Mostly I felt the non-SCS schools were ranked surprisingly high. (disclaimer, I'm currently a rising senior at CMU SCS, didn't want to hurt any H&SS kids' feelings :p)
>* 2 Safeties
If you've figured out there are two safeties then this implies that the defense is looking to take away big passing plays but give up the middle of the field.
2 safeties is pretty standard and is just as much a run stopping defense. For example the corners in man on the exterior with the safeties in man on the interior is a run stopping defense. Backers often cover the apex or a safety roles to the center taking away the middle. Nice overal explanation but the strategy in football is to "show" one thing and do another which is why a pre-snap read only goes so far.
Sketch Up would not be a good option because it produces mesh models which look like garbage when printed, a good low cost Nurbs modeling software that produces true curves for digital fabrication would be Rhino 3d. The educational version of Rhino is $195. http://www.rhino3d.com/
Edit: and if you want to make your cups parametric like the examples the grasshopper plugin for Rhino is the way to go http://www.grasshopper3d.com/
If you are seeking a masters in CS most universities are only looking for programming languages, computer architecture, data structures and one algorithms course. These are the prerequisites for most courses.
That's true I'm just speaking from experience of looking at many undergraduate computer science programs in the United States. They all generally require some "tough math", and I think they should because that sort of analytic thinking in solving complex mathematical problems applies directly to computer science.
An ABET accredited CS major requires learning the calculus and probably somewhat beyond the AP BC level plus a course in discrete math. And maybe a bit more, you can check out their web site at http://www.abet.org/
I would also add that school affords one with the ability to focus full time without the distarctions and fateague of a full time job (especially if the job is in a non related field). This is imparative to those who haven't been programming sense age 12 and are relatively new to the space. Everything is "easy" when you know how to do it. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the value in higher education extends beyond its curriculum and that value is entirely dependent on the individual.
The statue of liberty/wtc is somewhat of a silly point of comparison for national debt but grounding numbers into something familiar or in this case physical objects is quite telling for most people. Even if your point of comparison is "the federal budget/GDP/world GDP/debt of other large nations" it goes back to the same issue where you are comparing large numbers to other large numbers which is meaningless to most people(outside of HN). I wouldn't use this type of visualization to brief congress but it is telling.
This rhetoric is very non-specific though, which isn't usually a good feature of visualizations if you want them to be informative (rather than just rhetoric). Any amount of money beyond those that a normal household deals with would take up a lot of physical space with current paper currency, because we don't use bills above $100. Historically, inter-bank transfers actually happened using very large notes, or precious metals; now they go electronically, so paper money isn't set up to deal with macroeconomic sums.
If you want to impress someone with how obscenely large some dollar figure is, you can use exactly this "giant pile of cash" technique from any political perspective! Federal debt is a mountain of cash; Wall Street bonuses are a skyscraper of cash; Google profits are a Manhattan apartment block of cash; Medicare spending is Saturn V rockets full of cash; corporate tax evasion is a stack of dollar bills going to the moon; George Soros's bank account holds 140 metric tons in $1s; etc.
I think that's just the thing: it's telling, but not of any valuable information. And that's the last thing our political dialog needs right now: we've got a million times too much as it is.
Most of debt is from war because you don't have to have it funded to start one and once it's rolling well "gotta support the troops". Then the interest starts adding up fast.
Since the WTC demo is reduced to "half trillion floors", that means half of the first floor would be the entire lifetime cost of the NASA shuttle program.
Iraq War(s) would be the next five floors. Doesn't include Afghanistan or Libya or Yemen. Or our troop presence around the world like in Japan for some reason.
Next two floors would be the cost for heath care and benefits for injured/killed troops through 2050.
I'm against the wars - but IMO there's a good reason the US has a presence around the world in places like Japan. The entire point of being a superpower is being able to project this power in any corner of the globe.
China is investing heavily in its navy right now since it distinctly feels the lack of ability to do the same. When Chinese shipments came under pirate attack off the coast of Somalia, it took forever and a day for any forces to be dispatched, compared to the US whose naval and air presence is available within hours around the world by virtue of having bases in foreign countries.
Interesting. I imagine it wouldn't have been too hard for the creators of this graphic to include that, but for some reason they left it out (hmm!). Good example of how data visualization can be misleading.
