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Nowdays everybody can have an offspring

In your and my areas, maybe. In other places, it's still quite ... Darwinian: The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving-

As closely as I can figure it, there are about 11_515_262_616_000 metric tons of Uranium-235 in the earth's crust.

The numbers work out as follows: The mass of the earth is about 5.98e24 kilograms. The crust is about .099% of that. Uranium occurs at a rate of about 2.7 milligrams per kilogram in the crust, and about 0.7204% of that is Uranium-235.

Some of that would undoubtedly take more energy to mine, purify and enrich to usable levels than it would produce as output -- but even if only one percent is usable, it still works out to quite a large energy supply. Enrichment isn't necessarily needed -- but if you don't enrich the Uranium, you typically also have to moderate your reactor with deuterium, and it takes a fair amount of energy to purify deuterium from normal water as well. In any case, once you've purified the Uranium, enrichment is roughly a fixed cost regardless of the original source.

There's also Uranium in sea water, though the rate is quite low (3.2 micrograms per liter). That might be a practical supply as well, but I don't know enough about how difficult it is to purify from sea water to be certain. My immediate guess is that if the only alternatives were things like solar or wind power, somebody could figure out a practical way to do it.

When I went to high school, I participated in a program called ThinkQuest in 1999 and 2000. At the time it was run by an organization called advanced.org. Since then, Oracle has continued the program and it has changed for the worse. But back then, this program is probably a good portion of the reason behind my educational successes, my increased knowledge base, and some really good lessons learned that I would have never had otherwise.

ThinkQuest in those years was a pretty amazing program. You worked in teams of up to three students and international collaboration was required. In addition you could have two coaches which served more as mentors rather than coaches. The objective of the project was to build a educational website on nearly any topic. The website, whether it won or not, would be hosted and displayed on the web free of charge. The teams that won were awarded scholarships in sums of $5000, $10,000, and $15,000 per a student. That meant that if your team won first place, each of the students on the team was awarded $15,000 in scholarship money. There were 5 or 6 different categories and each category had a first place price. There was also a best of competition prize which had a sum of $25,000 per each student I think.

The program in a few words was awesome. There were no defined goals or constraints on what you could do other than that the website had to be for good educational purposes. Everything was totally in your control and up to you and that included content research, website development, and any innovation. Some websites had games and other flashy things. It was all acceptable.

I participated two years in a row. My team was completely international (US, Germany, Singapore) but we lost contact with the Singapore guy shortly after the formation of the team. In short, we failed with just two of us putting in effort and it was our first stab at the competition. But we learned a lot and I gained at least one valuable team member. The second year we added a Hong Kong team member and dumped the other guy for obvious reasons. We revamped the content and added more things that we hoped we would accomplish to make the site more interactive and we went to the finals to meet each other in person for the first time.

Looking back I am glad I took the opportunity for tons of reasons and I wish more students had the same opportunity I did. You got to meet different international individuals and overcome something seemingly impossible and challenging. But you didn't care, you were a carefree high school student. Today, people doing the same thing would be considered entrepreneurs and it is much scarier because your paycheck and credibility is on the line. Just like we failed the first time we learned what not to do (we made sure we recruited someone with previous competition experience) but many people don't have that experience or are too afraid to take the risks.

In addition after winning the competition many big successes shortly came after. It was probably one of the major reasons why I was accepted to universities and why I was offered a technical job in high school. It also stimulated me to accelerate my knowledge and learning abilities because I had no choice but to learn new things like web development in order to compete. Had I not had that experience I probably would have suffered just like everyone else in college because I would have wasted all my time in high school doing stupid things like watching tv or playing games.

So you're right. You should be disappointed. This is actually a poorly designed competition for your benefit.

