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Better yet, just go right here. Orbinauts represent - hail probe!

The inclination is crazy high because the russians only had a site at something like 45 degrees (roughly as far north as Wisconsin).

There are two separate effects:

1) The closer you are to the equator the more mass you can boost because the equator is spinning rather quickly... obviously about a timezone per hour...

2) Out of inclination launches are possible, but they waste tons of fuel. You can launch into any inclination orbit from any latitude, it just costs a ton of fuel.

Go play with Orbiter for awhile, get a feel for orbital mechanics.

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

http://www.beyondtheredline.net/demo.html is supposed to be a pretty good Battlestar Galactica -themed game based on the Freespace2 engine... it's even available in the Debian/Ubuntu repos so it's pretty easy to try.

I also liked Vendetta-Online back in the day, before they became more EVE-like and added crappy licensing requirements for the bigger ships. I'll have my space combat without pointless grinding, thank you. But it's worth a look.

Sadly, haven't seen anything with true 6DoF physics and gravity, except for some of the more hardcore simulations like Orbiter. Quite a bit of a learning curve, and there are a lot of addons (many of them incompatible with each other) that you have to fuss with to make it look pretty and have sound effects, but it's quite rewarding (and unfortunately Win32 only). There's a space combat addon somewhere, but I haven't played with it yet.

That'll be $5, please.

Freeon. Delicious Freeon.

Actually, that's spelled Freon. But no, in this case it's helium and magnets.

Check out Orbiter - without a doubt the most realistic (and incredible) space flight simulator around. My little brother has basically taught himself orbital mechanics using Orbiter and online tutorials for the game (if you can call it that!) The real deal - Hohmann transfer orbits and spaceflight mechanics-type concepts I'd never heard of.

When I saw "the space game", I thought for sure they were talking about Orbiter. If "designing your own route to Jupiter" is something you're interested in, do yourself a favour and check it out.

What useful thing has the UN ever really done?

The extradition treaties, trade treaties, and eradication of some major diseases that we have now would not have occured as soon without the UN.

They're useless at best

Absolutely wrong.

potentially hazardous at worst.

Absolutely right.

For an alternative insight into some of the issues here, you could do worse than to read the report "Probability and Statistics in the Law", by Philip Dawid.

The abstract is

"The field of legal reasoning is full of logical subtleties and probabilistic pitfalls. I survey a number of these, pointing out some of the problems and ambiguities, and various attempts to deal with them. Some celebrated court cases are used for illustration".

(PDF warning) http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/aistats/fullpapers/123.pdf

From the Haystack FAQ we can surmise that you run some small client program and point your browser at that.

That makes sense, but if the local proxy's going to encode your request for whyweprotest.net in a stream of requests for weather.com, there needs to be a proxy on the other side of the firewall that intercepts those requests and extracts the request for whyweprotest.net.

So here's the problem: how does your local proxy get the address of the remote proxy, without the Iranian secret police being able to run their own copy of Haystack, get the address of the remote proxy, and block it (or, worse, use the firewall to record all the addresses that connect to it)?

In the literature, this goes by the imaginative name of the "proxy discovery problem". Solutions include privately sharing proxy addresses with trusted friends, distributing addresses by email, requiring clients to solve computational puzzles, requiring users to solve captchas, and using the structure of social networks to limit the number of proxies an attacker can discover.

Which method does Haystack use? We don't know, because Austin Heap hasn't published any technical details of the design, or submitted it for review by a trusted party like the EFF, despite calls for him to do so.

The gold standard here is Tor: all the code is open source, there are detailed design documents, they submit their designs for peer review by the security community, and they have an excellent track record of fixing the weaknesses that are found. Austin Heap needs to learn a lesson from them, because just saying "It's ok, we encipher everything" doesn't cut it in 2010.

Frontier? Really? Try Orbiter.

Take a thousand families, with two children, where one of the children was a boy born on a Tuesday.

At least one of the children. That's the crucial difference. If you look at two-child families where the first child's a boy born on a Tuesday, then yes, the probability that the second child's a boy is 1/2. Similarly, if you look at two-child families where the second child's a boy born on a Tuesday, then the probability that the first child's a boy is 1/2. But if you look at two-child families where either or both of the children is a boy born on a Tuesday, the probability that both children are boys is 13/27.

