Consensus has no place in scientific discourse. Galileo was not a consensus kind of guy.
How many people in some category (such as how many scientists) share the same opinion on a subject has no bearing on the search for truth about that subject. It definitely has an effect on the politics involved, but that is not science. That is politics. Setting up a carbon credit system is politics, maybe good, maybe not, but definitely something involving politics (and a little engineering), but not science. Choosing who gets the research grants is politics and has nothing to do with the underlying science of the proposed research.
Make sure you understand the distinction between science and politics. Recognize that there are a lot of people with political motivations who want to have you confused about that distinction.
ZipLock freezer bags, double bagged for extra safety. Take a couple into the store when you are trying out their phones to find a touch screen that works for you under plastic.
Plus, the sales guy will find it disconcerting, especially if you don't tell him why. That's usually a good thing.
I understand the logic. But my reality is not as limited as that suggested by parent post.
1) I kayak in estuaries ("you are in a maze of twisty channels that are all alike...") and bicycle in towns that I do not know well. I needed to get a personal GPS as soon as I could afford one.
2) My primary computer is my netbook because I can take it everywhere so it sees much more activity than my desktop workstation. Having secure wifi access at any park bench or cafe table I set down to has become important to my life style.
It turns out that my Android w/ Google's tracking app and Verizon wireless was the lowest cost hardware I could find that would give me both of these. And does so in one gadget-- very nice. Also, the built in camera is good enough to take reference photos (I do some 3D modeling), and the barcode reader app has proven to be a convenient way to do pre-purchase research when in Staples or at the grocery store.
The wifi router function is good enough that I have dropped my wired connection and run my 3 computer household on it. Cost of basic phone service and 7 GB/mo (enough for my needs) is lower than the combined cost of my old cell phone and Comcast subscriptions.
Oh yeah, I sometimes make phone calls with the thing. For that, it is... adequate. I would probably be happier if I got a bluetooth ear dangle but I cannot justify the added cost and hassle of yet another gadget.
There are a tonne of apps and gizmos available for this thing and I guess that's fine for the kids. I ignore them; not part of my lifestyle.
So, if you're NH IT, pre-law, you do due diligence when selecting software
Talk about wild ass assumptions. In the real world, due diligence is only done when there is no way to avoid its costs. If Microsoft Office has been in use by all the Department of Motor Vehicle clerks since 1997, then prior to this law there has been no need to consider doing anything but buying into its next upgrade. Even if that means replacing all the desktop computers with new models that can handle the new software.
This law requires some people to actually start thinking instead of coasting on other persons' decisions-- that were often made before they even graduated and got their first jobs.
New Hampshire: a state that you should not take for granite.
With that statement, any choice can be made. It is impossible to legislate what people "should" do, particularly when dealing with large bureaucracies.
While true, this requires the minions to say so in writing, with their names attached. Which provides the demi-minions above them with grounds for low performance ratings, and so on up to the top of the heap. Where a challenger for some elected position could accuse the incumbent of failing to control costs, etc, using all these brief reports as concrete ammunition.
I have been employed by an agency of the Federal government, never for any State governments, but I believe when it comes to the hired staff they all work the same way. If you make the civil servants have to state their reasons for decisions in any kind of written report, suddenly those decisions become a lot more rational. They don't know who their boss will be after the next election, and if they want to advance, they've got to be good at covering their asses.
Looks to me like NH has found a way to make the CYA attitudes of its Sybil serpents work for the benefit of the populace. Way to go, Granite State!
I did not read TFA to its end; part way through it I realized that I had not re-enabled my browser protections (Noscript, etc) after disabling them while diagnosing a connectivity problem yesterday. And with the protections working, I cannot get that link to load. Go figure.
But I got far enough into the article to see that he was using psychomotor learning as an example. And while clearly playing tennis or riding a bicycle requires developing a whole lot of different motor skills simultaneously such that they are best developed in round robin fashion, I do not see how this kind of learning has much to do with cognitive learning or affective learning. Does TFA get into that later on, or is TFA a useless generalization of something that works for learning snowboarding skills that has no application to the physics of snowboarding (cognitive stuff) or handling the adrenaline rush when you've just grabbed 40 feet of air and realize you do not have a real good landing zone ahead (affective learning).