The most obvious technique for discriminating between an open and a closed universe is to measure the average density of matter. The Friedmann equation describes the competition between the attractive gravitational force and the expansion of the universe. The gravitational attraction exerted at the center of an arbitrary sphere cut out of the universe is proportional to the average density of matter. The measured value of the Hubble constant (H) yields the kinetic energy of the expansion of the sphere. If the present density is below the critical value at which the expansion and gravitational attraction balance, gravity cannot halt the expansion, and the universe must be open. The critical density for closure of the universe is

d critical = 3H2/8G = 5×10-30 gram cm-3

[sorry the equation got munched! -Kim]

where G is Newton's constant of gravitation. Another way to express this critical density is in the number density of atoms, which amounts to 3 x 10-6 atoms per cubic centimeter (cm-3), or only 3 atoms per cubic meter.

I thought the brain was supposed to cool the heart anyway. At least that is what Aristotle said: http://library.thinkquest.org/C0126536/main.php?currentchap=5&currentsect=history.htm

Not a big problem if pipes leak???????????

Have you ever heard of a LOCA - loss of coolant accident? OK, these were different pipes - merely the ones carrying fissile material.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_of_coolant

No, I didn't think so.

Great thinking, Edison. Got a solution for the Chernobyl Sarcophogus? Have any concept of the loss of life that occured immediately there, or the ongoing cancers faced by the people in the now dead zone?

http://library.thinkquest.org/3426/data/chernobyl- today/sarcophagus.conditions.html

No, I didn't think so.

I like this definition:

Narrowband is a transmission medium or channel with a single voice channel (with a carrier wave of a certain modulated frequency). Wideband is a transmission medium or channel that has a wider bandwidth than one voice channel (also with a carrier wave of a certain modulated frequency). Broadband refers to telecommunication that provides multiple channels of data over a single communications medium using frequency division multiplexing.

Through the Wires: Bandwidth

this page claims modern computers can crack an Enigma message in "a few minutes".
But a recent effort to crack some M4 messages using distributed computing estimated some 10,000 PC-hours to break a message.

NASA would be wise to also carefully contemplate what is inducing the dust to rise to form dust storms in the first place. They already have access to THEMIS images from the Mars Odyssey Mission that suggest that there is filamentation of Martian dust storms at both the leading and trailing edges. For a sample image (there are others too), go to:

http://themis.asu.edu/zoom-20060512a

Furthermore, we also know that Martian dust devils can contain lightning bolts at their cores:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/14jul_dust devils.htm

In addition to that, we also know that firsthand accounts from people who have seen the inside of a tornado and lived to tell about it indicate that tornadoes here on Earth tend to shimmer like a fluorescent light from the inside. This is typically obstructed from the outside by dust. There's a brief mention here. I'm sure there are other sources for this information:

http://library.thinkquest.org/C003603/english/torn adoes/insidetheeye.shtml

This could indicate that tornadoes and Martian dust devils are actually both electrical plasmas, and that the electrical activity is inducing the vortex -- not the other way around.

It is possible that vortexes are the natural result of the right-hand rule within electrodynamics. Peter Thomson's Charge Sheath Vortex site is an excellent tutorial on how this may be so:

http://www.peter-thomson.co.uk/tornado/fusion/Char ge_sheath_vortex_basics_for_tornado.html

He demonstrates his point at the end by creating a miniature vortex using electricity in a petri dish.

My point here is that NASA should seriously consider that the Martian dust is molecularly bipolar and is responding to solar and other electrical plasmas that are affecting the Martian planet. The evidence from both Mars and Earth suggests that it is a possibility.

We already know for a fact that upper atmosphere lightning exists. The weather scientists told us that this was not possible, and they were proven to be wrong. It's now easy to find pictures of upper-atmosphere sprites on the web. Try these:

http://usjma.jp/~sprite/sprite2005.11pic.html

http://www.usjma.jp/~kaminari/Sprite%202006/S%2020 06%20%203/sprite2006.3.13.html

http://www.usjma.jp/~kaminari/Gallery/Gallery%20SP RITE/galleryhome.html

http://www.usjma.jp/~kaminari/Gallery/Gallery%20SP RITE/Carrot/gscar01.html

So, why isn't it possible that they could also be wrong about current theories about tornadoes? And why in the world are those dust storms filamentary? When we see enigmatic features on Mars, we should create future missions to follow that data. As of recently, NASA has been exclusively following their script instead of the anomalies. We need to be doing both.

I hope they don't take the politically correct move by depicting the Europeans as the sole aggressors. I'd like to see some historical accuracy.

