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Wind and solar are only less expensive because of subsidies - which is cheating. They are actually the most expensive forms of energy out there, not only in terms of kw output, but the overall footprint required. http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au... Solar, for example, is 30-40% more expensive without subsidies http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... As for my karma, how can I possibly prove to you what I have seen with my own eyes? This is not my first time down this road on slashdot. It's not so much that I'm "pro-nuke", but that I'm "anti-green". The reality is, I'm just "pro-better".

The paper from University Of Sydney is from 2006! You are wrong to be relying on it. It's analysis is way, way out of date.

Wind and solar are only less expensive because of subsidies - which is cheating. They are actually the most expensive forms of energy out there, not only in terms of kw output, but the overall footprint required. http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au... Solar, for example, is 30-40% more expensive without subsidies http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... As for my karma, how can I possibly prove to you what I have seen with my own eyes? This is not my first time down this road on slashdot. It's not so much that I'm "pro-nuke", but that I'm "anti-green". The reality is, I'm just "pro-better".

Nuclear power has a larger carbon footprint than you might think: from the concrete used to build the stations, to the energy used in the mining, extraction and refining processes to produce the fuel. It can take more than 6 years to mitigate the energy used in building of the facility, let alone the actual construction costs.

On account of the fact that every utility scale fission reactor design is really nuclear steam power, every watt of power it produces requires two watts of heat dissipation using water. Of course this means the plants have to shut down if it's too hot, and that source of fresh water you were drawing on is not as cool as it was when the plant was built (eg, due to climate change).

It's also super expensive, because risks must be mitigated; some have pointed out this has led to a negative learning curve of nuclear power.

Much as it is kind of cool that people are using nuclear physics to make power, it really is very dated technology. Phasing it out in favor of cheaper, safer alternatives is a much better idea: with the advent of flow batteries, liquid metal batteries, you don't need to have peaking power plants paired with the renewables. You just need more renewables.

For all practical purposes there's no way, I repeat, no way to "heat the whole apartment block" to eradicate bed bugs. It's a myth perpetuated by the eradication industry. It's physically impossible unless you'd raise the building off the ground, isolate from all utilities, wrap air-tight with an insulating air gap between the plastic cover and the walls, and then heat up from inside. That's how I've seen someone get rid of a horrible infestation in a trailer home, and it's about the only way to pull it off. It did work, too - a year later, still no bed bugs. For normal buildings - forget it.

You see, bed bugs scamper away from heat, and when you're heating a building up, there are always gradients that let the suckers find the way to the basement, the attached car garage, whatever. Good luck heating the concrete basement or other adjoining walls to 45C, as that would be necessary to really kill them. Never mind that most heat treatments do not isolate the walls from outside air, so the walls never get hot enough.

The way heat-based bed bug eradication is normally done is you bring in a high-power space heater system that heats the air in the building. This is about the best scenario for bed bugs: due to slow heat exchange between hot air and the walls, the latter heat up slowly and let the bed bugs get out of the way before anything bad happens to them. That method doesn't kill any appreciable numbers of bed bugs, they simply go away for a while -- all the way to cracks and crevices in the foundation, if need be. It's then only a matter of time for the infestation to recover, as the suckers simply come back. Yes, their numbers will be reduced, but they'll come back all right.

There is a big problem with how the heat-based methods are evaluated: the test methods don't address the issue of bed bugs simply relocating elsewhere.

AFAIK, there are exactly zero pesticides that are approved for non-professional use the U.S. and that work against bed bugs. I repeat: ZERO. None. Nada. You're not buying anything unless you're licensed professional. The "higher test stuff" is not some nebulous thing either. There is exactly one category of insecticides that do work against bed bugs: organophosphates. Out of a whole lot of stuff, only one category. One that's highly regulated and universally toxic to pretty much anything with a nervous system, including humans. For all I know, if organophosphates came to be widely used against bed bugs, it'd be only a matter of time until those suckers found a way to cope with it, or even becoming totally immune. Perhaps whatever mutations would be responsible for it would also be of some use in humans - one can only hope.

