet setup and browser comments which I've snipped for brevity, were to debunk the baseless claim that Prada was in any way an iPhone-level smartphone that preceded the iPhone (other than having a full-front capacitive touchscreen). It was not a comment on Android PIM apps.

But, there should be no doubt that Apple's iPhone was the dividing line that separated pre- and post-2007 smartphone+touchscreen interfaces, as clear as the Iridium layer marks the end of the age of dinosaurs (an apt analogy there, too).

The availability of cheap capacitive touchscreens is a big UI dividing lines, just as the availability of cheap small TFTs was in replacing the older text-driven interfaces with more pictorial ones in earlier phones. The original iPhone ca

It has been demonstrated time and again that education decreases birth rate, partly by decreasing religious membership, as the people who are breeding the fastest in particular are overwhelmingly members of a religion that tells them to be fruitful and multiply... but partly because people understand the consequences of their actions.

I am not sure any such things has been demonstrated.

Actually, the part about religion has been debunked, as it appear it has little to no effect whatsoever. The other reasons you mention, as well as the fact that in richer societies more children are not a source of income but a drain.

Watch this, and stop hyperventilating.

It has been said many times before.

"What if we were wrong about all of this science? We will have built a better Earth for nothing!!"

We are approaching peak Human. See:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html

Peak Human doesn't address the damage done to the ecosystem though.

Khan Academy has a good series of ten-minute instructional videos about the theory of chemistry and organic chemistry, starting from first principles, this would be a good place to start.

http://www.khanacademy.org/#chemistry
http://www.khanacademy.org/#organic-chemistry

There are many online university lectures, which might be a little too advanced for a 10 year old, but they available anyway:
http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/chemistry
http://www.youtube.com/ (Search for long >20 minute videos)
https://www.coursera.org/ (Doesn't offer chemistry yet, but may do in the future)

I myself missed out a large part of my formal education and as a result became mostly self-taught. Being homeschooled means you don't have any deadlines or exams to worry about. The core thing to maintain is curiosity (the willingness to ask questions) and the confidence ans skills to go about answering them for yourself. Google is your biggest friend!

The approach is very different from structured learning. Pick a question, a project or a task. Jump in at the deep end, google the question directly, even its is rather advanced. The explanation will probably be full of alien words and concepts that you don't fully understand and simply raise up an even bigger pile of questions. So pick the first of these new questions, and keep drilling down until you have a good enough understanding of each word or concept that you can start to make sense of the original answer to the original question. Rather than trying to cover a pre-defined syllabus in sequential order and to a given timetable, you are aiming to drill down to whatever level of detail is needed in order to have the clarity required to answer the question you are interested in. It seems slow at first, but by the time you have fully answered your first proper question, you will have already covered half the syllabus. Age then becomes irrelevant and as long as you keep asking questions, you never stop learning.

Sugata Mitra has an interesting take on the power of simply giving children the tools to teach themselves:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

As the parents and the grandparents are not confident in teaching the subject, maybe you should turn the tables, set the 10 year kid the challenge of teaching the grandparents how do "French Cooking" (as it was once known).

Khan Academy has a good series of ten-minute instructional videos about the theory of chemistry and organic chemistry, starting from first principles, this would be a good place to start.

http://www.khanacademy.org/#chemistry
http://www.khanacademy.org/#organic-chemistry

There are many online university lectures, which might be a little too advanced for a 10 year old, but they available anyway:
http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/chemistry
http://www.youtube.com/ (Search for long >20 minute videos)
https://www.coursera.org/ (Doesn't offer chemistry yet, but may do in the future)

I myself missed out a large part of my formal education and as a result became mostly self-taught. Being homeschooled means you don't have any deadlines or exams to worry about. The core thing to maintain is curiosity (the willingness to ask questions) and the confidence ans skills to go about answering them for yourself. Google is your biggest friend!

The approach is very different from structured learning. Pick a question, a project or a task. Jump in at the deep end, google the question directly, even its is rather advanced. The explanation will probably be full of alien words and concepts that you don't fully understand and simply raise up an even bigger pile of questions. So pick the first of these new questions, and keep drilling down until you have a good enough understanding of each word or concept that you can start to make sense of the original answer to the original question. Rather than trying to cover a pre-defined syllabus in sequential order and to a given timetable, you are aiming to drill down to whatever level of detail is needed in order to have the clarity required to answer the question you are interested in. It seems slow at first, but by the time you have fully answered your first proper question, you will have already covered half the syllabus. Age then becomes irrelevant and as long as you keep asking questions, you never stop learning.

Sugata Mitra has an interesting take on the power of simply giving children the tools to teach themselves:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

As the parents and the grandparents are not confident in teaching the subject, maybe you should turn the tables, set the 10 year kid the challenge of teaching the grandparents how do "French Cooking" (as it was once known).

And those countries usually limit who they allow to go to college rather than vocational school because of the costs associated with funding college.

It's free in Denmark. For some popular educations where society can't employ everyone there are limits based on your grades in high school, although there's usually a secondary quota allowed in. So if you really want to do it, you can do some other vaguely related stuff (like visiting a school abroad) and get some points to get in.

What's more the people who receive those degrees tend to make less than what their counterparts in the US do.

On the flip side, as I gather it's common for people in the US to stop at the bachelor level, which is definitly not the case for Denmark. You do know that if you want to live out the American dream, you'd better move to Denmark?

