Setting aside the fact that LaTeX will perform typesetting, those word processing tools utterly fail for creation of documents with lots of (or complex) equations.
They are also very cumbersome for generating cross-references, bibliographic formatting, and management of figures/tables.
One killer feature MS Word *does* have over TeX-based solutions for now is excellent commenting, change tracking and shared collaboration features.
I know both worlds well, having used MS Word for collaborative proposal writing, and TeX for scientific publishing. I strongly prefer LaTeX.
As a scientist you don't want to get bogged down building a custom daq. SO the real bottom line is what commercial DAQs are open in design.
The only system I know that might possibly be in the open is the OASIS daq's developed for flow cytometry. these are mass produced and were developed at the National Labs. But I don't know how it is lic.
As a plasma physicist myself, that's exactly the sentiment.
In the plasma physics community, DTACQ digitizers have been becoming increasingly popular, not only because the hardware is top-notch, but they all run embedded Linux and all drivers are GPL.
I think one of the best examples of this topic has to be the Exile project, which has successfully created a cross-platform, open source, modern-day engine to play Origin Software's classic Ultima VII and Ultima VII:Serpent Isle games.
In a similar vein is the Pentagram project, which aims to make a similar engine (and repeat the same daunting reverse-engineering task) for Ultima VIII.
If you are an Ultima fan, and *haven't* heard of these projects, go and download them right now.:)
I work in nuclear fusion. One of the things we lust after in my field of research is more efficient superconducting magnets. Hell, even getting up to liquid nitrogen temperatures would be amazing for us. In the meantime, we're stuck with using liquid He and associated cryogenics, plus extra nuclear shielding around the $$$ SC coils.
Oh well. I thought we might have had something truly wonderful going with this one tonight, but it's just false advertising... (sigh)
Assuming that I can magically shove these through Congress, here's what I'd like to see:
1) Committing the US to solving the world's energy crisis. This means: 1a) Banning the construction of any and all fossil fuel plants. ("Clean" coal doesn't cut it.) 1b) Enacting legislation to convert the US fleet of vehicles to purely electric (plug-in) drive by 2025 (with, say, $100B (or other large number) bonus to Detroit if they can pull it off by 2015 and a sliding scale of reward on the way) 1c) Construct new nuclear plants to supply baseload power. 1d) Build as many renewable power plants as possible. Geothermal, hydro, wind, solar? We need 'em all! 1e) Invest heavily in funding for nuclear fusion.
2) Create a new Cabinet-level Secretary of Science, responsible for managing all Federally-supported research (with budget to match!). Charge the new Secretary to work with the Secretary of Education to ensure America's children become competent in science, math, and technology.
3) Provide universal health care.
4) Provide additional support to schools such that the average starting teacher's salary is >= $100,000. Pay them what they're worth.
5) Eliminate the legality of campaign contributions in an attempt to eliminate their corrupting influences on elected officials. Instead, publicly finance all federal elections, with the maximum amount of support capped at, say, $50M for big races like the presidency and at lesser amounts for Congressional seats, etc.
There are many more, but these should start a good discussion!
Here are a couple points from a nuclear fusion researcher in the field::)
Fusion fuel for reactors foreseeable in our lifetime will use D-T. The requisite tritium will need to be generated in-vessel via transmutation of lithium, giving, in effect, a closed fuel cycle. (It is worth noting, however, that for any fusion plant, the tritium breeding ratio needs to be greater than one (i.e. you're making more than you put in) for successful operation.)
Tritium is a short-lived (t_1/2 ~ 12y) isotope of hydrogen that can be safely transported. No doubt, it certainly will be -- there's only about 20 kilos of it in the world, with that being generated by fission plants! (Another reason for the necessity of fusion reactors being breeders.) Deuterium is naturally occurring in water and is perfectly safe to transport.
I'm not surprised either. Given today's view of the Nuclear boogeyman, the Not-in-My-Backyard crowd's complaints alone have prevented ordering and installation of new nuclear facilities for decades.
Short answer: because it's been proven to be physically impossible in any topology which can be mapped to a shpere since the 50's, at least if you're confining with magnetic fields. It has to do with their structure.
That's why all devices are topologically similar to that of a donut, be it like an inner-tube shape (tokamak), cored apple (spherical tokamak), or funny twisted kinky looking (stellarator).