I often take notes in lectures and discussions. Not that anyone else would be able to learn from them.
Where the notes become useful to me is when I "transcribe" them into a journal, which I try to do before my memory goes stale. Developing the journal entry often involves consulting textbooks, google, etc, and is where I really come to grips with the new material. The notes are an aid in guiding this process and are barely more than a list of new vocabluary words in enough context to google effectively.
The journal entry is often a WORN thing (write once, read never). When I try to wrestle new concepts into my own words, I am learning soemthing, but the words I end up with are generally a very rough first draft, useless of itself and very rarely worth any further effort. But a byproduct of the process is that I have learned something.
Use a wiki, like this one, for the web site where invitees could participate. Post their congratulations, etc.
Do the circuit board thing as well, silver on white sounds good. Don't fuss about making it functional; instead make it something people would want to display in their living room.
Include a QR code to the web site on the PCB board (would prob'ly need something more contrasty than silver on white though)
The web site would also be the place to post wedding photos, etc. And possibly other milestones of your twosomeness: birth announcements, kids' graduations, etc.
I have no way of knowing if poster of parent is an instance of the class. Yet this is the kind of logic/response that would be expected from those who earn their living selling SEO strategies.
Google's actions are going to piss off those who make a living by trying to outsmart its rating system. There is no other way that it could be.
Thanks for this post, it inspired me to look more closely at my Adblock Plus settings. I have turned on the "allow unobtrusive ads" feature and I think that this will make it easier for me to find some things. I can always turn it off again.
Google is now feeling pressure from Bing (why do feel the urge to write that as 'Bling'?) and this is an excellent move in differentiating its main product from competitors. It is now offering something a large segment of the market is going to appreciate rather than attempting to be everything to all customers.
I may be mistaken, but I do not believe any other search engine has the resources and sophistication to do the kind of analysis that this approach requires on the kind of scale involved. It looks like an excellent way for Google to leverage its strengths in differentiating its product from the competition.
I use Adblockplus, Noscript, and Betterprivacy so on first approximation what Google has done would not seem to affect my browsing habits much: I generally do not see the ads in question anyway. But on looking more closely at what is going on, this move by Google is likely to cause a lot of marginally useful web designers to start using better practices, and that will tend to make everyone's web experience somewhat better, including my own.
And if I use the new Google, which I probably will, I will be less apt to spend my time on shoddy web sites.
The USA can confiscate any equipment and shut down any operations that Megaupload is conducting within the USA's jurisdiction. There are international laws preventing the USA from taking direct action on anything outside its borders.
That New Zealand police are cooperating with law enforcement of the USA does not mean that the persons arrested in NZ are destined to be extradited. That will be a matter for the NZ courts to decide, and should depend on whether the USA laws that were alledgedly broken have any NZ counterparts. If there are none, or if the nearest similar law is substantively different between the two countries, then the NZ courts should block extradition. For instance, if the USA punishment for an offense is the death penalty but NZ does not recognize capital punishment, there might not be any extradition even in a murder case. Which this is not; this concerns a lot of "petty theft" where no single violation of the law amounted to more than $20US damage.
So this may not end up in USA courts at all. It might be that a NZ court could determine that the stupidly inflated fines for copyright infringement in the USA are too far out of line with more rational NZ laws and extradition cannot be done.
The mafias and the FBI are taking something of a risk with this one.
The fire can be started while the vehicle is inside of the garage and there is a room above where family members are sleeping.
Well, actually such a fire can start inside a garage even when there are no family members sleeping in the room above. In fact the risk is the same even if there is no room above the garage.
Sunday morning pedantry. Well, I have done my part. Time to wake up.
I had to re-read that bit about adding 12,000 volts to steel plates a couple of times before it made sense (still working on my first pot of coffee of the day).