Seriously. Here's the code. Try it for yourself.

It's not OSS, but Orbiter may be what you're looking for.

A super-strong magnetic field may not be so surprising when you already have a singularity :).

Strange, unless my memory fails me, that Pace VanDevender guy used to have a website which displayed the Donegal site, and asked people to submit reports of similar incidents. But I can't find traces of that site anymore. Can't find it in archive.org either. Maybe my memory is bad.

But the Pace VanDevender guy definitely exists, is a scientist and he definitely did write about it. And none of his peers have gone out and said he's a raving lunatic...

Maybe he was really on to something and the military asked him to shut up :).

Anyway here's what I dug up, I think these are pics of the site:
http://www.geologywales.co.uk/storms/autumn06b.htm
From a thread discussing it: http://www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=7952&start=1

And also:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~zcapc53/great_balls_of_fire.doc
http://zseltvay.com/first_installment_extreme_ball_lightning.htm

See the request for help from VanDevender at http://zseltvay.com/#A paper on (the link is #A paper on, but I'm too lazy to workaround Slashdot)

Looks pretty low resolution to me compared to NASA's HiRISE images from 2008. The wikipedia page has a link to a nice time magazine gallery and the Official HiRISE SiteGo ahead click on the 3374 × 3300 pixel image on this UCL page for an EXTREME closeup of Phobos.

So nice snap shots ESA, but hardly extreme...

Is this Higgs particle increasing in mass because the fermion is passing through/near it, or does the fermion increase in mass as a result of passing through/near this Higgs particle? Or am I misunderstanding the mechanics of this and the additional mass is due to the 'clustering' of these fermions in close proximity to each other?

Thanks for the link. It does help visualize this a bit better.

At one level, all you need to know is that the Standard Model "needs" this particle - no Higgs Boson, and the Standard Model may fall. Finding the Higgs (and thus its mass) should also help in making predictions in other areas, such as cosmology.

As for why the Higgs Boson is needed, you might find this interesting.

So if the engineers had their way, we'd be flying around in something like this?
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/images/gallery32.jpg

Ah yes, Orbiter! (Mod the parent Troll up, he actually knows what he's talking about beneath the harsh exterior he presents towards a cold, cruel world)

I spent many a good hour playing with Orbiter... I even managed to get the Space Shuttle into an irregular but stable orbit manually once (but of course without any fuel left for the reentry burn). I also liked their take at the advanced HUD and orbital transfer calculator on their Delta glider.

Anyway, I think they had some technical limitations that made it tough to implement multiplayer... plus not much of a damage model. But yes... Orbital and also Celestia are fun sims to explore, but not so much for combat :/ .

One might add that compared to most European languages English rules for pronunciation are not easy to grasp, to say the least: e.g., compare "creature/creation", "corpse/corps", "horse/worse", "head/heat".

Getting to the moon seems like just getting escape velocity and proper aiming

Don't forget, at a precise instant. At each instant, your aim and desired delta-V vary. And a minor nit-pic that your delta-V can be somewhat less than escape velocity... After all you only need to match orbit w/ the moon, and if the moon were "orbiting" at escape velocity, it would have escaped.

getting a proper circular orbit means achieving velocity AND THEN adjusting to get a proper orbit.

You mean, getting any-ole vaguely circular orbit that doesn't dip below the atmosphere is no big deal. And yes you do need two burns because any delta-V change you make more or less results in a delta-position change at the other end of the orbit.

Download a copy of Orbiter (its free) and play around:

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

If you want to try it yourself check out orbiter:

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

At least getting into earth orbit is simple, especially with the high powered experimental rocket plane they have.

You may actually need another burn to circularize your orbit if you want to get into earth orbit. It is called apogee burn.

This is not quite child's play but they offer you some nice tools while flying to actually get to the moon and planets.

Even tho it's early in the century, it might well be the longest eclipse of the century. I imagine that the calculations to predict eclipses and their duration would be relatively straightforward by modern standards. You probably wouldn't even need to take relativity into account.

They're not. You don't need GR, but you do need a lot of calculus and geometry. I've done an Astronomy masters by coursework and we didn't even attempt to cover this.

Good approximations however were worked out by the earliest civilizations...Read about the Saros cycle here:
http://www.ulo.ucl.ac.uk/public/eclipse/ecl_calc.html

Combined with this research, which shows that ugly men release more sperm, the chance of conception appears to be highest when a stunningly attractive woman sleeps with an truly ugly man.

