Clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and anti-clockwise in the sourthern hemisphere (or is that backwards, I can never remember).

The irony of this is that I had never heard of zotero until Thomson Reuters sued, and it made it to slashdot. Now I use it, and have a half dozen colleagues using it. Best publicity ever.

At least it is mostly better than it was. You used to have to pay a per page charge to have your paper published once it was accepted, which was on the order of hundreds of dollars for a scientific paper. If you wanted a color figure, it went up to thousands. Then, if you wanted copies of your paper to send to colleagues, you had to pay for those too. I published a paper in Science, and by the time we paid the page charges and bought 1000 preprints, we had spend most of $10,000. Now that's a business model.

The real problem with doing any science is coming up with a good question. I am a chemistry professor, and a couple of times a year somebody asks me this same question, with the general subject changing each time. In fact, it happened just yesterday. I was talking with a neighbour, and he said that he wanted to figure out how to do research into holograms and data storage. I asked him a few questions, and it quickly became apparent that he didn't know what was already known in the field, and that in fact he did not understand how holography worked. Like I say, this has happened over the last few years with hydraulics, lasers, energy storage, electric generation and water softening.

Good scientists start by looking through the field thoroughly and getting to know what has and has not been done. They carefully learn all of the science, which can take 5 years of graduate school, 2 years of post-doctoral work and 5 years as a professor. There are certainly exceptions. I have colleagues who have seen new directions in science and have transitioned into new areas of science much quicker that this, but the usually still spent a few years of near full-time effort reading the literature, attending conferences and networking with people in the fiels. People like to bring up Einstein, but forget that he had his PhD from a very prestigious school. He was NOT an amateur scientist, but one who had problems getting his first academic job.

So, by all means be interested in amateur science. Look into what interests you, and read up on what is knows and not known. Try to avoid fields that demand expensive equipment (I have a fairly small research group, but still have $250,000 in equipment that I operate, and depend on a few other department instruments that are worth millions). While not necessary, it is helpful to find a field where there are already amateurs whose paths you can follow.

Last of all, don't assume that we scientists are idiots. 9 out of 10 experiments in my field that I dream up have already been done by somebody.

Good luck

As a college professor, I have often wondered how we should handle education. One question that I have never felt comfortable is the: Are students better off being better educated if it doesn't improve their job chances? If a person is going to be a garbage man for the rest of his life, is he happier if he know music, literature, science and all that? I REALLY want the answer to be yes, but sometimes I wonder if showing people the great things of the world, and then denying them access to it is really the humane thing to do.

I have to agree with this. I have been using linux long enough that I remember the time before slashdot, before Redhat, and ran a pre 1.0 kernel for a while. I have been trying to wrap my brain around linux firewall rules, and I still get it wrong more than I get it right. Right now, most of my firewalls are copied from some site that I found on google. I suppose that somebody will (or has) made the argument the if you cannot understand iptables then you aren't worth having in the linux community, but that seems short sighted. Most people (including this 15-year linux veteran) cannot understand the current system well enough to make things work well, and I believe that we need to expand our community. I believe that the current system is powerful, and well constructed. What I think we need is an explicit tie between firewall and VPN, and then a useful abstraction to help unsophisticated users easily do the simple tasks that are most common in network configurations.

Which means that coal, oil and gas have never made it to being successful. The US government gives free extraction rights to companies, gives tax breaks for refining and transport all to keep fossil fuels cheap enough to ensure domestic happiness. I guess we need to give them up to, and go back to wood fires. Oh, but the government gives free leases and then builds the roads and cleans up afterwards for the timber industry, so they don't even count.

And the Acer Aspire Revo ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103228&cm_re=revo-_-83-103-228-_-Product ) looks like a pretty cheap and capable box at $200. VGA and HDMI, low power, and a commodity product, so you can have spares on hand.

It looks good, but at $1000 for one room, it is a bit pricey. It seems to me that a linux sound driver that pushes .wav (or maybe .mp3) onto the network, and a really dumb computer to convert it to analog should only be $20 or $30 per room, which is much more reasonable, but I don't know if such a thing exists.

Alternately, I have wondered if one could use a jail-broken iPod touch, which has built in wireless, built in sound decoding, and a touch screen, connected to an amplifier and speakers. I haven't found an app that would let it function like an airport express, but it should be too hard, right?

Actually with the 8500 it offers standard SANE, so xsane works just fine. Even better, it has a web based scanning that works from any browser. Not quite as powerful as a dedicated, but from anyh computer you can scan and it returns a pdf file of the scan through the browser.

I just did a major search, and this is what I decided.

My main concerns (in order) were
1. Color Multifunction
2. Good network and compatibility
3. Low cost of supplies
4. Low cost of operation (electricity)
5. Low cost of purchase

I looked at a bunch of different printers, and ended up with the HP 8500 Premier all-in-one. My reasoning was
1. It is a color multifunction printer with all of the capabilities that I needed, including duplexing.
2. It has good support with MSWindows, OSX and Linux, including remote printing and scanning, and even (HOORAY!!!) support for SANE interfaces so XSane works.
3. It uses a separate ink tank and replaceable print heads, and the cost per page is just a few cents per page; much less than for any other inkjet that I found. The premier comes with a second set of cartridges which justifies the extra $50 from newegg.
4. This was the biggie that made the difference. If you look at the stand-by power for either the Brother or HP color all-in-ones they are 25-30 W. This is listed at 5 W for standby, which saves a lot over a 24/7 month.
5. From newegg it was $299, which was a great price, much cheaper than any of the laser all-in-ones and included the extra cartridges and the duplexing unit.

I have been very happy, and so far it has been about 4-5 cents per page for black and white, and 20-30 for color. It has a web page that shows the exact amount of ink used on each page, so you can easily keep track of ink usage. So far in 2.5 months of medium use I have used 50% of the original ink cartridges, and since I got two sets of cartridges this is only 25% of the ink that came with the printer.

I am not an HP salesman, but I am pretty happy with the system, especially the Linux compatibility. You might want to give it a look. It is pretty big, and definitely made for offices, but it is works well for me.

Actually, that is not true. Electric transportation, assuming that we can make electricity with either nuclear, solar or wind power which does not generate CO2 in order to make electricity, is humanity's next step in reducing CO2 emissions. If you look at the current carbon footprint for electricity generation, it has a large component of coal burning, which is the absolute worst for CO2. So, electric cars are often (depending on where you live) inefficient coal burning cars.

Or as good as poo.

Even college level QM is pretty static. I teach the same material out of pretty muich the same textbook as when I took the course 20 years ago.

The really ironic thing is that if it hadn't been for the law suit, I would not have found Zotero. I have been complaining for years about Endnote, but was unwilling to go LaTeX/BibTeX all of the way, and had been paying for endnote, and using Microsoft Word. With Zotero, I got completely changed over to OpenOffice on all platforms.

So, Thanks for the law suit.