I am now a research physicist, doing experimental condensed matter physics, but when I was an undergraduate physics major, I got a research job in my sophomore year working for an astrophysicist, for what was nominally 10 hours per week. It is true that getting a Ph.D. in grad school probably requires about 20,000 hours of work, and this is if you start with a physics/astrophysics undergraduate degree, but I was able to start contributing to research with very little background. This was in the early 1990s, and it largely involved writing Fortran programs to analyze time series data from an X-Ray observation satellite. I was directly supervised by a grad student with whom met once a week or so. I can't say that, at the time, I actually understood much of the astrophysics, but it did eventually result in a publication (a conference proceedings paper, that the grad student wrote and on which I was the second author). Although developing an understanding of exactly what's going on with a set of observations, and further, knowing how that understanding fits in with the major unanswered questions in astrophysics does likely require a lot of advanced coursework. (And as someone else pointed out, to learn physics you need to solve hard physics problems, much the same way that to learn to program you need to write code.) But the actual day-to-day carrying out of research does not always require such deep understanding.
It'd be a long shot, but you might be able to find a researcher who would let you be a sort of unpaid equivalent to an undergraduate researcher. Some professor might have a data set lying around that nobody in his/her research group has had time to tackle. Or there might be a professor who mostly focuses on teaching and whose research program has largely come to a halt but who still is interested in some research questions. It'd probably be more feasible if you were also taking (or took) as a non-traditional student. It's not entirely straightforward: the research output of undergraduate-level researchers is often quite low, and faculty largely do it because it's understood to be an important part of undergraduate training, which would not apply in your case.
The wealthy-Googlers-forcing-the-99%-out-of-SF problem is exacerbated, if not entirely the result of, a darkly ironic twist on zoning and development. There is too little supply and much demand, for housing, so prices go up.
But let's compare SF and the Bay Area to NYC. SF itself has a population density (17k/mi^2) that's less than half of Brooklyn (36k/mi^2), which is NYC's second-most dense borough and which itself has half the density of Manhattan (70k/mi^2). The suburban counties south of SF, San Mateo (1.6k/mi^2) and Santa Clara (1.4k/mi^2) have roughly a third of the population density of the nearest suburban counties to NYC, Nassau (4.7k/mi^2) and Bergen, NJ (3.9k/mi^2).
So it's not like it couldn't be possible to house everyone, to increase housing supply to match demand. But many (but certainly not all) of the same voices who are now complaining about the influx of rich Googlers came of age in a time when developers and development were destroying so much that was good and building much that was bad, and so the only mode of civic-minded activism which makes sense to them is to STOP THE GREEDY DEVELOPERS. Stop them from upzoning, stop them from increasing population density, stop them from building enough housing for everyone.
Transit in the Bay Area is a mess, and Google and the other tech companies using the Muni bus stops isn't helping. But with so many employees who wish to live in SF, Google really ought to abandon the outdated suburban office park campus idea and build itself a large building in San Francisco itself.
Close, I think you're thinking of 501(c)(3), which is the part of the Internal Revenue Code that spells out the tax exemption rules for charitable non-profits.
At the undergraduate level, there's no "problem," as none of the US government-backed or university-backed financial aid programs support nonresident foreign nationals. Our universities take their tuition money and provide an education.
The issue would be at the graduate level in the sciences and in engineering. But we need to be extremely careful about exactly what is being paid for. First set aside fellowships, which also don't apply to nonresident foreign nationals. The absolute standard practice is that Ph.D.-level graduate students in the sciences and engineering have their tuition, and a small living stipend, paid for by a combination of teaching assistantships and research assistantships.
In the case of teaching assistantships, then the grad student provides some number of hours per week of teaching, and in return gets his or her tuition paid for and a modest stipend. This is in turn funded by the tuition that undergraduates pay. The University is, in essence, simply hiring someone to do a job. The grad student spends some of his or her time teaching and uses the rest of his or her time, and status as a University student, to further his or her own education. Although there can be issues with non-native-English-speaking foreign graduate students and their ability to communicate in English, that is beside the point, and there's no investment in the grad student, on the part of the government or the University, that's being "lost" if the grad student returns to his or her home country after graduation.
