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Of course, nothing ever goes wrong

History of Democracy

The ideas developed in Europe and was brought along with europeans that emigrated to America, where the theories were put into practical work rather quickly, as it was a new nation without the momentum of a couple of millenia's worth of history and politics to fall back upon. Except for the native americans, but they didn't have much say in these matters.

I can't really say which country was first with implementing true democracy, because then we would have to decide at what point a democracy really is a true democracy. For example, women and people of lower classes were not allowed to vote in many early european democracies, and I am sure we could find groups that weren't in early american democracy too. The first true democracy that most people could agree with would probably be the first nation where every single grown up individual, regardless of gender or race, has the right to take part in the election of the government. Which nation was first with that, I really don't know.

You seem to reject Greece being the cradle of democracy on the the fact that they used slaves. Well, guess what, so did the united states for the first couple of centuries too.

And, btw, democracy is not something that one guy figured out over night and then implemented the next day, it is a concept that has evolved and gone in and out of fashion over millenia, with the Greek system being one of the first that implemented it in any form.

Yeah, it's always the fault of those pesky foreigners...

Well, great Arthur C. Clarke told us they will come.

We just didn't know they were interested in our space junk :P

There is already a working example of this: : the German school system (warning, this link contains cheesy midi music)

They have have several different schools, some of which are geared for a working occupation and one (Gynasium) which is for univerisity bound kids. Kids are slotted into these schools at a very young age--10yo I think. One of the things that makes this work is that (supposedly) training in a tradeskill is not associated with low prestige like it is in the states. Being a cook or a car mechanic gets a fair amount of respect and does not result in a salary that is 1/10 of a doctor.

I'm not German so if there are any Deutchlanders out there that can comment on their experiences with this system I would appreciate it.

Here is an article detailing the comparison.

That'd make you the first Human Giraffe.

no it wouldn't

So I'd love for you to cite some specific examples of having been explicitly lied to by advertisements. And please be specific. I am honestly curious about your perceptions.

At least i don't tried to use Holliwood examples, like in Jurassik Park, Mimic or Godzilla, those examples would have been definatelly less serious than using Simpsons episodes.

And about controls, yep, the released rats could be sterilized, have some way of controlling/contain them, but, you know, shit happens and murphy rulez.

Not that I'm paranoid or anything. Ok, ok, so I'm paranoid and the governments' out to get me, but I still gotta wonder how quickly it was cracked by the boys with the big iron. Even though private/personal computational horsepower has increased dramatically over the years, while govt funding has decreased, I still can't see a general purpose CPU or network of CPUs being able to compete with dedicated crypto hardware .... Am I wrong??
Another interesting link here
Paper: "Architectural considerations for cryptanalytic hardware"
Cypherpunks Tonga

Perhaps someone will discover a work-around to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, or perhaps researchers will find flaws in the implementation of the algorithm. But if history is any indication of the future, quantum cryptography will eventually be cracked.

For those not quite ready for the leap to calculus, I've found this an excellent resource, Math for Morons like Us.

Side note: With the advent of no-overhead Publishing on Demand, from the likes of Lulu and Cafe Press, it seems to me a professor could put one of these electronic text in book form and sell it directly to students for $30 a pop, and still make a profit.

"If India can bring back space nuts, old thruster bells, and the like, they could make a killing on eBay!"

There's several spanners loose up there along with a Hassleblad camera...

What other hydrogen airships? I've found mention of other disasters, but nothing (other than the Roma, which only mentioned explosion...not fire) concerning flaming deaths...

Suppose Apple has this 100 times better memory that will fail every 2 days. How many times in avarage will they have to run a computation that takes a week? A month?

So now you have the question of how many tries it will take to get two successful runs when the probability of a success is 3.02%. For this one uses a negative binomial distribution. The average number of tries until you get 2 successes is 66.2.

You can see why ECC memory is considered very important. Say their memory is 10,00x better than mine, then the average number of tries to get two successes goes down to 2.83. Divide big mac's GFLOPS by 2.83, and they drop to 16th place on the top 500 list.

How about one hundred thousand times better memory? Probably doesn't exist. The chance of a week long calculation failing is 3.44%. Small enough to not double check the answer? I doubt it.

Suppose Apple has this 100 times better memory that will fail every 2 days. How many times in avarage will they have to run a computation that takes a week? A month?

So now you have the question of how many tries it will take to get two successful runs when the probability of a success is 3.02%. For this one uses a negative binomial distribution. The average number of tries until you get 2 successes is 66.2.

You can see why ECC memory is considered very important. Say their memory is 10,00x better than mine, then the average number of tries to get two successes goes down to 2.83. Divide big mac's GFLOPS by 2.83, and they drop to 16th place on the top 500 list.

