First-year university. They were looking at statistics from the 1980s. "West" Germany ceased to exist in 1990, when last year's typical first-year university students were born.

My wife was teaching a first-year economics course last year, and in one lecture she displayed some OECD data from the last 40 years or so. A student put up his hand and asked "Why does it say *WEST* Germany?" :-)

You'd say that, but you'd not have the faintest idea what you were talking about. The evidence strongly refutes that opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence I know, you can't really compare one country against another. But it's a better start than a (likely) self-interested opinion.

I don't know about the US, or even about a lot of Canada, but Ottawa is a fantastic city to bike commute - I did it for many years, most recently I had a 40km round-trip. Took under 40min each way on a good day, mostly on bicycle paths and quiet secondary roads.

Of course, this wasn't possible from mid-November until mid-to-late March most years. I doubt Finland is more amenable than that, though.

Well, the USA like Canada is a pretty democratic country. And the USA, like Canada, has a lot of smart, thoughtful people who can help think through problems. So as a Canadian, I'm happy to hear what Americans think about questions of interest to us both.

You're referring to the old nitrate-based filmstock that was used in until the early 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_base . It was and is susceptible to auto-ignition

That's the beauty of color photography - if you know how to desaturate the colors, you don't need the gels any more. If you treat the three color channels (RGB) as three monochrome channels, you can mix and match to your heart's delight, and you'll have as much, if not more, flexibility as you ever had with filters. But of course, a good "black-and-white" print is anything *but* monochrome - there are/were warm-toned papers, cold-toned papers, and toners like selenium with which you can create wonderful "split-toned" prints that range from reddish-browns through bluish to golden highlights. You *can* still do this digitally. I haven't used my 8x10 or 4x5 cameras in over 15 years. I'm not sure they're worth a lot of cash today, either, though. But you're right, the digital devices will depreciate even faster.

I'm not really up on CS theory (it was my interest as a grad student back around '80). But I think you'll see things like the map() function in Perl (or the array_map() function in PHP) as being related to this.

Here's a good place to start: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1283933 John Backus' 1977 Turing Award talk.

Hm. Nothing since 2003 on the front page. I set up my own access to US Economic data from US government sources: http://www.macrospect.com./ Currently has 177,000 data series from BEA, BLS, Census, OFHEO, FED. Data updated daily as it's released by the publishing agency. Browsing and graphing data is free.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful" - George Box http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_E._P._Box

Nor gauche.