Yes: education focuses on science as a body of knowledge (what science can do for us) rather than science as a process of discovery (what we can do to make more science, and when science is not really science). This was true of my education too; I'm not sorry I learned the Laws of Thermodynamics, but what I am sorry about is that the discovery aspect came mostly from books I read outside school.
Not to belabor the obvious: most people don't need to know the Law of Thermodynamics, and wouldn't be able to apply them correctly if they did know them. I can't quite remember them myself. But most people do need to know, and I do remember, why scientific discoveries are reliable (and when they're not, and why not).
Conclusion: science teachers should be forced kicking and screaming to read Popper and Kuhn. (Good luck!) I have given my sons some books on the history of science, though not yet the philosophy thereof, and so far, so good.
What you're missing is that they don't (yet...) plan to go to orbit. Getting to the upper atmosphere and popping up above 100km (as SpaceShipOne did) is much easier; you need a speed of only about 1000 m/s versus 8000 m/s. I'm sure Carmack would love to blast into orbit, but he is being realistic.
If I'm code review is taking forever, it's because I haven't documented I'm code. So in a culture of constant code reviews, I remember to document. Adding comments no longer wastes time; it *saves* time in the pretty near future. I also write fewer lazy hacks than I used to, because of the fear of having to explain them. And my code gets better for other reasons mentioned on this thread.
The OP didn't explicitly say that they were reviewing code months after it had been written, but no, archaeology and programming don't mix any too well. OTOH in a company where Hitting The Release Date is all-important, there is certainly a temptation to postpone until after that Date everything that can possibly be postponed, and pointy-haired types do think code review (and documentation) can be postponed.
What would you say to a teenage boy who thought putting on the condom could be postponed until after the... release?
Spacex' Falcon 1 has a thrust about 1.25 times its lift-off weight. The old Saturn V had much the same. You don't need, and in fact don't want, engines much bigger than that if you plan to go to orbit; they'd just be dead weight for most of the trip.
Disclaimer: I am not a rocket scientist. I just know how to do arithmetic.
For the past year or two I buy music from indie sites *only*. The quality of the best music I can find there is not discernibly different from the best music on the big labels, and the variety is amazing. Oh, and it's slightly cheaper.
I'm old enough that I don't give a RIAA whether I listen to the same music everyone else listens to, so what do I need big labels for? The price difference doesn't pay for better music; it funds their advertising agencies (and their lawyers).
1. you'll need either high amplitude or high frequency to get up to a useful speed
2. the design of a space elevator is already constrained by tension in the cable, and this scheme will lead to more tension, plus risk of fatigue fracture
3. how to power more than one vehicle at a time
4. what to do about the person who confuses vibration with jerking
Using monopoly power to jack up the price is bad, but Microsoft didn't jack up the price of Web browsers. Quite the opposite! What they did was scare away potential competitors who might (cough) have provided a better browser, by saying, in effect, "It doesn't matter how good your product is. You won't make any money. So forget it."
When I was growing up in England in the 1960s and '70s, the influence of religion was slight (having a state-sponsored church will do that, you know) but anti-intellectualism was strong: I remember the other kids saying things like "I do dislike walking computers" when they knew I could hear them. Why does the country that produced Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, and led the Industrial Revolution, feel this way? I trace it to complacency. Back in the late nineteenth century, a feeling developed that "We already rule the world, so there's no need to get any better." It would not surprise me if many USAans feel the same way deep down in their bones. Why is that boy being so intelligent? Can't he just have some good clean fun with the rest of us?
People also get a bit nervous when they see someone who looks as if s/he is going to rise rapidly up the class ladder. Either someone who was your equal is soon going to be your superior, or someone who was your inferior is soon going to be your equal -- both are uncomfortable prospects and it's tempting to try and pre-empt them. What? You say you have no class ladder in the USA? Bwahahahaaaa! I bet you even have some of our aristocratic disdain for people who get their hands dirty with practical things.
Leaving out the cowboy stuff, you have a fair point, one that some people like the Space Access Society (disclaimer: I'm a proud member thereof) have been worrying about for fifteen years and more: how do we make space travel cheap enough that we can actually afford to do all the wonderful things that we'd like to do out there? It doesn't seem impossible when you look at the technology, but if politicians are running the show for the benefit of their big aerospace contractors, it doesn't seem likely. I regard cheap flights as the main enabling factor for exploration and development of space. There has been enough noise made about it that NASA is paying lip service to the concept of getting private enterprise in there to do things more cheaply, offering prizes, and so on, but almost all the dough is still going to Boeheed, who have an incentive to keep flights expensive.
Warning: shameless plug coming: I've been happy with my Nokia N800. Cheaper than the Foleo was announced to be; not tied (even in imagination) to a Treo I don't want; a good fraction of laptop functionality but *wonderfully* portable; Linux, and some neat little apps available to fill in the details Nokia forgot. Downside: at my age, I need rather strong reading glasses to use it.
