Yes, definitely listen to the debate. I recommend it for both sides of the argument.

And as a result Coyne made his point very effectively. The killer counter argument to the "religious scientists exist therefore the two are compatible" statement will be hard to forget.

BTW, that debate video was definitely worth watching. I recommend it.

As I understand it a "militant athiest" believes religion is a counter productive force in the world and therefore should be eliminated. Compare this to the attitude of a "non-militant athiest" who might say, "Religion is ok for some people, but I don't believe in it". Since this is a war of ideas I think "militant" is an apt adjective.

Correct, turbines are not efficient. However, a nearly isothermal engine IS. Combine a solar array with a SustainX compressed gas energy storage system and a 200C thermal gradient and you would have something neat:

http://ecogeek.org/component/content/article/3620

The amount of heat leaking out of the core already is MUCH larger than anything added by geothermal power plants, by several orders of magnitude. The surface area of the Earth is huge, which means its thermodynamic coupling to the atmosphere and oceans proportionally high. When you compute the thermal output of a single lava volcano should find that it dwarfs the sum of all deployed geothermal power plants and probably our worldwide energy needs. All of this heat eventually leaks into the atmosphere already except that part that radiates directly into space through the air.

Some geothermal plant designs do have problems. For example, those that tap directly into hot water and release it as steam can introduce some poisons (arsenic, acids, salts) from underground that build up in the nearby topsoil, which will kill local plants and produce a small "toxic" dump. However, there are other designs that could use a temperature gradient to run a thermodynamic engine, such as the SustainX compressed air energy storage idea:

http://ecogeek.org/component/content/article/3620

While that is mostly for storing energy, if there were a sufficiently steep temperature gradient (boiling hot ground to ice cold water) then such a storage engine could exceed 100% "efficiency" and produce positive power without leaking any undrground water into the environment.

Coincidentally with the coldest part of the mini ice age was the "Maunder minimum" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum which was a period of very low sunspot activity. It is speculated that the two may have a common cause: variable solar radiance.

Yes and not necessarily.

I don't think you need to flee your new job yet. If the work is interesting and the company culture is decent then maybe it is worth sticking around. You could help upgrade the company's software pipeline. I'd start by trying to get them to move to a good version control system, then add an automated build system, and then add some unit tests and an automated test framework.

On the other hand, if it the corporate culture is only OK or bad then yeah... flee early.

I second the homeschool option. It sounds like the kid can handle academics so continue that through independent study, college courses, or online study. But convince him to try fun classes and adventures that will remind him that it is great to be young: rock climbing, ballroom dancing, metal working, and wilderness skills.

I've been teaching some kids how to program simple games using Python and the Pygame module (wrapper for SDL) with some success.

One problem I've noticed is that the kids aren't all that interested in programming the simple exercises, such as the "guess the number" game or programs that generate simple ascii art -- all stuff that was exciting to program in BASIC back in the day. I had a promising 12 year old student who was making good progress and had successfully made (with help) a side-view tank shoot-em-up game with two players. Guess what he wanted to do for his second project?... a StarCraft clone.

He was able to produce a random ground texture and to control a single "dot" to move where he wanted it via mouse clicks, and then he bogged down. He gave it a good try but the project was a bit too complex to provide easy progress.

I need to come up with some simpler project ideas that are still fun to create.

Yes, I was using Windows XP. It is nice to know modern versions of Window come with a burn tool.

After a bit of online research I find it is indeed possible to boot a MacBook Pro from a Linux USB stick. It looks like there are a few differences between the Mac and non-Mac recipes. Building the stick during the emergency doesn't look any faster, but a pre-built stick that sits in my desk drawer would be a nice tool to have.

This anecdote isn't about netbooks, but rather a triple booted MacBook Pro. Nevertheless it is about the difference between Windows and Ubuntu. Performance is not all that matters.

I managed to kill my laptop's ubuntu operating system yesterday and had to reinstall.

Why it died: I did a "sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-dev" so I could build some 3rd party app, and then my OpenGL apps wouldn't run (some version disagreement on the nvidia driver). So I rebooted, expecting the versions to match upon restart -- instead it would lock up during the ubuntu boot. Rescue mode also failed. I'm sure there were ways to rescue the operating system without reinstalling but I figured it would be easier to just install. I was already out of date (10.04) anyway, so why not upgrade?

I downloaded Kubuntu 10.10 ISO image on another computer, burned a CD, and used that to backup the data off the hard drive to an external one. This took about 1 hour, mostly because of my botched attempts to burn a CD from Windows (fail -- no CD burning software is installed by default!) and then Mac (fail, then success).

The install took 30 minutes and it recovered all the data in my $HOME dir. The software update took another 20 minutes, and didn't require a restart. apt-get install FTW.

A very easy rescue operation. None of my Windows rescues have gone so smoothly.

Expect to see growth in Python programming opportunities. Python is fun to use, rock solid, and powerful. Not all languages combine these qualities as well, hence its adoption will increase.

Python is a great language and I expect to see growth in python programming job opportunities.

The place where I work has been moving toward Python and Django for web services and away from PHP. Some of the old PHP code is being maintained and updated, but all noteworthy new development is going forward in Python.

Python is easy to learn and read but there still a difference between those who have dabbled with it and those who have a much deeper understanding. I say this as someone who has only dabbled but have worked with some experts.

I usually work in C++, but whenever I get to do some Python programming I have two very common experiences:

(1) I typically finish my python code before I expect. I'll be typing along and then suddenly get to a point where I realize, "Hey, I'm all done. This code is complete." With C++ the work almost always takes longer than I expect.

(2) When I'm done I think, "That was fun! I'd like to program in Python every day."

I knew a machinist in the physics machine shop at my university who claimed memory metal was really hard to work with. It gums up the cutting tools and creates burrs like crazy. If you try to drill a hole in the stuff you have to be really careful or you'll break the bit.

If you want to buy the fantastic overview of physics that this review is trying to sell just buy the Feynmann Lectures.