In the case of research assistantships, these are offered by individual faculty members to graduate students working in those faculty's research groups. The faculty, in turn, get the money from research grants, almost all of which are funded by the government. However, the funding agencies are not directly funding specific students, rather, they are funding particular projects. To get a research grant, the faculty member submits a grant proposal that details what they expect to learn, and how much it will cost in terms of equipment, materials, labor, and so forth. When such research leads to interesting results, it is published, and the funding agencies are acknowledged. What funding agencies want to do is fund successful work. In this case, the funding agency is paying to have a particular scientific question investigated. Invariably, the people who are actually in the lab doing the labor to produce the results are either the grad students, or postdocs, or sometimes undergraduates. Their salaries, and grad student tuition, are paid in exchange for this labor. But fundamentally, the government funding agency pays for, and hopefully gets, scientific results, without concern for who does the work to get the results. But again, there's no investment that's being "lost" if the grad students or postdocs who did the work decide to leave the US once the work is done, because the investment was in the scientific work, not the individual students.
With the graduate population in the sciences and engineering at US Universities, you'll find the whole cross-section of American graduate students, plus the very best of the foreign graduate students. Only the cream of the foreign crop comes to the US, and this leads to the skewing of the graduate populations in which the best and most promising students are more likely to be foreign. And for the faculty researchers, its in their best interests to work with the best students, in order that their work be successful and lead to further research grants. So it can be in the best interests of faculty, and the Universities themselves, to welcome the best foreign grad students into their research groups.
How is it possible to demonstrate that there are any sort of psychological evaluations that can determine if a potential Mars astronaut is actually ready for this sort of mission? This mission promises to set up a sustainable and growing community, but for an individual astronaut, there is also going to be a complete and final separation from damn-near everyone they know, and everything they've known, and all the millions of things anyone has come to take for granted after living on Earth for at least 25 years. So there is a sense in which this is comparable to a suicide mission, because of the separation. We also know from survivors of suicide attempts that if there is time for contemplation after the point of no return, there is nearly universally regret of the attempt. Those who jump off a bridge, and survive, nearly universally report that mid-air they had immediate regrets of jumping. How can it be possible to ensure that, once the astronauts are past the point of no return in the mission, there won't be a similar feeling of regret?
Your FAQ, in the "sustainability" question, states
The first four will also be carrying a device similar to a portable greenhouse, that will allow them to grow their own food.
If we take 2000 calories per day as a baseline human need, that's 730,000 calories per [Earth] year, or about 3 million calories per Earth year per four-person crew, and the total need will grow by 3 million calories per Earth year every two years as more missions arrive. The diet would need to be varied, both to guard against catastrophic crop failure and to provide an appropriate spectrum of nutrients, and a reasonable estimate (e.g. based on a combination of corn, beans, and squash) suggests that 1 acre on Earth can provide such 3 million calories. But Mars gets, on average, only about 44% of the insolation as Earth does, so the first-order estimate suggests you'd need about 2.3 acres per mission-load of astronauts to grow a subsistence diet. This presumes that radiation won't negatively impact the crops, that the yield throughout the Mars growing season scales comparable to the Earth's, that your soil is comparable to Earth's, and many more things. You'll also need enough additional carbon and water to make the non-edible parts of the plants and soil, and you'll need to make sure there exists a suitable microbial community to decompose crop waste and turn it back into a useable food-growing medium (i.e. compost).
I don't see in your concept drawing anything that approaches the size of land that would be needed to come anywhere close to such sustainable food production. Do you even have a back-of-the-envelope plan for sustainable food production, or is the bulk of the astronauts' calories going to need to come in perpetuity from the Earth?