THANK YOU GOD!!

Combined with this research, which shows that ugly men release more sperm, the chance of conception appears to be highest when a stunningly attractive woman sleeps with an truly ugly man. Somebody please think of the children.

Or, given the odds of that, we may just need to think of the child.

We've already had Christine Brinkley/Billy Joel.

Odds of another truly ugly man overchicking that much? Very small.

Combined with this research, which shows that ugly men release more sperm, the chance of conception appears to be highest when a stunningly attractive woman sleeps with an truly ugly man. Somebody please think of the children.

As ever, the media companies are deploying insupportable statistics. Most of the numbers for 'lost revenue' are coming form multiplying 'estimates' for the number of files shared by the recommended retail price of the shared item, which makes the huge leap of believing that every single download that the RIAA thinks happened represents a lost sale that otherwise would have taken place. This assumption is not only naive but studies have shown that people who download music for free also buy more music. In the UK the government is basing policies on similarly erroneous information bought and paid for by the media companies. In that particular case the 'academic study' got it's numbers for lost revenue from an industry press release...

Take this list (from CIBER site):

Dr Andrew Boyd Associate Research associate, information flow
David Brown Founding Director British Library. Journal publishing
Elizabeth A. Chapman Associate Deputy Director of Library Services, UCL
Andy Dawson Researcher UCL
Dr Tom Dobrowolski Founding Director University of Warsaw, web policy
Professor Barrie Gunter Director University of Leicester, mass communications
John Haynes Director Institute of Physics Publishing
Paul Huntington Senior Research Fellow UCL, data mining and web metrics
Hamid R. Jamali Researcher UCL, virtual scholar, digital information seeking
Professor Michael Mabe Founding Director Director, Elsevier Science, publishing strategy
Professor Michel Menou Associate Founding Director Consultant, information and development
Dr Rob Miller Researcher UCL
Professor David Nicholas Managing Director UCL, deep log analysis, digital information seeking and the evaluation of digital information systems/libraries
Dr Ian Rowlands Managing Director City University, information policy.
Bill Russell Founding Director Director, Emerald - marketing and sales
Chris Russell Associate Co-founder, eDigitalResearch.com
Dr Iain Stevenson Associate City University, publishing strategy
Dr Carol Tenopir Honorary senior research fellow University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Milverton Wallace Associate Consultant, NetMedia, new media
Professor Anthony Watkinson Founding Director Consultant, digital transition
Dr Berenika Webster Researcher University of Wellington, bibliometrics
Peter Williams Senior Research Fellow UCL, consumer health information
Richard Withey Director Independent Digital, new media strategies

Find bios/vitae for each. Find out what professional organizations each belong to.
Get the ethics policies from each.
For each that has an ethics statement regarding fabrication, submit a complaint about that person, attaching the work in question and subsequent research showing the falsifications.

Make copies of each such complaint and compile them into two volumes. Send one to the UCL ethic committee at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/staff/committees/ethics/ and one to the provost http://www.ucl.ac.uk/provost/ . Send copies to media outlets that display some leanings towards ethical behavior (as opposed to simply publishing expose type junk stories; you don't want to poison your own well). If they publish this, make copies of each and send them as follow ups to the ethics committee and provost as above.

Of course this requires that people care enough to do something more than simply publish stories about it saying how awful it is, and publish links and summaries elsewhere so those people can 'discuss' how awful it is. The proportion of stories and discussions regarding such awfulisms compared to submissions to ethics committees on science/journalism fraud indicates that damn near all people care more about talking about it than making it stop. Doing something about it doesn't require academic/scientific credentials, just a bit of work with careful attention to getting the facts right (ie. researching the sources back to the original). It needs to be good enough that the probable threats of libel lawsuits can be countered with accusations of barratry, as the facts presented serve as proof no libel occurred.