Two years ago I went to a talk by Carmack. He began by saying, "We've built four vehicles and crashed three." or something close to that. He's not overly optimistic; he expects to lose a few. The first three crashes just weren't reported as widely.
I'll comment on this and then I'll play devil's advocate.
The susceptibility of voters to TV ads, and the expense of TV ads, mean that politicians are going to need money. I don't have an answer to this either. I have no confidence in Al Gore's proposed answer, but I'll give him credit for trying, much as I dislike him. If people really do start watching less network TV, it may help.
Now, look at Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter" (not the book, the blog post on Cato last year). He points out that when ill-informed, ill-educated voters are left to make decisions, they sometimes make economically destructive ones. To which I replied, on a blog that nobody reads (my own), that when politicians are influenced by businesses, some of those economically destructive proposals don't turn into laws, because businesses don't like having their profits destructed. So a measure of corruption (though definitely less than now exists!) is in fact desirable, and pushing more decisions to the people has serious risks.
They're being bought by the campaign funding that they [think they] need in order to stay in office. For most of them, the real draw is power, not money... they use money to get power. (And power to get interns.)
But don't blame the monetary system as such. Before there was paper money, or National Debt, or any credit system as we know it now, governments (which is to say, kings and princes and dukes) had strong desires to spend more money than they could easily raise by taxation, so they borrowed it. This meant that bankers could attain enormous political power... search "Cosimo de Medici" for a possible example (but no, I am not an expert on Italian history).
As in, the real scandal isn't the kids who drop out; it's the ones who graduate without knowing enough to earn what their brains are worth. (We do occasionally see media stories about them, to be sure.)
Partly it's a problem that no mass-production education system is going to solve perfectly: on the one hand, give every kid the education that they can make best use of, vocational for some and academic for others; on the other hand, never close off any educational option, for fear the parents will kick up a fuss. My country (the UK) went with a vocational/academic split in the 1940s, and it worked very well for some kids who would have suffered badly under the previous system... but we abandoned it in the 1960s and decided to teach everyone the same. That is now being half-heartedly reconsidered... no bureaucracy, and certainly no politician, likes to admit to a mistake. Private schools can be more flexible.
Ekh, that's the business model General Motors is credited with pioneering some decades ago. Back then GM had something like 60% market share. Now they have 25% if they're lucky. Those who won't learn from history....
See http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1013/p01s01-usec.htm l or, for a more British orientation, http://www.abi.org.uk/climatechange Companies pay attention when their insurance premiums change, and insurance companies pay attention when the probability of major disasters seems to be going up. These outfits are in business to make money (in a fiercely competitive industry), not to frighten people. I'm sure someone will accuse them of peddling scare stories, but it will be harder to make the accusation stick.
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Yes: education focuses on science as a body of knowledge (what science can do for us) rather than science as a process of discovery (what we can do to make more science, and when science is not really science). This was true of my education too; I'm not sorry I learned the Laws of Thermodynamics, but what I am sorry about is that the discovery aspect came mostly from books I read outside school.
Not to belabor the obvious: most people don't need to know the Law of Thermodynamics, and wouldn't be able to apply them correctly if they did know them. I can't quite remember them myself. But most people do need to know, and I do remember, why scientific discoveries are reliable (and when they're not, and why not).
Conclusion: science teachers should be forced kicking and screaming to read Popper and Kuhn. (Good luck!) I have given my sons some books on the history of science, though not yet the philosophy thereof, and so far, so good.
Oops, replied to the wrong reply. Sorry.
What you're missing is that they don't (yet ...) plan to go to orbit. Getting to the upper atmosphere and popping up above 100km (as SpaceShipOne did) is much easier; you need a speed of only about 1000 m/s versus 8000 m/s. I'm sure Carmack would love to blast into orbit, but he is being realistic.
If I'm code review is taking forever, it's because I haven't documented I'm code. So in a culture of constant code reviews, I remember to document. Adding comments no longer wastes time; it *saves* time in the pretty near future. I also write fewer lazy hacks than I used to, because of the fear of having to explain them. And my code gets better for other reasons mentioned on this thread.
The OP didn't explicitly say that they were reviewing code months after it had been written, but no, archaeology and programming don't mix any too well. OTOH in a company where Hitting The Release Date is all-important, there is certainly a temptation to postpone until after that Date everything that can possibly be postponed, and pointy-haired types do think code review (and documentation) can be postponed.
What would you say to a teenage boy who thought putting on the condom could be postponed until after the ... release?
Spacex' Falcon 1 has a thrust about 1.25 times its lift-off weight. The old Saturn V had much the same. You don't need, and in fact don't want, engines much bigger than that if you plan to go to orbit; they'd just be dead weight for most of the trip.
Disclaimer: I am not a rocket scientist. I just know how to do arithmetic.
For the past year or two I buy music from indie sites *only*. The quality of the best music I can find there is not discernibly different from the best music on the big labels, and the variety is amazing. Oh, and it's slightly cheaper.