How about one hundred thousand times better memory? Probably doesn't exist. The chance of a week long calculation failing is 3.44%. Small enough to not double check the answer? I doubt it.

I don't think anyone would patch me if a security hole was found...

I know you were joking, but that isn't quite true due to the wonders of retroviral gene therapy. This is actually a somewhat viable technology now, having first been successfully demonstrated by Alain Fischer in 1999 to treat a group of children with X-SCID (better known as "bubble boy syndrome"). (However, there admittedly remain certain obstacles to gene therapy's widespread application. Damned bureaucrats!)

....read up on pepper moths in London sometime....

Maybe you should, too...
http://library.thinkquest.org/29178/pepper.htm
The colour variation was already in the DNA of the moth, just like some humans are Caucasian, some are Oriental, some are African, etc.etc. With selective breeding you can bring out any existing trait in any species. It's been shown that within 6 generations, any race of people on earth could be completely changed to appear as another race with selective breeding. But that doesn't make the children of such an experiment any more, or less, human. The dark hair and eyes of an Oriental, the dark skin of an Australian Aborigine, the muscles of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the sheer whiteness of a Dutch or Swiss person (all stereotypical, I know...I'm trying to prove a point here), are all encoded in my DNA right now. Bringing them out through selective breeding proves evolution in the same way that the RIAA proves that all P2P users are hardened criminals.
The potential is already there, but you've got to do something to bring it out.

So why are you bringing up silly things like "incredible new species" that occur spontaneously? That's not what I'm talking about.

Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record of gradual changes to species to develop into new ones.
If someone does manage to come up with something that looks good at first glance, further investigation reveals startling difficulties with the evidence.
For example, the rib count problem with horses. While lining up the number of toes to follow the evolutionary pattern, the number of ribs is all over the map. Put the ribs in order, and the number of toes is inconsistent.
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/horse.html
http://library.thinkquest.org/29178/horse.htm
I could find plenty more examples like this, but I don't see the point. You're just as blinded by your presuppositions as you claim that I am.

Hmm, thats a new word for me but I don't think it's going to get into my every day vocabulary. proka-what? No less than five words I've never absorbed before (the words not the subjects).

Yeah, biology at my school was science for art students. So I stopped early. Sad, because I liked it but it clashed with Maths, Physics and Chem.

What I am vaguely concerned about is Mr/Ms Lemming's irrational fear of bacteria. Is s/he going to die attempting to do a personal purge? Has this been done before or would it be a new category for Darwin Awards?

if you're interested more, this case is the constitutional basis for the exclusionary rule, explain in brief here again, IANAL I just like to read legal docs.

Sure. Some links below, found on google. I'd show you my textbook, if I could :)

http://library.thinkquest.org/26026/Science/extinc tion.html

http://biomed.brown.edu/Courses/BIO48/38.Extinctio n.HTML

http://nitro.biosci.arizona.edu/courses/EEB105/lec tures/extinction/extinction.html

http://fig.cox.miami.edu/Faculty/Tom/bil160sp98/10 _notes.html

Simon

Evidence.

from when I was judging ThinkQuest 2001. They were really, really bright. Needless to say they won a platinum award. Their contest entry is here.

from when I was judging ThinkQuest 2001. They were really, really bright. Needless to say they won a platinum award. Their contest entry is here.

Couldn't find a better link, sorry.

By sticking to Java the child will tend to learn clean programming design and algorithms, rather than wild pointer debugging tricks (also the case with BASIC I might add). As an added bonus the child will be learning one of the most commercially viable languages, and one with a lnog lifetime ahead of it IMO. I'd also begin exposure to SQL (MySQL or Postgres) when you felt the child was up to the added complexity and workload. Up to this point the cost has been $0.

Once the child (now 14 or 15 I'm sure;) was proficient coding in Java, I'd suggest exploring C, assembler, drivers and low-level machine architecture. Within a couple of years any CS program in the country should be easy pickings.

IANAP[hysicist], and so I have some questions about this process.

What I know:

• Photons have energy
• Light waves have the property of frequency which we percieve as hue
• The energy and frequency of a photon are related by E = hf
• Energy cannot be created or destroyed

So, when light is converted to a higher frequency (shorter wavelength) where does the necessary energy come from? The shockwave? What about when it is converted to a lower frequency (longer wavelength)? Where does the excess energy go? If the conversion really is 100% efficient (I'm a bit skeptical of that claim), then just imagine the solar panels we could have; sucking up all the UV raining down on us and emitting a soft red glow.

Fascinating stuff. I've got to study more optics and electromagnetic physics.

Back in the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church wanted a Cathedral built, they would pay a bunch of Freemasons to do it. The Freemasons viewed themselves as creative artisans, and they closely guarded the secrets they used to construct these impressive houses of worship.

