Yes, but states could, if they so cared, craft legislation that would protect existing dealers and allow for future innovation. Imagine a law that simply stated that a vehicle manufacturer has to declare up front whether a particular brand is going to be sold through dealers or directly from the manufacturer. There could be restrictions on changing that designation, like requiring they make the dealers "whole" (compensating for loss), or given them veto power to stop the change, etc. That would allow a new manufacturer, like Tesla, to enter the market, or an existing manufacturer to start up a new brand, like GM might have otherwise done with Saturn, via direct sales, without affecting dealers of existing brands.
Speaking as someone who was IRIF'ed during a large, showy reorganization at Xerox, I beg to differ: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9228947/Xerox_s_outsourcing_one_year_later_layoffs
And that move definitely destroyed the once-proud solid engineering traditions of the Phaser printer org that Xerox acquired from Tektronix. Used to be an amazing group of innovative engineers there, and now just a burnt out husk remains.
I've wanted to ask a real linguist: is there a technical term for that construct? I know a few people here in the US Pacific NW who occasionally make use of that construct in day-to-day speech, and I'm curious about how much it has been studied. For example, does it have a well defined regional distribution?
Diurnal temperature range: >100 K to <400 K (roughly -250 F to +250 F)
Total mass of atmosphere: ~25,000 kg
Surface pressure (night): 3 x 10-15 bar (2 x 10-12 torr)
Abundance at surface: 2 x 105 particles/cm3
Estimated Composition (particles per cubic cm):
Helium 4 (4He) - 40,000 ; Neon 20 (20Ne) - 40,000 ; Hydrogen (H2) - 35,000
Argon 40 (40Ar) - 30,000 ; Neon 22 (22Ne) - 5,000 ; Argon 36 (36Ar) - 2,000
Methane - 1000 ; Ammonia - 1000 ; Carbon Dioxide (CO2) - 1000
Trace Oxygen (O+), Aluminum (Al+), Silicon (Si+)
Possible Phosphorus (P+), Sodium (Na+), Magnesium (Mg+)
Composition of the tenuous lunar atmosphere is poorly known and variable, these are estimates of the upper limits of the nighttime ambient atmosphere composition. Daytime levels were difficult to measure due to heating and outgassing of Apollo surface experiments.
but thinks it impossible for someone to come up with their own rules seemingly from out of thin air.
Luckily for us, morals, even for an atheist, do not come out of thin air. Presumably, even an atheist participates in a society, and there are certain guidelines for meaningful conduct in said society. The distinction between those guidelines and some academic definition of "morals" proper, is what is actually rather thin.
If there was immediate economic value to the ISS, the government wouldn't (and shouldn't) be doing it -- private industry would be doing it instead.
So, by parallel reasoning: If there was immediate economic value to the Interstate Highway System, the government wouldn't (and shouldn't) be doing it -- private industry would be doing it instead?
...come to think of it, the ISS is kind of like a highway rest area (and hotel, restaurant, lab, etc) in the sky.
And for comparison, someone above quoted ~$1.3 billion/yr for the ISS. That's still shy of the amount California spends on highway patrol alone (http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/StateAgencyBudgets/2000 /2660/department.html). Their DofT budget (e.g. road maintenance and construction, etc), is over 10x that amount! Or put another way, it costs about $4.33 per US citizen. If one latte a year keeps that thing flying, I'm cool with it.
It's fair to confuse the two, since their "difference" has little actual scientific distinction. If you think there's a lot of controversy over evolution, you should check on some of the arguments just within the scientific community over the definition of the word "species". It's one of those topics that seems like it should be easy, but turns out, in practice, to be almost intractable.
For every definition of species that's come along, there have been many edge cases that just doesn't fit. Mules, hybrid plants, lichens, ring species, subspecies, etc. And that's just for the eukaryotes. Bacteria are a massive headache for almost all definitions since they'll swap DNA with just about anything. If one ponders a few of those cases for a moment, it rapidly becomes apparent that it's not just about who can breed with whom. There's more to it than that, and it likely has more of a fuzzy margin than folks in the "hard" sciences would enjoy dealing with. It's not that we haven't put enough time and effort into it. It's just that there may not be an answer. It could be that we're trying to impose an artificial distinction on nature that just isn't there.