I'm old enough that I don't give a RIAA whether I listen to the same music everyone else listens to, so what do I need big labels for? The price difference doesn't pay for better music; it funds their advertising agencies (and their lawyers).
Some things you should consider:
1. you'll need either high amplitude or high frequency to get up to a useful speed
2. the design of a space elevator is already constrained by tension in the cable, and this scheme will lead to more tension, plus risk of fatigue fracture
3. how to power more than one vehicle at a time
4. what to do about the person who confuses vibration with jerking
If the alternative is going round the Cape, waiting a few days will not seem like such a bad idea.
Using monopoly power to jack up the price is bad, but Microsoft didn't jack up the price of Web browsers. Quite the opposite! What they did was scare away potential competitors who might (cough) have provided a better browser, by saying, in effect, "It doesn't matter how good your product is. You won't make any money. So forget it."
People also get a bit nervous when they see someone who looks as if s/he is going to rise rapidly up the class ladder. Either someone who was your equal is soon going to be your superior, or someone who was your inferior is soon going to be your equal -- both are uncomfortable prospects and it's tempting to try and pre-empt them. What? You say you have no class ladder in the USA? Bwahahahaaaa! I bet you even have some of our aristocratic disdain for people who get their hands dirty with practical things.
Leaving out the cowboy stuff, you have a fair point, one that some people like the Space Access Society (disclaimer: I'm a proud member thereof) have been worrying about for fifteen years and more: how do we make space travel cheap enough that we can actually afford to do all the wonderful things that we'd like to do out there? It doesn't seem impossible when you look at the technology, but if politicians are running the show for the benefit of their big aerospace contractors, it doesn't seem likely. I regard cheap flights as the main enabling factor for exploration and development of space. There has been enough noise made about it that NASA is paying lip service to the concept of getting private enterprise in there to do things more cheaply, offering prizes, and so on, but almost all the dough is still going to Boeheed, who have an incentive to keep flights expensive.
Warning: shameless plug coming: I've been happy with my Nokia N800. Cheaper than the Foleo was announced to be; not tied (even in imagination) to a Treo I don't want; a good fraction of laptop functionality but *wonderfully* portable; Linux, and some neat little apps available to fill in the details Nokia forgot. Downside: at my age, I need rather strong reading glasses to use it.
Two years ago I went to a talk by Carmack. He began by saying, "We've built four vehicles and crashed three." or something close to that. He's not overly optimistic; he expects to lose a few. The first three crashes just weren't reported as widely.
I'll comment on this and then I'll play devil's advocate. The susceptibility of voters to TV ads, and the expense of TV ads, mean that politicians are going to need money. I don't have an answer to this either. I have no confidence in Al Gore's proposed answer, but I'll give him credit for trying, much as I dislike him. If people really do start watching less network TV, it may help. Now, look at Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter" (not the book, the blog post on Cato last year). He points out that when ill-informed, ill-educated voters are left to make decisions, they sometimes make economically destructive ones. To which I replied, on a blog that nobody reads (my own), that when politicians are influenced by businesses, some of those economically destructive proposals don't turn into laws, because businesses don't like having their profits destructed. So a measure of corruption (though definitely less than now exists!) is in fact desirable, and pushing more decisions to the people has serious risks.
They're being bought by the campaign funding that they [think they] need in order to stay in office. For most of them, the real draw is power, not money ... they use money to get power. (And power to get interns.)
But don't blame the monetary system as such. Before there was paper money, or National Debt, or any credit system as we know it now, governments (which is to say, kings and princes and dukes) had strong desires to spend more money than they could easily raise by taxation, so they borrowed it. This meant that bankers could attain enormous political power ... search "Cosimo de Medici" for a possible example (but no, I am not an expert on Italian history).
As in, the real scandal isn't the kids who drop out; it's the ones who graduate without knowing enough to earn what their brains are worth. (We do occasionally see media stories about them, to be sure.) Partly it's a problem that no mass-production education system is going to solve perfectly: on the one hand, give every kid the education that they can make best use of, vocational for some and academic for others; on the other hand, never close off any educational option, for fear the parents will kick up a fuss. My country (the UK) went with a vocational/academic split in the 1940s, and it worked very well for some kids who would have suffered badly under the previous system ... but we abandoned it in the 1960s and decided to teach everyone the same. That is now being half-heartedly reconsidered ... no bureaucracy, and certainly no politician, likes to admit to a mistake. Private schools can be more flexible.
Ekh, that's the business model General Motors is credited with pioneering some decades ago. Back then GM had something like 60% market share. Now they have 25% if they're lucky. Those who won't learn from history ....
See http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1013/p01s01-usec.htm l or, for a more British orientation, http://www.abi.org.uk/climatechange Companies pay attention when their insurance premiums change, and insurance companies pay attention when the probability of major disasters seems to be going up. These outfits are in business to make money (in a fiercely competitive industry), not to frighten people. I'm sure someone will accuse them of peddling scare stories, but it will be harder to make the accusation stick.