It's fine for evolution. Even desirable under certain circumstances. That individual won't reproduce anymore, but their offspring likely will have more resources, as will their kin who are likely genetically similar. Otherwise longevity would be more favored by natural selection, we wouldn't die of "old age", and suicidal ideations wouldn't exist. Kinda similar to how apoptosis is beneficial for cells.
I'm not well versed in economics, but that sounds almost like the broken window fallacy. Putting money into delaying the inevitable only would help if that person personally helped the economy while on their death bed.
Also, I've always found the "most selfish act" bit distasteful. "Woe is me, this person's life/future was bad enough for them to choose to die, but they didn't prioritize the pain that would cause *me*." Sure it's selfish, by definition, although certainly no more so than choosing to live. What's unjustly selfish is thinking you have any right to dictate the permissible ways for a rational individual to die. Ditto for keeping someone alive for your own (usually emotional) benefit.
If you are outside the atmosphere, and not accelerating then you're basically in free fall. Sure, gravity is pulling you somewhere, but it doesn't really have an effect on anything inside the spacecraft (your reference frame is moving with you). I suppose tidal forces and the gravity caused by nearby matter might be detectable, but it's so small as to be ignorable for anything but research on gravity. From a biological perspective there is no discernible effect due to gravity. Given that gravity is practically the only (essential) constant across the entire biosphere I'm a little surprised that there aren't more ill effects due to its absence.
Upon reading the GP's statement I tried Googling for a graph showing percent of the world's population killed in combat throughout human history. Unfortunately, such records don't seem to exist, although I did stumble upon an interesting article. Modern intellectuals seem to be fond of feeling guilty, but this seems like something of which we should be fairly proud.
Morality is a human invention, so we have a few billion years of natural selection working against us. If you're a creationist then I suppose you could look at human history (IIRC there are only ~100 years of global peace) and decide that either we're made to be violent, or some ever-present thing makes us violent. IMHO the natural world is violent (e.g. ants, cats), and subsequently the most intelligent creatures tend to be the most sadistic (chimps have tribal wars and dolphins kill for entertainment).
Combine that with some game theory and I'm rather surprised at how peaceful we are. Perhaps modern philosophy, civilization and instant communication help, or it could be that our weapons got too effective for a reasonable person to take lightly (i.e. give a person what they think they want and they might realize that they don't want it anymore).
Interesting, although I didn't use that one for long since it was finicky about mounting. Ext2FSD places an entry in HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Run, which doesn't work on Vista/7 because those entries won't be launched if they require elevation.
Umm... your own source states that they can be used at the beginning of a sentence, although for formal writing never outside of parenthesis. Kind of an odd rule, but I suppose it makes some sense (although most sources say to not use Latin abbreviations at all in formal writing).
As for capitalization, this seems to be a contested issue. About.com says to capitalize them, and I can't recall ever seeing "i.e." not capitalized at the beginning of a sentence in print . I suspect grammar books differ on this point, but unfortunately this is particularly difficult to Google. I couldn't find any relevant information on this topic in the book you mentioned (1st edition full text online). That book is criticized rather harshly though, so I'd definitely look for independent verification of any rules it mentions.
This is looking more and more like a rule that a grammar teacher made up (a tragically common occurrence). "Don't start with i.e." would prevent inadvertent sentence fragments caused by the habit of using those abbreviations mostly mid-sentence. From there one could generalize and say "always in lowercase" to curb the tendency to capitalize abbreviations. Not a real rule, but just a guideline to prevent common errors. Plus English is a natural language so grammar rules are well nigh impossible to keep that simple. I did check and neither an assortment of famous authors or newspapers obey this rule, so if it once was true then it is no longer so.
I have never encountered that rule, nor can I find any reference to it anywhere. The definitions of "e.g." I found literally translate it as "for example" and it seems to be an adverb. Both prepositions and adverbs can start sentences so I don't see the problem.
For example, this sentence works.
E.g. it is a complete sentence.
You could point out the lack of a comma after "E.g." but that seems to differ by "style" and I prefer to avoid consecutive punctuation. As for the latter sentence, "I.e." would be preferable, but can't be used since the list is not exhaustive.
ext2 IFS has gone nearly a year without a release so it seems de facto stopped. Ext2FSD is updated, but it's more behind-the-scenes stuff, so the portions of the code to which I was referring don't appear to be undergoing any revision currently. So that's what I meant by "stopped". I also used the term "half done" which could be more or less accurate depending on their future plans.