Regarding the Guardian's article: there was no science done here. Research, yes (very poor, yes) but science, no. The numbers tossed about are just that, not statistics in the scientific (inferential stats) sense. There's a tendency to call numbers used in support of statements 'statistics'. Such weak connotations do not add up to the denotation no matter how many times it is repeated. Even had there

Take this list (from CIBER site):

Dr Andrew Boyd Associate Research associate, information flow
David Brown Founding Director British Library. Journal publishing
Elizabeth A. Chapman Associate Deputy Director of Library Services, UCL
Andy Dawson Researcher UCL
Dr Tom Dobrowolski Founding Director University of Warsaw, web policy
Professor Barrie Gunter Director University of Leicester, mass communications
John Haynes Director Institute of Physics Publishing
Paul Huntington Senior Research Fellow UCL, data mining and web metrics
Hamid R. Jamali Researcher UCL, virtual scholar, digital information seeking
Professor Michael Mabe Founding Director Director, Elsevier Science, publishing strategy
Professor Michel Menou Associate Founding Director Consultant, information and development
Dr Rob Miller Researcher UCL
Professor David Nicholas Managing Director UCL, deep log analysis, digital information seeking and the evaluation of digital information systems/libraries
Dr Ian Rowlands Managing Director City University, information policy.
Bill Russell Founding Director Director, Emerald - marketing and sales
Chris Russell Associate Co-founder, eDigitalResearch.com
Dr Iain Stevenson Associate City University, publishing strategy
Dr Carol Tenopir Honorary senior research fellow University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Milverton Wallace Associate Consultant, NetMedia, new media
Professor Anthony Watkinson Founding Director Consultant, digital transition
Dr Berenika Webster Researcher University of Wellington, bibliometrics
Peter Williams Senior Research Fellow UCL, consumer health information
Richard Withey Director Independent Digital, new media strategies

Find bios/vitae for each. Find out what professional organizations each belong to.
Get the ethics policies from each.
For each that has an ethics statement regarding fabrication, submit a complaint about that person, attaching the work in question and subsequent research showing the falsifications.

Make copies of each such complaint and compile them into two volumes. Send one to the UCL ethic committee at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/staff/committees/ethics/ and one to the provost http://www.ucl.ac.uk/provost/ . Send copies to media outlets that display some leanings towards ethical behavior (as opposed to simply publishing expose type junk stories; you don't want to poison your own well). If they publish this, make copies of each and send them as follow ups to the ethics committee and provost as above.

Of course this requires that people care enough to do something more than simply publish stories about it saying how awful it is, and publish links and summaries elsewhere so those people can 'discuss' how awful it is. The proportion of stories and discussions regarding such awfulisms compared to submissions to ethics committees on science/journalism fraud indicates that damn near all people care more about talking about it than making it stop. Doing something about it doesn't require academic/scientific credentials, just a bit of work with careful attention to getting the facts right (ie. researching the sources back to the original). It needs to be good enough that the probable threats of libel lawsuits can be countered with accusations of barratry, as the facts presented serve as proof no libel occurred.

Regarding the Guardian's article: there was no science done here. Research, yes (very poor, yes) but science, no. The numbers tossed about are just that, not statistics in the scientific (inferential stats) sense. There's a tendency to call numbers used in support of statements 'statistics'. Such weak connotations do not add up to the denotation no matter how many times it is repeated. Even had there

There's a free (beer) spaceflight simulator available at http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html that lets you try these sorts of approaches.

It's irrelevant.
Never is it specified in British privacy laws that you have more or less rights when on public or private property.
It's a common myth that you have more privacy rights in your own home. You can charge someone with tresspass which is a seperate law if they are on private property but you don't have any more privacy rights in your own home than you do in public.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/global_law/publications/institute/docs/privacy_100804.pdf

This is the same in many other countries as well. It's amazing that people debate whether or not the Google street car was taking pictures of public or private property when in fact it doesn't even matter.
Privacy laws don't care about public or private property.

That link looks dead. Try this: http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html or just the wikipedia article...

I mean this: http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~idh/apod/ap080104.html Of course, I've never seen it quite that bold, but I recall in my youth being able to see the galaxy edge on distinctly in the night sky. You could tell that the galaxy was shaped at least something like what the text books were saying (instead of just a big sphere) , because you could look into it, or off away from it, and see the difference in star density. You could descern a distinct shape or structure, and even a buldge in the middle if you looked at the right time of year. Now, I can barely tell where it is. That's the difference between light pollution and no light pollution.

