I take 4-5 of these on every plane trip I take and I lose one out of every ten to the leaking problem.

I was a mechanical draftsman for a number of years, loved the rapidiographs, and have penmanship that makes people stare in a good way, I use the Pilot V5 for everything.

I am left handed and I push the pen from left to right, meaning the side of my hand passes over and comes to rest on things I have already written. The fast drying ink of the Pilot V5 keeps my hand from turning black.

I love the Pentel 205, its a .5mm mechanical pencil that got me through high school and college. They are getting harder to find, I have found Asian knock offs called Morning Glory, but my new favorite mechancal pencil is a ProMecha

http://davesmechanicalpencils.blogspot.com/2007/05/ohto-super-promecha-pm-1500s-mechanical.html

The other thing I like about linking timing in the videos to concepts is that when you get hungup on a concept the computer can show you all of the concepts that lead up to that concept.

If you are trying to learn something that depends on differential equations, and you are getting hung up, one of the prior concepts listed will be differential equations. Ultimately there will be a link to a course or tutorial on differential equations so you can learn to do them or brush up one them.

In the system as I envision it, you'd be free to call a tutor/teacher for help with a concept at any time. In the interest of lowering barriers to entry for self-studiers I want there to BE free layers of help available.

Yes the crowdsourcing layer depends on some technology and some heroes, but I also think that would help us refine the courses. We could probably also mine the question classifications from tutor requests. Again sucessfully linking it to the concept that hung you up in the first place would be best.

As far as teaching the test, what I'd be working towards is a test environement where the questions could almost be infinitely randomizeable per student so rote memorization wouldn't help.

There is actually some research that shows making the questions harder makes you remember the answer more, so the questions are deliberately written in a way that makes them more difficult. This concept bugs me a little because I want the classes to be exactly as hard as they need to be, and no harder, however if the data proves this helps people retain longer (we can randomly test people later maybe offer them free tutor minutes for answering) then its in.

Everything about the program will be as data driven as possible towards refining the education product to the best student experience/outcome.

Initially I'd like to attack the corner cases where Big Education isn't established. Right now colleges are spending a lot of time teaching High School Math and English, so classes that were the equivalent of High School Math and English that brought up your scores before you took the placement test in school would save you thousands of dollars.

There are a lot of training classes for jobs skills that are only taught by the vendor that makes the equipment, whether this is assembly line robot programming, or greenhouse irrigation equipment I'd like to get involved in the space.

According to Cornell there is nowhere you can get a 4 year degree in Controlled Environment Agriculture (Greenhouses, Hydroponics, Aquaponics) so the standard in the industry when opening a new greehouse is to poach someone elses foreman or make a lot of mistakes learning on your own.

Other places where I'd like to get involved are colleges that don't have their own online program yet and don't have the cash for one of the established providers, and not enough tech savvy to make an open source solution work.

One of these days I am going to start a kickstarter for exactly what you describe.

Anyone that argues online classes are going to replace teachers has missed the point.

Schools are losing their budgets, online classes will be part of the new normal. Right now many schools use online classes to offer instruction for the 2-3 students that want to learn Latin or something equally niche. It's either online Latin, or no Latin, if you are the Latin teacher you're getting replaced.

Possibly in the future online classes can parallel track a students classroom education providing quizzes and extra problems to provide practice and or feedback about the student's mastery.

Tutors should be available (at the lowest cost possible), but for self study I really want web forum (crowdsourcing) as a first line of defense, when you pause the video lecture there should be FAQs tied to the last concept mentioned before you hit pause. There should be questions voted up by the students, and like Stackoverflow answers voted up by the students with explanations why they are the best or most complete answer. There need to be Teachers or TAs as moderators to ensure the popular answers are in fact true. A moderation system should exist to ferret out trolls voting up nonsense.

Line 2, for free should be an expert system that knows the courses, questions and answers. Something like a Watson that you can access over something skype like.

Line 3, actual tutors rated by students and paid for by students. Like all other kinds of customer service, calls will be monitored to ensure ratings are fair. Labor rates will be set by the tutors, there need to be enough tutors in the pool that the rates remain competitive and quality remains high.

Content will be modular and easily modified, if 30 seconds of tape has a bad example that is causing a lot of confusion/questions on the forums, new tape should be shot with a better explanation and integrated into the course.

The same would happen with the content of the textbooks of course, eratta would be available online.