The main difference between the tokamak and stellarator is where to supply the confining magnetic field. You need two components: toroidal (around the donut the long way) and poloidal (the short way); tokamaks provide toroidal field and a weak poloidal field, but pass current through the plasma to self-generate the rest. Stellarators have horrendously complex coil structure to have, in principle, all the field structure worked out; you just switch it on, and don't have to pass currents through the plasma to contain it. (The motivation is that plasma current can drive instabilities. Stellarators are also intrinsically steady-state devices.)
Because tokamaks are much easier to build, they have done better historically; given the newfound computational tools today, stellarators are still playing catch-up. Specifically, plasma confinement still stinks, but hey -- they're making up for lost time at a great pace. Although I'm more of a tokamak enthusiast, I look forward to seeing what WS-AX in Germany and NCSX in PPPL can do in the next few years!
Sorry, but fusion works. It is completely proven as a physical mechanism -- look at the Sun! Look at the fusion reactors in which we've generated hundreds of megawatts of fusion power (not breakeven conditions); look at particle accelerators...
So, keep your faith in humanity; just because some ignorant asshat wants to blurt blatantly incorrect things like "water isn't wet" or "gravity doesn't work" doesn't mean it's true.
For the most part it is true that static fields are employed. Indeed, this is the goal of the stellarator, where we get the field configuration perfect through exquisite design and manufacturing! In tokamaks, anyway, control of plasma shape, position, and stabilization of vertical instability are all done with slight perturbations to the applied magnetic field. On all modern tokamaks, they do in fact vary -- just very slightly.
You also have attempts to impose magnetic field variations due to the existence of a 'resistive wall mode' to which the typically spinning plasma can 'mode lock,' effectively applying the brakes to the plasma and causing disruption; the perturbations would make the resistive wall look like an infinitely conducting wall. (This has been done!)
There are two aspects to answer your question properly:
In a fusion reaction, you are invoking a nuclear process. Think E=mc^2; the E is resulting from the change in mass following the fusion of hydrogen (or strictly, its isotopes deuterium and tritium) to helium and a neutron. It can also be thought as a change in effective binding energy per nucleon (proton/neutron) in the nucleus of the resulting atom. So, even though you've got lots of mechanical (thermal) energy in the plasma which is actually causing the fusion reactions to take place, after the nuclear reaction kicks in the energy "balance" rapidly gets skewed.
The fusion reaction for the first generation of practical fusion reactors is going to be D-T; ie D + T --> 4He + n + ~18 MeV, of which 14 MeV goes to the neutron. Neutrons don't feel the confining effects of the magnetic field, as they're not electrically charged; they fly out of the plasma, strike the first wall surface, and rattle around in the shield until they give up their kinetic energy to heat. If the blanket's made correctly (ie with Lithium too) it will also breed more T fuel to boot. The remaining ~4 MeV in the helium "ash" goes back into sustaining the plasma heating.
I hold a BA in Computer Science, and would highly recommend its study. The principles you learn are not solely relegated to computer science -- at least, not most of them. I've been able to successfully apply them to the fields of physics and mathematics in college, and continued to do so to problems in my research in the fields of nuclear engineering and fusion energy science today. It certainly has aided my job as a scientist -- a position you may not have considered relevant to CS/IT. Keep it in mind, we always need more bright people!:)
That said, I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to IT. It certainly is helpful to be able to solve a problem with the tools at hand. IT problems tend to be a bit more lucrative to solve (or solve more efficiently than those who came before you).
If you plan on being a creative problem-solver in your chosen line of work, seriously consider the perspective a CS background can offer. In my mind, that gives you the ability to pick up whatever the latest nifty tools/utilities that help you solve your day-to-day problems.
Still, I guess it just goes to show that now, perjury is OK!
I must also strongly agree with Joe Wilson: "Scooter Libby is a traitor." I certainly hope that those responsible for the egregious breach of national security are convicted as such.
I seem to be in the minority here, but in my experience the TI-85 and its big brother the TI-86 have served me well from high school, degrees in physics, math, and computer science in college, and now through my Ph.D. research in nuclear physics. If you need to do symbolic algebra, integration, or differentiation in a real-world setting, use a CAS like Maple or Mathematica; in a testing situation there is usually a 'trick' that makes the seemingly impossible trivial. The graphing capabilities are for the most part useless after high school or introductory calculus. There is elementary linear algebra and statistics support, as well.
I vouch for the 85 and 86 as well because of their unit conversion capabilities. It's tremendously practical when you are working with real-world measurements (especially in the non-Metric USA!). A library of built-in physical constants helps too.
