fuel chemistry is pushing the bounds of space exploration. And steel engineering. And antenna design. And numerous other fields.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1731#comic

Anybody know of similar stats for driving?

Quick look-up gives 1.25 fatalities/100 million miles traveled for 2008. Haphazard calculating gives 60 accidents/100,000 hours driving (50mph, 1 fatality in 1000 accidents).

Hard to compare, though.

Causation?

That doesn't really address either of the issues, does it?

Standard web-based clients (gmail, yahoo, university email systems) don't have built-in encryption/decryption systems. Sure you could find a firefox add-on that adds these, but that that leaves two problems:
1) I don't trust the third-party encryption to not spy on me (and, no, I don't want to read the code for the add-on).
2) I still won't have anyone to send my super-secure emails to: no one I know can decrypt my messages without undue trouble. Firefox add-ons aren't too relevant for most people.

If you have a real solution to those two issues, I'd love to hear about it.

They are actually made from real coins, so the real problem would be "defacing currency":

"Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins... shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than FIVE YEARS, or both."
relevant law

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6936352.ece?print=yes

"The cells were then incubated in a solution containing nutrients to encourage them to multiply indefinitely. This nutritious “broth” is derived from the blood products of animal foetuses, although the intention is to come up with a synthetic solution."

Abstract from the actual paper:
"Electrically charged particles, such as the electron, are ubiquitous. In contrast, no elementary particles with a net magnetic charge have ever been observed, despite intensive and prolonged searches (see ref. 1 for example). We pursue an alternative strategy, namely that of realizing them not as elementary but rather as emergent particles—that is, as manifestations of the correlations present in a strongly interacting many-body system. The most prominent examples of emergent quasiparticles are the ones with fractional electric charge e/3 in quantum Hall physics. Here we propose that magnetic monopoles emerge in a class of exotic magnets known collectively as spin ice: the dipole moment of the underlying electronic degrees of freedom fractionalises into monopoles. This would account for a mysterious phase transition observed experimentally in spin ice in a magnetic field, which is a liquid–gas transition of the magnetic monopoles. These monopoles can also be detected by other means, for example, in an experiment modelled after the Stanford magnetic monopole search."

'Cause that would really solve everything. If everyone switches to linux, the malware writers will just give up and not exploit security holes in linux, right?

(Or is linux just not popular enough among the computer-illiterate to be a good target for attacks?)

There are at least 400 students (2 big lectures' worth) that can come to my office hours, and of the 8 or so TAs, I'm one of two or three that are 100% fluent in English. There's also the issue that calc 3 is just hard the first time you see it, so even 5 hours of lecture/discussion a week might not address the specific questions and misunderstandings a student has. I'd say about 10 students come through my two office hours each week, and that's not that big a percentage.

And you're probably right, there's bound to be some ineffective teaching going on with that many teachers involved and some teaching for the first time.

I'm proctoring a test a week from now. We will check every student's ID. It's not quite common practice, but some instructors do insist on it.

The previous university I taught at provided a photo roster for each course. As a TA, I would go through this roster and make sure I recognized the students in my class.

Other people have mentioned actual in-class instruction being useless. As my students are getting ready to take their test, one of the main things I'm noticing is that I can't provide enough one-on-one instruction. At best, I have 5 people in office hours I'm trying to help at the same time. And that's still not personalized enough.

The internet is a great resource, but it's as good for undergraduate education as an encyclopedia. The biggest thing I learned in undergrad is _how_ to think about various concepts, not the concepts themselves - and you get that by talking to people.

"An education is what remains after you've forgotten everything you've learned".