As you can see, I am horribly bored this evening, but I am doing a test:

I'm running the linux OS you see in the Screenshots link below on a SanDisk 2 GB Cruzer Micro, partitioned like this:
SDA1 700 MB for Knoppix (the CD itself)
SDA5 700 MB for Persistent Home Directory
SDA6 400 MB for GIMP and K3B swap, additional storage also.
SDA7 150 MB linux swap.

Here is the output from TOP:
Tasks: 42 total, 1 running, 41 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 5.5% user, 3.9% system, 0.0% nice, 90.6% idle
Mem: 385800k total, 218864k used, 166936k free, 6456k buffers
Swap: 155192k total, 0k used, 155192k free, 130392k cached
(Uptime not shown, is 2:05)

This PC is a HP Pavilion 8250, Celeron 267 MHZ.
To get the USB drive booted up, I use a small HDD with MSDOS 6.21, and these files.
The small "boot" drive only runs for about 20 seconds, the Menu comes up, you make a choice, then the Linux OS runs entirely from the USB drive. The necessary "loadlin" command line is:
loadlin vmlinuz initrd=miniroot.gz BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix xmodule=s3virge fromhd=/dev/sda1 home=/dev/sda5

Browser is Firefox 2.0.0.4

Thanks for listening...

Rapidweather

Yesterday, you said that JFK said there 200 missles in cuba when there were only 6. Then you followed up saying that MS is like a bad JFK? So, where is the rest of your tripe? here is the speech. to spread light on your FUD and lies.

There should be some limits, but who wouldn't want to get rid of conditions that produce people who are a burden on society? (retards, etc.)

Firstly, if you're trying to say that food should not be dangerous, why are you assigning death into food? I made a coding funny! You wrote Food = DEATH instead of food == DEATH. HA! Ho... hum... Probably shoulda kept that myself...

But more seriously, you have to be SO rich to say FOOD==DEATH. It's ridiculous. Please watch the episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit entitled "Eat This."

...The quality of food and drink in the US has been going steadily down since, well since forever. There are more chemicals (MSG, Aspertame, Preservatives), cheap semi-toxic fillers (Any partially hydrogenated oil), and re-used byproducts in our food than there has ever been. The FDA is basically a rubber stamp for a few corporations who prey on the masses inability to find food sources that are anything but super convenient...

And yet lifespan keeps going up! Which seems so contrary to us eating more and more POISON Your anti-government chanting might play well here on /. but your anti-science stance will not. If it weren't for agricultural science, GM crops and preservatives, the earth would not be supporting 6.5 Billion.

Do I approve of standards in food control? Of course. Do I think that there is a potential threat in the food supply? Surely. Do I think your hyperbole HURTS the cause? yes. When you say food == DEATH, you come across as a well fed jerk who doesn't care. In the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty", and every year 15 million children die of hunger..

Where this gets sad is when anti-science, anti-progress nuts have convinced countries which have FAMINES that the GM food that Americans eat EVERY DAY will poison their people and ruin their crops. When you convince starving people to refuse food that causes the starvation death of MILLIONS -- how evil is that?

You say FOOD = DEATH?

Just the opposite is true my rich friend. No food == DEATH. Food == life

For those of you who aren't theoretical physicists/chemists, another visualization for this Island of Stability is shown in a spiral periodic table. The predicted region of heavy elements that might be stable are labeled superlactindes and come off as a third arm.

They have satellites up there which are dedicated to monitoring the amazon, as well as radar stations on the ground. So they're using google earth for mapping, not for imaging, I would infer. I know that they have active satellites in orbit currently because my father worked on the project that put them there. I'm rather puzzled though by this story which does not mention either the company my father works for nor the name of the project.

Besides, in this "terrorist age", you're instantly guilty if you're hiding something.

Dear Mr. Anonymous Coward,

The worst is when they don't realize how disingenuous they're being, which I believe is the case with you. Ignorance of ignorance is the pits.

Disingenuous? I assure you sir that I meant and believe what I've said above. What's disingenuous is that you attack me personally and sign your name as Anonymous Coward. Actually, that's more ironic than anything.