Not to mention, these things are built like a tank and sip the battery power. In my experience (and heavy use) I need to change the batteries less than once every two years!
When it comes to eating alpha sources, nothing should be considered safe, since the localized range (~cm) of the emitters, coupled with the strong energies of the alphas (~MeV) do terrible damage to the body.
The problem is that Po-210 is a potent alpha emitter. Since these guys are kicking off 5 MeV alphas, you will get a huge dose localized to a few cm from the parent nucleus. In the digestive system, you'll quickly tear things apart, killing the stem cells of the intestinal tract. It gets worse if absorbed into the bloodstream and the bone marrow.
While I'm not a toxicologist, I am a nuclear physicist; one of the foremost rules of radiation safety is to avoid ingesting alpha sources (or any other source, for God's sake) for precisely this reason. FWIW, alpha sources are one of the safer things to work with, for exactly the same reason that they're so bad for you if ingested: a few cm of shielding is sufficient to stop the penetrating alpha particles.
And in the realm of plasma physics, the eV is a common surrogate for temperature, in which Boltzmann's constant k is omitted. It's always fun when you have multiple definitions for the same abbreviation in exciting, but overlapping, branches of physics!
Since I was at this talk early this morning, it certainly was exciting to see the progress in this field.
The plan for ITER, as well as any future machine that will use D-T as a fusion fuel, is to utilize a lithium-contining 'blanket' on the interior of the vacuum vessel walls. Lithium can absorb the 14 MeV neutrons that will be flying around as a result of D-T fusion and convert into tritium, aiding the fueling of the reactor! The blanket, in addition to providing fuel for the reaction, will be the primary source of neutron shielding for the device.
More information regarding the technical details of the ITER blanket design can be found here (PDF), and general technical information about ITER here.
The ITER project will share the cost of $15B-ish of building and operating the device amongst all its international collaborators over the course of 30 years. ITER is currently the fusion research community's 'best-shot' of demonstrating realistic burning plasma characteristics. Unfortunately, we're working against nuclear cross-sections -- and they imply that the devices need to be very, very big. Hence, very, very expensive.
It's nice to know that the quarterly profits of some of our oil companies are sufficient to entirely replicate more than 30 years' worth of work to get ITER going. As a fusion scientist, I'd be happy to work for a domestic ExxonMobil ITER-clone / burining plasma facility.
This is a good analogy. Actually, one doesn't want to achieve ignition in a fusion reactor, since at that point the reaction is capable of sustaining itself entirely, running as long as fuel is present in the vessel. Why is this a bad thing? Because if the plasma entirely sustains itself, it doesn't respond to (or doesn't need to respond to) today's methods of control!
A plausible scenario is to operate a reactor at a reasonable fusion gain factor Q = P_fusion/P_input of 5-10. (Ignition is then Q = infinity.) This way, the reaction can be rapidly quenched under operator control.
They most certainly have not used DT in their first plasma, especially considering they were performing their intitial pumpdown/coil cooling/safety interlocks, etc. in February. (Paper) Once you put tritium in the system, it's never coming out -- and you've just made your site a regulated nuclear facility. Not to mention that you will likely need to do subsequent repairs remotely.
EAST will certainly help out with discovering (and engineering solutions to) the unique handling of superconducting coilsets. These are a necessity for a fusion reactor; they will also help gain insight for operation of ITER.
Clearly the second example is more elegant, given the assumption of a C-like language, as it is an in-place algorithm. As you point out, given the constraints of C the recursive implementation eats memory and thus doesn't scale well to GCD(large number); the tail-recursive feature of Scheme allows for an arguably simpler-to-visualize implementation.
Having written my own Scheme interpreter for a programming languages course back in my University days, I must admit I prefer C; however, each language has its strengths -- and that's why you use it!
I've been happily running a set of Myth boxen for more than a year now, and while I love the system, the one feature I had been sorely waiting for was an easy way to export to DVD. While a more involved method was possible, I look forward to being able to just create an ISO directly from Myth itself. Keep up the good work!
One of the key aspects afforded to "good" students who attend a class in person is that one is afforded the opportunity to halt the instructor with a question in the event that they start taking off too fast for you (and presumably the rest of the class). While with a podcast, one could rewind and replay, if the line of reasoning that has been recorded in this static media is still incomprehensible, it is of less value than attendance in the first place. It's amazing what a little clarification or an alternatative perspective on a concept can bring to the class, or others!