...at least for the growing number of UK 'universities' offering Homeopathy etc. BSc courses. Not an easy sell to students equipped with a basic knowledge of chemistry.

http://dcscience.net/?p=454
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403123&c=1
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=404104&c=2
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/dcpubs.html#fun1 [DC's Nature article, "Science degrees without the science" available here]

Make sure you don't send your kids (or yourselves) to any of these disreputable UK establishments:

http://www.thinkhumanism.com/files/UCAS%20Courses%20on%20quackery.xls [List of UK universities offering fraudulent 'science' degree courses]

I'm not sure if the grandparent isn't (somewhat) right. By pushing it backwards, you'd lower its periapsis altitude - on the opposite side of the orbit. The apoapsis (highest altitude of the orbit) should remain unchanged, which means it will end up on the same spot (where you pushed it off) again.

However, the duration of the orbit would be reduced, since for the most part, it has a lower altitude, hence a higher angular velocity. So although the orbits of the Pusher and the Pushed would still intersect at the Pushed's apoapsis, they wouldn't actually collide for quite some time. They won't be at the same spot at the same time.

And even if a collision were to occur at some point, it would be mostly harmless, since the difference in velocity would be very small - the speed at which the object was initially pushed away.

If I'm wrong with any of this, please correct me. I'm not a rocket scientist, I just like to play Orbiter from time to time. :)

What? No. By pushing it backwards you are slowing it down. It will then assume a lower orbit. Orbital height == orbital velocity.

It will not "assume" a lower orbit. The slower speed will make it descend and it will reach its lowest point half an orbit after you pushed it. It will then start to climb again and half an orbit later it will be back at the position where you pushed it (just not at the same time as you, which is crucial). If you want it to assume a lower orbit you need to slow it down again at its lowest point (or at any other point in its orbit really).

(Disclaimer: I learned everything I know about orbital mechanics by playing with Orbiter. Which is awesome, by the way.)

Years ago there used to be a collection of FOSS software that did just what the poster was describing. I don't know the status of those pieces of software are today, but its all been done before.

This seems like a rehash of Prof Yvo Desmedt's Things that Think project from MIT's media lab.

They have been focusing on the security and privacy impact of networked / intelligent devices since the mid 90s.

Hopefully these guys will be included (there's no mention of them in the article) as they've already looked at a lot of the key problems and solutions.

There's a great analogy for this which will probably help, http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/~djm/higgsa.html .

IIRC this was the result of a competition by Physics World (the magazine of the Inst. of Phys.).

The resolutions that matter are Security Council resolutions. These are the resolutions that can authorize the use of force (such as expelling Iraq from Kuwait).

Like these ones?

Vetoes only apply at the Security Council. You are also ignoring the many Security Council resolutions vetoed by the Russians & Chinese on behalf of their Arab/Muslim client states.

Research this, you'll find the number of security council resolutions vetoed by the US on behalf of Israel vastly outnumbers the number of vetos by other nations (and by vastly, we're talking something like 100 for the US, 2 for Russia).

As a sovereign nation, Iran signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and agreed to its terms. Iran didn't have to do that. Having signed, Iran has deliberately, repeatedly violated the NPT.

Sorry, no cheese for you. Saying that Iran is in violation of the NPT is like saying Iraq had WMDs. Sorry, the world doesn't believe the BS spewed by the US and Israeli intelligence fabrication services any more.

While it is possible to criticize the policies of Israel without being antisemitic (and you might be one of these people), the vast majority of the critics of Israel criticize Israel because they hate jews.

Totally untrue. Incidentally, if the entire world hates Jews, does that reflect a problem with the entire world, or with the way the Jews interact with the entire world?

Here's an example. A black man is driving 10 mph over the speed limit, gets pulled over by a cop, and is given a ticket. Is this a racist act? The driver was speeding - doesn't sound racist to me. However, day after day, this cop only pulls over black drivers to give them speeding tickets. The cop ignores white drivers who travel 50 or 100 mph over the speed limit.

Straw man, totally irrelevant and inapplicable analogy. Are you saying that the world is only critical of Israel? Please point me to some evidence that the mass media is critical of Israel and forgiving of everyone else. And I mean examples from Fox, CNN, BBC etc, not some niche market circular from your local mosque.

So, how do you feel about those who carry out politics in the name of Islam? How do you feel about those who carry out violence in the name of Islam?

I disagree with them, and I find it interesting that it was YOU that drew an analogy between terrorists and the state of Israel.