OK I finally dug it out. The article has been submitted, but not yet published.

http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/8977/4/Complaints%20FINAL.pdf

TedEd, Khan, et alis are not enough.

http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/ (current post)
http://www.techsavvyed.net/archives/1866 (refers to older posts of Frank)

Here's why Khan other video lessons may *worsen* the problems:
http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-the-effectiveness-of-science-videos/
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/pdfs/research/super/PhD(Muller).pdf

For that extra geek cred, go for a scintillation detector rather than a straight Geiger-Muller tube (?valve).

That'll let you say not just "it's hot", but "it's hot" with what it's hot with.

A spectrum analyser versus a crystal set.

Suitable app: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~marek/pra/index.html

A minority of AI researchers have tackled the problem on and off, and even built some small-scale models of curious agents. One of the classic precursors is Doug Lenat's 1977 system Automated Mathematician, which shifted from the idea of using AI to prove theorems, to instead looking for theorems that would be interesting if they were true (it didn't actually prove them; it was an interesting-conjecture generator). Essentially a model of mathematical curiosity.

Some interesting more recent work is a 2001 thesis that modeled curiosity as a social phenomenon in societies of agents, where agents try to find things that are: 1) new enough to interest its fellow agents; yet not 2) so new that they were incomprehensible in its cultural context.

(I'm an AI researcher, though not precisely in this area.)

Mathematica 7 has launched, as noted in Stephen Wolfram's blog post. Among the new features are huge equation typesetting, transcendental roots, and discrete calculus. Looking back at the version 6 discussion, it's perhaps inevitable that comparisons will be made to CAR, CGsuite, GAP, Geogebra, Geometer's Sketchpad, Geometry Expressions, Geonext, LaTeX, Magma, Maple, Matlab, nauty, noneuclid, Pari, Sage, or SeifertView. In other news, the Wolfram Demonstrations project now has over 4000 interactive math demos.

I've just had word from Sydney Uni that they are going to try to record the lecture and release it as a podcast. All going well it will be on the Physics Faculty website by Friday.

Doctors Karl Kruszelnicki and Kevin Varvell are giving an LHC lecture at the University of Sydney tonight. 7pm at the Footbridge Theatre. Varvell is a contributor to the ATLAS detector. Kruszelnicki is always fun. It includes a live cross to CERN. The lecture was to be in the school of Physics but has had to be transferred to a larger venue due to popular demand.

Correct form according to the OED, depends on localised variations. Restauranteurs. Not sure if it will work if you don't have a subscription (I get it through a uni portal, so it always works for me, but have never tried to link it before). It is the same as saying Americans are wrong because they spell color or the English are wrong for using Colour. Different sides of the atlantic do things different especially when it comes to loan words.

In most Australian Universities the postgraduate student owns the IP. I can't find the equivalent for UNSW, but here is the University of Sydney's policy (a close competitor to UNSW). It is quite clear that by default postgraduate students own their results.

Business establishments are required to have clearly marked exits and fire escapes. Private dwellings are not. Restaurants, pubs, shops and the like are not private dwellings. They are open to the public, and by that are subject to a number of rules that mostly deal with health and safety. They are places of employment, and again, by that are subject to more rules that have a large section dealing with health and safety. When obtaining a license to run such a venue, the owner/operator agrees to abide by those rules. That is why the government has a place dictating what can and can't be done in those facilities. Hygiene requirements are in much the same vein as smoking bans, albeit without a large proportion of the populace demanding the right to be served food with rat shit in it.

The gun-to-the-head argument is remarkably specious. Technically, yes, people could choose to give up their jobs, or not take advantage of the large services employment sector, to avoid cigarettes. But for many people, this means the choice is between a job with heavy exposure to cigarette smoke, and a probable health problem in the future, or no job at all. That's not a real choice. For customers, the choice is slightly better: it's the choice between going out, or not, but that's still hardly a real choice.

For what it's worth, people apparently did make those choices. Here: http://tobacco.health.usyd.edu.au/site/supersite/resources/pdfs/SmokeFreeCityReportFinal328.pdf. In the year after smoking was banned in New York restaurants and bars, tax receipts went up by 8.7%, and employment by 10,600 jobs.