So, if the definition of species has so much gray area, maybe species membership is not a boolean either-or relationship. You actually capture more of the true nature of real world populations if you start to view it more in fuzzy logic terms. For example, saying that a mule has some non-zero percent (and non-complete) membership in the "horse species" group and likewise in the "donkey species" group better reflects it's true nature than trying to define some discrete "mule species" group that can't breed and therefore falls out of a number of the standard species definitions.
Some of the current thinking, like that of Dr. Anna Graybeal, takes the approach that you can only define a species "after the fact", that it's not about the potential of whether two individuals/groups could interbreed, but more about when was the last time that they did. Or, to put it in a way that captures prokaryotes as well, "time of last gene flow". Using a definition like that, situations like geographically separated groups became different species almost at the moment they were separated, even though they could potentially interbreed if they met back up. Of course, if they did meet back up, then they would have been one species the whole time. Confused? It's not just you!
So, long story short, saying that you believe in microevolution but not macroevolution depends on there being a functionally rigorous definition of species, which simply does not exist. Nature prefers exceptions to rules!
1998, 1998, 1998,... Geez guy, you say we have a religious bent. Every single one of your posts mentions a year that anyone who has ever taken a statistics class can obviously see is a what's called an outlier. Have you taken a look at where it sits on the whole graph? Sure it's a local maxima, but the trendline for the whole series is about as significant as you get with real world data. We might be down 0.1 to 0.2C from the worst year, but we're still up at least 0.8C from a century ago. Or are you the type who needs data with absolutely zero noise to agree there's a trend? Sorry dude, but that's not the type of data that Mother Nature doles out.
Since no one can scientifically prove how we came into existence... But science, with its "proof"...
Seriously folks, we need to kill this meme. Math has proofs, science does not. Math != Science. They play in two totally different realms. Nothing in science will ever be "proven", that's not how it works.
In science, we make observations and then propose a postulate than tries to explain why/how we saw those observations. At any point in time, a new, conflicting observation can come in, showing the postulate to be a poor explanation of the actual world. That's called falsifiability. If your postulate isn't potentially (even if improbably) falsifiable, then it isn't scientific. That's why ID isn't scientific. If the postulate is that "God created the universe", what observation could possibly be made to falsify that postulate?
Getting back to your statement: But science, with its "proof" has a lot more to prove to me before I just jump on the bandwagon of 1) how the universe was created and 2) how life began on this (and any other) planet.
As stated, science is not concerned with "proving" either of these explanations. But postulates have been made to explain the observations we have regarding topic #2. There aren't really any serious proposals to explain topic #1, since there can be no observable data from before the existence of the universe. Don't confuse Big Bang Theory, which desribes what happened after the matter came into existence, with an exaplanation of where that matter came from. Regarding #1, if you have a beef with the scientific theories about the origin of life on Earth, all you have to do is state that there is some observable data that's a counterexample to the prevailing theories. Since these include postulates like "all life decended from a common ancestor", that could easily be falsified by finding an organism that does not appear to be related to the other organisms on the planet. However, despite a century and a half of looking (post-Darwin) and, more recently, decades of research doing genetic sequencing on every organism we can get our hands on, we have yet to find any critter, no matter how strange, that is not somehow related to everything else. Maybe you need more evidence than the 100 Gigabases sampled from over 165,000 organisms, but in my book, that's withstanding a pretty rigorous challenge.
It is entirely possible that the theory of evolution is right, but frankly, there isn't enough evidence to say for sure.
One more time kids: no scientific theory is ever proven "right". Theories get to be called theories when they meet two criteria:
They are stated such that they can be potentially falsifiable.
They then need to have withstood numerous scientific attempts to falsify them.
Notice that "right" never enters into it. Theories just have to be explanations that still seem to fit the evidence, even after you look really, really closely at them.
The part of Darwinism that seems to trouble people the most, that of common descent, fits both criteria. All you would have to do to falsify it is simply find an organism that does not appear to be related to the other organisms on the planet. However, despite a century and a half of looking (post-Darwin) and, more recently, decades of research doing genetic sequencing on every organism we can get our hands on, we have yet to find any critter, no matter how strange, that is not somehow related to everything else. Maybe you need more evidence than the 100 Gigabases sampled from over 165,000 organisms, but in my book, that's withstanding a pretty rigorous challenge.
Except for extremely rare occurances, mtDNA in animals does not undergo recombination, and usually only 1 parent contributes mitochondria to a child (almost always the mother). So, in a cross between a neanderthal father and a modern human mother, only the modern human mtDNA will appear in the child. The nuclear DNA however, will be a combination of both parents, but studies with it have been much more challenging. Long story short, mtDNA, while good for other phylogentic studies, is simply not the right tool for finding evidence of hybridization.