I realize TFA is more like the author's off-the-cuff musings and less like a rigorous study, but it does recommend looking at test score growth, and in the process fails to mention something that's both nearly obvious but almost always overlooked when discussing test score growth. When test scores grow, one is by definition comparing the scores that one group of students took on one test to the scores that another group of students got on a different test. With that in mind, there are 5 principal ways that test scores can "go up":
1. students cheat on the second test 2. the second test is easier 3. students who score low on the first test don't take the second test 4. students, who score high on the second test, were added to the testing group but did not take the first test 5. more individual students score better on the second test than perform worse on the second test
Cheating does happen, but it's probably rare. Tests can be psychologically validated to ensure constant difficulty, but this isn't done as often as it should. Nevertheless, #3 is by far the most common and least talked about way for test scores (particularly relative test scores) to improve. TFA recommends looking at the relative standing of a schools 2nd graders and 5th or 6th graders. We'd like to think that the students are being educated so successfully that their performance improves, but anyone making such a claim ought to be required to (rigorously and mathematically) prove that changes in the student population are not the primary cause. There is pretty good evidence, for example, that the high-profile improvement in the charter school that Michelle Rhee worked at was rather effective at "counseling out" the consistently low scoring students to have apparent test score gains that had little to do with their instructional program. I can well imagine the administrative staff of a school "working with" the parents to help find a school that's "a better match" to their kid's "unique learning style."
Anyone who is interested in understanding why GIMP just can't measure up to Photoshop, even old versions of Photoshop, owes it to himself to look at one of Dan Margulis's books: Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction, and Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace.
Mr. Margulis is an old-time graphic artist, the type who learned when paste and x-acto knives were the tools of the trade, but who saw very early on that Photoshop would revolutionize the field. His book instructs its readers how to do amazing things to photos using only a handful of tools. The key to many of his techniques, though, is the ability to switch to/from the CMYK and Lab color spaces, which as far as I know GIMP just can't do. And, he's a fantastic writer. I put these books in the same category as Mastering Regular Expressions: if you felt you needed to go find some text to search after reading that one, you'll feel you need to go find some photos to correct after reading these books.
For remote shutter control (and time-lapse) of a huge number of digital cameras, check out Harbortronics. They have several (cabled) remote/time lapse controllers starting just above $100. Some models are compatible with an RF triggering system for wireless setup.
Well I still need to start the day with the comics section of the dead-trees edition of the morning newspaper. And I tend to read the rest of the newspaper in paper format, over breakfast, as well. Sometimes I have my laptop at the breakfast table for websurfing over breakfast but I really do prefer the paper.
For everything else I have shifted to nearly entirely online sources. But one reason for this is that I'm no longer close to well-stocked university libraries that stay open late. As an undergrad or grad student, I'd often go get a stack of books on whatever subject I was interested in, whether or not it was my actual field of study or not. But now, away from academia, the public libraries hardly compare, and I can't check books out from any of the university libraries that are around here. So I'm usually too lazy to try anything but the web.
No, try again at Physics 101. You are correct that the droplets that make up clouds have weight because of their mass and gravity. However, their density is exactly the same as the density of raindrops any other water. What's different about cloud droplets is their terminal velocity. Cloud droplets are very small, with diameters of about a thousandth of an inch. This, their density, and the density and viscosity of air result in a terminal velocity of one to two feet per minute, which is slow enough that their motion is dominated by air currents and not by gravity. Regular raindrops, about a tenth of an inch in diameter, have a terminal velocity of about fifteen miles per hour, so they actually fall.
Here's an idea for those of you who'd like to get involved and show your support for our libraries and librarians; join your localFriends of the Library group. For example, for the library system mentioned in the article, visit Friends of the Santa Cruz Library. Perhaps you could work with your local group to put on a public forum on the issue or to provide handouts to patrons.
No, no--the NYC Metrocard still needs to be swiped, much like the regular Metrorail farecard we have here in DC.
Smart cards--like DC Metro's Smarttrip--are far cooler. You don't need to swipe them--just get them close to the reader. You don't need to take it our of your wallet: just put your wallet up to the reader and that gets it close enough.
Even better, you can register it with Metro and if you lose your card with $100 on it, you just have to pay $5 for a replacement card and you get all the value you had on the card.
In July, they should have Smarttrip readers on all the buses too, so that transfers will be automagic--no need to remember to get a paper transfer from one of those machines that always seems to be out of paper. Bus boarding should speed up dramatically too.
The film was shot on 35mm with a flat, 4:3 aspect ratio. Widescreen movies shot on 35mm film use special optics to horizontally squeeze a wide image onto the narrower film during shooting, and more special optics to unsqueeze the image during projection. To get an undistorted image on a TV screen (also 4:3), the wide image is either cropped horizontally (pan & scan) or letterboxed.
