In Alaska, there's two places that do the same. Good food. Amazing pizza. Reasonable tickets, and bar prices for beer and wine.

Everytime I'm in Anchorage, I go to the Bear Tooth, because it doesn't matter what movie is showing, it's worth it for the experience of seeing a movie like that.

Are you kidding me? Lab quality animals are cheap compared to the site licenses for good software to do the same. Never mind you lose a crapton of the detail. Site licenses can run into the five plus digits, easily, depending on enrolment. Plus you need computers to run them all on, and people to support those computers (granted, that's usually dumped onto IT's workload without ever giving them more pay or new workers). And if enrollment is high enough, as it is in many A&P courses (since pre-med, pre-vet, nursing, EMT, and general biology students all get fed through there), you might need a dedicated room to house all that. It adds up incredibly quickly. And that's ignoring that simulations are currently vastly inferior.

No. None of the models or simulations we've looked at capture the complexity or even the essence of what we're trying to teach in Anatomy & Physiology. And when it comes to practice of things like surgery, the answer becomes even more emphatic. And my area is Wildlife, where dead bodies are not in short supply. I've heard (And hearsay is the best evidence) the issue is larger in human work, where you have fewer human cadavers to practice on before you can move on to practising surgery on pigs. Not that many people donate their bodies to medical purposes (or donate their organs to people who need them, period!).

Who watches ads anymore anyways?
The overwhelming majority of Americans?

The problem is not the average loudness. If a channel is quiet, you can raise the volume and be fine. Loud? Turn it down, you're fine. It's sudden variation in volume that's the problem. You're cruising along, watching some TV, and then suddenly there's a super loud ad yelling at you at the top of its lungs. What's to do? Turn down the volume? Can't hear the news cast. Turn it down, and then up again? At some point, the average user is left with either "put a lot of effort into moderating the volume" or "say screw it and let things fall as they are."

I'm probably going to rot in obscurity down here, since I'm posting so late to the story. However, someone over here did a really basic analysis with the typical "unemployment by college major" data that the Wall Street Journal put up. They looked at variance in unemployment related to popularity of a major. While the data set was incomplete (they didn't have true sample size, so they used rank, and transformed rank), it showed clear indications that those with the lowest sample size had the highest variance in unemployment. Far from making some broad claims about the utility of a major, it suggests that the less popular majors have big issues with small sample size. A single individual's employment history has far more effect on the statistics of those rare 'terrible majors' than the more populous ones. The only way to make the data trustworthy is to look at it for a much longer slice in time than we typically examine it for.

Also, it's worth putting on your economics hat when you think of modifying incentives like this. The problem with the proposed structural change is it assumes that the government can react to changing incentives faster than an individual can. Where there is demand for labour is a shifting target from year to year, and decade to decade (Hell, it shifts from quarter to quarter in some cases!). By deciding where the incentives are, they government needs to be able to shift them to match need fast enough so when there's a shortage of Psychologists and a surplus of Biologists, people can react to it accordingly. I'm skeptical about a government's ability to react that quickly with policy. If you're going to include incentives, it's best to include incentives for education in general, and not for specific major, so such bias won't occur. If the incentives in the form of subsidization are equal across the board, demand signals should still be seen.

And taking off my stats and economics hats, and putting on my skeptic hat, I want to see percentage-wise how much these 'terrible' majors actually cost the system. My intuition based off of the variance in unemployment vs. rank-popularity is that it doesn't cost the system much at all, and this is much-ado about nothing while the real expenses (Military spending, Medical spending) is ignored. Of course, much of the current fury over debt ignores the fact that the government is not like household/private debt. The two are functionally different.

The clipboard is key. I've found the following pattern for having people leave me alone when I'm doing work out and about in outdoor places where people might (and sometimes should) ask me what the hell I'm doing there. An official looking hat works some of the time, and if people ask what I'm up to, I can point to it and say I work for them (even if I'm wearing a hat for a totally different organization). This seems to satisfy people. A clipboard works the majority of the time, although sometimes I have to wave it around and say I'm with XYZ organization. Any explanation, even a bad one, seems to work. An orange reflective safety vest has worked 100% of the time. It is the ultimate in human camouflage for walking around without question.

Luckily, I actually belong in those places when I'm working. But I've often wondered what sort of trouble other folks could get up to without anyone noticing.

It seems like there's this cultural attitude out there that cybersecurity (hate that term) is a bit of an overblown joke, and that the worst malicious agents could do is steal our nation's porn collection or some such. Really, between stuxnet and now this, I really hope that people take home the message that targeted computer security threats can do a lot of damage in the national-security sense.

I really would be surprised if it turns out that this looks like it was developed by insert-country-that-doesn't-like-the-US-here. Iran, dicking with the US for giving them stuxnet springs to mind.

Of course, it could have also been some service member who was adding material to the national pornstash who's responsible.

Fun fact: Most of Alaska should be one or two timezones behind where they are. The state is UCT -9. Geographically, every non-SE part should be UCT -10, -11 or ±12. But since time is so screwed up in the state's non SE-bits (Either endless light or pretty much none, with rapid changes between the two), UCT -9 works in a pinch. Of course that fact underlines how useless DST is in the north.

Okay, I lied. That fact wasn't even slightly fun.

This sounds really good, actually. Most of the rural state has massive heat loss problems, coupled with high costs of heating. Who would have thought that houses designed by the BIA (or whoever) for Arizona would suck on the tundra? Surely no one could have seen that one coming...

I live in Fairbanks. It gets dark here. And yet... solar works? I have first hand experience on this issue. You see, just because there isn't as much light doesn't mean that there's no light. Unless you go really far north, there'll still be a few hours of sunlight (albeit at an extreme angle). While this might not seem like a lot, it appreciably reduces your diesel consumption. And most places in the state have fantastic, reliable wind (Fairbanks not so much).
And then summer comes, and the issue with solar is dumping all the extra energy you're collecting because you're usually collecting an excess of your needs.

For me, when I see the starz logo, I know that it's going to be low quality, poor audio, and probably 20 years old. Not that there isn't good 20 year old movies, but that's definitely not what I'm on 'flix for. I'll miss Starz because it let me know what not to watch.

No one is losing money on Netflix. Deals with netflix doesn't cost them a single red cent to follow through on, since all the media exists on Netflix's end. The only thing they could be losing is the opportunity for additional contracts (if they have an exclusivity contract with netflix) or the opportunity to make even more money from netflix. Even if no one watches a single move of theirs on 'Flix, they would still be making profit.

Let me sum up this (and many other) comments: "Whaaaaaa! People are enjoying something that I don't find enjoyable! This is unreasonable!"
Newsflash. You might not like Hockey, or Poker, or Starcraft, or Law and Order marathons... but who the heck are all of you to crap all over people who happen to like something you don't? I find baseball boring as crap, but I'm not going to whine about it when other people are watching it. Heck, they show lots of stuff some people don't find interesting at sports bars, and yet the system seems to work thus far.
Don't like sports bars in general? Great. Don't go there then.

Except you can. MLG has betting markets. In fact, that was a big reason they're holding the next IPL in a casino - so the organizers can get in on it. So, I guess it's a sport?

Matlab is great, but my god the language is cumbersome. More so than R, though less than SAS. Also, it costs money, and I'm cheap. So, I'm wondering if this could be worked into R somehow. Since R seems to execute code in a single tread sort of manner (I say, knowing just enough to be dangerous about these matters), each wee bit of speed is a godsent.