You bring up the inability to rely on temperature readings from the early 1900s, despite the mercury thermometer having been invented 200 years prior

If you think Ezekiel's mercury thermometer reading back in 1903 is a good source of data, I think you're crazy. What I'm saying is there are more accurate technologies, such as semiconductors and wavelength analysis, that are available today which can be counted on as a good way of more accurately measuring temperature.

but offer no science as to how that increase in activity affects to the temperature of the earth. It's just a correlative model, and it makes sense to you, and there's no way other scientists could have thought to include that in their models

Ok, here it is in a nut shell. Particles are affected by magnetic fields. There was a famous experiment done by two scientists named Stern and Gerlach (source: http://library.thinkquest.org/19662/low/eng/exp-st ern-gerlach.html) where they effected the velocity of particles based magnetic fields induced on them. The Earth's magnetic field acts in a similar way to protect us from the Sun's particles. I'm saying that a natural decrease in the Earth's magnetic field is possibly allowing more particles/radiation into our atmosphere thus attributing to global warming.

I work in an unrelated field, but I once took a science class and we learned simplistic models of complex topics that bear tangential relation to the science I'm debunking

I'm not sure I see your point. For the record, I'm an Electrical Engineer where I studied energy and the very topic we're discussing here. To say I'm not qualified to comment on how energy may be affecting the Earth is silly. Besides, I have a right just like everyone else to speak my mind and you or anyone else won't silence me.

Your final point is that other planets are experiencing temperature variation in the same direction as Earth's. Of course, you discount that Mars has no magnetic field and a different atmospheric makeup, Jupiter has a massive magnetic field, generates huge amounts of energy, and is a gas giant, not rocky, planet

All I'm saying is that when other planets are experiencing climate changes like our planet is, don't you think that maybe nature just does this sort of thing? In other words, if Jupiter and Mars' climate are changing, is it so weird that ours is also?

Armchair science breeds ideas like creationism, intelligent design, and young-Earth theories. To the moderators that modded the parent up, please take a moment to think critically and realize that you are promoting lazy thinking and reinforcing the idea that it's perfectly OK to disregard years of work by thousands of people without ever getting out of your chair, just because something can sound sensible.

Huh? I'd like to make a suggestion for you now Mr. Anonymous Coward. Instead of anonymously putting other people down because you don't like what they're saying, next time engage in a debate and counter with your own ideas instead. I wish you well Mr. Anonymous Coward. Hopefully we can have a cup of coffee sometime.

I don't know where you get your information, but it's wrong. The overall crime rate increased 24% between the radification and repeal of prohibition:

http://library.thinkquest.org/04oct/00492/Crime_Ra te.htm

The murder rate skyrocketed during prohibition, dropped immediately after, and has jumped up again in the 40 years since the "War on Drugs" was declared.

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/crime.htm

I stand my ground that there is very little difference between the two.

Statistically who is more likely to carry a weapon on an airplane? Grandma or Mohammed Habib over there?

http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0212088/tertime.ht m

Actually, I always thought the stupidest one was the introduction of the mongoose into Hawaii.

It was introduced to control another introduced species: rats. Why they thought the already-proven solution of cats was too primitive for them, who knows - but the grand stupidity of the attempt is that rats are nocturnal. Mongooses are diurnal. The two species never met.

So now there are rats and mongooses in Hawaii.

That example just proves to me that humanity really, really needs to learn ecological engineering, because we're apparently too stupid to do this by instinct.

Well then... prove it already.

Show those that believe natural-borne phenomenon such as volcanic activity and animal-sourced emissions are less significant than any man-made pollution. Prove it.

Clearly there are moments in our history when we have wrought damage to our environment. But to say (or even imply) that we are systematically destroying our planet... prove it.

Statements such as (paraphrasing one Gore's current talking points) "we have 10 years to go or our planet is beyond the point of no return" strike me as way over the top. To Mr. Gore or any of his followers/supporters: prove it.

