The Tyrrell Museum near Drumheller is where you want to go for Dinosaur stuff. It is an amazing museum... you will probably need a whole day there (that's ok, there's not much else around there to do), and I believe they have tour guides who will take you out on hikes in the surrounding area to see the Badlands.
Calgary, Alberta also has the Stampede which is the only rodeo of its kind in the world. it's a huge tourist event, so hotels and so forth during that time would probably be expensive.
A warning about the train is that you will likely spend some (like 8 at least) very boring hours going through the prairies where you basically see flat fields of crops. I've also heard that unless you're careful, your train will be going through the Rocky's at night, which would be a shame. For the geek interested in outdoor activities, I think BC probably has the most variety to offer and it is extremely beautiful. Your dollar will also go farther in Canada than the US.
You should try to visit BC when you can go to one of the beaches that has good low tides. Looking at critters in tide pools is very interesting. Usually requires getting up at an ungodly hour, though. This is free except for the transportation cost. Probably one of the best places to go is Botanical Beach, which google tells me is near Port Renfrew (on Vancouver Island). Here's one website.
New Brunswick has the Bay of Fundy which has extremely low tides and whale-watching and that sort of thing.
I've recently been to the National Aviation Museum in Ottawa, and it was very cool. The displays are really well done, and a lot of interesting old planes and Canadian bush planes. Since it's the capital, Ottawa has a ton of galleries and museums for just about everything. Hull, Quebec is just across the river, so a visit to Ottawa, can easily include visiting the Museum of Civilization.
I have long argued that anyone who takes what they see in a game or movie and tries to create it in real life has more serious problems than the existence of said game or movie. Millions of people play games and watch movies and only a miniscule percentage go on to do violent things that might be construed to be based on them.
If the game wasn't around these people would be reading violent comic books or listening to violent music and those would get vilified (as they have in the past). They probably had the predisposition to be violent and would have done something similar without any outside inspiration.
I wish reporters would start making a case for personal responsibility. it's ridiculous to be blaming people's actions on anything other than the people themselves. Unless you're truly insane, most people have a basic sense of right/wrong and what society accepts, and they've just chosen to ignore it. This will happen even if we live in a sanatized, empty environment. (In fact, it might even be more common then because restrictive authority would be so much more tight).
I agree that outside factors will come into play, such as someone's environment, how they were raised and other social problems. But, it's far to simplistic to point to a single factor, especially something so dependent on choice of participation, and lay all the blame there.
This is exactly the sort of thing that real world spies do. They don't generally get tuxedo's and cool gadgets... they get papers and magazines and trade publications and they spend their time clipping things out and cross referencing. It has long been known that you can find out secrets by putting together lots of public information.
Real-seeming fantasy isn't that new ...
on
A Game of Thrones
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I find it irritating how often I hear someone praising a fantasy for how real the world seems. Any good writer should be able to accomplish this, although few really manage to make the people seem real.
My absolute favourite author, which very few N.Americans seem to have heard of, is Diana Wynne Jones. She writes for a wide range of ages, so you may have to select carefully. (Although I enjoy the books she writes for a younger audience because she doesn't write down to children at all). Perhaps a good one to start on is Deep Secret as it is young adult to adult level and widely released in N.America. The sequel The Merlin Conspiracy has just come out. A lot of her books have been republished due to the success of a certain other British author.
On that subject, although I did have fun with Harry Potter, I keep saying `what's the big deal?!' DWJ has been doing this for years and doing it far better. One of the best things about DWJ's books are the characters. They are always interesting people with both good and bad qualities and she never resorts to using a Pure Force of Evil as the badguy. The villains are generally perfectly normal people whose character traits and desires have just led them to behave in a less than laudable fashion.
Another suggestion for a starter book is A Sudden Wild Magic, which is intended for adults and is about a group of magic users on Earth who find out there is a parallel world called Arth that is using Earth as a test lab by causing problems and seeing how Earth people deal with them. So they create an interdimensional bus and send a bunch of them over to try to disrupt things.