However, as a graduate student, there are times when I have to work. There are also times when I just can't get every last bit of math off the boards before it's erased. This is where having a study group of friends is your first recourse, but a podcast could also help.
Frankly, if someone is bright enough to pick up the necessary content of the course solely from the podcasts, then good for them. To the lesser mortals, attendence is the tried and true recourse. And to the slackers: it won't help much.:)
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Setting aside the fact that LaTeX will perform typesetting, those word processing tools utterly fail for creation of documents with lots of (or complex) equations.
They are also very cumbersome for generating cross-references, bibliographic formatting, and management of figures/tables.
One killer feature MS Word *does* have over TeX-based solutions for now is excellent commenting, change tracking and shared collaboration features.
I know both worlds well, having used MS Word for collaborative proposal writing, and TeX for scientific publishing. I strongly prefer LaTeX.
This is very true. I wish I had mod points!
As a scientist you don't want to get bogged down building a custom daq. SO the real bottom line is what commercial DAQs are open in design.
The only system I know that might possibly be in the open is the OASIS daq's developed for flow cytometry. these are mass produced and were developed at the National Labs. But I don't know how it is lic.
As a plasma physicist myself, that's exactly the sentiment.
In the plasma physics community, DTACQ digitizers have been becoming increasingly popular, not only because the hardware is top-notch, but they all run embedded Linux and all drivers are GPL.
I think one of the best examples of this topic has to be the Exile project, which has successfully created a cross-platform, open source, modern-day engine to play Origin Software's classic Ultima VII and Ultima VII:Serpent Isle games.
In a similar vein is the Pentagram project, which aims to make a similar engine (and repeat the same daunting reverse-engineering task) for Ultima VIII. If you are an Ultima fan, and *haven't* heard of these projects, go and download them right now. :)
Amen.
I work in nuclear fusion. One of the things we lust after in my field of research is more efficient superconducting magnets. Hell, even getting up to liquid nitrogen temperatures would be amazing for us. In the meantime, we're stuck with using liquid He and associated cryogenics, plus extra nuclear shielding around the $$$ SC coils.
Oh well. I thought we might have had something truly wonderful going with this one tonight, but it's just false advertising... (sigh)
Assuming that I can magically shove these through Congress, here's what I'd like to see:
1) Committing the US to solving the world's energy crisis. This means:
1a) Banning the construction of any and all fossil fuel plants. ("Clean" coal doesn't cut it.)
1b) Enacting legislation to convert the US fleet of vehicles to purely electric (plug-in) drive by 2025 (with, say, $100B (or other large number) bonus to Detroit if they can pull it off by 2015 and a sliding scale of reward on the way)
1c) Construct new nuclear plants to supply baseload power.
1d) Build as many renewable power plants as possible. Geothermal, hydro, wind, solar? We need 'em all!
1e) Invest heavily in funding for nuclear fusion.
2) Create a new Cabinet-level Secretary of Science, responsible for managing all Federally-supported research (with budget to match!). Charge the new Secretary to work with the Secretary of Education to ensure America's children become competent in science, math, and technology.
3) Provide universal health care.
4) Provide additional support to schools such that the average starting teacher's salary is >= $100,000. Pay them what they're worth.
5) Eliminate the legality of campaign contributions in an attempt to eliminate their corrupting influences on elected officials. Instead, publicly finance all federal elections, with the maximum amount of support capped at, say, $50M for big races like the presidency and at lesser amounts for Congressional seats, etc.
There are many more, but these should start a good discussion!
Here are a couple points from a nuclear fusion researcher in the field: :)
Fusion fuel for reactors foreseeable in our lifetime will use D-T. The requisite tritium will need to be generated in-vessel via transmutation of lithium, giving, in effect, a closed fuel cycle. (It is worth noting, however, that for any fusion plant, the tritium breeding ratio needs to be greater than one (i.e. you're making more than you put in) for successful operation.)
Tritium is a short-lived (t_1/2 ~ 12y) isotope of hydrogen that can be safely transported. No doubt, it certainly will be -- there's only about 20 kilos of it in the world, with that being generated by fission plants! (Another reason for the necessity of fusion reactors being breeders.) Deuterium is naturally occurring in water and is perfectly safe to transport.
I'm not surprised either. Given today's view of the Nuclear boogeyman, the Not-in-My-Backyard crowd's complaints alone have prevented ordering and installation of new nuclear facilities for decades.