As you stated, the morphological evidence hints that hybrids were possible. Most notable is the skeleton of a child found in Portugal in 1998 that looks like a mixture of neanderthal and modern human traits. See the Wikipedia article for more info: Abrigo do Lagar Velho. Until there's better evidence from nuclear DNA studies, the fossil evidence is the best we've got to go on.
Lessee, article about Google setting up new WiFi hotspots appears right about the time there's an article posted about NASA's new lauch vehicle for getting to the moon. Do the math folks - we know where their first WiFi spot is gonna be!
Huh? Since when is gravitational acceleration not equal for objects of different masses? That is, if gravity is even a factor for gaseous ozone. If anything, it would diffuse slower due to larger mass.
Could you please do me a favor and go into a sealed room, open up a canister of CO2, heck open up a canister of O2 as well if you like, and then lie on the floor for a while? After all, according to your theory, the CO2 shouldn't diffuse downward any faster than the O2, right?
Of course, I doubt that anyone who has actually taken a chemistry class will be willing to join you on the floor, but that's probably because they stayed awake for the lecture about relative density/bouancy of fluids.
To be fair, the OP should have said density rather than mass, but I get the feeling that wouldn't have helped you.
IQ tests have two numbers used in their scoring process. One is the raw score (basically some value based on how many answers you got right or wrong) and the other is the "normalized" score (an adjusted score based on how others did on this particular test) and that's the one that's one that always has an average of 100. Normalization is the process of giving the proposed IQ test to a sample population and then using their scores, a gaussian distribution curve, and some statistical gymnastics to generate a raw score->normalized score translation table.
The Flynn Effect shows when you attempt give a test to a more recent sample poplation that those used for the normalization process. The sample populations keep scoring better each year, so the mean raw score keeps moving upward. And it's not that the tests are getting easier. If you were to give a 1995 IQ test to a sample population in 2005, odds are that you'd likely see a higher average raw score for the current group than when the test was originally normalized in 1995. If the test author uses the new sample population data to generate a new score translation table (but keeps the test the same), the process is called renorming or renormalization. Most of the time, renorming yields lower normalized scores.
Well, the "dummening" of the population of which you speak must be confined to only the population of this fair website, as the exact opposite trend has been noticed by numerous researchers on human IQ for many years. To quoth the 'pedia: "The Flynn effect is the continued year-on-year rise of IQ test scores, an effect seen in all parts of the world, although at greatly varying rates.... The average rate of rise seems to be around three IQ points per decade."
We need to fix our educational system by covering all of these types of topics equally as well:
The theory of the universe being composed of 4 elements, earth, fire, wind, and water needs to get equal time with this so called chemistry theory. I mean when's the chemistry theory going to stop adding elements to that silly periodic table of theirs. It's just further proof that they didn't get it right the first time!
Heliocentrism is just a theory, just like geocentrism. In our astronomy classes, if we can't spend equal time discussing a universe that revolves around the earth, then we're just promoting one group's beliefs.
Everywhere I've travelled the earth still looks basically flat to me, and I know quite a few people who support that theory. Geography classes are also just promoting a theory when they show kids a globe. There are holes in their theory too. For example, how can people stick to both sides of a round object? Wouldn't the people on the other side just fall off? It's very hypocritical to teach the round earth theory while denying the flat earth theory!
One of my friends spent a while studying the myth of the phoenix and then (philosophically) really got into what it would be like to live for 500 years. Then I pointed out that there's a big difference between living in the body of a 20 year old for 480 years versus living in the body of an 80 year old for 420 years. One would feel like paradise and the other well, almost a punishment. And most major advances in medical technology will end up giving us something more like the latter than the former.
I personally would like to see medical research focus on improvements in quality of life throughout our lives, rather than just trying to crank up longevity without regard to what those extra years will be like.
Geez, hundreds of comments on an article about creating an artificial singularity, and so far not a single discussion of Romulan engine technology. It just doesn't make sense.
There must be a new mmorpg/comic book/faster cpu/sci-fi movie/Taco Bell menu item out today that's distracting the true card-carrying geeks away from their beloved Slashdot.
L.A. writers? How about it's Portland creator? Recall that Mr. Groening is from a city that's within an hour or two drive of an ocean, a desert, mountains, multiple forests, a big-ass gorge, and, oh yeah, a nuclear power plant.