Plus you have the problem of the learning curve - how much will it take people to figure out how to properly use whatever technology you require of them? Remember, it doesn't matter if you think it's easy - if it gives them any kind of trouble, you're going to have to take time away from what you're supposed to be teaching to help with with the technology.
This point is extremely true! I'm a CS student, but as electives, I've had some arts courses that try to incorporate web-based discussions which then have one group member submit a summary. While this is easier than trying to set up group meetings or taking away from class time, the technology is usually a HUGE issue.
I found it very convenient as I could think for quite some time between posts, post at 2am if I wanted, or whenever it was most convenient. However, in the first class one of my group members couldn't figure out how to even log on, let alone submit a file (it popped up a choose file window, with the browse option) when it was his turn to do the summary. A lot of people don't use this sort of thing regularly and they find it really confusing and difficult.
That disclaimer disclaimed, I think the online web discussion groups can be really nice. This term, I'm taking a film class where we discuss questions posted by the teacher in small groups. I appear to have got a competent group as there have been no problems for us. I really like that it doesn't take up class time, nor do I have to try to schedule a meeting IRL, which can be really hard when you have 5 people with 5 different schedules. If it is appropriate for the type of English course you are teaching I would recommend using discussion groups. However, the point of them is OUTSIDE the classroom. I don't really see what use you will get with the computers during class time... at university I would think this should be lecture time, especially for an English course.
1. since ssn's are used by employers for tax stuff, you can also pretend to be an employer and get all sorts of info that's stored by SSN.
2.Even worse, if it's not someone famous like a politician or Bill Gates that people know what they look like, getting someone's SSN is a good first step to using their identity. see step 1, you can get hired as that person and income tax stuff will get really mixed up.
If it's outlawed to break crypto or copyright and they actually think this is going to be enforceable and effective, why have the middleman? Why not just make what the copy protection and crypto try to prevent illegal.
Oh wait, they probably already are. So if those laws aren't effective and crypto and copy protection aren't effective, then what makes them think these new laws will be the magic solution?!
This author is usually relegated to the children's or young adults sections, but that's just because they don't really know how to classify her books. Some definitely are for children, but other are certainly meant for adults. Try Deep Secret for a geeky fantasy. (much of the story takes place at a scifi convention).
DWJ is an amazing writer. Not only are the plots surprising and interesting, the characters are wonderfully real and developed. I don't mean she blathers on for pages about the character, but rather the characters act so naturally that they seem real.
For us younger geeks, who had hippy parents, some of this may have been passed down. When I was little, I remember carding wool for my mom to spin. Getting back to more natural ways of living was pretty common.
Also, my parents didn't have a lot of money, so it was important for them to know how to make stuff themselves. We ate fish and venison and made soup stock from leftover bones, which most people don't seem to know how to do these days even though you'll get the best tasting soup ever. Many things in our house, including my most-cherished toys were homemade, etc.
Now, I have an interest in being able to do the things that culture and neccessity caused my parents to learn. And knowing about woodworking and so forth is darn useful. A LOT cheaper to DIY than to buy in most cases.
However, I agree that the drive to learn is what motivates geeks. Even if the skill is not really that useful anymore. Who out there wishes they knew how to competently use an abacus?
This post suggests that you haven't outgrown the teenager's hatred of authority. Most people are not motivated enough to get a broad education on their own. It really is important to have general knowledge in many areas regardless of personal interest because the world is not compartmentalized.
I agree that a lot of high school seems pretty dumb, but actually, if you forget the bad experiences, most people do actually learn some important stuff while there. Not only what they teach you in class, but how to deal with the social structure. Even if the classes are slow and boring as they were for me, only the most arrogant or genius of teenagers could claim they know more than ALL their teachers. Besides, for the more intelligent student, homework is quick and easy and this means you have plenty of your own time to look into what interests you. If you find the homework long and hard, then you probably need to spend the time on it. And if it's tedious, well that's an important life lesson actually. Many of the things you just have to do aren't fun and interesting. But they still have to be done.