I probably should have used "I.e." rather than "E.g." so thanks for calling me out on it. Pedantically, though, it still works since I didn't explicitly define my point by virtue of the fact that I used "e.g." rather than "i.e." (probably a more serious concern). I started with something it wasn't, and ended with something it was, both of which help delineate my point, but fall short of completely defining it, so they're technically just examples. As for capitalization, I stand by my usage. "E.g." is an abbreviation for "exempli gratia", the first "e" of which gets capitalized to start the sentence. This placement of the expression is rarer so it occasionally throws people's pattern recognition off.
My point isn't that the work is easy or hard. Either way, the hard part of reverse engineering is more or less done. But it only works, it doesn't work well. Is it really that difficult to, say, implement an autostarting method that wasn't depreciated with XP? Or have a filesystem driver that doesn't require a completely different method of operation than all others? E.g. my point is that they stopped before polishing the final application.
While they work, they hardly seem efficient. USPS keeps raising the price of stamps well above the rate of inflation (unless you're a junkmailer... they seem to get a 60% discount). Road construction seems to constantly go over budget and is very slow to ever be finished.
I prefer Ext2FSD myself, but neither is ideal. They require a helper application that doesn't autostart (there's a non-working option for it), and they can be fickle about mounting (e.g. click mount and it doesn't happen, or open the drive and Windows asks to format it). I've had data loss with NTFS-3g (hopefully that bug's been squashed), and exFAT isn't supported in Linux.
IMHO filesystem compatibility is a great example of how Linux devs are bad at leaving boring, but critical applications half done. E.g. they work, but have you have to jump through hoops and even then there are major bugs and little to no polish. Ideally, you could use any Windows or Linux filesystem in the other OS transparently with all features, to the point that the common user doesn't need to know what filesystems their partitions use.
All that said, I use FAT32 or Ext2 for shared partitions for lack of a better alternative.
Hmm... If you put too many rats in one container they resort to cannibalism despite being well fed. When I heard about that study someone mentioned that other studies were looking at whether this phenomenon could explain higher crime rates in cities. However, I'd never really thought of war (and resulting plague) as a major population control factor for humans. Perhaps humans seem inherently violent because we are still hardcoded to deal with hunter-gatherer level population densities. Thus modern society might trigger anti-over-population adaptations (evolutionary hold-overs) such as war. That would make space colonization very attractive... e.g. lower human population density and the resulting wastes of resources while retaining our ability to share knowledge.
That's what I was thinking, although the definition for "Woman" would probably need to be fairly sophisticated. E.g. a three year history of androgen levels + sensitivity below some threshold. Or have one unrestricted category, then various other categories that pit people with equal handicaps against each other (low androgen levels/female, don't have the bone structure of a fish, physical disabilities, hasn't spent their whole life training for the one event, etc.).
Why wouldn't the wealthy care about the poor? It's not like sociopathy is correlated with wealth, beyond that caused by being stigmatized by much of the other 95% of the population. Just look at the current setup... Our legislators tend to be wealthy, as are those who donate to their campaigns. Even so, those making >$100K are paying around three fourths of the taxes (top 50% pay 97%). Most government programs, OTOH, benefit the poor quite a bit more than they benefit the rich since the rich have other means of acquiring what they need.
So, simply by looking at past and current actions, the rich seem to care quite a bit about the poor. You can keep your cynicism by attributing that to needing cheap labor for mundane jobs, but I think it's more that one doesn't tend to care much about others until one's own needs are met. I won't say that the government doesn't have a pro-wealth bias, but overall it seems setup to protect the poor, otherwise you'd see the poor paying a lot more in taxes or mandatory service, and getting a lot less for their money/efforts.
In dust form (or slightly larger) the particles should be sufficiently small to combust far more easily, so I'd still be wary (dust is scary). Stripping it with one's hands is probably the safest method (I was picturing with a knife or something), but I wouldn't handle a flame for a while afterwards. Realistically, it probably isn't all that dangerous, but it's still pretty far from being safe. An accident is unlikely, and even if it did happen would probably be minor (singed hair or something). OTOH, I personally try to eliminate any chance for Murphy's Law to put a speck of white hot magnesium on my cornea.
I'd be a bit worried about the magnesium powder getting caught in the wind. Worst case scenario, it gets blown on you while you have the match lit. There's also the possibility of burning your hands if there's a spark when scraping the magnesium off of the wire. My guess would be neither would cause a Darwin award, unless you count "can't find a date due to facial scarring".
