Slashdot Mirror

The fact that you don't even read what you post here is quite indicative. None of the studies on basal metabolic rate shows anything contrary to my previous statement that any time people in controlled environment reduced their calorie intake, they lost weight or to the general notion that nutrition is governed by laws of thermo dynamics on the macro level.

As I don't expect you to progress beyond ad hominems at this point, I am not going to waste any more time with your posts. But if you want to be taken seriously next time, please learn at least the basics. I highly recommend this series of lectures which are a great introduction in nutrition science for laymen like you.

Amen to this.

I am a "homeschooling" parent. This does NOT mean my children are taught solely by myself and/or my wife, and it does NOT mean they are taught solely at home. It DOES mean that we have personally selected and combined a number of different educational opportunties for them. These include (but are not limited to):

Enrolling in college coursework while still in high school. Example: Harvard Math 23b. The majority of students in this class are admitted Harvard freshmen, but it is also available in an open enrollment capacity through Extension for anyone of any age willing to pay tuition. I like that peer group for "socialization" a whole lot better than the kids at my local public high school.

Hiring the chair of the language department at a local private high school to come to our home to provide personalized one-on-one instruction in classical Greek and Latin.

Hiring multiple music teachers for piano, guitar, theory, and composition.

Participation in team sports at the local health club.

Engaging a flight instructor for our son to earn a private pilot's rating.

Successfully completing qualifying flights for TARC

The Internet (Obviously). Taking advantage of online educational programs such as AOPS and edX and Open Courseware

Stocking our home with thousands of quality print books and plenty of subscriptions to lots of quality print journals (e.g. Economist, Nature, Lapham's Quarterly, IEEE publications, etc.)

Buying a whole bunch of the Great Courses

Joining CTY

Plenty of socratic dialogue with Mom & Dad. And plenty of unstructured time.

Flexibility to travel (including abroad) during the school year.

Concrete advice for OP: First, read The Underground History of American Education. Make of it what you will --- just include it (or criticisms of it) as a data point. Next, decide if any your local school choices (either public or private) are awesome. Do they approach the quality of Exeter or Boston Latin or Bronx Science? Understand the concept of a feeder school and that this concept can start at the elementary level. Got great public or private school options you like and can afford? Go for it. Not so much? Then go ahead and homeschool kindergarten. I guarantee you that your drop-out wife is capable of teaching your child to read and anything else they are supposed to learn in kindergarten. I guarantee you that unless you are completely negligent that your child will (if you choose) be able to enter first grade after a year of homeschooling and do fine. And I guarantee you that after a year you will be in a much better position to understand if more homeschooling is the right choice.

The Teaching Company has some awesome courses on those topics. Link: http://www.thegreatcourses.com... They are taught by college professors and intended for audiences of educated adults, but not those who have majored in the topics of interest. These are a good place to start. With 10 hours a week to watch these, you can pick up quite a bit of background and then go from there. I've watched dozens of their courses and am always impressed! You can often find them used on Amazon for much cheap, and I've even seen them at my local library.

Firstly, I really recommend people watch this video series. It's brilliant:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com...

One of the things discussed here was that Hamilton and Madison, architects of the new national government, were acutely familiar with the history of self-governance experiments elsewhere in Europe, from ancient Greece onward.

They sought to avoid the inevitable decline of all previous attempts of such societies. Madison, especially, observed that factionalism led to the decline of all such pluralistic, democratic societies. Once one faction gained sufficient power, it marginalized opposing factions and consolidated power.

Rather than trying to eliminate factionalism, Madison's basic idea was to depend on it. He proposed a national government whereby differing factions would always be at each others necks, with no faction really having the possibility of gaining enough power to completely suppress all the others. Factionalism can be broken down along a variety of axis (wealth, education, aristocracy, etc), and Madison tried to work that into the construction of the government as well. This also helped balance the VERY different perspectives of Jefferson, the rural populist, and Hamilton, who would be happy if everyone still wore powdered wigs.