The run-of-the-mill teenager is too busy trying to impress their peers and be rebellious towards authority to really get as much out of high school as they could. If you didn't put these kids into this "day care", they sure as heck wouldn't be learning anything on their own time. At least this way they get some basic math, reading and writing skills.
It's awfully hard to judge what's important to learn. Usually it's the stuff you didn't learn that you notice, not the stuff that you did. I believe that the current school system is lacking but any system, no matter how good, needs to be complemented with a rich environment outside of school hours.
Someone in the article is quoted as saying they didn't want to hand out pamphlets and so forth for fear of scaring elderly people who lived during the McCarthy era. However, that's exactly what they should be doing. People need to see the parallel and need to be afraid that their rights have been eroded to do anything.
There has been fear in the past about using people's book preferences for profiling on a larger scale. Took out a book on gay relationships? maybe you're gay. Took out a book about religion X? Maybe you practice religion X. Took out a book on living with disease X? maybe you have disease X. This becomes a lot more insidious if records of specialized bookstores are being examined. I seem to recall a case recently about a gay/lesbian focused bookstore refusing to release their customer records.
Sorry but thems the breaks. You don't have to ask to link to someone's page. If you put up something in public space, people are free to link to it. I thought most services just refused access to your page if you went over your bandwidth anyways.
This is not really your average guy movie, but the girl geeks out there might enjoy New Waterford Girl. Might be hard to find since it was an independent Canadian film. Very quirky, humourous and fun.
There is a lot of discussion about using old or new materials. As was recently driven home by the article about non-toxic housing, a lot of new materials emit all sorts of chemicals. I would recommend researching your materials carefully to make your home not only lasting, but a healthy, safe home for your family.
It's just jumping on a convenient political bandwagon in order to get support for their cause. Same reason marijuana "funds" terrorism, it's something they want to label as bad and right now, terrorism is a safe excuse since regardless of what people think of war, it's hard to dispute that terrorism is bad.
If the current big evil was pollution, I'm sure they'd be coming up with some way to say that piracy was causing pollution... surely all those poorly run pirate factories are big polluters, right?
I would guess that a lot of the anti-civil-liberties laws that got shoved through recently were not created recently. I bet they were just waiting around for a good enough excuse that the public would accept it.
I remember hearing in high school that we knew less about the depths of our oceans than about outer space even though the ocean is a lot more accessible.
Arizona has tapped dry aquifers and caused sink holes. It's a desert! Having swimming pools is a foolish luxury and a huge waste of water.
The US has serious water problems and has been trying to convince Canada to change it's rules (no pipelines, restrictions on trucking it out) so they can suck Canada dry too.
I'm not blaming rich car drivers, I'm blaming lazy ones. People often drive for a little bit more convenience (although you have to wonder about the parking issue) when walking or biking or bus would be fast and easy too. This has a devastating effect on air quality when considered on a large scale.
and I never claimed people were poor because others used too many resources... I was claiming our world was being harmed (duh!) by overuse and misuse of resources. I admit, the food and oil shortages might be bad examples because they are artificial shortages.
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A warning about the train is that you will likely spend some (like 8 at least) very boring hours going through the prairies where you basically see flat fields of crops. I've also heard that unless you're careful, your train will be going through the Rocky's at night, which would be a shame. For the geek interested in outdoor activities, I think BC probably has the most variety to offer and it is extremely beautiful. Your dollar will also go farther in Canada than the US.
You should try to visit BC when you can go to one of the beaches that has good low tides. Looking at critters in tide pools is very interesting. Usually requires getting up at an ungodly hour, though. This is free except for the transportation cost. Probably one of the best places to go is Botanical Beach, which google tells me is near Port Renfrew (on Vancouver Island). Here's one website.
New Brunswick has the Bay of Fundy which has extremely low tides and whale-watching and that sort of thing.
I've recently been to the National Aviation Museum in Ottawa, and it was very cool. The displays are really well done, and a lot of interesting old planes and Canadian bush planes. Since it's the capital, Ottawa has a ton of galleries and museums for just about everything. Hull, Quebec is just across the river, so a visit to Ottawa, can easily include visiting the Museum of Civilization.