But it made me realize that Chevie has picked a poor name for their electric car. We are doomed to see electrifying headlines about damage when a bus gets hit by 12 volts, etc.
To be perfectly honest, I am not yet satisfied that I know what "any of the stuff that would be useful in getting a real job" is, at least not at the level where I can articulate it. What you suggest,
...any of the stuff that would teach them to actually think, for themselves, beyond the confines of chosen orthodoxies...
is certainly part of it, but there is more, that has to do with what "a real job" is. I think part of what has happened is that somewhere along the way the whole concept of "wealth" got shuffled out of the public discourse and without that concept, we can only talk about finances and money. And not about what would make a wealthy life, which has something to do with what a "real job" would be. It is as if everyone is talking about inches and centimeters, but no one knows any more what the measurements are supposed to represent. How much wealth is there in a hundred dollars? Or in a month's salary? There should be some meaning in those questions, but frankly I do not see it; the language has failed. I think through atrophy of the word "wealth".
Read the post again. I never said that there was an "organized system to create unemployed, in debt college graduates". You are the one who has brought that assumption, along with a load of other biases, to this discussion. What we have in the broken down USA education system is the product of a mindless evolutionary process where all the players are making the very best decisions they know how to make.
Which is really the tragedy of the whole thing. All these persons who take such pride in their intellectual accomplishments but are unable to look at the system they are participating in an objective manner. All these highly trained minds that continue their mindless group-think like so many lemmings going to the sea cliff.
Please, if you are going to lambast me for stating my biases, at least lambast me for the biases I have, and not the ones that you think I should have.
"Iron monoxide" is a perfectly cromulent synonym for ferrous oxide.Like dihydrogen monoxide, and hydrogen hydroxide, it is sometimes the better choice for clear communications. Depending of course on exactly what you intend to communicate.
Catch the suckers while they are young, hook them with blue sky visions of grand careers. Milk them, but oh so gently so their tits don't get sore, with student loans that will put them in debt for years to come. What better way could there be to assure that your tenured nest is comfortably feathered? Of course you want to do this in such a way that not only will they pay and pay for their undergraduate years, but they will also desperately seek to continue the experience by doing post graduate studies, with yet more loans. Gee, if you structure it right, you can make sure that in order to avoid facing a debt they do not have the skills to pay down, they will need to keep learning all the stuff you do not mind teaching, and that they have no time left over to learn any of the stuff that would be useful in getting a real job.
A lot of employers really like the idea of having a pool of warm bodies to draw from when they need more help. A student with a B.S. or B.A. is a wonderful thing to hire, because they have demonstrated that they know how to be mushrooms (one hand washes the other, you have to go along to get along, etc) and they have these wonderfully huge debts to pay off so they cannot just walk away. It doesn't matter to the employer what the degree is in; all baccalaureates are interchangeable cogs as far as they are concerned. What matters is that college graduates have proven that they have what it takes to keep themselves in the dark and eat whatever sh*t is fed to them, and that they have fscking huge debts so that when you push them a little beyond their moral or ethical boundaries, they will go along with it rather than facing an unemployment line.
In the USA, it has taken more than 50 years for colleges, businesses, and government (student loan programs, etc) to develop this neocolonial system of eating its young. The system has not grown very fast, chiefly because it depends on a kind of doublethink blindness of what is really happening among its supporters, and you can never build things at speed when you need to keep one hand from knowing what the other is doing. But at this point the overwhelming majority of professors, business leaders, and civil servants who administer the programs are products of the system itself. That is, any tenured professor with less than 30 years in his c.v. is a product of the system itself and learned how to go along to get along, not to look too closely at what is happening around him, etc, etc. It lets them preserve the fantasy that they are really good people who are doing the best that can be done in a bad situation.
"After seeing these filings I can't help but note the irony (and hubris) of a company choosing to name itself Oracle when it seems to be incapable of "giving wise or authoritative decisions or opinions."