The method they used, however, was less than impressive. Typically, they would start with a general design, and piece together stone and mortar until something collapsed, which happened quite often. Then they would patch the section that collapsed and keep on going until something else fell down, or they finished. Given the level of understanding with regards to Physics and Material Science, those Freemasons has no other choice than to build them this way.

Now fast forward to the 21st century. The engineering disasters on par with those medieval collapses can be counted on one hand (Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse are the only two I can think of). This is directly due to the fact that a civil engineer can determine if a design is structurally sound before they build it.

Contrast this with modern day software development. We can't even tell if a system is flawed after we build it, let alone before. So software gets written, deployed, and put into the marketplace that has no assurances whatsoever of actually doing what it's supposed to do (hence the 10,000 page EULA).

You can't have Civil Engineers until you have Physics. And you won't have 100% bulletproof software until you have Software Engineering. And you won't have that until someone can figure out a way to prove that a given peice of software will perform as it's supposed to. JUnit is a step in the right direction, but there's still a long way to go. It's going to take a breakthrough on the order of Newton to make Software Engineering as reliable a discipline as Civil Engineering.

On the ground first ... In orbit first... why not the (thin) air ....

The Roads To Space Travel

ThinkQuest maintains a huge library of past entries, all of which are educational and most of them are entertaining. Your cousins should be able to find information on any subject they're interested in there.

Forgive me if any of these have been previously mentioned. I haven't finished reading the thread yet.
FunBrain.com
The Exploratorium: the museum of science, art and human perception.
BrainPOP
Reeko's Mad Scientist Lab - Free Fun Educational Science Experiments
KidsCom, a fun site for kids
Thinkquest Libraries

Very young kids have problems with attention span, reading, typing, etc. so you may want to use something like Lego Mindstorms instead of text-based programming.

Actually it's not just kids how have attention span issues who can benefit from Lego Mindstorms. If your siblings haven't yet taken high school geometry yet (or haven't had enough exposure to boolean logic), then Lego Mindstorms is a really cool to get a day-to-week-long introduction. Past that, I'd say, based on my own experience, that (when I was 11) C was difficult for me to pick up until after I learned Pascal. They both have similar structures, but Pascal was a much better introduction because of its use of natural language in most of its syntax.

You can find some tutorials here, here, here, here, and here.

The only problem with Pascal (nowadays) is that compilers/debuggers seem hard to come by. Here's a free one that might help. If that doesn't work, then you could always try something this, but I wouldn't recommend it for the beginner who doesn't even know what compilers or linkers are and why they are necessary.

Actually, this is exactly what I've been doing since last year. In addition to the Cisco CCNA course offered at my high school, a teacher picked a few students out of the C++ class, including myself, to learn PHP and MySQL. In fact, last year we entered the Thinkquest USA contest, and actually took first place with this website. So, to answer your question, yes they are teaching PHP and MySQL.

Actually, this is exactly what I've been doing since last year. In addition to the Cisco CCNA course offered at my high school, a teacher picked a few students out of the C++ class, including myself, to learn PHP and MySQL. In fact, last year we entered the Thinkquest USA contest, and actually took first place with this website. So, to answer your question, yes they are teaching PHP and MySQL.

What exactly is the physical difference between living and dead snip
This is an excelent question, and center to many heated debates. When I was in highschool, I was taught that if it could breath (as in burn glucose to obtain energy), then it was alive. It seems that the scientific comunity conscents on at least seven traits of living orgainsims. The following articles go further into this subject:

• thinkquest site. Unfortunately the site is down for maintenance, nevertheless u can access it in the following google cache
• Characterisitcs of living matter

It would be a very interesting if we were to find some outer space entity which fulfilled only some of the listed requisits. I guess that would put a real test on to define what is alive, and what is dead.

There is quite a comprehensive site here detailing the effects.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Mine is "Imagination is more important than knowledge".

In any case, I found this site a while back. It's somewhat of a tutorial on Einstein, allowing you to do "Easy" or "Advanced", and fairly informative.

Theory of Relativity

Radiation Overview

And yes, the stone fish is the world's most venomous.

Looking at Google, I'm seeing lots of conflicting stories about the good old stone fish. Most state that it is the most venomous, but "can often be deadly". I've definitely seen Aussie documentaries that are perhaps understating the dangers. This one states to immerse foot in hot water, which I have heard disables the venom.

This site suggests that death by heart failure can occur.

The deadly (female sydney) funnelweb is a fairly small spider though, and I'm pretty sure it's not very closely related to the tarantula

I saw something on TV recently that claimed that they were. This site suggests it, along with many others, are being incorrectly called tarantulas. Here's an interesting site, stating that they're not tarantulas.

A hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer!

Jupiter is by far the most interesting planet (with it's moons) to me, other than the Earth. More information as well as pictures can be found on NASA's site for the planet itself.

If there are zany creationists reading this out there, please do feel free to email me links or give me better arguments via email. I've had this invitation open for years, but no one has given me anything other than b.s. so far.

Since you asked for a *zany* creationists reply...

For the same reason God can't be proven to exist, I don't think that creationism can be proven true; at least not through purely scientific means. Though I do believe that one can infer truth about creationism from scientific evidence stemming from the nature of evolution itself. Go here and look at the questions posed at the bottom of the page.

Over a historically very short period -- just 40 million years -- the basic forms of just about all of life in existence evolved. I think it is interesting to note that the first story of creation as told in the book of Genesis gives a fairly accurate account of the order in which life evolved as determined through science. Now I don't know how much people knew about the Cambrian period almost 2000 years ago, but the correlation is interesting. Genetically speaking, it's entirely possible that God had it all planned out before the Cambrian period even began, or even before the world was created. The triggers that have shaped and continue to shape our evolution could have been placed already and we just haven't discovered them yet. Ever see 2001: A Space Odyssey? Remember how each time the monolith is discovered, life evolves in some significant fashion? Isn't it funny how each generation tends to rediscover the monolith in its own way and time?

Scientists and computer programmer types generally have a hard time accepting the existence of God and thus creationism. I think this results from a tendency to develop knowledge from that which is directly observable. Taken to the extreme, as was the case for Einstein, they can come to knowledge of God as the force behind the design of the universe. This is a result of the fact that existence itself is so complex and yet there is order to it.

I believe that any and all possible paths we have or can travel have been plowed already. However, it is one thing to simply shine a light in front of yourself as you walk and completely another to look back over where you have traveled and think "why?" I think it is here that we can best determine where we might be going.

I didnt know when I read your post,

But, your question started me thinking, because you had a very good point about defraggin moving all of the data to the slower part of the drive.

According to my research on the subject, unlike CD's, hard drive tracks start at the outer edges of the hard drive and work their way in.

So, that means that not only is defragmenting a good thing to do because of its resequencing of the data, but also because it moves the data to a faster portion of the drive

my sources
Inside computers, an In Depth guide
&
Disk Layout

This doesn't surprise me in the least. Up here in Canada, the US Government rushed through tariff legislation to appease their own labour board, why not do the same for Hollywood? Or AOL with their vast empire of Trademark ownership?

When will the US Government ceast this protectionism agenda and work towards a more harmonious system?

I'm also reminded of the Helms-Burton act where One provision forbids executives of companies dealing with Cuba using U.S. property and their families from entering the U.S..

Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but it does make me wonder when all of this is going to end. I live in canada, damnit.. I don't want to be constantly looking over my shoulder for Uncle Sam.

--Maetrix--

I would strongly disagree with your comment.

Up until a few hundred years ago science and arts were one of the same. Looking back trough the course of history a hell of a lot of famous inventors, scientists and mathematicians were also artists.
Look at things like the works of Leonardo Davinci , the elements or any old biology book you care to mention.

Just because you have a high level of creativity and inspiration doesn't mean that you can't do the math or apply engineering first principles to a project.
Sure, some of the projects out there will be purely created artistically, and some may be enginered(very hard to do with software!) but a lot of projects and probably most of the best ones will be a mix of artistic inspiration and creativity, and engineering principles.

Personally when I start to code on the 'Unknown' I play around with a few creative ideas, then re work those creative ideas into an well designed piece of software.

Water cooling, with the modern invention of the ocean, requires FAR less power than a CPU fan. You could build the computer into the boat so that the hull acts as a heat sink... your CPU would never get over 80 degrees.

Lawyers should consider the use of a seperate EULA, covering the EULA. Formally and informally it should be known as the EULA-EULA.

Any reference to the EULA-EULA provision which is self-covering should be called the EULA-LOOP in honour of the Hula Hoop.

It should be noted that complex life probably evolved not once but at least twice on Earth. The Ediacarans (Check it) are believed to be the first multicellular organisms, but they are not the ancestors of any currently-living kingdom. They first showed up about 50 million years before the Cambrian explosion. They vanished somewhat mysteriously. Some believe they were gobbled up by the first animals.

I was hoping to see a Calabi-Yau space, myself. How many 1x3's would that take?

I don't know if you were trolling or not, and I'm sure you've read the replies that this is not what Claud Shannon was talking about. Although I don't think its necessarily analogous to spam, no one has pointed out that it was actually Benoit Mandelbrot who said that noise is inevitable in communications. Is this where you get nlog(n)?.