So apparently, places COULD have made more money by being smoke free, and public opinion largely supported that decision, but they didn't. The government stepped in to regulate a market which clearly demonstrated itself to be incapable of self-regulation. That is part of the government's function, and in this case, they have surprisingly done so even despite very heavy lobbying against these bans.

I don't agree with the ban of cigarette sales, but I do support taxing the sales of them to the point where the burden on the national health services caused by smoking related illness is offset entirely by the people creating that burden. In time, perhaps, as social acceptance of smoking dwindles further and further.

Like:
What exactly do you mean by scratch?
How does it switch?
What wavelengths and materials does it work best with?
How long to market?
If this is a "photonic IC" how long until we can buy photonic logic units?
Will this work with SOS (Silicon On Sapphire) technologies?

But the insightful article cleared them all up. Psyche! No it didn't. I learned that apparently a scratch can act as a waveguide of some kind that switches very rapidly. I know that the average reader doesn't have a PhD in photonics, but come on!

The paper will probably show up on their publications page soon. I don't think that the top link is about this new photonic switch, because 160Gbps isn't exactly 100x the speed of exiting 10Gbps fiber systems, but I'm not sure.

Freedom Evolves is an extension of his earlier view. Dennett is actually a compatibilist so I think you may be projecting somewhat with the supposed confusion. He does lean on explanations that diminish control, hence the metaphors about the self as the center of narrative gravity, or like a symphony, and some silly views about qualia; however he is a compatibilist and does think we do exercise control (maybe less than others would tend to think) hence the subtitle "varieties of free will worth having"

I prefer a compatibilist view more similar to the one expressed by Jenann Ismael:

http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/ismael/papers/5.freedom&determinism.pdf
http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/ismael/papers/selves.pdf
http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/ismael/papers/6.causation_perspective_agency.pdf

also:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2008.00057.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=ppsc

Freedom Evolves is an extension of his earlier view. Dennett is actually a compatibilist so I think you may be projecting somewhat with the supposed confusion. He does lean on explanations that diminish control, hence the metaphors about the self as the center of narrative gravity, or like a symphony, and some silly views about qualia; however he is a compatibilist and does think we do exercise control (maybe less than others would tend to think) hence the subtitle "varieties of free will worth having"

I prefer a compatibilist view more similar to the one expressed by Jenann Ismael:

http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/ismael/papers/5.freedom&determinism.pdf
http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/ismael/papers/selves.pdf
http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/ismael/papers/6.causation_perspective_agency.pdf

also:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2008.00057.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=ppsc

Freedom Evolves is an extension of his earlier view. Dennett is actually a compatibilist so I think you may be projecting somewhat with the supposed confusion. He does lean on explanations that diminish control, hence the metaphors about the self as the center of narrative gravity, or like a symphony, and some silly views about qualia; however he is a compatibilist and does think we do exercise control (maybe less than others would tend to think) hence the subtitle "varieties of free will worth having"

I prefer a compatibilist view more similar to the one expressed by Jenann Ismael:

http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/ismael/papers/5.freedom&determinism.pdf
http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/ismael/papers/selves.pdf
http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/ismael/papers/6.causation_perspective_agency.pdf

also:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2008.00057.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=ppsc

Considering that the need for Dark Energy to explain the expansion of the universe is in question, I don't know. We know very little about Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Now we hear that our own galaxy might be twice as thick as we previously thought. Dark Energy and Dark Matter are added to observed data to come up with models to explain observations. I'm thinking if 75% of the energy in the model is no longer required to explain observations and the 4% of free hydrogen and helium might be doubled that maybe we should take a look at the 25% that is Dark Matter as well.

Many of us don't think the gee-whizz eye-candy coolness factor of watching someone bounce round the moon on TV is actually worth the enormous opportunity cost of what could have been done with that money if it wasn't wasted on manned missions. The Shuttle's landing tomorrow morning after a ten day mission that cost $1.3 billion. Consider that the incredibly successful Mars Exploration Rovers cost less than half that over the entire four years and counting mission, and have made fantastic breakthrough scientific discoveries as well as producing some amazing eye-candy.

(And incidentally those are all "amateur" images produced from the raw data stream, thanks to JPL/Cornell/Steve Squyres' wonderful policy to release it as it arrives.)