Short answer: because it's been proven to be physically impossible in any topology which can be mapped to a shpere since the 50's, at least if you're confining with magnetic fields. It has to do with their structure.
That's why all devices are topologically similar to that of a donut, be it like an inner-tube shape (tokamak), cored apple (spherical tokamak), or funny twisted kinky looking (stellarator).
The main difference between the tokamak and stellarator is where to supply the confining magnetic field. You need two components: toroidal (around the donut the long way) and poloidal (the short way); tokamaks provide toroidal field and a weak poloidal field, but pass current through the plasma to self-generate the rest. Stellarators have horrendously complex coil structure to have, in principle, all the field structure worked out; you just switch it on, and don't have to pass currents through the plasma to contain it. (The motivation is that plasma current can drive instabilities. Stellarators are also intrinsically steady-state devices.)
Because tokamaks are much easier to build, they have done better historically; given the newfound computational tools today, stellarators are still playing catch-up. Specifically, plasma confinement still stinks, but hey -- they're making up for lost time at a great pace. Although I'm more of a tokamak enthusiast, I look forward to seeing what WS-AX in Germany and NCSX in PPPL can do in the next few years!
And yes, I am a plasma physicist.
Sorry, but fusion works. It is completely proven as a physical mechanism -- look at the Sun! Look at the fusion reactors in which we've generated hundreds of megawatts of fusion power (not breakeven conditions); look at particle accelerators...
So, keep your faith in humanity; just because some ignorant asshat wants to blurt blatantly incorrect things like "water isn't wet" or "gravity doesn't work" doesn't mean it's true.
For the most part it is true that static fields are employed. Indeed, this is the goal of the stellarator, where we get the field configuration perfect through exquisite design and manufacturing! In tokamaks, anyway, control of plasma shape, position, and stabilization of vertical instability are all done with slight perturbations to the applied magnetic field. On all modern tokamaks, they do in fact vary -- just very slightly.
You also have attempts to impose magnetic field variations due to the existence of a 'resistive wall mode' to which the typically spinning plasma can 'mode lock,' effectively applying the brakes to the plasma and causing disruption; the perturbations would make the resistive wall look like an infinitely conducting wall. (This has been done!)
There are two aspects to answer your question properly:
And yes, I am a plasma physicist. :)
I hold a BA in Computer Science, and would highly recommend its study. The principles you learn are not solely relegated to computer science -- at least, not most of them. I've been able to successfully apply them to the fields of physics and mathematics in college, and continued to do so to problems in my research in the fields of nuclear engineering and fusion energy science today. It certainly has aided my job as a scientist -- a position you may not have considered relevant to CS/IT. Keep it in mind, we always need more bright people! :)
That said, I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to IT. It certainly is helpful to be able to solve a problem with the tools at hand. IT problems tend to be a bit more lucrative to solve (or solve more efficiently than those who came before you).
If you plan on being a creative problem-solver in your chosen line of work, seriously consider the perspective a CS background can offer. In my mind, that gives you the ability to pick up whatever the latest nifty tools/utilities that help you solve your day-to-day problems.
... and perfectly legal, in this case.
Still, I guess it just goes to show that now, perjury is OK!
I must also strongly agree with Joe Wilson: "Scooter Libby is a traitor." I certainly hope that those responsible for the egregious breach of national security are convicted as such.
I seem to be in the minority here, but in my experience the TI-85 and its big brother the TI-86 have served me well from high school, degrees in physics, math, and computer science in college, and now through my Ph.D. research in nuclear physics. If you need to do symbolic algebra, integration, or differentiation in a real-world setting, use a CAS like Maple or Mathematica; in a testing situation there is usually a 'trick' that makes the seemingly impossible trivial. The graphing capabilities are for the most part useless after high school or introductory calculus. There is elementary linear algebra and statistics support, as well.
I vouch for the 85 and 86 as well because of their unit conversion capabilities. It's tremendously practical when you are working with real-world measurements (especially in the non-Metric USA!). A library of built-in physical constants helps too.
Not to mention, these things are built like a tank and sip the battery power. In my experience (and heavy use) I need to change the batteries less than once every two years!
When it comes to eating alpha sources, nothing should be considered safe, since the localized range (~cm) of the emitters, coupled with the strong energies of the alphas (~MeV) do terrible damage to the body.