But with Koyaanisqatsi, no special optics were used; the original film is 4:3. This is how the movie is presented on the $180 special edition DVD. To give the appearance of a more artsy film, the regular DVD was released in a widescreen ratio, by cropping the top and bottom. You get less of the original picture, not more! Terrible, terrible, terrible.
I suppose this just sets them up to release another version later, with both "widescreen" and full-screen versions. I'd really like to see a running commentary as well, but for now, the 20-minute interview with Reggio is good.
Most physicists find that the Feynman lectures are amazingly insightful books, but they are often unhelpful for the beginner. Feynman's class, upon which the books are based, was a disaster (read about it in the Feynman biography Genius).
Whatever books you choose, remember that simply reading is not sufficient to really understand what's going on: you must work the exercises and problems. One of my professors once remarked to the class that "you haven't read a book until you've worked all the problems."
Some books I haven't seen mentioned:
Experiments in Modern Physics, by Melissinos. Often used as a textbook in upper-level undergraduate labs. Dated but interesting.
Purcell's Electricity and Magnetism. Very nice, often used for the "honors" level introductory E&M
Walker's The Flying Circus of Physics although it's been a long time since I've looked at it
Cartoon Guide to Physics by Gonick and Huffman--also a long time since I've looked at it
Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles by Eisberg and Resnick. Although I thought this was terribly simplified for an upper level quantum mechanics course, it would be very good for a modern physics course.
IANAG (I am not a geneticist), but one argument I've heard about the so-called "meaningless drivel" in the DNA is that the current estimates for the distribution of gene sizes is heavily biased towards small genes. Apparently, the cost to sequence a gene scales with the size of the gene, and in the interest of actually finishing a sequencing project, geneticists have favored the smaller, and therefore cheaper genes. The estimates for amount of "meaningless drivel" simply take the estimate for average gene size multiplied by the estimate for the number of genes, and find that this falls short of the total number of base pairs. The problem, then, is that the average size of genes is severely underestimated.
Giving this article a title suggesting that CTS is a hoax is a troll. Read the article a little more carefully. There is no question about whether the pain is real; it is. There is no question that Carpal Tunnel Syndrome--compression of the median nerve of the wrist--is real and does cause pain. The question is whether the presence of pain in the wrist always means that there is an actual physical injury caused by excessive or improper keyboarding, or not. The point of the article is that current research suggests not: pain need not be caused by physical injury, and the incidence of actual physical injury shows no correlation to computer keyboard use.
Earlier this week the Copenhagen newspaper Politiken printed extracts of the letter which alleges, among other things, that Lego is trying to obtain legal rights to Polynesian words. Lego says this is wrong: only the name Bionicle - taken from biology and chronicle - has been registered as a trademark.
I'd side with the Maori if Lego is actually trying to obtain rights to Polynesian words and I'd side with Lego otherwise.
My professor for graduate quantum mechanics, while imploring us to work by ourselves on his problem sets, told us this:
Teamwork in research is highly effective if most team members are able to operate on their own, but a team of unseasoned researchers is no better than an orchestra of poor musicians.
It's been sad to read about the ArsDigita meltdown. I've been somewhat of a fan of Greenspun's for a while--I've spent a fair amount of time lurking on photo.net, I own dead-trees copies of both of his books, and I've found his writing generally amusing. I've contemplated, but never followed through with, learning Web Publishing the Greenspun Way, going through all his problem sets and setting up a Linux/Oracle/AOLServer/ACS system to play with.
But now he's using words like "rubric." Twice. No wonder they're in such a mess.