You can do PCR without a thermal cycler, albeit it would be far more tedious. You could even probably skimp on the enzymes and get a polymerase that isn't resistant to heat if you're cycling manually anyway. Even making/extracting the enzymes is probably feasible after one ordered an appropriate plasmid or bacterial colony. In any case, if you have a cheap source of labor I'd bet you could do PCR for very little expense using mostly household items. That said, DNA work is finicky enough that this kind of thing might be impractical or have an abhorrently low throughput.
I can't find the study, but IIRC, adults don't need (much) less sleep as they get older, they just get used to working with less. The information that I did find suggests that sleep needs change considerably during childhood, but adults basically need 7-8 hours per night. My guess would be that sleep requirements are correlated with metabolic activity (highest in childhood, but for adults the basal metabolic rate is fairly constant given body type/size). Getting by with less is certainly possible, but you're reducing your mental/physical performance and increasing the risk of stuff like diabetes and heart disease. Working long hours pretty much came about with agriculture, so I'm doubtful the human body is terribly well adapted to it.
Getting other people to do things for you, and not knowing how everything works is positive, it's called civilisation.
While I agree that not doing everything yourself is the basis of civilization, I disagree that it's imperative to not know how things outside your specialty work. IMHO, one needs to have a rough idea so one can negotiate successfully. E.g. it's impossible to ascribe a value to the product of someone's work if you have no idea what they did. You could trust the price they set, but that assumes they have knowledge about your work, and aren't trying to exploit you.
Besides, I've always looked at knowing how things work as vitally important. While I don't understand electricity in great detail, I know that flipping a light switch mechanically closes a circuit, allowing an electric field to be established within a wire, which excites electrons to a higher energy state in a light bulb, which releases photons when those electrons return to their lesser energy state. When I was younger I had a simpler understanding, but I was never comfortable with Flip Switch -> Light comes on. It seems rather important to understand what you're doing when you're flipping a switch, since otherwise that switch could be doing anything... including things I presumably don't want to happen. Not caring to education oneself about how common things work and common things people do seems dangerous, or at least assumes that everyone, everywhere has your best interest in mind, and is competent.
My ISP does this as well, and I've used a variety of solutions in the past. Basically, run a DNS server on my computer, run one on my router, set bogus-nxdomain on my router's Dnsmasq configuration, or use an alternate DNS server like OpenNIC (OpenDNS does the same thing from what I hear).
As for how annoying this is... the way my ISP does it is by redirecting a mistyped URL to the ad-filled "not found" page. So, making a typo means I have to retype the entire URL, rather than just fix the typo.
Irrespective of the existance of free will, my interpretation of the rationale behind the criminal justice system is that it identifies individuals with a lack of respect for the law. This is deemed incompatible with modern society, so such individuals are removed from society and/or there is an attempt to foster that respect through punishment or deterrence.
It seems that a more legal/safer method would be to simply make a rule requiring all cell phones be turned off and use detection equipment to detect when students break that rule. OTOH, I suppose one wouldn't be able to localize the signal much more accurately than a classroom, but that should be enough to inform a teacher to keep a closer eye on their students. Identifying cell phone users in hallways and such would be harder... but I doubt that's as important.
-Many places crank the lobby music so i can't hear my own music without causing ear damage.
You might look into some canalphones. They're basically ear-plugs with a speaker, so they are quite good at passively noise reduction. OTOH, I try not to wear them too much in public since it's easy to lose all situational awareness, and people think you're ignoring them.
I remember the most annoying part about learning a language in a course was that I couldn't really make what I considered to be "real programs". For BASIC and Java you have to install interpreters (meh, I guess a VM isn't an interpreter per say). Therefore, you can't really make a program and give it to your mates without going into long details about how to get it to work. Even then, if it's Java then any GUI you make won't look native, so it doesn't look like a "real program". So my suggestion would be to start with something that can make a.exe file for Windows that anybody can run, and teach how to do that.
1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive
Hmm... what I was always told was that rod cells in the retina are sensitive to single photons. IIRC, that's also why spinthariscopes work. Now, sure, I understand that the probability of a random photon entering the eye hitting a rhodopsin pigment is fairly low, and the response could be inhibited by nearby neural cells, but it's still my understanding that you can see individual photons in very dark surroundings. So, is this threshold more of a "what people notice under normal lighting", or are these researching splitting photons somehow?