I think that's a serious weakness of the Hanke-Henry proposal
I am working on a piece of fiction set in an alternate reality that uses a calendar based on the Earth's orbit: Jan 1 is always on Perihelion Day (varies from Jan 2 to Jan 4 in current calendar); Mar 15 is always on First Equinox Day; etc. The advantage is that each calendar day is always tied to a specific spot in the Earth's orbit (within 1 degree). This makes it much easier to estimate delivery times of interplanetary trade ships, etc. On a local level, it makes it easier for farmers, including solar power farms, to predict future activities.
Additionally, this fictional calendar uses the year that the first light from the Crab Nebula supernova was seen as year one (1054 CE). It is thought that this will make it easier to handle certain communication issues during first contact situations, but it also completely secularizes the common calendar, reducing one source of friction in a world plagued with religious intolerance and terrorism.
For anyone interested, The Prologue of the story, Artie Wood and his Electric Flying Machine, has a bit more about this. Scroll down to the "About Time" section.
Well, since you asked, range of breadth is like depth of draft, only horizontally.
It so happens that the University of Melbourne offers baccalaureate degrees in range of breadth studies. This is apparently better than majoring in one subject while also completing a minor in another subject. Or maybe it has something to do with the flip in the Coriolis effect on that far side of the equator. As you are probably aware by now, I am no expert in these areas.
Well, if it's all just a symbolic structure, then I guess the beliefs themselves don't really matter much, huh? You could swap in Earth Mama for God, and Shiva for Jesus, and the algebra would still work the same.
This is probably a discussion better continued with your Pastor, Rabbi, or High Priestess (or similar personage, depending on your faith). You could print these posts out and bring them to Sunday School. That would probably generate an interesting discussion about the differences between beliefs and symbols.
Think about it and you will realize that more than 95% of posters who attempt to correct errors in grammar or spelling are called Grammar Nazis, Spelling Nazis or Soup Nazis.
And more than 80% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Slashdot Mirror
Consensus has no place in scientific discourse. Galileo was not a consensus kind of guy.
How many people in some category (such as how many scientists) share the same opinion on a subject has no bearing on the search for truth about that subject. It definitely has an effect on the politics involved, but that is not science. That is politics. Setting up a carbon credit system is politics, maybe good, maybe not, but definitely something involving politics (and a little engineering), but not science. Choosing who gets the research grants is politics and has nothing to do with the underlying science of the proposed research.
Make sure you understand the distinction between science and politics. Recognize that there are a lot of people with political motivations who want to have you confused about that distinction.
ZipLock freezer bags, double bagged for extra safety. Take a couple into the store when you are trying out their phones to find a touch screen that works for you under plastic.
Plus, the sales guy will find it disconcerting, especially if you don't tell him why. That's usually a good thing.
I understand the logic. But my reality is not as limited as that suggested by parent post.
1) I kayak in estuaries ("you are in a maze of twisty channels that are all alike...") and bicycle in towns that I do not know well. I needed to get a personal GPS as soon as I could afford one.
2) My primary computer is my netbook because I can take it everywhere so it sees much more activity than my desktop workstation. Having secure wifi access at any park bench or cafe table I set down to has become important to my life style.
It turns out that my Android w/ Google's tracking app and Verizon wireless was the lowest cost hardware I could find that would give me both of these. And does so in one gadget-- very nice. Also, the built in camera is good enough to take reference photos (I do some 3D modeling), and the barcode reader app has proven to be a convenient way to do pre-purchase research when in Staples or at the grocery store. The wifi router function is good enough that I have dropped my wired connection and run my 3 computer household on it. Cost of basic phone service and 7 GB/mo (enough for my needs) is lower than the combined cost of my old cell phone and Comcast subscriptions.
Oh yeah, I sometimes make phone calls with the thing. For that, it is... adequate. I would probably be happier if I got a bluetooth ear dangle but I cannot justify the added cost and hassle of yet another gadget.
There are a tonne of apps and gizmos available for this thing and I guess that's fine for the kids. I ignore them; not part of my lifestyle.
