I'm a chemistry professor, and I want to agree with this post and follow-up. The bio side has lots of labs/departments that lean Mac-heavy. In chem, organic chemists have a larger Mac population than society/rest of chemistry, but it's still well under 50%. Physical chemists that are experimentalists are probably using something command-line on their instruments, because they probably built them themselves in the last few decades, and the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule applies (plus more modern computers aren't so great at supporting the connections needed, so you'd be rebuilding the whole instrument anyway.) The computational chemists typically use $nix systems, because they're working with computing clusters - though many of them do their analysis on PC/Mac platforms.

BUT, to re-address the original topic - I don't think there IS a good go-to operating system to use in a high school that will prepare students for the higher sciences, because as many have posted so far it depends what those students want to do later in life. As a teaching&research oriented prof who spend 2 days a week in the K-12 system for 4 years doing on-demand professional development and curriculum deepening, I can say that there are two key criteria to use in deciding what tool to use with the students:
- is the tool "ready to hand"? - http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/63450/abstract is an example of what I mean
- are the 'big ideas' the students will develop from the task generalizable enough to be platform-independent?

These are central themes of the Technology in Science Education course I teach, for what it's worth.

The NYT article was actually pretty good, but for those who want a bit more 'meat on the bone', here's the 2009 research project report:
http://caracol.cos.ucf.edu/reports/2009.php
There are some nice examples of the LIDAR images at the end of the page in the Figures section.

Cardboard box + lobby = happy broke chemist ;*) I agree about simplifying though - I think I finally tossed my Vic-20 in my last move. And boy, do I ever need that audio tape drive daily since ;*)

Actually, the area people that would still need/use these parts. In my old research group, I was babying a 286/XT switchable computer because its power supply liked to act a bit funky. We had already cobbled together a battery to maintain the BIOS settings (after I spent an entire day of trial and error getting the BIOS to be able to read the hard drive - documentation was lost to the world...) And we were always on the lookout for old computers being tossed from the department to keep flush with 5-1/2 and 3-1/4 drives. And that's just for this one computer - I'm not even bringing up the 386, 486, old Mac, and other tech we had in that lab.

"But why not upgrade to X?" "Oh, that's stupid, the Y is way cheap now!" I can hear some people ramping up to make these comments... Here's why - if it's not broke, don't fix it. And, if we had that $5k handy for the X or Y you're suggesting, we'd rather spend it on something else altogether! Our electronics rack may be replaceable by a $10k digitizing oscilloscope, but not only did our system already work, it could do specialize pulse rejection, finer amplification, etc. But the important part is that it already worked.

So, consider asking your local instrumental/analytical chemist if they need the parts. And if they don't, you can even offer it to the physicists... ;*) Or, I suppose you could start a side business reselling these components to science folks, but then you're going to have to hoard even more, which seems to be the cautionary point of the article.

Do you recall ever being given a blurb in a syllabus that strongly suggests that the optimal approach to learning in a class is to:
- read the materials before class (even a cursory read will do)
- come to class to gain connections, context, and detail for the more subtle points
- study after class to do the 'heavy lifting' of mastering the details?
Following that approach may help you with the "can't really use what I've been taught or contribute to discussion/examples until I've tried out [whatever technique/method we're learning] on my own in my own time" issue.

It's a lecture, and not a class, because with large dining halls, a fleet of academic/social/athletic buses, computer labs that require constant updating, etc., most campus administrations have moved to larger-sized intro-level courses and reserve the good instructor:student ratios for higher level courses (where the effort will support their discipline's students) rather than using scarce resources on intro/gen-ed classes. That's why it's a 'lecture', and not a 'class'. However, most of your profs have made a major commitment to educating (take hard science faculty - they choose beginning salaries in the $40k-50k range, rather than $120k+). Trying to maximize your learning gains IS the prof's business, actually (in the business/career sense), along with using the rest of their hours to contribute to the field.

The good (and still energetic) faculty try to offset these large-sized classes by using approaches that try to build back in some of the in-the-moment feedback from a small-class setting - both for the students and themselves. e.g. That's one of the things we're trying to do when we have you use those 'clickers'. For many of us, it's the reason for online homework systems - not because we're lazy, as we're often portrayed, but because we see the same common mistakes over and over and these systems do an improvingly-passing job of giving feedback as you're learning. We try to spur on classroom interaction. Are we always successful? Nope - and the still-energetic faculty also have to overcome the difficulty of learning this trade (teaching the highest-level classes) IN ADDITION to being a top-tier participant in their field. (Those who can, do, those who can try to do everything well at the expense of a life and sleep, teach.)