Slashdot Mirror
It's fine for evolution. Even desirable under certain circumstances. That individual won't reproduce anymore, but their offspring likely will have more resources, as will their kin who are likely genetically similar. Otherwise longevity would be more favored by natural selection, we wouldn't die of "old age", and suicidal ideations wouldn't exist. Kinda similar to how apoptosis is beneficial for cells.
I'm not well versed in economics, but that sounds almost like the broken window fallacy. Putting money into delaying the inevitable only would help if that person personally helped the economy while on their death bed.
Also, I've always found the "most selfish act" bit distasteful. "Woe is me, this person's life/future was bad enough for them to choose to die, but they didn't prioritize the pain that would cause *me*." Sure it's selfish, by definition, although certainly no more so than choosing to live. What's unjustly selfish is thinking you have any right to dictate the permissible ways for a rational individual to die. Ditto for keeping someone alive for your own (usually emotional) benefit.
If you are outside the atmosphere, and not accelerating then you're basically in free fall. Sure, gravity is pulling you somewhere, but it doesn't really have an effect on anything inside the spacecraft (your reference frame is moving with you). I suppose tidal forces and the gravity caused by nearby matter might be detectable, but it's so small as to be ignorable for anything but research on gravity. From a biological perspective there is no discernible effect due to gravity. Given that gravity is practically the only (essential) constant across the entire biosphere I'm a little surprised that there aren't more ill effects due to its absence.
Upon reading the GP's statement I tried Googling for a graph showing percent of the world's population killed in combat throughout human history. Unfortunately, such records don't seem to exist, although I did stumble upon an interesting article. Modern intellectuals seem to be fond of feeling guilty, but this seems like something of which we should be fairly proud.
Morality is a human invention, so we have a few billion years of natural selection working against us. If you're a creationist then I suppose you could look at human history (IIRC there are only ~100 years of global peace) and decide that either we're made to be violent, or some ever-present thing makes us violent. IMHO the natural world is violent (e.g. ants, cats), and subsequently the most intelligent creatures tend to be the most sadistic (chimps have tribal wars and dolphins kill for entertainment).
Combine that with some game theory and I'm rather surprised at how peaceful we are. Perhaps modern philosophy, civilization and instant communication help, or it could be that our weapons got too effective for a reasonable person to take lightly (i.e. give a person what they think they want and they might realize that they don't want it anymore).
Interesting, although I didn't use that one for long since it was finicky about mounting. Ext2FSD places an entry in HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Run, which doesn't work on Vista/7 because those entries won't be launched if they require elevation.
Umm... your own source states that they can be used at the beginning of a sentence, although for formal writing never outside of parenthesis. Kind of an odd rule, but I suppose it makes some sense (although most sources say to not use Latin abbreviations at all in formal writing).
As for capitalization, this seems to be a contested issue. About.com says to capitalize them, and I can't recall ever seeing "i.e." not capitalized at the beginning of a sentence in print . I suspect grammar books differ on this point, but unfortunately this is particularly difficult to Google. I couldn't find any relevant information on this topic in the book you mentioned (1st edition full text online). That book is criticized rather harshly though, so I'd definitely look for independent verification of any rules it mentions.
This is looking more and more like a rule that a grammar teacher made up (a tragically common occurrence). "Don't start with i.e." would prevent inadvertent sentence fragments caused by the habit of using those abbreviations mostly mid-sentence. From there one could generalize and say "always in lowercase" to curb the tendency to capitalize abbreviations. Not a real rule, but just a guideline to prevent common errors. Plus English is a natural language so grammar rules are well nigh impossible to keep that simple. I did check and neither an assortment of famous authors or newspapers obey this rule, so if it once was true then it is no longer so.
I have never encountered that rule, nor can I find any reference to it anywhere. The definitions of "e.g." I found literally translate it as "for example" and it seems to be an adverb. Both prepositions and adverbs can start sentences so I don't see the problem.
For example, this sentence works.
E.g. it is a complete sentence.
You could point out the lack of a comma after "E.g." but that seems to differ by "style" and I prefer to avoid consecutive punctuation. As for the latter sentence, "I.e." would be preferable, but can't be used since the list is not exhaustive.
ext2 IFS has gone nearly a year without a release so it seems de facto stopped. Ext2FSD is updated, but it's more behind-the-scenes stuff, so the portions of the code to which I was referring don't appear to be undergoing any revision currently. So that's what I meant by "stopped". I also used the term "half done" which could be more or less accurate depending on their future plans.