The site is already very slow, so posting the actual links.

http://www.sagemath.org
http://sage.math.washington.edu/sage
http://modular.fas.harvard.edu/sage
http://www.opensourcemath.org/sage/
http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/sage
http://sage.apcocoa.org
http://echidna.maths.usyd.edu.au/sage
http://sage.scipy.org/sage

Disclaimer: I wrote the AMS opinion piece being discussed.

> ...is this saying the American Mathematical Society
> is accepting proprietary software used in proofs?

Yes, the AMS does sometimes publish papers that contain tables, conclusions, data, etc., that were computed using only proprietary software. These tables may then be used by other mathematicians in their work... As an example, here is a paper that I personally co-authored that uses proprietary software (Magma http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/magma/) for the calculations:

      http://www.ams.org/mcom/2001-70-236/S0025-5718-01-01320-5/home.html

This sort of thing is now extremely common in computational number theory, at least.

Another location issue pertains specifically to Texas. Texas wind power has been growing very rapidly and may easily meet anticipated demand. Wind costs about $1.30/Watt to build while the nuclear plant, at this early phase, is anticipated to cost $2.20/Watt without modifications that come up in the licensing process or construction delays that genrally plague large projects.

Don't forget to figure in that Wind generally has a production factor of around 30%, while nuclear has one of over 90% - and that's mostly demand based(IE they can produce power when they want to, and can normally schedule outages for maintenance). A plant with a capacity factor of 100%(IE 100% production for a full year) would produce 8.76 kWh per watt. A nuclear plant would average 7.884 kWh, while a wind turbine would only average 2.628 kWh.

That kicks wind up to $4.33 per sustained watt(IE max/factor), and nuclear to $2.44. That'd leave $1.89 to cover any increased operating costs of the nuclear plant. Heck, at 5% interest, that'd be 9.5 cents per watt in interest alone. That's a penny per kw/h that can go towards operating expenses on the plant - forever.

Also, don't assume that wind turbines are without operating costs - they might not need fuel, but they do need monitoring and maintenance.

Saw this on pocketinformat.com

http://www.pocketinformant.com/Forums/index.php?s= 7c5317a05ae84814ac6bb4ab9a83e2ea&showtopic=11368&s t=0&p=61900&#entry619003

cracker iFalleni
aka Fallen
aka F/\LLEN
aka Syrkine, Vladimir
aka Vladimir Syrkine
russian living in australia, undergrad at university of sydney (honor roll according to univ.)

mailto:vsyr4253@it.usyd.edu.au

pirate sertoli
aka Anderson Barbosa de Oliveira
aka Anderson Barbosa
aka Anderson B Oliveira
aka Andros
aka androabo
aka mike terr
aka Barbol
aka tttsmith
living in brazil

mailto:andersonbarbosa@cardiol.br

Know them? They have pirated your stuff. Google them to see what it is these two hoods do.

already been done: http://www.warren.usyd.edu.au/bulletin/NO49/ed49ar t3.htm, http://nicta.com.au/uploads/documents/060915_audie nceresponse_casestudy.pdf

But you have not provided a single instance of government control over media. It just doesn't happen. And you don't seem to be able to respond to the fact that the USSR did use massive amounts of propaganda.

That's a great example of a fnord if you can't notice them. Whenever I compare US and any foreign media, especially anything non-Western, it becomes pretty clear how much US media repeats US government's propaganda formulas. And when I don't, I am still sickened by the amount of illogical, sensationalist pandering to whatever is the currently most convenient to the government.

You missed the point. If you had strung the next sentence in, you would realize that all I was saying was that the reason troops were stationed around the world was to halt Soviet expansion. That was the reason, whether or not it was correct.

It was not the reason. A more realistic description can be found here and here. It would be extremely foolish for US military and political analysts, if they did honest job, to become mistaken about USSR intentions after WWII unless they all suffered from severe paranoia.

Now as for documents, I can produce one document and at least one other example. The document: the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, signed days before Germany invaded Poland. The agreement divided up Poland into a Soviet and a Nazi region.

