I am a scientist (Ph.D.). I have not met Dr. Lubchenco, but I know of her work through the journal, Limnology and Oceanography, and I was astonished that the Federal Government was able to recruit such an excellent person for herding cats in Washington. We will be well served.

Actually, using cyanobacteria can get around the scarce resource problem, because cyanobacteria are among the most efficient micro-organisms at growing in hypersaline, warm ocean (and salt flat) environments. In freshwater pond environments, one sees a progression of algae from diatoms (early in the growing season when the water's cold) to green algae, to cyanobacteria. Many researchers attribute this progression to the microcrustaceans' eating preferences, literally spitting out the cyanobacteria until everything else is eaten.

I have Vector Linux 3.2 installed on a Pentium 66. I split the (?1.2 gig) hard drive into two partitions, lap-linked the file (~320 meg) to the first dos partition, and used a Vector Linux boot disk to load the file and install it to the second partition. I have 16 megs of ram on the Pentium 66, so I think you install it successfully with your 486 system.

Do you have infinite patience?

My wife is also a graduate student taking online courses. When she found she could not access the lectures using Windows XP Pro (DRM problems per Firefox), I installed a dual boot system with Ubuntu on her computer, and then installed IE and Windows Media Player with Crossover Office. It works splendidly, and the Linux kernel isolates IE from malware. Of course, it is very easy to move screenshots, etc. from the Linux to the Windows partition.

The reverse happened to my wife. She is a student in Library Science at Wayne State University. They are also a "windows only" shop. When she went to access the lectures for the computer technology course using Windows XP Pro, she could not - IE went into a continuous loop, and Firefox reported that the lectures were not accessible because of DRM. We tried to access the lectures on 4 computers with Windows XP Pro, including two of our own, and two at the library where she works, without success. Finally, I dug a copy of Windows 2000 out, and the lectures came through. A short time later, I was able to access the lectures through IE running with crossover office on Ubuntu, and on Firefox (using Mplayer on Ubunt 8.10) without. Later, we also found the lectures came through with Windows XP home. My wife now looks at the lectures using Ubuntu, and then reboots into windows and does her work with (the required) Office 2007 there.

What he or she reads is just as important. For younger kids - The Book of Knowledge (if you can find it) has many "how to" articles. For older kids -a subscription to the Scientific American - Yes, it's high level - but a 9th grader can read at least some of it, and the ideas - the Amateur Scientist section of the 70's and 80's - led me to my present (scientific) career.