I know you just said you have an English Lit major, but as a tangent, I believe that the best critics in the disciplines of the social sciences, Literary Critics for instance, will do a great deal for their discourse if they learn as much mathematics and science as possible. There has been a long recorded mutual hostility and ignorance between the two worlds -- the hard and soft sciences -- and it's projects like John Brockman's Edge, ones trying to advance C.P. Snow's Third Culture concept, for example, that will push not just math further, but literature, art criticism, and philosophy. Most philosophers of the twenty-first century are aware of this (not just people like Alain Badiou or Irigaray, who get railed on for invoking math in interpretive ways, but see Katherine Malabou's essays on brain plasticity and philosophy -- this is where we need to take Writing), most lit-heads are still, unfortunately, not. /rant

That's, like, you're opinion, man.

Can't find the link, but read a 'more rigorous' prediction which mentioned a) pre-impact toasting of the planet, and b) immense pre-impact winds that would toss anyone and anything so high into the air they'd be dead on return. The article included distances though and might have been based on a hypothetical 10km body. Doesn't seem likely that most people would witness impact in a true extinction event, an absolute version of which seems more and more impossible/unlikely the more one learns about both reality and previous events.

To Serve Forty Man

Not entirely clear. I could read this as quite egocentric. Who turns down a million bucks? The same kind of CEOs who wear cross trainers and dingy shirts, make their kids work like everybody else, and decide to live off the grid. self-righteous JERKS. /devils advocate

Visual art has seen a shift in the last 40 or 50 years towards scientifically oriented work (from Op Art's exploration of visual phenomena to Earthwork art). In the last 20 to 30 years it has seen a turn towards project and research based work (eco art, direct action, social sculpture with an environmental bent, art that observes the cosmos), which, read in the context of the art/life blurring of boundaries, are understood as art helping to 'do the work of' science. The thing is, most art people essentially understand science as cargo cult; therefore, given some luck, panache, and interesting presentation, a moderately capable science person could 'frame' their work as an art project, and would be much more likely to receive accolades from the art world, and have their work subjected to serious (if scientifically hopeless) art criticism and discourse, than they would actually getting any of their work into a peer-reviewed journal, much less making a serious contribution to a scientific discipline.

I was just about to get into this "Usenet" I see mentioned here and there.

In Europe, a vote against minarets is arguably a vote for freedom of speech.

but seriously, the racists are going to go gaga for this study

just the tip...

why didn't you use Wordpress MU?

I would venture to say that many entrepreneurial kids these days (myself included) want to learn what they broadly think of as "programming" so that they can build great websites that they can ideally sell later on for lots of money, and get on with their "portfolio career". The barrier to entry for implementing a web-based business model used to be the $30,000 sunk cost of hiring a programmer to build a dynamic website with web 2.0 functionality. Now, CMSes like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla et al. offer the opportunity to start that business for next to nothing, if you have some web dev skills. If one jumps into wordpress as a, let's call it an environment, one learns things, languages, principles, in a haphazard way but learns them nonetheless (again, if one is going beyond basic blog functionality and a downloaded template). One can come to understand HTML, PHP, MySQL, CSS, Javascript (jQuery library of course) and hence the DOM, can learn their way around a command line, and eventually ... down the line, begin to learn OOP, which actually THEN serves as the spark igniting interest in learning other, more fundamental programming languages. Does this make any sense to you guys?

gives new meaning to TinyMCE