Having streets named Flanders, Quimby, Van Houten, Kearney (the bully), and Terwilliger (Sideshow Bob's last name) its kind of a dead giveaway too.
In fact, this site has it's own map, very much in the style of the Springfield map in this article, that shows various spots around Portland and their relationship to the show.
My MacAlly IcePad seems to work as well as the products in this review, but is rigid instead of fabric-based. It can lie flat, or tilt up a couple of inches. It has little airflow channels along the top surface and dissapates heat really well. It has a grippy surface and I've never had trouble with the PowerBook slipping while on it. Given how much my PB used to heat up if I had it sitting on a blanket or pillow, and how cool it runs now sitting on the IcePad, $30 is a reasonable price for not cooking the $2k computer (or me).
Slashdot Mirror
Now for the important questions: Is it executable? And is it illegal?
http://fatphil.org/maths/illeg...
Yes, but states could, if they so cared, craft legislation that would protect existing dealers and allow for future innovation. Imagine a law that simply stated that a vehicle manufacturer has to declare up front whether a particular brand is going to be sold through dealers or directly from the manufacturer. There could be restrictions on changing that designation, like requiring they make the dealers "whole" (compensating for loss), or given them veto power to stop the change, etc. That would allow a new manufacturer, like Tesla, to enter the market, or an existing manufacturer to start up a new brand, like GM might have otherwise done with Saturn, via direct sales, without affecting dealers of existing brands.
Speaking as someone who was IRIF'ed during a large, showy reorganization at Xerox, I beg to differ:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9228947/Xerox_s_outsourcing_one_year_later_layoffs
And that move definitely destroyed the once-proud solid engineering traditions of the Phaser printer org that Xerox acquired from Tektronix. Used to be an amazing group of innovative engineers there, and now just a burnt out husk remains.
I've wanted to ask a real linguist: is there a technical term for that construct? I know a few people here in the US Pacific NW who occasionally make use of that construct in day-to-day speech, and I'm curious about how much it has been studied. For example, does it have a well defined regional distribution?
Might want to tell that to the folks that have been there. They seem to believe the following:
It sure would explain a lot if we were to find a colonial era broadside that says "Bufy, bufy, bufy".
but thinks it impossible for someone to come up with their own rules seemingly from out of thin air.
Luckily for us, morals, even for an atheist, do not come out of thin air. Presumably, even an atheist participates in a society, and there are certain guidelines for meaningful conduct in said society. The distinction between those guidelines and some academic definition of "morals" proper, is what is actually rather thin.
So, by parallel reasoning: If there was immediate economic value to the Interstate Highway System, the government wouldn't (and shouldn't) be doing it -- private industry would be doing it instead?
...come to think of it, the ISS is kind of like a highway rest area (and hotel, restaurant, lab, etc) in the sky.
And for comparison, someone above quoted ~$1.3 billion/yr for the ISS. That's still shy of the amount California spends on highway patrol alone (http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/StateAgencyBudgets/2000 /2660/department.html). Their DofT budget (e.g. road maintenance and construction, etc), is over 10x that amount! Or put another way, it costs about $4.33 per US citizen. If one latte a year keeps that thing flying, I'm cool with it.
It's fair to confuse the two, since their "difference" has little actual scientific distinction. If you think there's a lot of controversy over evolution, you should check on some of the arguments just within the scientific community over the definition of the word "species". It's one of those topics that seems like it should be easy, but turns out, in practice, to be almost intractable.
For every definition of species that's come along, there have been many edge cases that just doesn't fit. Mules, hybrid plants, lichens, ring species, subspecies, etc. And that's just for the eukaryotes. Bacteria are a massive headache for almost all definitions since they'll swap DNA with just about anything. If one ponders a few of those cases for a moment, it rapidly becomes apparent that it's not just about who can breed with whom. There's more to it than that, and it likely has more of a fuzzy margin than folks in the "hard" sciences would enjoy dealing with. It's not that we haven't put enough time and effort into it. It's just that there may not be an answer. It could be that we're trying to impose an artificial distinction on nature that just isn't there.
So, if the definition of species has so much gray area, maybe species membership is not a boolean either-or relationship. You actually capture more of the true nature of real world populations if you start to view it more in fuzzy logic terms. For example, saying that a mule has some non-zero percent (and non-complete) membership in the "horse species" group and likewise in the "donkey species" group better reflects it's true nature than trying to define some discrete "mule species" group that can't breed and therefore falls out of a number of the standard species definitions.