I don't listen to Rush myself (I work during the time of his show), so I don't know what he is saying about this at present. But I can tell you my own point of view, and it is that it's really difficult to listen to the leftist claptrap that's coming out of the so-called "concerned scientist" community these days. It's obviously to me that it's about a political agenda, not about any concern for our environment.

Mod me down, all you lefties and socialists and ecology activists. Enjoy yourselves.

I'd be interested in seeing if any of your responses to this are any more than vitriol, or "just play along and our planet will survive" (still without any facts), or whatever.

I'll start with some real information of natural-borne phenomenon doing more environmental damage than what man can ever do. Google "Mt. Pinatubo", and you will get these links (among many others):

http://library.thinkquest.org/17701/high/effects/p inatubo.html
http://www.answers.com/topic/mount-pinatubo
http://www.volcanolive.com/pinatubo1991.html

Effects of the Eruption (from the last link above):

740 people killed.
A huge caldera was formed 2.5 km across.
260 m was lost off the summit of the volcano.
The ash entered the stratosphere and covered the whole earth within 12 months.
Global temperatures were reduced by 0.5 degree C the year after the eruption.
Forests buried under 50-200 m deep ash and pumice.
During the last five months of 1991 200 mudflows raced down the valleys of Pinatubo.
Damage amounted to $450 million dollars.
8,000 houses were destroyed and 75,000 houses damaged.
2 million people were affected by the eruption.
The biggest volcanic disaster of the 20th century was avoided due to good planning and monitoring.

One point I will repeat:
Global temperatures were reduced by 0.5 degree C the year after the eruption.

This planet does more to ITSELF in a matter of months than us 6+ billion people could ever think of doing to ourselves in our entire recorded history.

I don't know if Rush really said "prove it".

But I certainly will:

PROVE IT.

I'll bet it's warmer than it was 10,000 years ago, too.

Uh, no. Radioactive waste is made of many different isotopes. Some have a half-life of 290 years, and some of it has a half-life of 29,000 years.

Half-life does NOT mean "it's safe after" or "it disappears and is harmless after". It means HALF of it decays into something else.

Please see The Bane of Nuclear Energy

Also, if you bothered to read the article in my original post, you'd see that we have 50,000 tons of waste right NOW, and Yucca would only have 77,000 tons of capacity. Yucca, IF it opens, will open at the earliest in 2014. It will only process at BEST 3,000 tons of waste a year. The industry currently generates 2,000 tons a year.

That means by 2014, there will be 66,000 tons of waste, and it'd take 66 years for Yucca to catch up- but five years after Yucca was completed, we'd again have more nuclear waste than storage capacity (it would not be full until 2039, by which point, we would have generated another 50,000 tons of waste, assuming we keep the same level of nuclear power, which is unlikely given petroleum will be completely gone in 20-30 years.)

very good point I googled (love using it as a verb) for stock types and found this link that seems to explain things... now I have no clue as to the reliability as I just followed the first link on this page.

Now, I didn't verify the types of google stock issued, but still if it is publicly traded, someone has to own the common stock that has voting rights, and someone will most likely sell those at some point

"You could just run your datacenter off the 30 tons of TNT."

http://library.thinkquest.org/C006011/english/site s/huygens.php3?v=2

Christian Huygens got it right in 1666, we could have avoided all the mucking about with steam and such.:)
_______________
Andre' B.

Research does not have to be profit motivated. A lot of research comes from universities which in turn receive funding from the government. I believe this model is better suited to pharmacuetical research than corporations trying to maximize profits.

The government will always refuse to support vital and important research for various political reasons. It also has limited amounts of money to provide, and what the government determines should be a priority may not be what you think it should be; they may determine that a new weapon is more important than a certain virus pandemic. For these reasons, societies that limit their research dollars to the government's whimsy fall behind technologically, or even destroy their own advances in a government-sponsored fit of nationalism.

I won't go as far as T. Boone Pickens' assertion to the Amarillo Rotary Club that "Greed Is Good," but to deny researchers even the option of reward for their endeavors historically leads to slow progress or even a reverse.

Or let's talk about how EQ itself took the crown and stole most customers from UO, i.e., from those who invented the genre.