So, if you're NH IT, pre-law, you do due diligence when selecting software
Talk about wild ass assumptions. In the real world, due diligence is only done when there is no way to avoid its costs. If Microsoft Office has been in use by all the Department of Motor Vehicle clerks since 1997, then prior to this law there has been no need to consider doing anything but buying into its next upgrade. Even if that means replacing all the desktop computers with new models that can handle the new software.
This law requires some people to actually start thinking instead of coasting on other persons' decisions-- that were often made before they even graduated and got their first jobs.
New Hampshire: a state that you should not take for granite.
"Didn't meet our requirements."
With that statement, any choice can be made. It is impossible to legislate what people "should" do, particularly when dealing with large bureaucracies.
While true, this requires the minions to say so in writing, with their names attached. Which provides the demi-minions above them with grounds for low performance ratings, and so on up to the top of the heap. Where a challenger for some elected position could accuse the incumbent of failing to control costs, etc, using all these brief reports as concrete ammunition.
I have been employed by an agency of the Federal government, never for any State governments, but I believe when it comes to the hired staff they all work the same way. If you make the civil servants have to state their reasons for decisions in any kind of written report, suddenly those decisions become a lot more rational. They don't know who their boss will be after the next election, and if they want to advance, they've got to be good at covering their asses.
Looks to me like NH has found a way to make the CYA attitudes of its Sybil serpents work for the benefit of the populace. Way to go, Granite State!
I did not read TFA to its end; part way through it I realized that I had not re-enabled my browser protections (Noscript, etc) after disabling them while diagnosing a connectivity problem yesterday. And with the protections working, I cannot get that link to load. Go figure.
But I got far enough into the article to see that he was using psychomotor learning as an example. And while clearly playing tennis or riding a bicycle requires developing a whole lot of different motor skills simultaneously such that they are best developed in round robin fashion, I do not see how this kind of learning has much to do with cognitive learning or affective learning. Does TFA get into that later on, or is TFA a useless generalization of something that works for learning snowboarding skills that has no application to the physics of snowboarding (cognitive stuff) or handling the adrenaline rush when you've just grabbed 40 feet of air and realize you do not have a real good landing zone ahead (affective learning).
I often take notes in lectures and discussions. Not that anyone else would be able to learn from them.
Where the notes become useful to me is when I "transcribe" them into a journal, which I try to do before my memory goes stale. Developing the journal entry often involves consulting textbooks, google, etc, and is where I really come to grips with the new material. The notes are an aid in guiding this process and are barely more than a list of new vocabluary words in enough context to google effectively.
The journal entry is often a WORN thing (write once, read never). When I try to wrestle new concepts into my own words, I am learning soemthing, but the words I end up with are generally a very rough first draft, useless of itself and very rarely worth any further effort. But a byproduct of the process is that I have learned something.
Parent post is the best idea yet.
Improvements I'd suggest include:
Use a wiki, like this one, for the web site where invitees could participate. Post their congratulations, etc.
Do the circuit board thing as well, silver on white sounds good. Don't fuss about making it functional; instead make it something people would want to display in their living room.
Include a QR code to the web site on the PCB board (would prob'ly need something more contrasty than silver on white though)
The web site would also be the place to post wedding photos, etc. And possibly other milestones of your twosomeness: birth announcements, kids' graduations, etc.
I have no way of knowing if poster of parent is an instance of the class. Yet this is the kind of logic/response that would be expected from those who earn their living selling SEO strategies.
Google's actions are going to piss off those who make a living by trying to outsmart its rating system. There is no other way that it could be.
Thanks for this post, it inspired me to look more closely at my Adblock Plus settings. I have turned on the "allow unobtrusive ads" feature and I think that this will make it easier for me to find some things. I can always turn it off again.
I do not disagree but I do think that there is a big difference between content and advertisements. Maybe that is an unAmerican attitude, though?
I don't think parent post has it right.
Google is now feeling pressure from Bing (why do feel the urge to write that as 'Bling'?) and this is an excellent move in differentiating its main product from competitors. It is now offering something a large segment of the market is going to appreciate rather than attempting to be everything to all customers.