If the game wasn't around these people would be reading violent comic books or listening to violent music and those would get vilified (as they have in the past). They probably had the predisposition to be violent and would have done something similar without any outside inspiration.
I wish reporters would start making a case for personal responsibility. it's ridiculous to be blaming people's actions on anything other than the people themselves. Unless you're truly insane, most people have a basic sense of right/wrong and what society accepts, and they've just chosen to ignore it. This will happen even if we live in a sanatized, empty environment. (In fact, it might even be more common then because restrictive authority would be so much more tight).
I agree that outside factors will come into play, such as someone's environment, how they were raised and other social problems. But, it's far to simplistic to point to a single factor, especially something so dependent on choice of participation, and lay all the blame there.
This is exactly the sort of thing that real world spies do. They don't generally get tuxedo's and cool gadgets ... they get papers and magazines and trade publications and they spend their time clipping things out and cross referencing. It has long been known that you can find out secrets by putting together lots of public information.
My absolute favourite author, which very few N.Americans seem to have heard of, is Diana Wynne Jones. She writes for a wide range of ages, so you may have to select carefully. (Although I enjoy the books she writes for a younger audience because she doesn't write down to children at all). Perhaps a good one to start on is Deep Secret as it is young adult to adult level and widely released in N.America. The sequel The Merlin Conspiracy has just come out. A lot of her books have been republished due to the success of a certain other British author.
On that subject, although I did have fun with Harry Potter, I keep saying `what's the big deal?!' DWJ has been doing this for years and doing it far better. One of the best things about DWJ's books are the characters. They are always interesting people with both good and bad qualities and she never resorts to using a Pure Force of Evil as the badguy. The villains are generally perfectly normal people whose character traits and desires have just led them to behave in a less than laudable fashion.
Another suggestion for a starter book is A Sudden Wild Magic, which is intended for adults and is about a group of magic users on Earth who find out there is a parallel world called Arth that is using Earth as a test lab by causing problems and seeing how Earth people deal with them. So they create an interdimensional bus and send a bunch of them over to try to disrupt things.
This point is extremely true! I'm a CS student, but as electives, I've had some arts courses that try to incorporate web-based discussions which then have one group member submit a summary. While this is easier than trying to set up group meetings or taking away from class time, the technology is usually a HUGE issue.
I found it very convenient as I could think for quite some time between posts, post at 2am if I wanted, or whenever it was most convenient. However, in the first class one of my group members couldn't figure out how to even log on, let alone submit a file (it popped up a choose file window, with the browse option) when it was his turn to do the summary. A lot of people don't use this sort of thing regularly and they find it really confusing and difficult.
That disclaimer disclaimed, I think the online web discussion groups can be really nice. This term, I'm taking a film class where we discuss questions posted by the teacher in small groups. I appear to have got a competent group as there have been no problems for us. I really like that it doesn't take up class time, nor do I have to try to schedule a meeting IRL, which can be really hard when you have 5 people with 5 different schedules. If it is appropriate for the type of English course you are teaching I would recommend using discussion groups. However, the point of them is OUTSIDE the classroom. I don't really see what use you will get with the computers during class time... at university I would think this should be lecture time, especially for an English course.
1. since ssn's are used by employers for tax stuff, you can also pretend to be an employer and get all sorts of info that's stored by SSN. 2.Even worse, if it's not someone famous like a politician or Bill Gates that people know what they look like, getting someone's SSN is a good first step to using their identity. see step 1, you can get hired as that person and income tax stuff will get really mixed up.
Oh wait, they probably already are. So if those laws aren't effective and crypto and copy protection aren't effective, then what makes them think these new laws will be the magic solution?!
then you can sue them for even more money for wrongful dismissal. :)
This author is usually relegated to the children's or young adults sections, but that's just because they don't really know how to classify her books. Some definitely are for children, but other are certainly meant for adults. Try Deep Secret for a geeky fantasy. (much of the story takes place at a scifi convention). DWJ is an amazing writer. Not only are the plots surprising and interesting, the characters are wonderfully real and developed. I don't mean she blathers on for pages about the character, but rather the characters act so naturally that they seem real.
