Tea time! How lovely. I think I will look into this - thanks for the idea ladies! :001_smile:

I was not happy about flying before these new procedures and now I am just not going to do it. I LOVE road trips and I get a good long look at our beautiful country when I do them. The airline industry can dry up and rot for all I care - before they only treated you like cattle - now they treat you like criminal cattle. I'm done and I'm happy about it! :D

My workday involves computer and internet 100% of the time. I am on constantly - but I don't waste my time - I am highly productive. There are days when I tend to slack off and goof around on forums, Facebook, or whatever - but it does not interfere with my work - most of the time it is my work. Sometimes when I have to travel for work I stay at hotels and since I don't have a laptop anymore I don't bother with the internet. It's pretty nice. :D I do feel I spend too much time on the internet - but it is not personal time so if I am addicted, it is to working on the internet and not playing.

And just to add - since the OP was about backscatter - it is still IONIZING radiation. Who cares that they are telling you it's a small dose. "Small" is relative to each individual person's past history with all other cumulative forms of ionizing radiation and that is not something they are even mentioning to the terrorist suspects - errr - airline customers.

I would assign it over the summer... :tongue_smilie:

So here's the thing - if they want to use electromagnetic waves and "not radiation" in the same sentence, then they should be called out on it. I don't know who Golden is, but this person obviously thinks the scientific explanation is far too complicated for us little people - but electromagnetic radiation and electromagnetic waves are the same thing. Radiation does not mean radioactive - it describes the movement of waves through a medium. Furthermore - if you are saying they are sound waves then they are not electromagnetic waves. Which confuses people even more because he/she states in the "article" and I use the term loosely, that it IS electromagnetic waves. So which is it? Sound or electromagnetic waves? Radio waves are not sound waves. If the **** people in charge would get their story straight maybe the entire country would not be so freaking confused, but as it stands now they did a pretty crappy job selling us on the necessity and the safety so they deserve every single bit of backlash they are getting. In addition, terahertz waves, the type used in the scanners, do have a potential DNA effect - including the unzipping of double stranded DNA. That is no small finding. Now, whether or not it turns out to be true is another story but you can read the paper here yourself: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0910/0910.5294v1.pdf

And if you can find out who they use for e-mail marketing - $1000 says it is Constant Contact or iContact - you can report them and they could have their account suspended. It is a VERY big no-no to disregard anti-spam policies on the web. HUGE.

If you really want to know about coops you should definitely go here. :001_smile: I have about 30 chickens right now but we have a barn not a coop. Those little coops and chicken tractors are nice but you really can only get one or two regular sized hens in there. You could get more quail though - many more quail.

I recently saw it on cable and I felt the same way. While it held my attention and the science fiction was good enough, it was not any kind of original remarkable story - especially for science fiction of which I am somewhat of an expert. In fact - it was pretty much white people bad and greedy and blue people not. But it was pretty to watch - I just can't imagine those people who were depressed because they couldn't go live on Pandora. Be-Zar. :001_huh:

My daughter used it when she was in an online school for 10th grade - this was several years ago so it might have been updated. Alll in all the lectures were good but I felt like the problems were not satisfactory. I wish they had worksheets (Maybe they do now? In which case I would really take a hard second look at it) or at the very least more online practice problems. The questions we used for Algebra were multiple choice. So she had to work the propblem then choose the correct answer. My daughter, being the sneaky sneaky sneak she is would often just guess to move through the lesson faster. So I guess my bottom line is: Loved the video lectures and the algebra teacher Didn't think there were enough problems

I'm also the wrong person to answer because I think texting is the very same thing as talking on the phone when we were kids. I spent HOURS talking on the phone. It's just the updated version. I'd get her the phone.