The problem is that Po-210 is a potent alpha emitter. Since these guys are kicking off 5 MeV alphas, you will get a huge dose localized to a few cm from the parent nucleus. In the digestive system, you'll quickly tear things apart, killing the stem cells of the intestinal tract. It gets worse if absorbed into the bloodstream and the bone marrow.
While I'm not a toxicologist, I am a nuclear physicist; one of the foremost rules of radiation safety is to avoid ingesting alpha sources (or any other source, for God's sake) for precisely this reason. FWIW, alpha sources are one of the safer things to work with, for exactly the same reason that they're so bad for you if ingested: a few cm of shielding is sufficient to stop the penetrating alpha particles.
And in the realm of plasma physics, the eV is a common surrogate for temperature, in which Boltzmann's constant k is omitted. It's always fun when you have multiple definitions for the same abbreviation in exciting, but overlapping, branches of physics! Since I was at this talk early this morning, it certainly was exciting to see the progress in this field.
The plan for ITER, as well as any future machine that will use D-T as a fusion fuel, is to utilize a lithium-contining 'blanket' on the interior of the vacuum vessel walls. Lithium can absorb the 14 MeV neutrons that will be flying around as a result of D-T fusion and convert into tritium, aiding the fueling of the reactor! The blanket, in addition to providing fuel for the reaction, will be the primary source of neutron shielding for the device.
More information regarding the technical details of the ITER blanket design can be found here (PDF), and general technical information about ITER here.
Funding. No, seriously.
The ITER project will share the cost of $15B-ish of building and operating the device amongst all its international collaborators over the course of 30 years. ITER is currently the fusion research community's 'best-shot' of demonstrating realistic burning plasma characteristics. Unfortunately, we're working against nuclear cross-sections -- and they imply that the devices need to be very, very big. Hence, very, very expensive.
It's nice to know that the quarterly profits of some of our oil companies are sufficient to entirely replicate more than 30 years' worth of work to get ITER going. As a fusion scientist, I'd be happy to work for a domestic ExxonMobil ITER-clone / burining plasma facility.
This is a good analogy. Actually, one doesn't want to achieve ignition in a fusion reactor, since at that point the reaction is capable of sustaining itself entirely, running as long as fuel is present in the vessel. Why is this a bad thing? Because if the plasma entirely sustains itself, it doesn't respond to (or doesn't need to respond to) today's methods of control!
A plausible scenario is to operate a reactor at a reasonable fusion gain factor Q = P_fusion/P_input of 5-10. (Ignition is then Q = infinity.) This way, the reaction can be rapidly quenched under operator control.
They most certainly have not used DT in their first plasma, especially considering they were performing their intitial pumpdown/coil cooling/safety interlocks, etc. in February. (Paper) Once you put tritium in the system, it's never coming out -- and you've just made your site a regulated nuclear facility. Not to mention that you will likely need to do subsequent repairs remotely.
EAST will certainly help out with discovering (and engineering solutions to) the unique handling of superconducting coilsets. These are a necessity for a fusion reactor; they will also help gain insight for operation of ITER.
Clearly the second example is more elegant, given the assumption of a C-like language, as it is an in-place algorithm. As you point out, given the constraints of C the recursive implementation eats memory and thus doesn't scale well to GCD(large number); the tail-recursive feature of Scheme allows for an arguably simpler-to-visualize implementation.
Having written my own Scheme interpreter for a programming languages course back in my University days, I must admit I prefer C; however, each language has its strengths -- and that's why you use it!
I've been happily running a set of Myth boxen for more than a year now, and while I love the system, the one feature I had been sorely waiting for was an easy way to export to DVD. While a more involved method was possible, I look forward to being able to just create an ISO directly from Myth itself. Keep up the good work!
One of the key aspects afforded to "good" students who attend a class in person is that one is afforded the opportunity to halt the instructor with a question in the event that they start taking off too fast for you (and presumably the rest of the class). While with a podcast, one could rewind and replay, if the line of reasoning that has been recorded in this static media is still incomprehensible, it is of less value than attendance in the first place. It's amazing what a little clarification or an alternatative perspective on a concept can bring to the class, or others!
However, as a graduate student, there are times when I have to work. There are also times when I just can't get every last bit of math off the boards before it's erased. This is where having a study group of friends is your first recourse, but a podcast could also help.
Frankly, if someone is bright enough to pick up the necessary content of the course solely from the podcasts, then good for them. To the lesser mortals, attendence is the tried and true recourse. And to the slackers: it won't help much. :)