I just reread the Diamond Age and it is also very good, about nanotech.
There are many parts of the world where people take pride in working their land. The US is hardly the first or foremost of these.
Also, my parents didn't have a lot of money, so it was important for them to know how to make stuff themselves. We ate fish and venison and made soup stock from leftover bones, which most people don't seem to know how to do these days even though you'll get the best tasting soup ever. Many things in our house, including my most-cherished toys were homemade, etc.
Now, I have an interest in being able to do the things that culture and neccessity caused my parents to learn. And knowing about woodworking and so forth is darn useful. A LOT cheaper to DIY than to buy in most cases.
However, I agree that the drive to learn is what motivates geeks. Even if the skill is not really that useful anymore. Who out there wishes they knew how to competently use an abacus?
I agree that a lot of high school seems pretty dumb, but actually, if you forget the bad experiences, most people do actually learn some important stuff while there. Not only what they teach you in class, but how to deal with the social structure. Even if the classes are slow and boring as they were for me, only the most arrogant or genius of teenagers could claim they know more than ALL their teachers. Besides, for the more intelligent student, homework is quick and easy and this means you have plenty of your own time to look into what interests you. If you find the homework long and hard, then you probably need to spend the time on it. And if it's tedious, well that's an important life lesson actually. Many of the things you just have to do aren't fun and interesting. But they still have to be done.
The run-of-the-mill teenager is too busy trying to impress their peers and be rebellious towards authority to really get as much out of high school as they could. If you didn't put these kids into this "day care", they sure as heck wouldn't be learning anything on their own time. At least this way they get some basic math, reading and writing skills.
It's awfully hard to judge what's important to learn. Usually it's the stuff you didn't learn that you notice, not the stuff that you did. I believe that the current school system is lacking but any system, no matter how good, needs to be complemented with a rich environment outside of school hours.
There has been fear in the past about using people's book preferences for profiling on a larger scale. Took out a book on gay relationships? maybe you're gay. Took out a book about religion X? Maybe you practice religion X. Took out a book on living with disease X? maybe you have disease X. This becomes a lot more insidious if records of specialized bookstores are being examined. I seem to recall a case recently about a gay/lesbian focused bookstore refusing to release their customer records.
Read this comment A ddos attack is just that, an attack. Linking is perfectly legal and it's part of the framework of the internet.
Sorry but thems the breaks. You don't have to ask to link to someone's page. If you put up something in public space, people are free to link to it. I thought most services just refused access to your page if you went over your bandwidth anyways.
This is not really your average guy movie, but the girl geeks out there might enjoy New Waterford Girl. Might be hard to find since it was an independent Canadian film. Very quirky, humourous and fun.
There is a lot of discussion about using old or new materials. As was recently driven home by the article about non-toxic housing, a lot of new materials emit all sorts of chemicals. I would recommend researching your materials carefully to make your home not only lasting, but a healthy, safe home for your family.
If the current big evil was pollution, I'm sure they'd be coming up with some way to say that piracy was causing pollution... surely all those poorly run pirate factories are big polluters, right?
I would guess that a lot of the anti-civil-liberties laws that got shoved through recently were not created recently. I bet they were just waiting around for a good enough excuse that the public would accept it.
I remember hearing in high school that we knew less about the depths of our oceans than about outer space even though the ocean is a lot more accessible.
The US has serious water problems and has been trying to convince Canada to change it's rules (no pipelines, restrictions on trucking it out) so they can suck Canada dry too.
If you have to "opt-in" somewhere, doesn't that make it no longer "unsolicited"? (not that that's a bad thing)
But do you claim they are not finite? At any given moment I would think they must be finite.
I think it would be nice if the moon were made into an international "park" (as in a protected area not as in a place with swings).
and I never claimed people were poor because others used too many resources... I was claiming our world was being harmed (duh!) by overuse and misuse of resources. I admit, the food and oil shortages might be bad examples because they are artificial shortages.