Why do I keep referring to 'energetic' faculty? Because, as time goes on it's simply too draining to fight the room full of 50/130 students staring at their screens. Seeing solitaire cards (or worse...) reflected back throughout the room. And not interacting/participating/responding to your efforts to reclaim the small-class opportunities for them. You see, those students on their laptops, the ones tuned-out, the ones 'showing up' in body, but not caring about the class - they're the control rods in a reactor. And by inserting them in the classroom, it has the same effect - it kills any amplification you get from having many minds in a room together, and reduces the classroom into a YouTube video - but there's now actual YouTube videos in the room that have skateboarding dogs, and stoichiometry can't compete with that for many people.

So, it's a negative feedback loop - you complain that the class is pointless, so you entertain yourself instead. Blunting any efforts on the part of the prof to improve the experience for yourself and those around you, and make it NOT pointless. The prof burns more hours/energy trying to overcome this. Finally, many simply give up and give over-rehearsed slides/monologues to the large classes, and save their energy for the 10 person majors-only class that really digs in with you, and feeds off of one another to construct a deeper knowledge of the material than any of them had from the textbook alone.

Yeah, feel free to roll your eyes at this - to say that no (or not enough) profs try as hard as I'm claiming. Whatever - you can pick it apart point-by-point, and we can have a running text battle for weeks! The big idea is: this is the view point from the 'front of the room'. And it's why some profs are trying to pull the control rods out of the reactor. You may not think it works that way; you may not care; you might be right! But we're trying to improve things, not just hearken back to the 'good old days.'

If there is an additional energy input, and if that input is highly efficient, I'm ok with the energy balance. If we consider the trash to be thrown away (ah, love what I did there...) then it's energetically lost. That means for an additional energetic input of 8E8 BTU (I rounded up for high-but-not-perfect efficiency), we get fuel worth 19E8 (scaled to matching exponents). There's something to that sort of process - it's like having a huge interest rate savings account.

And let's remember that converting crude oil into fuel forms requires energy inputs (hydrocarbon cracking, etc.) - but the energetic 'loss' is worth it to us since we get a portable energy source with more energetic value than we spent (ignoring the intrinsic energy from the fuel oil, which =0 to us in terms of utility until after processing.) As long as we break even (or better) in terms of processing energy input vs. energy of the fuel output, we lose nothing we haven't (literally) already thrown away.

If, of course, their information is otherwise complete and not overstated, and if the energy input is efficient enough to break even or better.

That would be because different educational activities can have different goals. I give analytical chemistry exams that are supposed to be somewhat collaborative, to provide an opportunity to learn (something called a "formative assessment") - this gives the students peer-guided instruction, and gives me feedback about where they stand in the process.

But, at some point I'll need to know how the individuals are getting it. These assessments/assignments may still be a formative assessment, depending on how I am using it as the instructor. Eventually, I have to sort the students based on achievement (or maybe I don't - this isn't the place for that debate, but I think we can all agree it's the most common practice) - this would be a "summative assessment".

And your example of homework is relevant - profs will often not care about whether it's done solo or in groups. But, when a _project_ contains an explicit requirement for solo work, it's (supposed to be) because the instructor has a purpose - and how often do prof.s explain to their classes their summative/formative intent? These intentions may be opaque to the student.

In reality, most profs are pretty savvy about how they work (even if you don't see it) and are using a mix of summative and formative goals in their grading and assignments. Discussions on /. about cheating and education have lots of people coming out of the woodwork to say, "I think this educational approach is dumb, so I did what I wanted instead - and I say it's more authentic!!1!", or some variant of this. I love the hubris involved in assuming that not only does the student have a better awareness of the material and the 'realpolitik' of the eventual career, but that they know education better than the prof (and that the prof's goals are necessarily transparent). Or that the classroom is only supposed to emulate the daily job - that students should learn only to consume knowledge and approaches, not to originate them ("When you get into a corporate environment, "cheating" is actually preferred. No reason to re-invent the wheel when there is existing code that gets the job done." - http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1547360&cid=31111942). And yet, how does the student produce new work unless taught how? That's one of the curricular decisions the instructor makes - am I pursuing the 'originator' or 'realpolitik-daily' approach as my learning goal today?

Those wearing the instructor-hat were a student for a long time, and (should) have an awareness of the benefits of group work. But when students simply declare that they've decided to ignore rules and requirements because they've chosen their own goals, in my experience they're either:
    so self-aware in their learning that they'll succeed no matter what;
    or they're being lazy or self-delusional and using their own notions of 'what good learning is' to justify it.

Schawlow was at Bell - Maiman was at Hughes. I didn't bother with cites earlier, but I was pulling from Jeff Hecht's "Understanding Lasers" (3rd ed.) book for the Maiman info (nearest cite I have to hand - it's the text for the lasers course I'm co-teaching...) A quick google gave me Schawlow as being at Bell, but I haven't followed that part any further. If my memory serves me right, Schawlow was looking into other gain media and bypassed ruby initially, but during the publicity after Maiman's success, many people revisited it (and if I remember the anecdote right, the photographer was disappointed by the effect of the 'wimpy' flashlamp, and asked him to substitute a bigger one - and most people followed this 'design' as a result!)