USSR had no other choice -- at that time Germany literally 0wned Europe, and whatever land Stalin would not claim, would just go to Hitler in whatever version of the pact. Not signing the pact was not seen as an option because Stalin believed (more for ideological than practical reasons) that Hitler was not interested with a war against USSR, and was more afraid of USSR attacking Germany, thus signing the pact would protect USSR from Germany's "preemptive" strike. For USSR the pact was defensive, even if ill-advised. Poland and Baltic stated by that time were already doomed, and one can argue that if Nazi Germany managed to establish a stable empire within Europe, for any Eastern European country it would be much safer to be a USSR member rather than being ruled by Germans who literally treated population of those countries as subhumans according to their ideology, even before Holocaust.

region. As for the other example, Stalin made it clear in the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences that he wanted a "buffer zone" (i.e. that he wanted Eastern Europe) to slow further German attacks (the reason is irrelevant, he still was expanding). The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was signed by the USSR, so that counts, and Stalin spoke at both Yalta and Potsdam, so that counts also.

An important property of any buffer is its stability. USSR wanted (and got) a stable zone of influence controlled by governments allied with USSR, not some kind of forefront of continuing expansion. Apparently at the time US and Britain accepted it as reasonable.

Generally, given a lack of evidence to the contrary, one accepts a statement as fact. It was not until the media (yes the media, traveling with the soldiers in Iraq) reported that no WMDs had been found that we grew skeptical. After all, we are generally conditioned to trust our leaders (this is true of almost any society and the media has nothing to do with it).

It was from the very beginning known that there were no WMD. The only possible way for the public to believe in such a nonsense from the government is total suppression of all rational thought because it was already known that Blix inspection found nothing, and all information about supposed weapon programs came from people interested in invasion. It was also well known that government of Iraq had no ties with international terrorists, especially ones interested in attacks on U

Having said that, there are some faint hexagonal spikes created by the central object, but they are much fainter than the hour glass shape..

I wouldn't use the term "quasar-like" because the word quasar is an acronym for "quasi-stellar radio source" and i don't think this object is the source of many radio waves

Having said that, there are some faint hexagonal spikes created by the central object, but they are much fainter than the hour glass shape..

I wouldn't use the term "quasar-like" because the word quasar is an acronym for "quasi-stellar radio source" and i don't think this object is the source of many radio waves

If any of them would design a repeatable experiment that conflicts with existing theories, they'd become instantly famous.

Wallace Thornhill accurately predicted *all* of the anomalous results from the Deep Impact Mission to Comet Tempel 1. Results that remain anomalous to NASA to this day were all natural byproducts of EU Theory. Did it make him famous? No, not really. People still blew him off. It is a fact, actually, that pretty much all of the anomalies in the space sciences today have an electrical explanation. Nobody really cares, to tell you the truth. We live in "interesting" times, I suppose.

It may seem to people who have not read the Electric Universe materials that Tim Thompson puts the issue to rest. This is far from the case.

Although I can certainly see major problems with some of his analysis (like the notion that neutrino flavors change in only one direction), I do not personally have the capability to evaluate all of Tim Thompson's arguments. Few people do. Does that mean that he is the only person capable of formulating an opinion on the universe? No, it does not. Does it mean that he is more qualified to evaluate the situation? No, not even. It is oftentimes worse to know something wrong than to not know anything at all. It is a fact that astrophysicists are unanimously taught in school that electricity plays no important role in space. Those people were educated before it became apparent that space is filled with plasma, and these educational programs persist in spite of the fact that Hannes Alfven, the father of plasma physics, tried in vain to convince the astrophysicists that electricity does flow through space. We know from the laboratory that plasma is electrical in nature. It is a gas that consists of a certain percentage of charged particles. Plasma is in fact *highly* conductive in our laboratory experiments. Astrophysicists are taught that they can ignore this fact in school in a class called magnetohydrodynamics. In that class, they are taught that plasmas can "instantly neutralize" and that plasmas have frozen-in-place magnetic fields (look it up on wiki "if you care" ...). These simplifications are useful for doing math because it allows them to avoid using Maxwell's Equations and model plasma as a superconductor -- even when the plasma stretches light years in distance. Contemplate the concept of a plasma that's light years across instantly neutralizing. It's silly. Now, if you remove that assumption and permit the plasma in space to act as plasma in the laboratory does, then you are effectively giving resistance to the plasma. With resistance, plasma conducts electricity. It's not space that deprives plasma of its conductivity. It's the astrophysicists.

