The crater is in Hamilton County which is along the southern border of the eastern part of the state. Looking at a geologic map of the region, the county is sitting on rocks from somewhere between Cambrian and Ordovician in age (about 540-440Ma). However, the region's geography is dominated by a thrust-and-fold mountain belt that formed during the Alleghenian orogeny about 325-260Ma. The crater is undeformed so it has to post-date the collisional event. Its definitely less than 260Ma. Considering how symmetrical the crater is, its probably a lot younger but I can't find any sedimentary maps for the area.

Or, you could ask a local Tennessee student and s/he will tell you the crater was formed when God smote Satan 10,000 years ago.

Ugh.

All the more reason to promote science, empiricism, and rationalism. This is what happens when science is portrayed in schools as a list of facts, vocabulary words, and diagrams to memorize. It becomes perceived as more dogma, another belief system. This allows people to portray the issue as a choice between one belief system and another. And which version of reality are people going to choose? The one that requires thinking and math or the one that tells you you're the center of the universe? The answer is: you don't get to choose the version of reality you like best.

There is more to Nye's comments than "let your kids learn about evolution" and there is more to science than "will it run Perl scripts and what is its shear stress threshold?".

Evolutionary theory relies on a number of other systems and theories from a variety of fields outside the biosciences. Evolution relies on deep time, which is also fundamental to cosmology. The measurement of deep time is accomplished, among other methods, through radiometric dating. That only works if you understand nuclear physics and particle theory. And then there is mathematics that underly and support biology, physics, chemistry, etc. These are fundamental, unifying theories in their respective fields. The support columns of a single building. Knock out one and the rest are put under strain, susceptible to failure.

I wouldn't say "most Americans". There's just a very vocal minority out there that presents itself as representing the majority.

Don't know much about higher mathematics, but based on the post and the explanation of Shor's Algorithm from wikipedia, its not an issue of how easy it is to factor a small number or how practical. Its more of a benchmark for quantum computing. If the ideal success rate is 50%, then 48% is an indicator of how well the system is operating.

And besides, the quantum computer got a higher score on that math problem than the average American student. That's got to count for something.

Oh good, I'm not the only one who hates white boards. Expensive markers that constantly walk out the door, special erasers, special cleaning solution because the markers aren't all that erasable . . .

I love technology and I genuinely have no idea how people got through college without the web and email (lots of camping out in front of professor's offices I guess). But some times if its not broke, don't fix it. Chalkboards have been cheap and effective for a few thousand years. It also helps remind you that you're in a classroom or lab, and not a conference room.

I'm an adjunct professor at three local colleges, so I get to experience a variety of educational technologies and IT departments. My frustrations don't come from the technology itself, but from the policies administrators and the IT staff implement. All three schools have a campus email system for students, faculty, and staff. But two of them are web-based systems that do not allow auto-forwarding. I have to manually log in to the clunky web-based system and sift through a mountain of intra-spam. The feature exists on these platforms, according to my research, its just been disabled. I guess they want to make sure we're all using the outsourced webmail system they spent millions of dollars importing from the late 90's.

When it comes time to submit my grades, one school's system flips a coin each semester to decide whether it supports Mac users. Not whether it supports Safari, not "the Mac version of Firefox" or even "the Mac version of IE" but logging in from a Mac computer at all. When I call the registrar's office, they claim to have never supported Mac. Except, they did. Last semester.

One school has a laptop loan program for faculty and students. We can request to borrow a laptop to run our classes with. For one month. Then we have to return the computer and resubmit the request. The same school installed 3M Smart Boards in many of the classrooms. They have loads of cool features, but the remote controls and digital pen devices you need to use them all disappeared within months of installation. Now they serve as very expensive white boards.

The list goes on . . . None of these are failings of technology, but how technology is implemented. I often get the impression that the people in charge of acquiring, installing, and managing tech at my schools are being brought in from the business sector. They are attempting to implement methodologies and policies suited to smaller, homogeneous work environments. Classrooms aren't office buildings; faculty and students use tech differently from the office staff.

Absolutely. The first test will be how each candidate responds to the debate proposal itself. Will either or both accept and, if so, will it be with a ton of conditions and modifications to the question list?

I always find it funny that the generations of people who grew up living in absolute terror of all things nuclear are the same generations that believed hiding under a piece of furniture would protect them from all things nuclear.

Similar to the "convenience fees" many utilities, companies, and government agencies charge to conduct business via their web sites. Why does it cost money to NOT publish my phone number? Why does it cost money to renew my car registration online via an automated system instead of at a building that costs rent and overhead with a human employee? Why does it cost my bank $3 a page to mail me copies of old bank statements (and why can't they send me pdf's)?

Perhaps we've hit upon a new revenue stream. We could call it "Unservice" or "Negative Features".

War, famine, violence, addiction, pollution . . . truly, WE are the Chaos Monkeys!

Splice this into humans and it'll solve the social security's financial problems AND the war on terror! Bonus: the line at the post office will move faster.

She's lost the will to live . . .

Alright, on further inspection Netvibes does appear to have the same functionality as iGoogle. Just took some poking around to figure out how it works. The edit buttons for the feed widgets were not visible for me in the default theme so I couldn't figure out how to edit or delete content initially.

Good recommendation. Now I'm ready for when iGoogle goes dark . . . in November of 2013.

Just looked at Netvibes. Its a social media aggregator with news feeds from Yahoo and Bing (bleck). I put in "science" as my starter topic and it comes back with thousands of forum posts and blog entries. I'm not interested in what forum trolls and paid sock puppets think about the LHC press conference. I'd like to read about the contents of the press conference.

I'm looking for something that draws on actual news sources like AP, Christian Science Monitor, the Guardian, CNN, etc. without me having to open a dozen web pages and sift through their individual interfaces. I guess I need to learn to use GoogleNews and then open up a few other pages for weather, chat, etc.

Maybe I need to ask a broader question: If having a personalized home page is obsolete, what's the new way to see all the basic information you're interested in one place?