Not having ever owned a DOS or Windows PC, I haven't paid attention to Ultima for a long time. I do remember walking into Egghead software, back when they still sold Apple II software, and getting my copy of Ultima V as soon as it was released. At that time, they were just getting around to releasing the IBM (as PC was called then) version of Ultima IV. I probably still have my "Ultima V: The Wait is Over but the Excitement Has Just Begun" t-shirt. I had a Mockingboard for my IIe, and hooked it up to a pair of old speakers. The computer was in our study, so my parents got to listen to those repetitive Ultima songs over and over and over until I finished the game. And then, of course, the Apple II world collapsed, although as a die-hard Apple II fan (I read A2-Central and loved Beagle Bros Micro Software (established $7BC)) it took me quite a while to realize this. I kept hoping Ultima VI for the Apple II would be released--there were rumous all over the place that it had actually been completed but never released. I suppose now that my Mac G4 would be fast enough to run the PC versions of Ultima VI and VII under emulation, if I ever wanted to revisit that experience of my youth...
I never understood the whole furor over cloning to begin with... cloned organisms are essentially identical twins, and nobody finds the existence of identical twins ethically challenging. The same skepticism goes for those who'd like to clone themselves, at least the way the popular media portray them. Why is anyone so eager to get an identical twin? A clone won't act the way it might in some mediocre science fiction piece, taking on all the thoughts and memories of its original or having some mystical unified mind split between two organisms.
So I'd say this news is a good thing, if it means that the feasibility of creating human clones is delayed until the furor on both sides of the current debate has calmed down.
Many anti-SAT arguments seem to assume that there's this large population of students who have no problem learning and understanding math, English, and other rigorous subjects but are somehow incapable of learning test-taking skills. Are test-taking skills really more esoteric than calculus? Others say that its unfair if you're ill or have a bad hair day on the appointed test-taking day, but at least when I took the SAT you could always cancel your scores on the day of the test if you really felt it went poorly. And some like to point out the obvious, that SAT scores aren't accurate to 10 points--at least when I took the SAT, they marked a range with 'X's on our score reports showing the accuracy to which we should interpret our scores. A 10-point difference is of course insignificant, but a 100 point difference probably is significant, and a 200 point difference most certainly is significant. Although its possible to be good at math and not get a high math SAT score, it's almost impossible to get a high score if you're not good at math: a high score means you're good, a low score either means you're not good or you're not good with tests. But I can't imagine that admissions officers at selective colleges are so dumb as to not be able to figure this out. Yet this is the implicit accusation that many SAT opponents are making. If I were an admissions officer, I'd probably feel insulted.
I still fail to see why Internet commerce should be taxed differently than mail order commerce, and all this law seems to be saying is that in California, the two will be treated the same way. Of course, this does nothing to address the question whether the current sales tax system still makes any sense--but I doubt that can be fixed at the state level.
Myself, sales tax avoidance is not the reason I buy stuff online. The internet affords the opportunity for more product detail than in print catalogs, and I don't have to wait for a paper catalog to arrive before ordering. And there's none of this "please call for price" garbage that you see in computer and electronics catalogs. I can place an order at 3am if I want to, and don't have to wait on hold or talk to a sales associate. It's much more efficient to read e.g. shipping options or available seats on a flight than to listen to a salesperson read them off. I get an e-mail record of my purchase instantly, which often has a direct link to the status of my order. I can store this in a "commerce" folder on my email client, instead of writing everything down on some scrap of paper. Lower price or no, I think the Internet is just a better way of doing a lot of purchasing.
Slashdot Mirror
I am now a research physicist, doing experimental condensed matter physics, but when I was an undergraduate physics major, I got a research job in my sophomore year working for an astrophysicist, for what was nominally 10 hours per week. It is true that getting a Ph.D. in grad school probably requires about 20,000 hours of work, and this is if you start with a physics/astrophysics undergraduate degree, but I was able to start contributing to research with very little background. This was in the early 1990s, and it largely involved writing Fortran programs to analyze time series data from an X-Ray observation satellite. I was directly supervised by a grad student with whom met once a week or so. I can't say that, at the time, I actually understood much of the astrophysics, but it did eventually result in a publication (a conference proceedings paper, that the grad student wrote and on which I was the second author). Although developing an understanding of exactly what's going on with a set of observations, and further, knowing how that understanding fits in with the major unanswered questions in astrophysics does likely require a lot of advanced coursework. (And as someone else pointed out, to learn physics you need to solve hard physics problems, much the same way that to learn to program you need to write code.) But the actual day-to-day carrying out of research does not always require such deep understanding.