I may be mistaken, but I do not believe any other search engine has the resources and sophistication to do the kind of analysis that this approach requires on the kind of scale involved. It looks like an excellent way for Google to leverage its strengths in differentiating its product from the competition.
I use Adblockplus, Noscript, and Betterprivacy so on first approximation what Google has done would not seem to affect my browsing habits much: I generally do not see the ads in question anyway. But on looking more closely at what is going on, this move by Google is likely to cause a lot of marginally useful web designers to start using better practices, and that will tend to make everyone's web experience somewhat better, including my own.
And if I use the new Google, which I probably will, I will be less apt to spend my time on shoddy web sites.
The USA can confiscate any equipment and shut down any operations that Megaupload is conducting within the USA's jurisdiction. There are international laws preventing the USA from taking direct action on anything outside its borders.
That New Zealand police are cooperating with law enforcement of the USA does not mean that the persons arrested in NZ are destined to be extradited. That will be a matter for the NZ courts to decide, and should depend on whether the USA laws that were alledgedly broken have any NZ counterparts. If there are none, or if the nearest similar law is substantively different between the two countries, then the NZ courts should block extradition. For instance, if the USA punishment for an offense is the death penalty but NZ does not recognize capital punishment, there might not be any extradition even in a murder case. Which this is not; this concerns a lot of "petty theft" where no single violation of the law amounted to more than $20US damage.
So this may not end up in USA courts at all. It might be that a NZ court could determine that the stupidly inflated fines for copyright infringement in the USA are too far out of line with more rational NZ laws and extradition cannot be done.
The mafias and the FBI are taking something of a risk with this one.
Perhaps it is just the Sunday morning sleepies, but this whole discussion about taking away the legitimacy of ferrous oxide strikes me as ironic.
The fire can be started while the vehicle is inside of the garage and there is a room above where family members are sleeping.
Well, actually such a fire can start inside a garage even when there are no family members sleeping in the room above. In fact the risk is the same even if there is no room above the garage.
Sunday morning pedantry. Well, I have done my part. Time to wake up.
I had to re-read that bit about adding 12,000 volts to steel plates a couple of times before it made sense (still working on my first pot of coffee of the day).
But it made me realize that Chevie has picked a poor name for their electric car. We are doomed to see electrifying headlines about damage when a bus gets hit by 12 volts, etc.
Stupid stupid name.
To be perfectly honest, I am not yet satisfied that I know what "any of the stuff that would be useful in getting a real job" is, at least not at the level where I can articulate it. What you suggest,
...any of the stuff that would teach them to actually think, for themselves, beyond the confines of chosen orthodoxies...
is certainly part of it, but there is more, that has to do with what "a real job" is. I think part of what has happened is that somewhere along the way the whole concept of "wealth" got shuffled out of the public discourse and without that concept, we can only talk about finances and money. And not about what would make a wealthy life, which has something to do with what a "real job" would be. It is as if everyone is talking about inches and centimeters, but no one knows any more what the measurements are supposed to represent. How much wealth is there in a hundred dollars? Or in a month's salary? There should be some meaning in those questions, but frankly I do not see it; the language has failed. I think through atrophy of the word "wealth".
Read the post again. I never said that there was an "organized system to create unemployed, in debt college graduates". You are the one who has brought that assumption, along with a load of other biases, to this discussion. What we have in the broken down USA education system is the product of a mindless evolutionary process where all the players are making the very best decisions they know how to make.
Which is really the tragedy of the whole thing. All these persons who take such pride in their intellectual accomplishments but are unable to look at the system they are participating in an objective manner. All these highly trained minds that continue their mindless group-think like so many lemmings going to the sea cliff.
Please, if you are going to lambast me for stating my biases, at least lambast me for the biases I have, and not the ones that you think I should have.
"Iron monoxide" is a perfectly cromulent synonym for ferrous oxide.Like dihydrogen monoxide, and hydrogen hydroxide, it is sometimes the better choice for clear communications. Depending of course on exactly what you intend to communicate.