I probably should have used "I.e." rather than "E.g." so thanks for calling me out on it. Pedantically, though, it still works since I didn't explicitly define my point by virtue of the fact that I used "e.g." rather than "i.e." (probably a more serious concern). I started with something it wasn't, and ended with something it was, both of which help delineate my point, but fall short of completely defining it, so they're technically just examples. As for capitalization, I stand by my usage. "E.g." is an abbreviation for "exempli gratia", the first "e" of which gets capitalized to start the sentence. This placement of the expression is rarer so it occasionally throws people's pattern recognition off.
My point isn't that the work is easy or hard. Either way, the hard part of reverse engineering is more or less done. But it only works, it doesn't work well. Is it really that difficult to, say, implement an autostarting method that wasn't depreciated with XP? Or have a filesystem driver that doesn't require a completely different method of operation than all others? E.g. my point is that they stopped before polishing the final application.
While they work, they hardly seem efficient. USPS keeps raising the price of stamps well above the rate of inflation (unless you're a junkmailer... they seem to get a 60% discount). Road construction seems to constantly go over budget and is very slow to ever be finished.
I prefer Ext2FSD myself, but neither is ideal. They require a helper application that doesn't autostart (there's a non-working option for it), and they can be fickle about mounting (e.g. click mount and it doesn't happen, or open the drive and Windows asks to format it). I've had data loss with NTFS-3g (hopefully that bug's been squashed), and exFAT isn't supported in Linux.
IMHO filesystem compatibility is a great example of how Linux devs are bad at leaving boring, but critical applications half done. E.g. they work, but have you have to jump through hoops and even then there are major bugs and little to no polish. Ideally, you could use any Windows or Linux filesystem in the other OS transparently with all features, to the point that the common user doesn't need to know what filesystems their partitions use.
All that said, I use FAT32 or Ext2 for shared partitions for lack of a better alternative.
Hmm... If you put too many rats in one container they resort to cannibalism despite being well fed. When I heard about that study someone mentioned that other studies were looking at whether this phenomenon could explain higher crime rates in cities. However, I'd never really thought of war (and resulting plague) as a major population control factor for humans. Perhaps humans seem inherently violent because we are still hardcoded to deal with hunter-gatherer level population densities. Thus modern society might trigger anti-over-population adaptations (evolutionary hold-overs) such as war. That would make space colonization very attractive... e.g. lower human population density and the resulting wastes of resources while retaining our ability to share knowledge.
That's what I was thinking, although the definition for "Woman" would probably need to be fairly sophisticated. E.g. a three year history of androgen levels + sensitivity below some threshold. Or have one unrestricted category, then various other categories that pit people with equal handicaps against each other (low androgen levels/female, don't have the bone structure of a fish, physical disabilities, hasn't spent their whole life training for the one event, etc.).
Why wouldn't the wealthy care about the poor? It's not like sociopathy is correlated with wealth, beyond that caused by being stigmatized by much of the other 95% of the population. Just look at the current setup... Our legislators tend to be wealthy, as are those who donate to their campaigns. Even so, those making >$100K are paying around three fourths of the taxes (top 50% pay 97%). Most government programs, OTOH, benefit the poor quite a bit more than they benefit the rich since the rich have other means of acquiring what they need.
So, simply by looking at past and current actions, the rich seem to care quite a bit about the poor. You can keep your cynicism by attributing that to needing cheap labor for mundane jobs, but I think it's more that one doesn't tend to care much about others until one's own needs are met. I won't say that the government doesn't have a pro-wealth bias, but overall it seems setup to protect the poor, otherwise you'd see the poor paying a lot more in taxes or mandatory service, and getting a lot less for their money/efforts.
In dust form (or slightly larger) the particles should be sufficiently small to combust far more easily, so I'd still be wary (dust is scary). Stripping it with one's hands is probably the safest method (I was picturing with a knife or something), but I wouldn't handle a flame for a while afterwards. Realistically, it probably isn't all that dangerous, but it's still pretty far from being safe. An accident is unlikely, and even if it did happen would probably be minor (singed hair or something). OTOH, I personally try to eliminate any chance for Murphy's Law to put a speck of white hot magnesium on my cornea.