Some of the current thinking, like that of Dr. Anna Graybeal, takes the approach that you can only define a species "after the fact", that it's not about the potential of whether two individuals/groups could interbreed, but more about when was the last time that they did. Or, to put it in a way that captures prokaryotes as well, "time of last gene flow". Using a definition like that, situations like geographically separated groups became different species almost at the moment they were separated, even though they could potentially interbreed if they met back up. Of course, if they did meet back up, then they would have been one species the whole time. Confused? It's not just you!
So, long story short, saying that you believe in microevolution but not macroevolution depends on there being a functionally rigorous definition of species, which simply does not exist. Nature prefers exceptions to rules!
Sure, and I assume you've got a rigorous biological definition of "impressive" handy that I can use as a metric when researching various organisms?
1998, 1998, 1998, ... Geez guy, you say we have a religious bent. Every single one of your posts mentions a year that anyone who has ever taken a statistics class can obviously see is a what's called an outlier. Have you taken a look at where it sits on the whole graph? Sure it's a local maxima, but the trendline for the whole series is about as significant as you get with real world data. We might be down 0.1 to 0.2C from the worst year, but we're still up at least 0.8C from a century ago. Or are you the type who needs data with absolutely zero noise to agree there's a trend? Sorry dude, but that's not the type of data that Mother Nature doles out.
> Experience negative health benefits from children.
Especially if your kid is named Oedipus.
But science, with its "proof"...
Seriously folks, we need to kill this meme. Math has proofs, science does not. Math != Science. They play in two totally different realms. Nothing in science will ever be "proven", that's not how it works.
In science, we make observations and then propose a postulate than tries to explain why/how we saw those observations. At any point in time, a new, conflicting observation can come in, showing the postulate to be a poor explanation of the actual world. That's called falsifiability. If your postulate isn't potentially (even if improbably) falsifiable, then it isn't scientific. That's why ID isn't scientific. If the postulate is that "God created the universe", what observation could possibly be made to falsify that postulate?
Getting back to your statement:
But science, with its "proof" has a lot more to prove to me before I just jump on the bandwagon of 1) how the universe was created and 2) how life began on this (and any other) planet.
As stated, science is not concerned with "proving" either of these explanations. But postulates have been made to explain the observations we have regarding topic #2. There aren't really any serious proposals to explain topic #1, since there can be no observable data from before the existence of the universe. Don't confuse Big Bang Theory, which desribes what happened after the matter came into existence, with an exaplanation of where that matter came from. Regarding #1, if you have a beef with the scientific theories about the origin of life on Earth, all you have to do is state that there is some observable data that's a counterexample to the prevailing theories. Since these include postulates like "all life decended from a common ancestor", that could easily be falsified by finding an organism that does not appear to be related to the other organisms on the planet. However, despite a century and a half of looking (post-Darwin) and, more recently, decades of research doing genetic sequencing on every organism we can get our hands on, we have yet to find any critter, no matter how strange, that is not somehow related to everything else. Maybe you need more evidence than the 100 Gigabases sampled from over 165,000 organisms, but in my book, that's withstanding a pretty rigorous challenge.
One more time kids: no scientific theory is ever proven "right". Theories get to be called theories when they meet two criteria:
- They are stated such that they can be potentially falsifiable.
- They then need to have withstood numerous scientific attempts to falsify them.
Notice that "right" never enters into it. Theories just have to be explanations that still seem to fit the evidence, even after you look really, really closely at them.The part of Darwinism that seems to trouble people the most, that of common descent, fits both criteria. All you would have to do to falsify it is simply find an organism that does not appear to be related to the other organisms on the planet. However, despite a century and a half of looking (post-Darwin) and, more recently, decades of research doing genetic sequencing on every organism we can get our hands on, we have yet to find any critter, no matter how strange, that is not somehow related to everything else. Maybe you need more evidence than the 100 Gigabases sampled from over 165,000 organisms, but in my book, that's withstanding a pretty rigorous challenge.
Except for extremely rare occurances, mtDNA in animals does not undergo recombination, and usually only 1 parent contributes mitochondria to a child (almost always the mother). So, in a cross between a neanderthal father and a modern human mother, only the modern human mtDNA will appear in the child. The nuclear DNA however, will be a combination of both parents, but studies with it have been much more challenging. Long story short, mtDNA, while good for other phylogentic studies, is simply not the right tool for finding evidence of hybridization.
