All I can remember from Space: 1999 was all the psychedelic colors. The crew would inevitably land on some kind of orange/green/yellow planet with some tall flowers, some kerfuffle would ensue, and guns would make people vanish, problem solved and end of the episode. Fun stuff.

Look no further than in agriculture. Just a century ago, what percentage of people used to work in the farms? What's that percentage now? People then moved into the manufacturing industries, but work there has also been replaced by machines to a great extent, and cheaper labor in other countries.

It doesn't take a lot of human labor to fulfill our basic needs anymore, and so people have been trying to create needs we didn't think we had. This is why so much rides on advertisement these days. Is there a point where the incremental improvement in our comfort is no longer worth the money we'd spend to get it? That's when we'll probably face major unemployment issues...

What is well established is the scientific discovery process, and the difference it makes between a scientific theory and beliefs. The theory of evolution is a great illustration of that difference, and making sure that it is taught is especially timely.

Just in time for the latest XKCD! http://xkcd.com/1118/

Just yesterday I decided to give up on iGoogle, as I hated the fact that I couldn't use it while using a different YouTube account in the same browser. Much as I don't mind them logging and datamining everything I do (to some extent), I don't like them to correlate my calendar, my email information AND the silly videos I might want to watch. So the Google/YouTube consolidation did it for me, and I returned (unhappily) to My Yahoo. Too bad, as I really liked having Google Calendar and its to do list so readily available. Now with iGoogle being retired I really can't regret my decision. But Yahoo Calendar is ugly and its to-do list sucks. Netvibes looks promising, so I'll give it a shot.

The people listening on those conversation probably aren't any more sophisticated than those they're listening to, so maybe they won't be bored at all.

Someone please mod this up!

What we need is for reputable researchers from reputable institutions to launch free open access journals, and have them managed and archived by their libraries, using digital library tools. In Artificial Intelligence, there's already the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) that has been free and available on-line since the beginning, and it has a good reputation.

The digital repository tools are mature now, we just need MIT, Stanford and others to decide to circumvent Elsevier and co and do it themselves. Then federate all the digital libraries across universities, and now you have additional redundancy and ease of access. It might even be cheaper for universities to run their own digital repositories instead of paying Elsevier and co outrageous fees. Or at least it gives them some leverage for fee negotiation.

Udacity and Coursera were launched by Stanford profs; not sure no-namers would have had the same success.

Yes, patterns often are needed due to the inflexibility of your programming language of choice (erm, Java), and yes, when you first learn about them you tend to use them everywhere and over-engineer things to death (guilty!). BUT, with some experience you realize that it's the idea behind them that is important. Especially if you're using some agile methodology, you basically only end up with patterns or a piece thereof as a result of some refactoring (see Joshua Kerievsky's excellent book on the subject), and you should also be ready to move away from them as soon as you realize you don't need them. Patterns provide a direction, but they're not necessarily an end goal.

I haven't read this new book, but breaking down patterns into smaller, more fundamental chunks could be very useful in that "refactoring toward patterns" attitude.

Also wanted to add that there's nothing to stop vocational schools to also require their students to be well-rounded, and to expect them to take many courses at University as part of their curriculum. As I said in an earlier post, that would in fact provide a great way to further subsidize university, through the offering of these "service courses" to the vocational schools.

That's not a bad way to look at it either. I'm just afraid it would cost more than my solution. I also wonder if everybody would go straight to a vocational school first and then never bother with a non-professional degree, meaning you'd never see the kind of Renaissance Man model you wished for in the first paragraph (and that I would like as well).

The student debt will just get that much higher. Unless the education bubble eventually bursts, the day people start defaulting on their debt repayments.

How would that be worse than the current situation? Right now those who do non-professional degrees spend all that time AND money on something that won't get them a degree. What I'm proposing is to make the state subsidize those degrees so that at least student's aren't in debt once they've completed a program that doesn't lead to a job. If anything, this should mean that we'll see MORE lower and middle classes in university, aided in that by everybody's taxes.