Central Indiana Homeschool blog pointed me to this article by John Haney about homeschooling’s rising popularity.

Home schooling is a growing trend earning more respect. Its supporters say that’s because it is getting results.

Statistics from the Dept. of Education show that children who learn at home read better and do better in math.

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Home school students have standardized achievement test scores nearly 35 percent higher than public students. That means more and more elite colleges are choosing home school students in the application process.

Future employers are also taking notice.

Check out the whole article.

Processing information at the speed of light may be possible. Scientists have discovered, for the first time, how to speed up or slow down light using off the shelf technologies at the telecommunications wavelengths.

The telecommunications industry transmits vast quantities of data via fiber optics. Light signals race down the information superhighway at about 186,000 miles per second. But information cannot be processed at this speed, because with current technology light signals cannot be stored, routed or processed without first being transformed into electrical signals, which work much more slowly. If the light signal could be controlled by light, it would be possible to route and process optical data without the costly electrical conversion, opening up the possibility of processing information at the speed of light.

This is exactly what the EPFL team has demonstrated. Using their Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) method, the group was able to slow a light signal down by a factor of 3.6, creating a sort of temporary “optical memory.” They were also able to create extreme conditions in which the light signal travelled faster than 300 million meters a second. And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, Einstein needn’t move over – relativity isn’t called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected.

Slowing down light is considered to be a critical step in our ability to process information optically. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) considers it so important that it has been funnelling millions of dollars into projects such as “Applications of Slow Light in Optical Fibers” and research on all-optical routers. To succeed commercially, a device that slows down light must be able to work across a range of wavelengths, be capable of working at high bit-rates and be reasonably compact and inexpensive.

The Northbrook Village Board wants to mandate sprinkler systems in all new single family homes.

Northbrook Village Board proponents maintain that compared to the value of the lives the devices might save, their cost is insignificant.

Karagianis challenged them, saying, “If you feel that’s true, why don’t you back a requirement for retrofitting” houses with sprinklers?

Heller protested that retrofitting a house could run more than twice as much.

“So cost is an issue, then,” Karagianis replied. “When you start considering your own budget, suddenly it strikes home to you.”

Fark’s take:

So when residents burn toast, instead of that annoying beeping, they can simply haul the soaked contents of their house to the curb and buy all new stuff

Hah!

Yep. That’s right. Mark Morford is ecstatic that it’s been done with virtually no notice and no outrage.

Amazon.com is selling sex toys. A lot of sex toys. More than you knew it would ever dare sell and more than you even knew were being manufactured in the world today and a more advanced and varied selection than you probably imagined they could ever get away with.

And what’s more, Amazon has added this array of delicious adult goods quietly, effortlessly, with zero fanfare and zero marketing and zero apparent intolerant outcry (so far as I know) from the right-wing Christian sex tormenters, and with absolutely no children anywhere in the nation spontaneously combusting or being struck by lightning and/or converting to wanton paganism (yet) by viewing any of these items (which they easily can)

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This is no trifling thing. Amazon’s sex-toy department is simply a huge portion of the site’s Health and Personal Care area. The “Sex and Sensuality” section of the site contains a staggering 37,000 items, with the Sexual Enhancers (that’s the toys, baby) subsection alone offering up a whopping 4,863 items — enough to satisfy an entire repressed evangelical congregation and terrify Alabama

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There are no cheesy porny product shots. There is no explicit nudity or raunchy descriptions, except for the wonderful and silly product titles. There is no age-verification system and no insulting adult warning and no purchase restrictions. Amazon has done the perfectly natural thing of merely folding the toys into its array of general offerings as if nothing’s unusual, no pornographic shock value, nothing to worry about. It’s as if these items were perfectly commonplace and acceptable and everyone should have them. Imagine.

This, then, is the most glorious upshot. Sex toys, like much of the porn biz in general, have gone mainstream. They have been normalized. [Emphasis mine]

This site has some interesting ideas… including this one:

Change the name of the show to “CBS Evening Rumors.” Instead of news, offer rumors. Isn’t that what Dan Rather did anyway? The 18-to-34 demographic already has all of its news by 6:30 anyway via the Internet, so why not just focus on rumors and gossip that people on the Net will be talking about tomorrow?

Interesting wager. Bookmark Myopic Zeal and come back in 10 years, we’ll be there for the results!

Two climate change sceptics, who believe the dangers of global warming are overstated, have put their money where their mouth is and bet $10,000 that the planet will cool over the next decade.
The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev have agreed the wager with a British climate expert, James Annan.

The pair, based in Irkutsk, at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, believe that global temperatures are driven more by changes in the sun’s activity than by the emission of greenhouse gases.

The scientific global warming experts Hillary Clinton and John McCain disagree. I guess we’ll just have to wait it out.