And the movement is towards putting *nonfiction* in English classrooms. The all-business-all-the-time ideologues want English teachers to finally drop that literature stuff (or a good chunk of time for it). This is seriously happening and the curriculum may look a lot worse in ten years. Of course the schools the rich can attend will still have all the good stuff. This is just a policy they want to foist on the rest of our kids.

It looks more like a cube in 3-dimensions, not a cube within a cube. That diagram is not what it would look like projected onto 3-space, it is rather some scheme for conveying information about the shape. See the pictures and animations at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract

I'm thinking of that other classic book, Flatland. Picture a cube if you lived in 2-dimensional space. You might see it as a square, or as an oblique slice through a cube. But not as a matrix conveying the facts about a cube.

Or maybe I'm missing something. The idea of projecting 4-space onto 3-space, or 3-space onto 2-space, may not be the correct analogy for perception here. Also, the space itself in which the tesseract or cube or square lives may not be straight. Think of curved space-time. A standard 2 dimensional space is the straight x/y coordinate system, going off to infinity in all directions. But another is the outside surface of a sphere, closed up eventually, but locally looking nearly flat (measure the angles of a triangle and subtract 180 to get the slight curvature). An then there a are distorted versions of each, x/y or sphere.

Really I just want to think of a tesseract as a solid shape I see at one moment in time, followed by another moment and another moment until it is gone. That way time is my 4th dimension. If everything is laid out straight, I guess a one-meter tesseract is a one-meter cube the appears all at once and stays the same until it disappears, after 1/c ( = speed of light) seconds (?). But if it lays at an angle in 4-space, or 4-space is curved, or 4-space is closed, then who knows. I just can't picture it being a cube within a cube. Then again, I feel like I live in Boxland at a moment.

Add to that, the time dimension really does seem to different physically, and 4-space has an infinite number of smooth coordinate structures, not just straight, closed spherical, etc. While 2-space, 3-space, 5-space, 6-space, etc. all have a limited number of structures, 4-space is the exception and has an infinite number.

Works great. I like the Win8 machine I occasionally use better than the Win7 one. Not sure why, it may be as simple as the ugly folder icons in Win7. The 3rd party app (not an "app") I found for Win8 makes it boot to desktop, restores the start menu, turns off the weird mouse actions at the edge of the screen. It's Classic Shell or StartMenu8, forget which.

Story broke in 2008 (Randi), NYT (2009), and then in 2010 the BBC did more work on it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8471187.stm
Here's the original WIkipedia page, from 2009, with the links to NYT and Randi:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ADE_651&oldid=323934632

They are keeping a very close eye on the company Facebok page. I posted a negative comment which was deleted within a minute or two.

Tell it to Mozilla. All resources seem to be going to the OS project. Thunderbird lost funding.

I keep my old TP500 (4MB) for some reason. It's in a closet, but still. It ran PC-DOS instead of the probably identical MS-DOS. Why do I think it ran OS/2 instead of WIn3.1 on top? Maybe it did. Anyway, it was a bare bones ThinkPad at 4MB even then.

(Metro is horrid.)

Just install a classic start menu and disable Metro. I forget which 3rd party start menu I installed, but it's great. Win8 is now a better Win7, as far as I can tell. But I haven't done any real work with it.

He is reading articles from Wired and citing the EFF. It's not too boring, and he seems to be staying on topic.

I was surprised to see a mobile phone company's official FB page flooded with complaints, and one service rep trying to tell people to email her so she could fix their problems. I guess FB does not allow holding comments for moderation like you can with typical forum and blog software. In FB you can disable commenting, but that's it as far as I can tell.

Are you sure that was part of thee DNS? Usenet used that kind of hierarchy: humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc, alt.binaries.nice, alt.tv, etc. Also, you see DNS names reversed like uk.co.bbc in algorithms. Makes a much more readable sorted list.

At one time there were three countries without much geography in their common names:
United Kingdom (of...)
United States (of...)
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (no geography at all).

Then there's the (Roman) Empire and the (Roman) Catholic Church. Anglicans talk about a "catholic" church, meaning "universal," which is confusing.

Oh, and the billion as million-million thing too. Does the BBC still stick with "thousand million" and "million million" exclusively? Can't recall I've heard it recently.

I find "subzero" confusing in Canadian or British weather. Adds to the wind-chill confusion, but that is less common.
I read somewhere British phone numbers are the most difficult to remember. Maybe it's the punctuation, but I mostly like the U.S. system, except for the newer area code regime.