I'd second this. You have to remember that at some point your kids are going to leave home (you hope) and have to make decisions for themselves about their own education at university and parents can no longer be involved. Indeed this seems to come as a shock for some parents (fortunately very few) when they either call me up or try to visit to discuss their kids performance at university and I have to tell them that privacy laws forbid me from discussing anything about their son or daughter's performance with them. School is a nice way to get both the kid and the parent used to this fact so when they do go to university the gap is not so large.

A further thing to consider is whether the academics really are better for home schooled kids. I'm sure that you can cram facts into their heads but, as a university prof who has seen students from foreign countries where rote learning is de rigour, this does not turn out well at university when they are required to understand and apply knowledge rather than just regurgitate it. In addition there is the benefit of exposing them to different teacher's points of views and interests: your kids are not you and they need to find out what they like.

Lastly I'd also question whether your wife is really capable of home schooling at all. At school all the teachers have managed to get a degree in something plus training as teachers. Your wife is clearly not well educated and lacks any training in teaching young kids: there is a very good reason why school teachers require special training in educational techniques while university professor do not. Kid's minds do not function the same way as adult's and you need to take account of this to be an effective school teacher, particularly for primary school kids.

That's very clearly the case. We used to have a really useful and highly effective vaccine that gave protection against the root cause of the problem we are discussing here: ignorance. The vaccine was education. Sadly as this has been watered down it has become less effective with the result that we now see increasing outbreaks of ignorance worldwide resulting in new symptoms such as intelligent design and not having your kids vaccinated as well as some old symptoms, like astrology, re-emerging.

Sadly governments have not responded to this by once again strengthening the vaccine, education, that has protected us for so long. Instead they seem to prefer to treat each individual symptom of the disease by passing laws. This is simply not going to work: already new strains of ignorance, such as intelligent design, have proven remarkably resistant to this treatment and have started to attack the education vaccine directly weakening its effectiveness further.

The problem with that is that you really need the kids of idiots who don't vaccinate to get an education to stop the ignorance spreading. If you keep them out of school then they will end up even more ignorant than their parents and things will rapidly spiral downhill from there one they get to vote.

I wonder if the IP cams which use someones cloud for the images have such a URL for getting the current or latest JPEG image? If they do then you could use such a cam since it would be pushing out the images. BTW, once a cam pushes out an image, there is a TCP/IP connection between the camera and service server so they can command the camera to do things without initially knowing your cameras IP or having to come into your network from 'outside'.

LoB

that's what I was thinking except for the rPi, use a WiFi enabled SD card like EyeFi to offload the pictures. The rPi might be cheaper but would require a bit more geekery but with the added ability to do more. The WiFi SD solution should be just a bit of server code to pull in the pictures. There would have to be a network and WiFi already there.

LoB

what about a low end( by todays standard ) digital camera like a Cannon which can have installed new firmware on the SD card for timed pictures and use one of those wifi enabled SD cards?

CHDK is the firmware:
http://lifehacker.com/387380/turn-your-point-and-shoot-into-a-super-camera

SD WiFi card(Eyefi):
http://www.eyefi.com/

if EyeFi won't let you send to your own web server then just put a script on your web server to go get the latest picture from the EyeFi site.

That should cover it except for some kind of mount which would have to hang from the ceiling and could have a standard tripod screw mount on it. Heck, CDHK probably lets you flip the picture so you can just suspend a tripod from the ceiling with the camera attached. You'll also want to find a compatible Cannon camera which can take external power.

LoB

Probably but I don't see how it will work. What is to stop companies registering themselves elsewhere so that they are no longer US companies and then only their US operations will get taxed? Even if this strategy does not work they have an army of lawyers using the legal system of every country in the world to figure out workarounds that will work.

I think there is some confusion over what "parallel" universe means. This is generally taken to be a universe which has been an exact parallel of our own universe up to some point after which it diverges i.e. everything is the same up to some point in time. In the quantum multiverse interpretation of QM this happens for each possible result of collapsing the wave function.

I've never heard of this ever being associated with multiple 'universes' from inflation because QM requires that the universes interact before they separate (this is how it explains the self interference of a single particle) whereas inflation requires that the universes be causally disconnected after their creation i.e. inflationary universes are just different universes, not parallel ones. So I think the author of the article got himself rather confused.

Really you have two options here. Either that Martian life would be entirely different to us in which case it is unlikely going to be even able to survive on Earth let alone devour anything or it is somehow similar to life on Earth in which case would it really be any worse that the collection of highly infectious, nasty bugs we already have in labs around the planet?

Certain science fiction loves to go on about alien superbugs because they make good stories but I expect that in this regard reality will be a lot more boring, and safer, than fiction.

Interesting. I was confused by this since I was taught as a kid that The Hague was the capital of the Netherlands and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, that is still where the government sits even though it seems that Dutch law defines Amsterdam as the capital (which was something I'd never heard of until today). So apparently at least in the UK we used to be taught based on the definition of capital, i.e. where the ruling government presides, and not whatever local laws would like to call a capital.

Actually I would think it depends more on how intelligent and how advanced it is. Microbial life on Mars will hardly instill much fear but a lot of curiosity. An advanced space craft appearing in orbit and contacting us will generate far more fear...but still a lot of curiosity about their technology. So I'd say that curiosity is the one constant regardless of what type of life we find. Whether we fear it will depend on the details.

My point is though that without knowing the width of that distribution you have no idea how wide the 'middle' is: if your average time to evolve intelligence is 30+/-20 billion years we are still well within 2 sigma from the mean. This could make intelligent life sufficiently rare so that we could easily be the first in our galaxy given the age of the universe. With billions of galaxies there could still be more advanced intelligent life in a galaxy far, far away but we would never know about them.

Just curious but why do you say that? We have no clue how likely intelligent life is to evolve. All we know is that it has happened once, and it took 3.5 billion years from the formation of the first like on Earth. Suppose that this was very much faster than average and the the mean time for intelligent life to evolve (once life itself has started) is 30 billion years? Such a long time would hugely reduce the number of intelligent species since you need a very stable environment for a long period of time and even then you have to get lucky.

Trying to quantify what you don't know is a mug's game...in order to be able to do it you really need to know what you don't know. If anything I would argue that there is, perhaps, some weak evidence for intelligent life being rare: travel might be hard but radio is easy. We have not heard ET's broadcasts which would suggest perhaps that there is no intelligent life nearby (or they use some technology beyond EM waves).

Especially given that they now track global warming. Nuclear war is a doomsday scenario but global warming is most certainly not. It may cause economic hardship and the displacement of populations as sea levels rise plus the need to alter crops etc. but it is not going to wipe humanity off the face of the earth. Since the clock is supposedly set by scientists if they can be so wrong about something scientific then I have little faith they can predict the likelihood of nuclear war either given that this depends on politics.

Just like it is unconstitutional to torture prisoners etc. etc.? I expect that you are right in that they will deny his request but the reason will be because it is the request of a foreign power. I also expect that many US politicians will think that it sounds like an excellent idea and after a suitable period so that they can claim it is their own idea there will be an American lead initiative to do the same thing. Why would they listen to some idiotic right wing UK politician when they have plenty of their own to choose from?