Except Legends of Kesmai was around before UO, so it's hard to back up a claim that UO invented anything. MUDs have been around for almost 30 years.. slapping a graphical interface on one was just an eventuality. UO didn't invent the graphical interface, nor were they the first to use it for a MUD. At best, they popularized the genre. EQ was the first of its kind to go 3D, and while that too may have been just another eventuality, at least they hold the distinction of being the first.

More tripe. These were not invented by ID proponents but are specific terms used in the Theory of evolution. If, indeed, your erroneous representation of the Theory of Evolution was correct, with the "small" advancements over long eras without any MacroEvolution. How do you explain things like the Cambrian Explosion, or the Wistar Institutes findings See http://library.thinkquest.org/29178/wistar.htm for the damaging findings of the independent Wistar institute which was formed by prominent mathematicians and scientists and statistically disproved the Theory of Evolution. Mind you, this was not a "Christian" organization or folks who were proponents of Creationism or ID. Just the facts.....

Well according to this article: The death toll in the building of the first Great Wall was astounding: More than a million people died building this 3,000 mile section more than 300 people per mile.

Now, if more than a million died building some wall... How many more Chinese must die building the Great Sun of China? China's not exactly known for its valuing of individual's lives in the progress of economics...

http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Har rison/BlackHoleThermo/BlackHoleThermo.html

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answer s/011125b.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/C007571/english/adva nce/core3.htm

ok :

The influeza pandemic post WW1

HIV/AIDS

Suitability for city living

World Hunger :
http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present /stats.htm

In 1994 the Urban Institute in Washington DC estimated that one out of 6 elderly people in the U.S. has an inadequate diet.

The infant mortality rate is closely linked to inadequate nutrition among pregnant women. The U.S. ranks 23rd among industrial nations in infant mortality. African-American infants die at nearly twice the rate of white infants.

Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger

Perhaps...

I envision a project timeline as such:
http://library.thinkquest.org/26157/timeline.html

They should bring cats http://library.thinkquest.org/03oct/00128/en/cats/ history.htm

(I like cats BTW but not enough to think that this -http://catsinsinks.com/- site is cute )

Its relevant because this is a discussion of Microsoft. As far as humor goes...your sense of it is clearly broken. Study up so that you can emulate it.

Here you go.

Read the part about "hyperbole."

The first to climb Everest? What do you think the Sherpa guides had been doing, pray tell? Or did they just guess their way when guiding?

China used clay tablet printing for widespread (semi, most people were illiterate) in the BCs.

AD 800s is for the mechanical clock, not an accurate timepiece. Try looking up when Europe created the mechanical clock. Exactly.

http://library.thinkquest.org/23062/mclock.html

Time measurement was very important for the Chinese since they based so much of their life on precise astrological measurements.

--Rob

There is story in Scotland about a crow which would refuse to go back to its nest in a tower, unless it saw all the men that went in, come out again. Until that is, more than five men went in, and the crow lost count.

Being able to understand the concept of zero would be particularly useful to a bird when counting the number of predators around its nest.

Could you please provide a reference for how the names ought to be pronounced? Every single pronunciation guide I could find on-line said, to the last one, that the pronunciation of "Zeus" is [ZOOS]. I've had an interest in Greek Mythology for some time, and I've never come across any other pronunciation. If there actually is a pronunciation that is more correct than that, I am very curious to know what it is.

Here are a few references I found when attempting to find a pronunciation guide:
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Diction ary&va=Zeus&x=0&y=0
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/z/zeus.html
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0853377.htm l
http://library.thinkquest.org/J002110/zeus.htm
http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/z/z0012500.html
http://reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/Z/Zeus. html
http://www.gods-heros-myth.com/godpages/zeus.html
http://www.hyperdic.net/dic/zeus.htm
http://www.uwf.edu/english/lanier/Pronunc.html

Sheep with human brains and other organs.
or
Google Search
- The glow from the firefly has been inserted into tobacco plants making them glow in the dark.
or Google Search
- A human embryo cloned using a cell from a man's leg and a cow's ovum lived and developed for twelve days until it was terminated.
or Google Search
- Goats bred with a spider gene produce milk which is processed to make "BioSteel".. The US military has set up their own goat farm to make bulletproof vests, aerospace and medical supplies.
or Google Search
- Extended Life Spans
or Google Search

This is not just a turning point in history. It's also the fulcrum upon which technology balances our very evolution. ted

For example, there are a number of Torahs recovered from Shtetls long since wiped out through the Pograms or by the Nazis. My hometown synagogue has one such Torah.