I'd be a bit worried about the magnesium powder getting caught in the wind. Worst case scenario, it gets blown on you while you have the match lit. There's also the possibility of burning your hands if there's a spark when scraping the magnesium off of the wire. My guess would be neither would cause a Darwin award, unless you count "can't find a date due to facial scarring".
You can do PCR without a thermal cycler, albeit it would be far more tedious. You could even probably skimp on the enzymes and get a polymerase that isn't resistant to heat if you're cycling manually anyway. Even making/extracting the enzymes is probably feasible after one ordered an appropriate plasmid or bacterial colony. In any case, if you have a cheap source of labor I'd bet you could do PCR for very little expense using mostly household items. That said, DNA work is finicky enough that this kind of thing might be impractical or have an abhorrently low throughput.
I can't find the study, but IIRC, adults don't need (much) less sleep as they get older, they just get used to working with less. The information that I did find suggests that sleep needs change considerably during childhood, but adults basically need 7-8 hours per night. My guess would be that sleep requirements are correlated with metabolic activity (highest in childhood, but for adults the basal metabolic rate is fairly constant given body type/size). Getting by with less is certainly possible, but you're reducing your mental/physical performance and increasing the risk of stuff like diabetes and heart disease. Working long hours pretty much came about with agriculture, so I'm doubtful the human body is terribly well adapted to it.
While I agree that not doing everything yourself is the basis of civilization, I disagree that it's imperative to not know how things outside your specialty work. IMHO, one needs to have a rough idea so one can negotiate successfully. E.g. it's impossible to ascribe a value to the product of someone's work if you have no idea what they did. You could trust the price they set, but that assumes they have knowledge about your work, and aren't trying to exploit you.
Besides, I've always looked at knowing how things work as vitally important. While I don't understand electricity in great detail, I know that flipping a light switch mechanically closes a circuit, allowing an electric field to be established within a wire, which excites electrons to a higher energy state in a light bulb, which releases photons when those electrons return to their lesser energy state. When I was younger I had a simpler understanding, but I was never comfortable with Flip Switch -> Light comes on. It seems rather important to understand what you're doing when you're flipping a switch, since otherwise that switch could be doing anything... including things I presumably don't want to happen. Not caring to education oneself about how common things work and common things people do seems dangerous, or at least assumes that everyone, everywhere has your best interest in mind, and is competent.
My guess would be that's why they're adding it.
My ISP does this as well, and I've used a variety of solutions in the past. Basically, run a DNS server on my computer, run one on my router, set bogus-nxdomain on my router's Dnsmasq configuration, or use an alternate DNS server like OpenNIC (OpenDNS does the same thing from what I hear).
As for how annoying this is... the way my ISP does it is by redirecting a mistyped URL to the ad-filled "not found" page. So, making a typo means I have to retype the entire URL, rather than just fix the typo.
Irrespective of the existance of free will, my interpretation of the rationale behind the criminal justice system is that it identifies individuals with a lack of respect for the law. This is deemed incompatible with modern society, so such individuals are removed from society and/or there is an attempt to foster that respect through punishment or deterrence.
It seems that a more legal/safer method would be to simply make a rule requiring all cell phones be turned off and use detection equipment to detect when students break that rule. OTOH, I suppose one wouldn't be able to localize the signal much more accurately than a classroom, but that should be enough to inform a teacher to keep a closer eye on their students. Identifying cell phone users in hallways and such would be harder... but I doubt that's as important.
You might look into some canalphones. They're basically ear-plugs with a speaker, so they are quite good at passively noise reduction. OTOH, I try not to wear them too much in public since it's easy to lose all situational awareness, and people think you're ignoring them.
I remember the most annoying part about learning a language in a course was that I couldn't really make what I considered to be "real programs". For BASIC and Java you have to install interpreters (meh, I guess a VM isn't an interpreter per say). Therefore, you can't really make a program and give it to your mates without going into long details about how to get it to work. Even then, if it's Java then any GUI you make won't look native, so it doesn't look like a "real program". So my suggestion would be to start with something that can make a .exe file for Windows that anybody can run, and teach how to do that.
Hmm... what I was always told was that rod cells in the retina are sensitive to single photons. IIRC, that's also why spinthariscopes work. Now, sure, I understand that the probability of a random photon entering the eye hitting a rhodopsin pigment is fairly low, and the response could be inhibited by nearby neural cells, but it's still my understanding that you can see individual photons in very dark surroundings. So, is this threshold more of a "what people notice under normal lighting", or are these researching splitting photons somehow?