Plasma is unique in that we know from the lab that its physical interactions induce electric current, and vice-versa. If you accept, as astrophysicists do, that plasma pervades 99.999% of all space, then out of necessity, it's inevitable that electrical currents will result from violent physical interactions in space.

Astrophysicists are oftentimes taught in class that it would require more energy than exists within the universe to completely strip the electrons from all of the atoms in a teaspoon of salt. Some education there! That assumes that the plasma universe started in a neutral state. We know no such thing.

One could then argue, well, if plasma in space was electrical like the stuff in the lab, then we'd see evidence of this in our observations. And in fact, we do. Every single week that goes by, in fact, there are images of z-pinches that we observe within the laboratory in NASA press releases. This week, in fact, we saw two such images:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070406_red_r ectangle.html
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~

Sorry folks, but as a 30 year weather guy, I have to call B.S.

In the 1970's, the worry was Global Cooling, because global temps were on a down swing, so we're all going to die. Now they're tending upwards, so we're all going to die. Oh, and there was an Ozone Hole, so we're all going to die. You get the idea.

The global temps were much warmer than today from the 1300's to 1500's. Greenland was actually green and you could grow grapes in Scotland. The 1600's saw a cool period -- see Maunder Minimum. Around 14,000 years ago, when Europe, northern Asia and North America were under the ice, Egypt and North Africa were grassy plains. Therer were plenty of rivers through the Saraha, and the Qatar Depression was a lake. The ice age ended and the climate changed. Guess what -- animals and people moved along with it. The melted ice cap meant the oceans rose a few hundred feet, so the coastline changed too. Polar bears still know how to swim.

The Carbon Dioxde and temperature pattern are correlated, but from Statistics 101, day 1, Correlation is NOT causation. BTW -- warmer conditions mean more plant growth, so more C02 is a likely RESULT of a temperature rise, not a percussor. WATER VAPOR is the earth's primary "greenhouse" gas, and many times more significant than C02, because Water Vapor forms CLOUDS.

Without the atmosphere, the earth's blackbody temp would be 255K/-18C/0F. The atmosphere makes the effective temperature 288K/15C/59F, which is why 15C is part of the International Standard Atmosphere.

The point is that warming and cooling are going to come and go because solar cycles come and go. The last 14,000 years or so have been (mostly) warming -- the most recent (of many) ice ages ended. No doubt things will continue to fluctuate, and so what? We'll adapt.

If you were able to watch UK Channel 4's "The Great Global Warming Swindle", it's been pulled from YouTube for copyright issues. Pity. It was spot on.

You have issues in the US.

I went to the largest university in Australia and there were no police. Just your garden variety overweight security guards. In my 5 years there I recall seeing a real policeman there once.

This said, I am happy this technology is leaving the dark basements of university labs and, even if painfully slowly, heading into the mainstream use.

Cool. It looks like the ACFR, where I did my BE, has been involved in DARPA. I haven't been in contact with any of them since I left uni, so I don't know what the project is. It isn't surprising that UTS is involved, the guy who heads UTS's Mechatronics dept is a former ACFR man.

The ACFR has for some time had a bit to do with vehicles. The've used a UTE as a testing platform for a while. Most of their work has been to do with industry, mining trucks and straddle carriers. They've done some solid work though.

Trying that again, should have previewed.

No. Click the about Us link at the bottom of the page.

But yes it does mean robots.

Geezer Wrote:
CFCs are not found in the stratosphere any where on the planet, they're simply too heavy

That's flat-out wrong. For measurements of CFC (NOT Cl) in the statosphere see:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1987P&SS...35..657B
http://umpgal.gsfc.nasa.gov/www_root/homepage/uars -science/CFC.html
for two easy examples.

Also see
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~cairns/teaching/le cture16/node2.html
http://www.thespacerace.com/glossary/index.php?ter m=290
http://amsglossary.allenpress.com/glossary/search? id=homosphere1
where we read that the atmosphere is well-mixd below 100 km. (Stratosphere starts around 12 km).