There is a family that goes to one of my relative's synagogues, and they helped save a Torah just before the Holocaust. Back in Europe just before it was too late (I don't remember which country) the Rabbi and some members of the synagogue took the Torah from the ark, wrapped it up securely, and buried it somewhere in the town. Some years after the Holocaust the survivors dug that Torah up and it's now being used in a synagogue somewhere.

I wonder if anyone knows how close we are to the power of the human brain yet.

How do measure the computational power of the human brain?

Here's a 6 year old napkin calculation.

They give a figure of 10^8 MIPS. Figure 1:8 for a MIPS:MFLOPS ratio. So ~13 TFLOPS.

The IBM Blue Gene/L is the current record holder at 135 TFLOPS. That puts it at the power of 10 human brains if that napkin calculation has any validity.

For average consumer computers...

The ordinary computer of Aug. 2004 performed 18,000 MIPS. Ref

Human brain power is ~12.44 Moore's law cycles away from that point. That gives 19-25 years.

So, your computer should be more powerful than your brain by 2030.

Renewable? No. Clean? It depends.

Renewable? YES! It's called reprocessing. We recycle the used radioactive material that comes out of a nuclear power plant and reprocess it in a breeder reactor to get more useable nuclear material. The result is more material suitable for a reactor and some (as in very little) low level radioative material that is much easier to hand and dispose of.

The original plan back in the 50's when we staretd using nuclear power was to use reprocessing on the fuel and make waste management easier. Carter nixed this. So as for "Clean? It depends." well, it still depends.

Here's some links on the matter, please actually read them, they give a better explanation than I can:
http://www.argee.net/DefenseWatch/Nuclear%20Waste% 20and%20Breeder%20Reactors.htm http://library.thinkquest.org/17940/texts/nuclear_ waste_future/nuclear_waste_future.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/ fasbre.html

However, whether it was numerically correct from the start may not be the important part. How about just nailing down the shape of the curve? Isn't that worth something by itself?

On the other hand, does anyone actually have a graph of transistors per chip, or transistor size plotted against time, covering the past 40 years? That is, is anybody checking the numbers?

I guess I can do my own Googling:

Gordon's graph paper that shows cost versus number of transistors per chip

Intel processors, a little behind the curve - doubling every two years.

More Intel processors (same ones), but this time doubling every 18 months.

This one is probably the most useless. It looks good (although too large to display the whole thing) until you notice the disclaimer for the vertical (Transistors) axis: "Note: vertical scale of chart not proportional to actual Transistor count." WTF?

I'm sure the Canadians would relish the opportunity to fire up the white house again.

That'd be the short story The Hole Man by Larry Niven. It won the 1975 Hugo for short story, and is included in his collection of short stories, "N-Space."

When going over the doppler effect in my second semester of Physics, I asked the prof why our radios don't get distorted by the doppler effect when we are driving. He swiftly made me look like an ass by doing what I should have done instead of thinking out loud: plugged the numbers into the equation. As such, the equation.

Yes, and the "device" industry was doing just fine without patents for about 2 million years before patents.

It is a (common) logical falsehood that software would be where it is now without software patents. It might, but the same could be said for any patents on anything. Unfortunately we can't repeat history twice and try it out both ways and see which is better.

The question is whether the protection of patents drive some people and/or companies to put effort (and money) into developing new things, whether they be medical devices or object recognition algorithms. Obviously it does drive some developments. The real question, which seems impossible to answer, is whether more developments + patents is better than just having the fewer developments. More developments + patents mean you have to pay to use the developments or not use them at all. But in the end you get more developments than without patents.

Which is better? I don't know, and I'm sure you don't either. But it's an interesting topic.

I think they might be wearing them anyways

I agree. Many people laugh at and euphemize about death.