It'd be a long shot, but you might be able to find a researcher who would let you be a sort of unpaid equivalent to an undergraduate researcher. Some professor might have a data set lying around that nobody in his/her research group has had time to tackle. Or there might be a professor who mostly focuses on teaching and whose research program has largely come to a halt but who still is interested in some research questions. It'd probably be more feasible if you were also taking (or took) as a non-traditional student. It's not entirely straightforward: the research output of undergraduate-level researchers is often quite low, and faculty largely do it because it's understood to be an important part of undergraduate training, which would not apply in your case.
The wealthy-Googlers-forcing-the-99%-out-of-SF problem is exacerbated, if not entirely the result of, a darkly ironic twist on zoning and development. There is too little supply and much demand, for housing, so prices go up.
But let's compare SF and the Bay Area to NYC. SF itself has a population density (17k/mi^2) that's less than half of Brooklyn (36k/mi^2), which is NYC's second-most dense borough and which itself has half the density of Manhattan (70k/mi^2). The suburban counties south of SF, San Mateo (1.6k/mi^2) and Santa Clara (1.4k/mi^2) have roughly a third of the population density of the nearest suburban counties to NYC, Nassau (4.7k/mi^2) and Bergen, NJ (3.9k/mi^2).
So it's not like it couldn't be possible to house everyone, to increase housing supply to match demand. But many (but certainly not all) of the same voices who are now complaining about the influx of rich Googlers came of age in a time when developers and development were destroying so much that was good and building much that was bad, and so the only mode of civic-minded activism which makes sense to them is to STOP THE GREEDY DEVELOPERS. Stop them from upzoning, stop them from increasing population density, stop them from building enough housing for everyone.
Transit in the Bay Area is a mess, and Google and the other tech companies using the Muni bus stops isn't helping. But with so many employees who wish to live in SF, Google really ought to abandon the outdated suburban office park campus idea and build itself a large building in San Francisco itself.
Close, I think you're thinking of 501(c)(3), which is the part of the Internal Revenue Code that spells out the tax exemption rules for charitable non-profits.
At the undergraduate level, there's no "problem," as none of the US government-backed or university-backed financial aid programs support nonresident foreign nationals. Our universities take their tuition money and provide an education.
The issue would be at the graduate level in the sciences and in engineering. But we need to be extremely careful about exactly what is being paid for. First set aside fellowships, which also don't apply to nonresident foreign nationals. The absolute standard practice is that Ph.D.-level graduate students in the sciences and engineering have their tuition, and a small living stipend, paid for by a combination of teaching assistantships and research assistantships.
In the case of teaching assistantships, then the grad student provides some number of hours per week of teaching, and in return gets his or her tuition paid for and a modest stipend. This is in turn funded by the tuition that undergraduates pay. The University is, in essence, simply hiring someone to do a job. The grad student spends some of his or her time teaching and uses the rest of his or her time, and status as a University student, to further his or her own education. Although there can be issues with non-native-English-speaking foreign graduate students and their ability to communicate in English, that is beside the point, and there's no investment in the grad student, on the part of the government or the University, that's being "lost" if the grad student returns to his or her home country after graduation.
In the case of research assistantships, these are offered by individual faculty members to graduate students working in those faculty's research groups. The faculty, in turn, get the money from research grants, almost all of which are funded by the government. However, the funding agencies are not directly funding specific students, rather, they are funding particular projects. To get a research grant, the faculty member submits a grant proposal that details what they expect to learn, and how much it will cost in terms of equipment, materials, labor, and so forth. When such research leads to interesting results, it is published, and the funding agencies are acknowledged. What funding agencies want to do is fund successful work. In this case, the funding agency is paying to have a particular scientific question investigated. Invariably, the people who are actually in the lab doing the labor to produce the results are either the grad students, or postdocs, or sometimes undergraduates. Their salaries, and grad student tuition, are paid in exchange for this labor. But fundamentally, the government funding agency pays for, and hopefully gets, scientific results, without concern for who does the work to get the results. But again, there's no investment that's being "lost" if the grad students or postdocs who did the work decide to leave the US once the work is done, because the investment was in the scientific work, not the individual students.