This is probably just some weird, catastrophic oversight of mine. I probably preferentially hear/read distrust just because it's the term I prefer to use. As for which is proper, according to the Shakespeare Search Engine, both terms have been in use for at least 400 years.

This site claims they're rough synonyms, and that distrust adds an air of suspicion in addition to lack of trust.

And I'm still not entirely sure what this cloud is.

- THIS VIDEO: why is the explosion perfectly symetrical around a vertical centreline? as you'd expect from an explosive detonation, such as the cordite that pentagon personel smelledbut NOT from a 500 mile an hour horizontal plane crash! we've all seen the footage of the second plane strike at the wtc, how the fireball and debris splashed out sideways from the impact WHY DOES THIS LOOK NOTHING AT ALL LIKE IT

- look at the photos of the pentagon, whole in the wall looks like a missile damage, and does not have holes or damage where the 10 tonne titanium and steel jet engines travelling at the speed of a bullet collided with it.

-I briefly mentioned the melted steel, heres more info: 6 weeks after 9/11, the cleanup crews were pulling out huge lumps (think size of a car or bigger) of white hot and sometimes still molten steel. if steel was this easy to melt (just add some kerosene i.e. jet fuel) then why did it take thousands of years for us to figure out how to smelt iron, after entering the bronze/copper age? why do we use blast furnaces, oxy acetalene torches and arc welders to melt steel, when we can just pour on some kero. I know you might say there was SO MUCH jet fuel, but thats irrelevant, there is a maximum temperature that a particular fuel can attain when burning, known as the adiabatic temperature, which is only attained in absolutley ideal conditions( ie NO HEAT LOSS, stoichiometric ratios of fuel molecules to oxygen etc), not when there is a massive steel heatsink sucking away whatever heat the remaining fuel not burnt up in the initial fireball, and office furniture could create, with limited oxygen, especially in the structural interior that would have had to have got the hottest. It is NOT dependant on the amount of fuel, only the ratio of air to fuel and lack of heat loss: adding more fuel to a fire doesnt generally make it hotter, it makes it bigger. Kerosene(jet fuel) does NOT ordinarily burn hot enough to melt steel. to do so it needs to be in almost perfect stoichiometric mixture with the air(not the case at all, see black smoke indicative of fuel rich and/or cool fire, have virtually no heat loss (not the case at all, heat was radiated away and the building was a massive heatsink) and some preheating of the air without lowering the oxygen content (ie the air has to be heated by passing hot surfaces, not by being in a fire on a lower floor, as the lower fire lowers the oxygen level and therefore makes the latter fire COOLER if any heat was lost in between the two (which it would be)

- please look at the following diagram showing HOW HUGE the centre support column of the building was wtc and then look at the following EXTREMELY MISLEADING diagram given by the bbc to explain the collapse misleading page ok enough now, for more info, like I said before, watch 911 loose change(and other similar videos) on google video and keep an open mind.

In fact, those hairs are cuticular hairs, and probably not sensory. Other crustaceans have similar hairs, but this species just has a lot on the first legs. An isopod crustacean, Peludo , also has a lot of cuticular hairs. I wonder if this is indeed a new family, as it looks like other members of the galatheid group.

Yeah, I see what your saying. The way I view is is that any half decent engineer can get a "real" job and earn significantly more than they would teaching/researching at a uni. So uni's can become a place where engineers who can't get a real job end up, in my experience it's been those who know the work but don't know enough english to get by in the real world.

My experience in physics however has been that people who go into teaching at a uni are those who really love what they're doing. Subsequently they not only know their work really well but come across as enthusiastic lecturers as well. So much so in fact that at USYD they have a "physics quotes competition", where students are encouraged to submit the funniest things their lecturers say. I'm not sure where the current results are, but the 2002 results are up here.

nothing new... 30 or so years ago good PDP11 used two similar (in terms of output power) units for a total of 2kW (some setups probably needed even more) http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/pdp-11/psu.html

not to mention systems built of vacuum lamps from the ENIAC era - they needed their own power stations...

