You should look at CHDK and see if they come out with a version for your camera. It will probably enable raw mode, among many other features.

I'd skip Meteor Crater. It's private land, and they charge a hell of a lot of money to see a big hole. As an alternative, I highly recommend the National Parks in northern Arizona. There are a string of them along the road from Phoenix to Flagstaff, and a ton in the area around Flagstaff. To replace your 'crater' fix, go see Sunset Crater. It's a volcanic cinder cone in the middle of a volcanic field with flows and all kinds of cool formations. For more tech-geekery, Lowell Observatory is right inside the town. They do day and night tours.

Flag's a good place to jump off from if you intend to see the Grand Canyon, too.

You should probably get the National Park Pass in any case. It's pretty easy to pay off in two or three big parks.

You're right in all of your suppositions. (Except for cloudy day--It's the cloudy nights you have to watch out for :)

Today's 10m class and tomorrow's 30m class telescopes can do a lot of what Hubble has done, especially when you factor in advanced AO systems like the one that was recently installed on Gemini South (one 50W laser split into 5 beams for correction over a large field). Anything on the ground is cheaper than in space.

Hubble, JWST, Chandra, and the others can see wavelengths that are absorbed by the atmosphere, no matter how high you are.

And integration time is a huge factor. The Ultra Deep Field image was over 1.1 million seconds of exposure. It's just not practical to do exposures like that from the ground.

In fact, they just started blasting the site. I actually live next door to the LSST's architect, which is pretty cool.

Astronomers generate a tremendous amount of data, bested only by particle physicists. Storing it all is a challenge, to put it mildly. Backup is basically impossible.
The real problem is that the data lines that go from the summit to the outside world are still not fast. The summits here are pretty remote and even when you get to a major road, it's still in farm country. And then getting it out of the country is tough--all of our network traffic to North America hits a major bottleneck in Panama, so if you're trying to mirror the database or access the one in Chile, it can be frustratingly slow.

I have a problem with them--they're hugely expensive and not very useful. I also have a problem with the screeners supplying misinformation to the traveling public, muddying the waters of the discussion of safety issues, efficacy of scan, etc.

Contrary to your experience, my wife and I frequently are "offered" the non-magnetometer scanners. Perhaps it's the times at which we fly?

I was going to complain about the fact that no one at the newspaper caught that obvious error in the quote, but I guess we can't expect that kind of thing from The Tennessean :)

I just hope that the resistance to these scanners will soon reach the point that someone decides to stop wasting money on them.

“No, it’s not an X-ray,” she told Abbott. “It is 10,000 times safer than your cell phone and uses the same type of radio waves as a sonogram.”
(emphasis mine)

What. The. Fuck. I was told almost the opposite, but still wrong at BWI--that the mm-wave scanner was sound waves, not EM. How is this getting twisted? Is there some statement that the mm-wave is "as safe as a sonogram" and the agents are mixing and matching at will?

I don't expect the security screeners to be physicists, but they really need to know what the equipment they operate emits. At this point, I barely trust their magnetometer to not blast me with ionising radiation.

There's no real reason for that functionality. It's easier to simply select both circles when you're sharing something. Your previous selection is set as the default for your next post, so you don't get frustrated with having to click the same buttons over and over.

I've found that for whatever reason, I can't watch embedded Vimeo videos. If you click through to the source page, it works just fine. I'm on Linux with Firefox 5, latest version of Flashplayer for Linux.

Yeah, it really sucks to be able to tell the difference between denominations with a quick glance or by touch.

I do note your smiley, but plenty of USians are serious when they object to different colored notes. I live in Chile, where they are rolling out new notes for all denominations--in plastic. I think they're great. They look cool and seem really durable. The different colors make it super easy to tell what value it is. One way in which that's useful is when people throw money into the pot to pay for a group dinner--guests sometimes don't get the exchange rate and will accidentally substitute a $1000 bill for a $10000. The former is green and the latter is blue. Easy.

I also think it really says something about priorities when you still have the same people on the bills all the time. Why not have American scientists? That would be awesome.

I'm by no means an expert, but I remember an article a while back about offshore medical transcription services being used, and the transcriptionists not being native English speakers. This led to confusion over homophones and differentiating 15 and 50, etc. I think that we already have the problems that you're worried about. If the speech recognition displayed the transcript immediately, it could be corrected in real time.