You do know the story of the F16 guidance system? Allegedly, as originally designed, crossing the equator would lead to the plane doing an instant flip and carrying on upside down. http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3.44.html

If you were writing software in the '70s, the speed of change was such that most programs were being totally rewritten within 2 years. We were finding better ways of doing things (both hardware and software) all the time. I guess management hoped that some stuff would not need renewing in less than five years. The eventual news of programs which had stayed in use for _20 years_ was a real surprise. The original programmers had no way of knowing that some of their stuff would live until the year 2000.

While certain groups may have higher fertility with an increased standard of living, I don't think that is true of populations as a whole.

Currently, a big driver for reducing fertility is educating girls and women. This is thought to increase their own control over their lives and thus enable them to choose to have fewer children but a more cynical view is that as their earning power grows, so it makes less sense for the family to keep them at home in the kitchen. The opportunity cost of large families is felt directly. Only in families where a woman's earnings are irrelevant is there likely to be high fertility.

It is hard to know how this changing workforce fits into Garratt's model. These new working women presumably increase energy consumption now, but their reduced fertility reduces it in the future.

Some people are forecasting that world population will stabilise through this effect with no other action being taken -- sorry, can't find a link quickly, but there are plenty about fertility reducing to replacement level in eg the richer states in India.

Diamond Geezer is a blogger who is a London enthusiast and he has covered lots of the smaller museums and other off-the-beaten track attractions of London. He also has plenty of geeky London Transport facts.

tfl (Transport for London) is the website for travel information for London, and Traveline will give you public transport routes from anywhere to anywhere outside London. You certainly don't need to hire a car in London -- as well as the famous Tube, buses are widely used by everybody and have great coverage. You don't really need one out London either unless you want to visit really remote rural sites such as lonely beaches.

Note that the main crime for which McKinnon faces life in a US prison is not illegal outside the US. Embarassing the US government is not actually a crime in the UK.

"No proximity sensor or other mechanism for disabling the touchscreen while on a call."

There's an app for that.

Thanks for that.

".... I have yet to see one besides the iPhone with wifi"

Now that is really living out in the boondocks. Never seen an Android, Pre, a newish Blackberry, some Nokias etc etc?

Wifi certainly helps me to preserve my "as much as you can eat, providing you don't eat too much" data plan.

Designing this course sounds a lot of fun, but quite challenging. You want to make the most of the kids' capabilities and past experience, while not disadvantaging too much those who haven't had much opportunity to make (or break) things before.

I really like Clockwise_Music's list. As a teacher, I am sure you won't forget that girls are people too, and you may need to exert a strong hand at times to make sure they get a fair share of the fun and the learning. Do listen to them about the tech they want to try -- and obviously to the boys' ideas too.

Do you have to grade their work? Whether you do or not, I strongly suggest some attention to making lab notebooks. If they all have access to computers then various software solutions suggest themselves, but learning how to make and use a paper-based system is also constructive.

Do enjoy yourself. I assume that an aim of the course is to teach them the fun of doing it for yourself, so a relaxed pace is best.

Partly because it seems likely that some of the anomalous properties of water are involved in biological mechanisms -- properties not shared by other liquids. And carbon's properties as a backbone chain in molecules are not matched by other elements, at any temperature or pressure.

No moon implies no tides. Without life-forms adapted to the short-term alternation of wet and dry phases in the tidal zone, the move from water to land animals might have been much more difficult.

But linking to the .png? Without the hover title text?

I am sorry that your own relationship with your mother is so poor that you think that is funny.

Er -- what I said was that the defendant should not be able to suddenly and without warning introduce evidence from Mrs Bloggs. Because the prosecution does not have the opportunity to establish that she is not just an innocent old lady who happened to be around but is really Aunt Sadie.

I am sorry, I guess you just haven't come across the idea of an ambush defence before. When you think about it, I think you will agree that it does not improve the quality of justice in our courts. And asking that someone outlines their defence before the trial starts is very different from mandating that they incriminate themselves.

Where did I say that? Or anything like it?