Either way, I think we both find the same punchline - Navy funding was the initial MASER spark, a combination of private and public money was the kindling, and the wildfire happened finally in industry.

He was talking about a laser, not a laser printer (the word "printer" never appeared in the GP.)

Replying to the entire thread here;
    Ammonia maser = 1953 - partially funded by US Navy as part of radar-type research (at Columbia)
    Funding for laser development = intervening years (ARPA, private, etc. funding)
    Ruby laser = 1960 - Hughes Research Laboratories

If anything, this is an example of the traction that comes from using public funding to stimulate scientific advancement until the public sector jumps in. HRL was excited enough that they publicized the heck out of the development, and the way corporations ran with it in the subsequent decades does show that companies would do well to keep pouring money into R&D (ala Bell Labs) but that public funding often gets the ball rolling. And oftentimes, that seed money comes with military aims (better radars) that gain massive traction and yield huge benefits in divergent fields (here, everything from music to telecommunications to supermarket checkouts.)

Fun fact - Wolfram Alpha can serve as your 'self-checkout line' for things like this.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+cubic+micrometer

Here's a bit of scale - a cubic micrometer is about the same size as a calibration bead for microscopy. A red blood cell is about 8 micrometers across. http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/ Or, there's this video showing the "powers of ten" (also its title...): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY

Also, chemists work at these dimensions, too! (So do biologists. And others.) :*P Don't snub the other disciplines!!! Or I'll weep. And not gently, nor to a guitar.

That screams to me that there are two separate groups, each with their own agenda. That happens pretty frequently in large companies/organizations - though it's more fun for most people to describe it as some tactic on the part of MS. Maybe it really is a plot (maybe, they really are all out to get us...), but I prefer to apply Hanlon's Razor...

I frequently hear the "print-to-pdf" feature touted as a major advantageous feature of Ooo - but with the wide availability of pdf 'printer' programs I don't see this as a feature at all. A separately installed pdf-printer program is available to all other programs (print to pdf from esoteric scientific program, notepad, browser, whatever) instead of tying the feature into Ooo itself. In fact, this seems contrary to the mentality of most programming (and by extension, to the open source movement) logics - aren't we supposed to want a single copy of code that can be called by any program, rather than code living in a walled garden that is replicated in each program?

(This post is less of a reply to the OP - but it seemed like a logical place to make the point. Also, I'm speaking of Win-family OS'es wrt the printer programs - I know the other OS's have similar functionality either as a program or built-in. Man, I hate that I feel the need to put disclaimers to head off the rush of "Blah can already do that!!11!" comments...)

The only story here is that people are selling small works instead of big ones. And that fits the overall model we've seen in the last 15 years online. Buy a single instead of a CD. Buy a single key to replace one on a broken laptop keyboard (instead of a replacement.)

Well, now they're selling individual lesson plans, instead of an entire book of them.

Proof of these lesson plans available as books: http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Science-Success-Lesson-Grades/dp/1933531355/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258372050&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=science+lesson+plans&x=0&y=0

And these are only ones new enough to be on Amazon. I'm not in my office and don't feel like tunneling there to search WorldCat, but publishing lesson plans isn't new at all, and quite arguably is part of the scholarship of teaching.

I'll feed the troll in the name of science.

Am I sure (is there a possibility I've misses a subtle effect and later testing may uncover it)? No, I'm not willing to say there's no possibility that ultra-subtle effects could be at play.

Am I sure (as in, does this reach the level of scientific fact, and is it well enough supported by evidence that it can be built upon)? Yes, I'm that sure.

Remember that a proton in the atmosphere of Neptune interacts with an electron here on Earth at a weak level - but it's safe to say that your CD player will still work just fine. Might we discover someday that the electron in your CD player had some subtle coupling with an electron on Neptune, causing the photodiode to fry? Sure, but I doubt you'll be rushing to buy $100 anti-coupling shields for your electronics. (OTOH, if you're in the market, I'm selling anti-coupling shrouds for personal electronics for only $87 plus shipping this week - email me and we'll set up the fund transfer.)

Yep - remember, even a pulse has a time width, and it's pretty easy to get to high powers (in wattage) if the power is compressed in a small-enough time and. W = J / s Deposit 100 mJ in a ns-ps time window, you'll get some shocking-looking numbers. Then toss that energy into a heat capacity equation, and you'll find that while blackbodies absorbing the light will have a big temperature jump right away, once that heat energy has partitioned into the rest of the material it's pretty easy for the temp change to be negligible (realigning the outcome to our everyday expectations.)