But then again I plan a lot of things, and few of them ever happen. :-)

Seems counterintuitive to me. An object traveling from Titan to Earth would be falling into the Sun's gravity well. Some energy would be required to get the object out of the neighborhood of Saturn but the bulk of the acceleration to 29.7 km/s could occur naturally by falling, no?

No, but don't feel bad, it's a common misconception.

Turns out traveling towards the sun is hard. In fact, it's just as hard as traveling away from the sun. And you should be thankful for that, after all you wouldn't want the Earth to "fall" into the Sun.

Basically, all the objects in the solar system are in some type of orbit with respect to the sun. Getting closer or farther from the Sun (or from the Earth), means changing your orbit speed, and therefore your orbit. It takes the exact same energy to move to a higher orbit that it does to go from that higher orbit back to the lower orbit. If you're interested in that type of stuff, give orbiter a try.

I highly recommend Orbiter for anyone really interested in seeing how orbital mechanics work. It's a fun sim (with a steep learning curve), but there's something satisfying about knowing how to figure an orbital engine burn.

So whats to stop some enterprising individual from putting all of Usenet on a distributed, encrypted network?

Okay, okay, I just have to finish my thesis and then I'll get right onto it.

I think the Deep Belief Networks of Hinton et al are way ahead of Numenta.. in that they are real science with measurable results that has been reproduced by multiple implementations. The 2006 paper that started it all and Hinton's presentation on google video:

http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~ywteh/research/ebm/nc2006.pdf
http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=228784531481853811

A formal analysis:

http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2007/inf_deep_net_utml.pdf

Application to natural language processing:

http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/cs81/s08/DahlLaTouche.pdf
http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/425.pdf

Reproducing Hinton and extension to and evaluation in other domains:

http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/331.pdf

Use in Computer animation of facial expressions:

http://aclab.ca/users/josh/downloads/pubs/23_Susskind_Hinton_Movellan_Anderson.pdf

Most impressive:

http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2007/aistats_multilayered.pdf

A C++ implementation (although it has much Python love):

http://plearn.berlios.de/

So yeah, there's some pretty good demonstrations of how powerful DBNs are.. Numenta is lagging behind.

Note light WILL interact weakly with light via virtual charged particles. This is the principle behind gamma-gamma studies and their ilk. Keep in mind, this isn't what the researchers the /. article are doing (see elsewhere in the article and thread for that explanation).

From what I've read, current CO2 levels are at the low end of what plant life can tolerate.

When dinosaurs walked the earth (about 70 to 130 million
years ago), there was from five to ten times more CO2 in the atmosphere
than today. The resulting abundant plant life allowed the huge creatures
to thrive. . . . Based on nearly 800 scientific observations around the
world, a doubling of CO2 from present levels would improve plant
productivity on average by 32 percent across species.

Past CO2 levels have been documented in peer-reviewed journals:

We find that CO2 emissions resulting from super-plume
tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7
times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.

This discussion may prove enlightening:

We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times
the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon
dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably
higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better...
And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur
extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide
increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of
photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they
started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs
really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the
neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible
with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this
suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first
dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second,
the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly
tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous...
The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present
ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides
for a much greater biogenic diversity.

I got four As at A-level. Looking back, I might as well have just done three, and done something else with the free time (or, perhaps done a language instead of one of them for variety).

UCL say that over 11% of candidates got three or more A-grades at A-level last year.

And here it says that 7% of students go to private schools. Many of them are getting multiple A-grades.

You're 100% correct about the real problem though. There was a good Panorama a few weeks ago about testing in schools, it concluded that Wales (which has given up SATs) made the right decision, and the teachers and children agreed.

VIC and RAT are now both developed as part of AVATS, which is still active.

VIC allows arbitrary numbers of people to join in a videoconferencing session. It fails the 'easy to use' test, but could probably be used as the basis for an application that doesn't.

No, that's "indeterminism". A lot of indeterminism is randomness. Whether or not free will is indeterministic or deterministic is a subject of great dispute.

Even chaotic systems are deterministic; they're just unpredictable. Now, Newtonian physics allows for indeterminism, but not for reasons of chaos. Here's a discussion of that that's probably over your head. Executive summary: Newtonian physics allows for point masses to come in and out of spacial infinity.

That's the worst argument I've seen in my life.