Disagreed. IMNSHO, a "valid theory" requires falsifiablity. ID is at best a hypothesis with a modest amount of evidence against it, such as inefficiencies in metabolic biochemistry, the existance of a blind spot in the human eye (which is not the case in some marine species), not to mention the classic joke that God is a Civil Engineer.

Furthermore, successful prediction of expermental results is what allows a Hypothesis to advance to being considered a Theory. I have never heard anyone trying to use the concept of ID to make testable experimental predictions. This means that the Flying Spaghetti Monster Hypothesis is markedly superior to the Intelligent Design Hypothesis, as the FSMH allows the prediction that the number of pirates on the high seas will continue to fall as Global warming continues to rise — a testable proposition which might allow the FSM to be considered a theory in the next few decades. Really.

Evolution, on the other hand, has among other things been used to successfully predict that intermediate forms (such as archaeopteryx) would be discovered in gaps in the fossil record.

I repeat: ID is not science. I will elaborate: ID should not be taught in science classes. (It might be suitable for mention in modern American government high school classes in Junior or Senior year, as this is usually about as early as you can get students to intelligently reflect on the WHY and HOW of their education, and on whether this is how they SHOULD be educated.) I will also add: if intelligent design is in fact true, the Watchmaker is not only Blind, but a drunken Idiot with a perverse sense of humor to boot.

Yes, I am saying it may be Proven, but is still Invalid. It's not science. Science can be wrong — the Thompson "Plum Pudding" model of the atom springs to mind. Science, however, after tripping over an inconvenient counterexample, tends to dust itself off, examine the stumbling block, pick it up and add it to the collection, and continue on an adjusted course. Religion merely pretends that there's no problem there, even after tripping over the stumbling block, until someone picks the stumbling block up and tries to use it the beat religion's head in — at which point Religion says it's being "persecuted".

Heritable epigenetic variation is however not Lamarkian, it is Darwinian inheriance. You still need to have variation that is selected, even if it is epigenetic.

For example you still cannot make a striped giraffe by stretching a zebra's neck as no cells from the zebra's neck will end up in the next generation. The cells that make sperm and eggs were all determined before you got your hands around the zebra's neck.

This result (the twins not the zebra) is not at all surprising to people in the genetics field and helps formalize well established concepts of incomplete penetrance of genetic traits and somatic (non reproductive tissue) mutation

The twin study did not look at reproductive tissues, but if the variation in epigenetics holds true there children of younger parents should be more like their parents

While we're linking to videos... This whole bendable concrete thing is nothing new - we've had it since the 1940's.

Robocode is a little game where you write a java applet to control a tank. Then you can run it against other automaton tanks and see who wins. I think it was designed as an educational tool.

If you want to try X.org on debian, just add Ubuntu to your sources.list (details here) and intall the packet xserver-xorg.
You could also compile it from source and install it under /usr/local/ (details here)

Enough talk. Let's look at some Freedom Force python script code:

http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~sholden/site.cgi/STUFF/ FFORCE/SCRIPT/MUG1/

While people have suggested maple and mathematica they are both fairly expensive (even for students). magma is another paid alternative.

mupad is a decent alternative, that, while not open source, is free to download.

To comment on the many pencil+paper posts, I would like to add that a whiteboard is an essential mathematical tool. Besides ease of erasure, they allow for much more collaboration than a pencil and paper.

Science: Explaining how the Universe works, God is considered irrelevant.

Philosophy: Explaining why the Universe works, God is considered relevant.

I'm not sure that I agree with "Complexity does NOT generally come from randomness." Granted that increasing Entophy is a foundation stone of science but chaos theory and fractal geometry seem to be saying something about the general processes of "growth" in things as diverse as snowflakes and the neaural networks in our heads. You could argue that there exists an anti-entrophy like the newly discovered "dark energy" but at the moment that is truly in the realm of Metaphysics.

Like ants, science isn't quite sure how the bees communicate (pheremones of some sorts) but the end effect is that they can guide many others to far away flowers, organize a defense of the hive, keep the hive core temperature habitable from 40 below (F) to 120+ (F), neglecting un-needed bees to death in times of drought, and a lot more.