With the graduate population in the sciences and engineering at US Universities, you'll find the whole cross-section of American graduate students, plus the very best of the foreign graduate students. Only the cream of the foreign crop comes to the US, and this leads to the skewing of the graduate populations in which the best and most promising students are more likely to be foreign. And for the faculty researchers, its in their best interests to work with the best students, in order that their work be successful and lead to further research grants. So it can be in the best interests of faculty, and the Universities themselves, to welcome the best foreign grad students into their research groups.
How is it possible to demonstrate that there are any sort of psychological evaluations that can determine if a potential Mars astronaut is actually ready for this sort of mission? This mission promises to set up a sustainable and growing community, but for an individual astronaut, there is also going to be a complete and final separation from damn-near everyone they know, and everything they've known, and all the millions of things anyone has come to take for granted after living on Earth for at least 25 years. So there is a sense in which this is comparable to a suicide mission, because of the separation. We also know from survivors of suicide attempts that if there is time for contemplation after the point of no return, there is nearly universally regret of the attempt. Those who jump off a bridge, and survive, nearly universally report that mid-air they had immediate regrets of jumping. How can it be possible to ensure that, once the astronauts are past the point of no return in the mission, there won't be a similar feeling of regret?
Your FAQ, in the "sustainability" question, states
If we take 2000 calories per day as a baseline human need, that's 730,000 calories per [Earth] year, or about 3 million calories per Earth year per four-person crew, and the total need will grow by 3 million calories per Earth year every two years as more missions arrive. The diet would need to be varied, both to guard against catastrophic crop failure and to provide an appropriate spectrum of nutrients, and a reasonable estimate (e.g. based on a combination of corn, beans, and squash) suggests that 1 acre on Earth can provide such 3 million calories. But Mars gets, on average, only about 44% of the insolation as Earth does, so the first-order estimate suggests you'd need about 2.3 acres per mission-load of astronauts to grow a subsistence diet. This presumes that radiation won't negatively impact the crops, that the yield throughout the Mars growing season scales comparable to the Earth's, that your soil is comparable to Earth's, and many more things. You'll also need enough additional carbon and water to make the non-edible parts of the plants and soil, and you'll need to make sure there exists a suitable microbial community to decompose crop waste and turn it back into a useable food-growing medium (i.e. compost).
I don't see in your concept drawing anything that approaches the size of land that would be needed to come anywhere close to such sustainable food production. Do you even have a back-of-the-envelope plan for sustainable food production, or is the bulk of the astronauts' calories going to need to come in perpetuity from the Earth?
I realize TFA is more like the author's off-the-cuff musings and less like a rigorous study, but it does recommend looking at test score growth, and in the process fails to mention something that's both nearly obvious but almost always overlooked when discussing test score growth. When test scores grow, one is by definition comparing the scores that one group of students took on one test to the scores that another group of students got on a different test. With that in mind, there are 5 principal ways that test scores can "go up":
1. students cheat on the second test
2. the second test is easier
3. students who score low on the first test don't take the second test
4. students, who score high on the second test, were added to the testing group but did not take the first test
5. more individual students score better on the second test than perform worse on the second test
Cheating does happen, but it's probably rare. Tests can be psychologically validated to ensure constant difficulty, but this isn't done as often as it should. Nevertheless, #3 is by far the most common and least talked about way for test scores (particularly relative test scores) to improve. TFA recommends looking at the relative standing of a schools 2nd graders and 5th or 6th graders. We'd like to think that the students are being educated so successfully that their performance improves, but anyone making such a claim ought to be required to (rigorously and mathematically) prove that changes in the student population are not the primary cause. There is pretty good evidence, for example, that the high-profile improvement in the charter school that Michelle Rhee worked at was rather effective at "counseling out" the consistently low scoring students to have apparent test score gains that had little to do with their instructional program. I can well imagine the administrative staff of a school "working with" the parents to help find a school that's "a better match" to their kid's "unique learning style."
Labview: putting the spaghetti in spaghetti code.
