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Great post. I never made the connection between the Gracchi brothers and the Progressives and New Dealers, but I think there's definitely something to it.

To your point about the similarities between the decline of the Roman and American republics: Sir John Glubb wrote a paper about how empires collapse ~250 years after their inception. Like you, he's not trying to lay out a numerology theory or "historical law," but uses these similarities to analyze *why* empires collapse. Glubb specifically cites the introduction of the welfare state, followed by liberal granting of citizenship to foreigners, as a common cause of decline. The EU should take note.

"...the Founders, who were very aware of Roman precedent when they designed the government, hoped to prevent."

It's pretty amazing how the Romans' best ideas were transplanted through time and space -- I mean there's a senate that meets atop a Capitol Hill thousands of miles from Rome on a continent they didn't know existed.

"here's why history is important to know something about: to avoid making the same mistakes others have in the past."

One of my favorite American historians, Thomas Bailey, said something like, "Every generation of apes begins where the previous generation began, because apes can hand down no record of their experience. Man leaves a record; but how much better is he than the apes if he does not study it and heed its warning?" Expunging the classics from public schools wasn't a conspiracy per se; I think it was arrogance by the bureaucrats who truly believed that the past is irrelevant.

"... a quadratic function of the height."

A quadratic function is one of the form f(x) = ax2 + bx + c, where a, b, and c are numbers with "a" not equal to zero. X to the 2nd power is exponential. In this case the exponent is only 2, but that is exponential.

This in the story summary made me laugh: "Building a mountain is not a simple thing," Most people have very limited technical knowledge.

Except, of course, that there's (very) old data suggesting a possibly rate of 2.4m/century, century after century.
http://people.uncw.edu/grindlayn/GLY550/Fairbanks-Sealevel-1989.pdf

You do know that there are somewhat credible pessimistic scenarios where the sea level rises at 5 meters per century under conditions pretty much like the ones we are creating right now? The estimates are based on "paleoclimate" studies; best estimates are that there was a time when the sea rose that quickly.

This paper (you may want to click through to linked/referenced papers from it)
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_15/
discusses attempts to discern any lag in sea level rise given the relatively slow (compared to present conditions) climate forcings, and finds none. Essentially, it says that if you fail to see rapid sea level rise in the geological record, that should not comfort you -- it only indicates that the temperature did not rise quickly, but as fast as it did rise, so did the sea level.

This paper
http://people.uncw.edu/grindlayn/GLY550/Fairbanks-Sealevel-1989.pdf
finds that there was a time when the sea level rose 24m in 1000 years at one time, and a second "melt water pulse" appears to have had even higher rates of rise.

All of this is subject to caveats about what is melting (Greenland? Antarctica? Ice sheets?) and the resolution and accuracy of geological proxies. But people aren't just pulling these scary estimates out of their posteriors.

I do not think it would be possible to protect coastal Florida with dikes; the geology there (karst) would literally undermine your efforts. There are water-filled passages connecting the Gulf of Mexico with inland lakes and sinkholes.

if they could have. At the time, Bell Labs was not allowed to sell software, and software was not patentable until 1981, so there was not a lot of incentive for Bell Labs to tie software-related stuff up legally.

It's very peculiar that nowhere in the discussion here or Chamberland's video does anyone mention NOAA's Aquarius habitat, in operation since 1988: http://www.uncw.edu/aquarius/ . Aquarius has been in operation as a civilian research station underwater off Key Largo for years. Before that it was in the Virgin Islands. It is operated by NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) for marine biology research and NASA training. It's an amazing place where researchers get to do 10-day research projects that would be difficult or impossible to run from the surface.

But what's not mentioned by Chamberland or anyone involved in his little promo piece is that living underwater is grueling. You're in a single-wide trailer equivalent with multiple other people. Going outside is wonderfully liberating, but y'know, it's cold. Even in Florida, once you've been in the water for a few hours, you're cold. Then you do it again. And again. It's humid and pretty much everyone gets skin problems after a few days.

And you can't come up. You've saturated to 55-foot depth after a day, so you'd get the bends if you surfaced. So all your diving is done with cave-diving rigs that are designed for diving where there's no surface to go to. If you get in trouble, you have to get back to the habitat, not the surface. Oh, you'd probably survive if you had to surface, but it wouldn't be healthy or pretty. At the end of the 10-day mission it takes 18 hours to decompress to surface pressure.

That said, it is really truly astounding to live underwater for a while. Looking out through the window at dinner at the fish, and realizing that they're looking at you: you're the one in the aquarium. It's a trip.

But it's an incredibly resource-intensive thing to do. Rough estimates I recall from my Aquarius trips were that it cost about US$10,000 per day to support four researchers in the habitat. That's not sustainable for daily life.

As far as I can tell, Dennis Chamberland wants to set up some sort of high-end hotel-like underwater facility. More power to him. But don't pretend that we're all going to have the chance to go live under the ocean.

WOW, I really screwed up that href...sorry.
Was supposed to be:
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/EDN566logical fallacies.html

The point isn't so much to always get the right answer or to be graded on your response. It's supposed to be a system that keeps the students involved in the class while also giving the teacher an idea on how well the class is picking up the material.

Or at least, thats the approach taken for the Numina project. They use wireless handhelds for student interaction (that belong to the school, no cost to the student). Then they took advantage of having all of those handhelds and built in lab applications and such so they would have a greater set of uses.
From the classes I sat in on that were using them, they seemed to go over pretty well. It's all in how the teacher uses the idea.

my professor at UNCW has been working on this http://people.uncw.edu/adharg/VR/vr.html (website isn't pretty). He can either take pre-made videos and display it on them, or he can use a video camera that runs through a hardware filter that he created that will turn the video feed into something that looks 3d on the curved screen. He uses SPI to convert the code into opengl that will appear to be curved correctly. The work is being done for future projects in Florida. The idea is to stream the video from undersea dives to the marine biology research lab in Wrightsville Beach, NC and displaying it on the surface. Eventually robots with cameras would be able to dive and the researchers and use remote controls to control movements of the robots. We got to use it some during my comp. graphics class. I posted some pics of it on my site at http://www.qsopht.com/school/index.htm

People spend days or weeks working at deeper depths than the scooter goes. You become "saturated" and have to undergo slow decompression before surfacing.

I spent some time in the Aquarius with no ill effects other than some interesting fungus blooms.

All that ended decades ago. No manned submersible in operation today can go to the deepest part of the ocean. All the undersea habitats are defunct except for Aquarius, which the University of North Carolina now owns and struggles to fund. It's over.

Manned operations in the deep ocean never became cheaper or safer. They're possible, but not useful. Deep ocean work belongs to robots today.

Much the same thing has happened to space. All remaining manned space operations are ego trips for governments. All useful work is unmanned.

Someday this may change, but it won't be done using chemically fueled rockets.