You must have had really poor teachers. There are SO many ways of making chemistry fun, and not all of them involve hard-to-get chemicals. You can start out with just boiling water on a bunsen burner to teach him some safety procedures and tell him about the different states of matter. Sounds boring? My 12-year-olds loved it. Molecule models are fun to build. You can do all sorts of fun tricks with indicators of pH (like water that turns red, then transparent, then red again). You can blow up a hydrogen balloon (use a match on a stick!) and if you want to make it extra fun add some aluminum or iron powder in the balloon. Mix an alcohol with an acid and get an ester. Soap bubbles are fun. Baking soda and water is fun. Lemon batteries are fun. Stuff that burns is always fun, no matter what. Stuff that flies is always fun, no matter what. Even trite knowledge like the periodic table can be made fun with rhymes or the like.

The Internet is your friend. Check out some Youtube videos. Ask on a teachers' forum. Search the web. The tricky part is seldom finding fun things to do, but rather to do them in the right order and connect the experiment to the actual chapter you're teaching. You also have to remember that abstract material like protons, neutrons and electrons can be challenging to a young kid. Check out a curriculum to get an idea about what subjects to teach at what age.

Another example: I once stepped in as a swim coach for kids, and didn't have any stopwatch, so I downloaded an app for my smartphone. Didn't work. The operation of a stopwatch requires you to press a button with your thumb while your eyes are focused on something else. Having to look at the screen to see where that button is defeats its purpose. A button is at least one order of magnitude more accurate in this case.

Touchscreens are great when you can reasonably assume that the user's full concentration will be at the screen. Other times, buttons are far better. Buttons have the additional advantage of staying in the same place, which means you can usually find it by feeling your way forward. This can work extremely well, for our brains are wired to remember certain oft-repeated movements of the fingers. A guitar player doesn't have to look at the strings to play, and you can probably tie your shoelace without looking.

Here's an excellent article on the future of interactive tools: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

Everyone knows that math is just applied philosophy.

I stand corrected. Thanks.

In the case of Game of Thrones, there's another reason: money and convenience.

Game of Thrones is mostly being filmed in Belfast due to good facilities, tax breaks and partial funding from Northern Ireland Screen. During casting they specifically looked for local actors. There are a few exceptions such as Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage, but most of the other actors (especially the children) are British. One of the most important reasons is availability: when you're planning a multiple-year series you don't want to engage actors that are likely to drop out due to other jobs. Actors already living in Britain will be far more likely to be available for subsequent seasons than actors based in Hollywood.

FTFY

No. Anyone who works with Linux, develops for Linux, is a Linux sysadmin or just happens to be interested should do it at least once. Then there's us who prefer distros of the more automated type (I'd rather avoid terms like "beginner-friendly", "user-friendly" or "bloated" but you probably know what I mean). People who use some flavour of Linux simply because it fits our needs. We shouldn't go anywhere near LFS.

Cars now may be junk, but at least they're safe junk. You get airbags, deformation zones, traction control, ABS and so on. Even small cars today are much better than the large ones of old. Plus you get a mileage that old cars couldn't dream of.

A study from the recruiting firm Manpower was recently published in Swedish newspapers. It listed HR manager as the number 1 job people want. "Nobody ever wants to do it" seems like quite an incorrect statement.

Source (translated): http://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.manpower.se%2FMPNet3%2FContent.asp%3FNodeRef%3D58911%26Ref%3DSWEDEN_NORDIC%26LangID%3Dse&act=url

I strongly recommend reading the abstract, it's very descriptive and easy to understand I wish more abstracts were like that.

By the way, what's the deal with describing them simply as "astronomers"? Better than the all-too-often-used "scientists" I suppose, but wouldn't it be even nicer to write "a team of astronomers led by Saul Rappaport from M.I.T."? Scientists are people with names, and the more we use them the more we raise the status of pursuing a scientific career. Science needs more superstars!

I see a lot of comments bashing the overhead costs of different charity organisations. Granted, some of it might be unnecessary, but not all of it. The logistics needed for a relief operation in a catastrophe site is a huge and difficult challenge, and only a sufficiently large and professional organisation can handle it. You need materials, food, shelter, trucks, people with different skill sets, lawyers and diplomats to ensure the cooperation of the local government, and so on. It can be quite chaotic, and of course it's going to be inefficient form time to time - but it helps. Without the people who are handling the economics and the logistics, there would be no food or shelter for the workers in the field to hand out.

No, but I can add a place where people have been equally unhappy without their government: Belgium.

Five years ago Linux was sort of cool to use, required a bit of hacking, and provided a desktop full of eye-candy. The cons were that Wine didn't work so well if you wanted to use Windows programs, there weren't any good drivers for the latest hardware and you often ended up with some non-functioning parts (suspend/hibernate, peripherals, printers, 3D graphics...).

Nowadays the exact same things are still true. Wine still doesn't work reliably. There still aren't drivers for the newest hardware. There are very few Linux games compared to Windows games. Photoshop, MS Office and Outlook still aren't available for Linux.

It's an uphill struggle to keep Linux up-to-date. I'm starting to think it's probably never going to get there - and life is too short to keep tinkering with my own computer. It's not fun any longer when you're still facing the same problems year after year. And I know most of these problems aren't Linux' fault per se but rather lack of third-party support, but that doesn't matter - I'm the one who has to deal with it anyway.

That, and the fact that Windows doesn't suck anymore.

I agree to this. Make a distribution that works like Windows 7 except:

1) Free (as in speech and beer)
2) Huge loads of great free software available
3) Super easy software installation via GUI interface or command line
4) Faster and lighter on resources
5) More possibilities to customize everything
6) Rotating 3D cube! Yay!
7) Command line still available for advanced users
8) Nice online community of friendly people eager to help

Ubuntu used to be this distribution. Which distro comes closest now?

Which is unfortunately nearly every single time.