Mr. Margulis is an old-time graphic artist, the type who learned when paste and x-acto knives were the tools of the trade, but who saw very early on that Photoshop would revolutionize the field. His book instructs its readers how to do amazing things to photos using only a handful of tools. The key to many of his techniques, though, is the ability to switch to/from the CMYK and Lab color spaces, which as far as I know GIMP just can't do. And, he's a fantastic writer. I put these books in the same category as Mastering Regular Expressions: if you felt you needed to go find some text to search after reading that one, you'll feel you need to go find some photos to correct after reading these books.
Sample chapters can be found here.
For remote shutter control (and time-lapse) of a huge number of digital cameras, check out Harbortronics. They have several (cabled) remote/time lapse controllers starting just above $100. Some models are compatible with an RF triggering system for wireless setup.
For everything else I have shifted to nearly entirely online sources. But one reason for this is that I'm no longer close to well-stocked university libraries that stay open late. As an undergrad or grad student, I'd often go get a stack of books on whatever subject I was interested in, whether or not it was my actual field of study or not. But now, away from academia, the public libraries hardly compare, and I can't check books out from any of the university libraries that are around here. So I'm usually too lazy to try anything but the web.
No, try again at Physics 101. You are correct that the droplets that make up clouds have weight because of their mass and gravity. However, their density is exactly the same as the density of raindrops any other water. What's different about cloud droplets is their terminal velocity. Cloud droplets are very small, with diameters of about a thousandth of an inch. This, their density, and the density and viscosity of air result in a terminal velocity of one to two feet per minute, which is slow enough that their motion is dominated by air currents and not by gravity. Regular raindrops, about a tenth of an inch in diameter, have a terminal velocity of about fifteen miles per hour, so they actually fall.
Smart cards--like DC Metro's Smarttrip--are far cooler. You don't need to swipe them--just get them close to the reader. You don't need to take it our of your wallet: just put your wallet up to the reader and that gets it close enough.
Even better, you can register it with Metro and if you lose your card with $100 on it, you just have to pay $5 for a replacement card and you get all the value you had on the card.
In July, they should have Smarttrip readers on all the buses too, so that transfers will be automagic--no need to remember to get a paper transfer from one of those machines that always seems to be out of paper. Bus boarding should speed up dramatically too.
The film was shot on 35mm with a flat, 4:3 aspect ratio. Widescreen movies shot on 35mm film use special optics to horizontally squeeze a wide image onto the narrower film during shooting, and more special optics to unsqueeze the image during projection. To get an undistorted image on a TV screen (also 4:3), the wide image is either cropped horizontally (pan & scan) or letterboxed.
But with Koyaanisqatsi, no special optics were used; the original film is 4:3. This is how the movie is presented on the $180 special edition DVD. To give the appearance of a more artsy film, the regular DVD was released in a widescreen ratio, by cropping the top and bottom. You get less of the original picture, not more! Terrible, terrible, terrible.
I suppose this just sets them up to release another version later, with both "widescreen" and full-screen versions. I'd really like to see a running commentary as well, but for now, the 20-minute interview with Reggio is good.
Whatever books you choose, remember that simply reading is not sufficient to really understand what's going on: you must work the exercises and problems. One of my professors once remarked to the class that "you haven't read a book until you've worked all the problems."
Some books I haven't seen mentioned:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,
Quote of note:
I'd side with the Maori if Lego is actually trying to obtain rights to Polynesian words and I'd side with Lego otherwise.
But now he's using words like "rubric." Twice. No wonder they're in such a mess.
So I'd say this news is a good thing, if it means that the feasibility of creating human clones is delayed until the furor on both sides of the current debate has calmed down.
Myself, sales tax avoidance is not the reason I buy stuff online. The internet affords the opportunity for more product detail than in print catalogs, and I don't have to wait for a paper catalog to arrive before ordering. And there's none of this "please call for price" garbage that you see in computer and electronics catalogs. I can place an order at 3am if I want to, and don't have to wait on hold or talk to a sales associate. It's much more efficient to read e.g. shipping options or available seats on a flight than to listen to a salesperson read them off. I get an e-mail record of my purchase instantly, which often has a direct link to the status of my order. I can store this in a "commerce" folder on my email client, instead of writing everything down on some scrap of paper. Lower price or no, I think the Internet is just a better way of doing a lot of purchasing.