As you stated, the morphological evidence hints that hybrids were possible. Most notable is the skeleton of a child found in Portugal in 1998 that looks like a mixture of neanderthal and modern human traits. See the Wikipedia article for more info: Abrigo do Lagar Velho. Until there's better evidence from nuclear DNA studies, the fossil evidence is the best we've got to go on.
Lessee, article about Google setting up new WiFi hotspots appears right about the time there's an article posted about NASA's new lauch vehicle for getting to the moon. Do the math folks - we know where their first WiFi spot is gonna be!
Huh? Since when is gravitational acceleration not equal for objects of different masses? That is, if gravity is even a factor for gaseous ozone. If anything, it would diffuse slower due to larger mass.
Could you please do me a favor and go into a sealed room, open up a canister of CO2, heck open up a canister of O2 as well if you like, and then lie on the floor for a while? After all, according to your theory, the CO2 shouldn't diffuse downward any faster than the O2, right?
Of course, I doubt that anyone who has actually taken a chemistry class will be willing to join you on the floor, but that's probably because they stayed awake for the lecture about relative density/bouancy of fluids.To be fair, the OP should have said density rather than mass, but I get the feeling that wouldn't have helped you.
> But... I thought the average IQ was always 100.
IQ tests have two numbers used in their scoring process. One is the raw score (basically some value based on how many answers you got right or wrong) and the other is the "normalized" score (an adjusted score based on how others did on this particular test) and that's the one that's one that always has an average of 100. Normalization is the process of giving the proposed IQ test to a sample population and then using their scores, a gaussian distribution curve, and some statistical gymnastics to generate a raw score->normalized score translation table.
The Flynn Effect shows when you attempt give a test to a more recent sample poplation that those used for the normalization process. The sample populations keep scoring better each year, so the mean raw score keeps moving upward. And it's not that the tests are getting easier. If you were to give a 1995 IQ test to a sample population in 2005, odds are that you'd likely see a higher average raw score for the current group than when the test was originally normalized in 1995. If the test author uses the new sample population data to generate a new score translation table (but keeps the test the same), the process is called renorming or renormalization. Most of the time, renorming yields lower normalized scores.
Well, the "dummening" of the population of which you speak must be confined to only the population of this fair website, as the exact opposite trend has been noticed by numerous researchers on human IQ for many years. To quoth the 'pedia: "The Flynn effect is the continued year-on-year rise of IQ test scores, an effect seen in all parts of the world, although at greatly varying rates. ... The average rate of rise seems to be around three IQ points per decade."
We need to fix our educational system by covering all of these types of topics equally as well:
P.S. It's turtles all the way down.
One of my friends spent a while studying the myth of the phoenix and then (philosophically) really got into what it would be like to live for 500 years. Then I pointed out that there's a big difference between living in the body of a 20 year old for 480 years versus living in the body of an 80 year old for 420 years. One would feel like paradise and the other well, almost a punishment. And most major advances in medical technology will end up giving us something more like the latter than the former.
I personally would like to see medical research focus on improvements in quality of life throughout our lives, rather than just trying to crank up longevity without regard to what those extra years will be like.
Geez, hundreds of comments on an article about creating an artificial singularity, and so far not a single discussion of Romulan engine technology. It just doesn't make sense.
There must be a new mmorpg/comic book/faster cpu/sci-fi movie/Taco Bell menu item out today that's distracting the true card-carrying geeks away from their beloved Slashdot.
But wouldn't the discount have to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 100% to beat the price of Eclipse?
L.A. writers? How about it's Portland creator? Recall that Mr. Groening is from a city that's within an hour or two drive of an ocean, a desert, mountains, multiple forests, a big-ass gorge, and, oh yeah, a nuclear power plant.
Having streets named Flanders, Quimby, Van Houten, Kearney (the bully), and Terwilliger (Sideshow Bob's last name) its kind of a dead giveaway too.
In fact, this site has it's own map, very much in the style of the Springfield map in this article, that shows various spots around Portland and their relationship to the show.
My MacAlly IcePad seems to work as well as the products in this review, but is rigid instead of fabric-based. It can lie flat, or tilt up a couple of inches. It has little airflow channels along the top surface and dissapates heat really well. It has a grippy surface and I've never had trouble with the PowerBook slipping while on it. Given how much my PB used to heat up if I had it sitting on a blanket or pillow, and how cool it runs now sitting on the IcePad, $30 is a reasonable price for not cooking the $2k computer (or me).