So, we can certainly debate how well Madison's plans have worked out in practice (e.g. do we really have multiple competing factions? Or just the illusion of controversy, ala the WWF wrestlers...), but in principle, the two major parties arguing against policies and practices chiefly when used by their opponents if part of the plan. According to Madison, the system _needs_ opposing factions in order to outlast the previous European attempts at self-governance.

It would be interesting to do an analysis of legislation that was swept through the federal government with broad support, and tabulate how often that legislation was ultimately found to be harmful/undesirable...

If you need an in-depth lesson (sans actual math), I recommend the first few lectures from http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/Courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=1413 .

Aha, someone is wrong! Even if they died a while ago. Let me correct that.

The big bang theory suggests there's a finite amount of past, but that doesn't mean the universe "was created a finite time ago". Time itself is part of the universe; it's a dimension, which only differs from the other three in how you calculate distances in space-time. (It's r^2 = x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - t^2, not plus as you might expect)

This is literally the only difference between time and space.

At this point you may be asking where causality comes from. Ah, but that's a different question, you see. If you're very curious, I would suggest reading The Clockwork Rocket (fiction, *very* well made, set in a universe where it's plus instead of minus..), or visiting http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=1257 if you'd rather hear directly about this universe.

tl;dr: People tend to conflate time (causality) and time (the dimension). This works well enough for normal life, but not well enough for border conditions such as, oh, the big bang. Or some laboratory experiments. The universe is bounded in time, but that doesn't mean it was created anymore than the existence of a north pole lets you ask what is north of the north pole. "Why does the universe exist" is a valid question, but not one that can be solved by adding a creator, and one that would apply just as well to an eternal universe.

Via these magazines he can learn to read AND learn science at the same time:
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
http://www.astronomy.com/
http://www.sciencenews.com/
AND audio/video courses on chemistry (a lot of this stuff you can download for free off isohunt.com) http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/search/search.aspx?searchphrase=chemistry

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/

Dear Slashdot Editors,

Please spend some time getting intimate with a writing course. Such as this one by prof. Armstrong. Come back when you'll have a clue.

Sincerely,
tibit

PS. Prof. Armstrong is geeky. She is quite rational and measured in her speech, even if that means many /. "articles" would make her barf.

To add some weight to it: there's a company that sells "great" courses on audio CDs. Some of them are crap, some are decent, but the thing is: a 12 CD course (12+ hours of talking!) on writing that I have recently borrowed fits in a pamphlet with about 1/3 of the text of a single Chronicles of Narnia book. You can read 12h worth of audio course in an afternoon.

The Teaching Company sells DVDs and audio CDs of various star lecturers from campuses across the country. No assignments or tests, just lectures. They have a rotating sale policy so that in practical terms, their customers are only expected to buy items on sale, at prices which work out to about $3/hr for audio and $5/hr for video lectures. Some of the courses are quite good - to start out, I would recommend any of Kenneth Harl's courses on ancient and medieval Greece/Rome/Asia Minor.

Yeah, they're not free, but still quite a bargain compared to registering for a course at a local university - and there's no commuting hassle.

Agreed, this is a valuable and approachable intro to game theory! I've been studying with it, too.

Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond , a 12-hour course taught by Professor Scott P. Stevens. US$254.95.

Agreed, this is a valuable and approachable intro to game theory! I've been studying with it, too.

Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond , a 12-hour course taught by Professor Scott P. Stevens. US$254.95.

Prof. Stephen Pollock considers the question of "what if there is no Higgs boson" in some detail in his course "Particle Physics for Non-Physicists: A Tour of the Microcosmos" ( http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/Course_Detail.aspx?cid=1247 ). Lecture 19 is specifically about the Higgs, but I'd recommend the course in its entirety. It's fascinating stuff. Regarding the question, to keep it short, in his view even if there is no such thing as the Higgs boson, the Standard Model is not in any danger of getting obsolete. Should the Higgs prove non-existing (little side question: how do you prove something doesn't exists?), parts of the model dealing with the Weak Force ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_Force ) might need to be revisited and perhaps expanded upon. However, for the most part there is a huge amount of experimental evidence of its correctness, which has been accumulated in decades long of research.