An ion drive of any size could probably not power such a beast off the Earth

Very true, but the getting off Earth part isn't really that interesting, we can do it already and it's *really* not something you would have wanted to use a nuke-drive for anyway, unless you have to do so very quickly before the space-elephants drop a kinetic weapon on you (loved Lucifer's Hammer, a battered old copy still holds it's place in my personal library)

For getting around the solar system though - if a state of the art ion drive is 1000x too weak to do what you want, strap 1000 drives to your hull and add enough nuclear reactors to power them all. Not at all an elegant solution, but then I think that would only qualify it even more for the name. Granted the specific impulse is probably well below what could be managed with a true Orion design, but then massive overkill was the name of the game there, so we don't really need to get anywhere close to be useful - I mean come on sustained 1g acceleration will have you beyond the orbit of Pluto in ~12 days, but even 1/100g will get you there in 4 months. And a paltry 1/1000g is enough to get you from Earth to Mars in only 46 days at conjunction, or 100days at opposition - if the sun weren't in the way... and you didn't mind doing all your deceleration in the last few microseconds of the journey.

Hmm, of course all those are assuming flat-space accelerations, the whole climbing out of the sun's gravitational well thing would start factoring in at lower accelerations. Still I think the point is obvious - if you can sustain any sort of acceleration at all the solar system isn't actually that big a place, it's just that it's not possible to sustain thrust with a chemical drive.

An interesting talk on the Orion project from a fellow that managed to salvage a lot of research lost by NASA, if you don't mind seeing stuff still technically classified as Top Secret Orion

You Sir, should watch 5 dangerous things kids should do:

http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

Actually, it's quite surprising just how many calories you burn with light activity - just standing up can burn calories almost twice as fast as sitting down, and walking can double that again to almost half of what an aerobic workout would do. Add in the fact that a standing/walking workstation may have you "exercising" for 40+ hours a week and the results can be very impressive (who other than a few fitness nuts does the equivalent 20 hours of aerobics a week?).

The trick is just that there's a sort of "exhaustion threshold" - below a certain exertion level you can maintain a fairly continuous activity level indefinitely, cross the threshold and your body starts having trouble keeping up with the demands you're putting on it and you start getting tired. Obviously every person has a different threshold, but our nomadic ancestry shows through - pretty much anyone if halfway decent shape can quickly acclimate to walking at a slow, steady, pace.

There's even some evidence that we're optimized for endurance running - running is unique among physical activities in that, with training, a 70 year old can compete on fairly even footing with a 25 year old. Performance still peaks in the 18-22 year old male demographic, but unlike virtually every other physical activity every other age and gender demographic comes in about equal. One theory is that our ancestors hunted on the plains by running their prey into the ground - we can't compete on burst speed, but we can out-endure just about everything else out there. But you can't very well haul a bunch of deer carcasses back to the tribe you left a couple days behind you, so the whole tribe needs to come along for the feast. (NOTE: all numbers estimated from memory of this TED talk)

If genius came free, without HUGE DOWNSIDES then selection would ensure that we'd all be geniuses. Think about it for a second, virtually every renowned genius had huge emotional or operational baggage. Dyslexia, autism, bipolar, monopolar, synesthesia... the list of common problems suffered by the exceptionally intelligent is legion. It's guessed that significantly more than half of all the great works of art and science were accomplished by Bipolar people in their manic phase. Personally, I think the hardest part for someone of profound genius, is being torn between the clear vision of what it possible and the sad reality of what is allowed by people to persist. There are some interesting conversations about ways of coping with genius. The Greeks had a very healthy concept, externalizing genius, such that it was a resource to be tapped and that some were simply better at getting to it. That took the onus of brilliance off the person, freeing them up, to simply pursue whatever it was they were pursuing. Here's a great TED Talk about that.

I know I'm being obtuse, but seriously, this stuff is too complicated for simple little animations and pictures to make substantially easier.

I'd say high quality animations and pictures are EXACTLY what's required to make basic biology, chemistry, and physics substantially easier. These subjects are ideal targets to improve with these tools. Consider the excellent animations in this ted talk: (animations start at around 3:40).

How long do you think the level of understanding granted by a few minutes with these animations would take to impart via "dialog, lots of words, and drawing on blackboards"?

(Child) pornography on the internet is a arousal addiction -- you always need new different ( http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html ).

This demand is met by some supply, which makes children (somewhere) suffer. But /. cannot even accept child pornography is a problem.

Sides? No, there's no sides here. Ari wants to defend one law by breaking another. Regardless if he's incompetent, that doesn't mean we can break one law to try to defend another (the law being broken is the general reference to our freedom of information and how we choose to use the internet, and the law Ari is trying to protect is hollywood's property being 'stolen'). There is also a whole other level here that Ari would likely never address, because his head shoved too far up his ass, and that is that there is an unwritten social consensus that we care more about our freedom than these companies bottom line. Plus there's http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html Where's your TED Talk Ari?

For those who have questions of how such an e-voting type system could work, watch this TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud.html

Thanks.

A thought provoking discussion of multiculturalism, etc....a very, very old idea...:D
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/neil_macgregor_2600_years_of_history_in_one_object.html

we have too many people. Population growth needs to level off if we are to have a sustainable future. I don't want to see that through draconian population control measures, I'd rather see it through people self regulating.

There was an interesting recent TED talk on world population growth. The numbers the guy presents say we're just about to reach steady-state in number of children worldwide, though as the world's population pyramid fills up the overall number of people (children plus adults of all ages) will take a few more decades to level off at around 10 billion. The number of children per woman worldwide has plummeted everywhere except sub-saharan Africa. If you don't want to watch the talk, you can at least see this animation (after it loads, click play). Watching China is particularly interesting. There's been a huge shift towards fewer children in the last 30 years, and we're just about down to the replacement rate, on the whole.