Ok, I did a lot of reading recently on the water pruifications system on the ISS. Astronauts need about 9 pounds of water a day. ~3 pounds gets reclaimed in urine, ~5 pounds from their breathing and sweat with a recovery rate of 97% overall.

They lose 3% of the water budget to solid waste, NASA said that they'd need a bigger system to make reclaiming the solid wastes practical.

If this is a near term project I'd take the proven system from the ISS, so take your astronauts x 9 pounds a day to get your water daily budget, then add AT LEAST 3% daily replenishment on top of that to make up for your 3 years worth of system losses.

You can take 2 machines along in case one breaks you have a spare, the total system is the size of a 2 full height server racks.

As for other posters comments on insanity, I'd drop a robot with arms and a couple ready to assemble habitat modules first and ensure there was an atmosphere, power supply (solar) and maybe a hydroponic greenhouse going before I sent people.

I don't want to have to respect the rights and feelings of my vacum cleaner, trash disposal, meal preparer, or grocery shopper. If these devices are designed and built for a purpose they should make my life easier.

If I specifically want a butler type robot that caters to my needs and needs higher level functions, maybe I'll be ok with social robotics, so long as he keeps the secret that I'm batman.

What about the robot you keep around that sits on your couch and loses at madden/halo/callofduty to make you feel better?

Robot Girlfriend?

SOG calls their Compound Leverage
http://nationalsurvivalcenter.com/sogpos60.html

There is supposed to be some gearing in there to make it easier.

I was in Montana on a networking gig in 97, we did 90 everywhere on the highway. Never saw a police car on the interstate they were all in town responding to real crimes. Story I heard was there was a dealership in Colorado letting folks test drive the fast cars over in Montana. Also heard that if you did get pulled over real tickets started at $300.

Look him up on Amazon and then look at the price for the Kindle Editions, most of them are free.

We also use He-3 for medical imaging, today despite its insanely high ($40k a kilo) cost.

You can't print glass, are you sure about that?

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-06/24/solar-sinter

Shapeways also prints in glass and Stainless Steel.

Qualcomm clearly didn't understand my voice mail.

With all these advances in 3D printing, Robotics and AI, would it be possible or even profitable to have a web enabled service where you submit a 3D model to a service like Shapeways, you see your 3D object printed, picked up by the robot and packed in a box to be shipped to you?

I watched some stuff getting 3D printed at the DC hackerspace and its really slow right now. So maybe they can time lapse that part of the job.

Also who has a $500-600 3D printer kit, I never seem to find these, always $900 or more.

I often think about an SUV conversion project, my 2004 TrailBlazer was a very popular model as was the blazer before it with many still on the roads today. These body on frame Trucks are a dangerous safety hazard.

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/are-suvs-more-dangerous-than-minivans/

I can't find it now, but there was a pretty famous article about SUVs how users wanted to be up high, and have plenty of metal around them, as well as lots of cupholders. The height invites rollovers, the metal makes them terrible at avoiding crashes, and the owners died or were maimed hundreds of times more often than minivan owners. The models compared were the Ford Explorer and Aerostar minivan.

For a long time body on frame SUVs were not tested for safety, unlike the minivans.

So you're better off from a safety perspective with a Crossover SUV or a minivan.

Meanwhile we'd all be safer and more efficient if all the body on frame SUVs dissappeared tomorrow, so making them more efficient keeps us all worried about getting crashed into by an SUVs so people don't opt for the smaller cars in any great numbers.

I had my crossover Equinox in the shop for 2 weeks and the delaership loaned me an HHR, a boxy little minivan-car sorta thing. It felt remarkably like my Equinox in so far as size, seating, cargo and modest comfort, but it was lower to the ground, had way less materials the doors sounded hollow when you shut them. It also seemed peppier, it got around town great and accellerated much faster than my Equinox or Trailblazer both of which have larger 6 cylinder engines. I drove the thing for 2 weeks normal commuting and errands on 7 gallons of gas as opposed to 14 gallons in my Equinox, couldn't guess on my Trailblazer we try not to use it outside of commuting to public transportation and big truck jobs.

So from a safety perspective you should be looking to refit a crossover or unibody style SUV, but from an efficiency perspective you should rethink the idea of an SUV that's towing an extra ton of vehicle it doesn't really need.

I've seen a lot of the college acapella groups where folks have posted videos to YouTube, have you tried to record your groups singing and posted it to Facebook?