Buying presents for teens is expensive and difficult. My DS is 13 this year and asked for a new WACOM Intuos drawing tablet (medium at $300) and Windows 7. That's a $450 Christmas - which isn't unusually high compared to previous years (last year he went to Space Camp ~ $1200) but still - $450 bucks is a lot - especially in these lean times. But the tablet is practically a school item - he has graphic art every Friday using expensive software. What good is it to have only half the tools you need? He does have a cheap tablet but it doesn't take a genius to see why one tablet is $50 and one is $300 (and that's with the academic discount). Typically if there is a way to pull it off - I will buy the expensive gifts for Christmas. Kids only get one childhood so I try to make it is great as possible as often as I can. There have been plenty of disappointing holidays in the past so I don't feel guilty - besides, sometimes you have to live in the moment and stop thinking about the future because futures don't come with a guarantee. :001_smile:

Better than having nothing under that pillow.

If I were her I'd be packing heat. Little S&W Bodyguard under my pillow and I'm good.

:D I think you are my long lost sister. Grammar for us is a complete afterthought. Yes, we do it and yes I have even forced my oldest to do Analytical Grammar (which she did for a year and then said NO WAY, NEVER AGAIN!) and finally I only do the grammar included with other programs. I might have a slanted POV because I was a science major in undergrad and grad school and the only thing I learned about grammar and writing was that no one gives a crap if you can write very well in undergrad as long as you can get your point across and in grad school your PI is going to re-edit everything you publish anyway. If I had to do it all over again, which I don't because my oldest is now 13, I would refuse to teach writing and grammar until 8th grade and save us all the aggravation.

I have it and use it for middle school - I don't think it would qualify for high school. Try these: http://www.esciencelabs.com/catalog/kits_subject/chemistry

I was starting to wonder if I imagined signing up for it! :D They are advertising the show all over the TV and I don't have anything yet.

Yes, I agree. I mean if Nebraskans were speaking Neraskianian and Wyomingings were speaking Wyomingian I would learn their languages then, wouldn't I? But I were to expect my son to keep up fluent Japanese when we only visit there once is sort of stupid. And in my opinion, a huge waste of time since I tend to think that science and math are the most important subjects in our school. Not to say that Japanese hasn't been taken seriously - it has been 5 days a week of Japanese for 3 years - just like math and science. So I object to the assumption that I might think of it as fluff.

I tried Classical when we first started - I mean we had EVERYTHING. The Latin, the logic, the DVD lectures, the posters with Latin conjugation, the maps of the Ancient World - all of it. THEY HATED EVERY BIT OF IT. Sucks to waste that much money on really good programs that just didn't work. And there is no way they would ever read literature for history. Needless to say we dropped it 7 years ago and never looked back. However - if I were homeschooling MYSELF :D I would choose a classical education as I like everything they hate.

Well, maybe it is just me - but all that gobbley-gook grammar linguist stuff just sucks ALL the fun out of foreign language. :tongue_smilie: I don't even what to know that much about ENGLISH - let alone Japanese or German! :D

Well, they are definitely not English natives - but I can almost guarantee you that they are writing their copy based on keywords and not grammar. That's pretty common, especially when you have a high demand keyword with a lot of competition.

I have a MS and all my PhD classes, only lacking research, and yes. It helps. But do I think you need a college degree? Nope. If you are dedicated you can learn to teach just about everything. What did Thomas Edison say: "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration"

YUK! I'm not a queasy person, and in fact I RARELY censor my kids from anything - but what you described is just wrong somehow. I didn't see that when we went, and like you I enjoyed the baseball guy and stuff like that - but not the babies and kids.

The American Dream to me is having the freedom to choose to better myself and my family and the understanding that if I follow the rules, work hard, and do my homework - I can be successful even though my ancestors never were.

Just FYI - you can accept credit/debit cards through regular PayPal (free version - only takes a % of your sale) too - but it is not as efficient a checkout process as Paypal Pro ($30 a month and a % of sale). I like PayPal because all the security is done on their end - you don't have to worry about a SSL or anything like that. And depending on what kind of website you have (like I use joomla) you can get extensions to make PayPal ever more efficient and professional.