Collegiate neocolonialism is a more fitting term.
Catch the suckers while they are young, hook them with blue sky visions of grand careers. Milk them, but oh so gently so their tits don't get sore, with student loans that will put them in debt for years to come. What better way could there be to assure that your tenured nest is comfortably feathered? Of course you want to do this in such a way that not only will they pay and pay for their undergraduate years, but they will also desperately seek to continue the experience by doing post graduate studies, with yet more loans. Gee, if you structure it right, you can make sure that in order to avoid facing a debt they do not have the skills to pay down, they will need to keep learning all the stuff you do not mind teaching, and that they have no time left over to learn any of the stuff that would be useful in getting a real job.
A lot of employers really like the idea of having a pool of warm bodies to draw from when they need more help. A student with a B.S. or B.A. is a wonderful thing to hire, because they have demonstrated that they know how to be mushrooms (one hand washes the other, you have to go along to get along, etc) and they have these wonderfully huge debts to pay off so they cannot just walk away. It doesn't matter to the employer what the degree is in; all baccalaureates are interchangeable cogs as far as they are concerned. What matters is that college graduates have proven that they have what it takes to keep themselves in the dark and eat whatever sh*t is fed to them, and that they have fscking huge debts so that when you push them a little beyond their moral or ethical boundaries, they will go along with it rather than facing an unemployment line.
In the USA, it has taken more than 50 years for colleges, businesses, and government (student loan programs, etc) to develop this neocolonial system of eating its young. The system has not grown very fast, chiefly because it depends on a kind of doublethink blindness of what is really happening among its supporters, and you can never build things at speed when you need to keep one hand from knowing what the other is doing. But at this point the overwhelming majority of professors, business leaders, and civil servants who administer the programs are products of the system itself. That is, any tenured professor with less than 30 years in his c.v. is a product of the system itself and learned how to go along to get along, not to look too closely at what is happening around him, etc, etc. It lets them preserve the fantasy that they are really good people who are doing the best that can be done in a bad situation.
"After seeing these filings I can't help but note the irony (and hubris) of a company choosing to name itself Oracle when it seems to be incapable of "giving wise or authoritative decisions or opinions."
... except equinoxes and solstices...
I think that's a serious weakness of the Hanke-Henry proposal
I am working on a piece of fiction set in an alternate reality that uses a calendar based on the Earth's orbit: Jan 1 is always on Perihelion Day (varies from Jan 2 to Jan 4 in current calendar); Mar 15 is always on First Equinox Day; etc. The advantage is that each calendar day is always tied to a specific spot in the Earth's orbit (within 1 degree). This makes it much easier to estimate delivery times of interplanetary trade ships, etc. On a local level, it makes it easier for farmers, including solar power farms, to predict future activities.
Additionally, this fictional calendar uses the year that the first light from the Crab Nebula supernova was seen as year one (1054 CE). It is thought that this will make it easier to handle certain communication issues during first contact situations, but it also completely secularizes the common calendar, reducing one source of friction in a world plagued with religious intolerance and terrorism.
For anyone interested, The Prologue of the story, Artie Wood and his Electric Flying Machine, has a bit more about this. Scroll down to the "About Time" section.
Well, since you asked, range of breadth is like depth of draft, only horizontally.
It so happens that the University of Melbourne offers baccalaureate degrees in range of breadth studies. This is apparently better than majoring in one subject while also completing a minor in another subject. Or maybe it has something to do with the flip in the Coriolis effect on that far side of the equator. As you are probably aware by now, I am no expert in these areas.
Oh.
Well, if it's all just a symbolic structure, then I guess the beliefs themselves don't really matter much, huh? You could swap in Earth Mama for God, and Shiva for Jesus, and the algebra would still work the same.
This is probably a discussion better continued with your Pastor, Rabbi, or High Priestess (or similar personage, depending on your faith). You could print these posts out and bring them to Sunday School. That would probably generate an interesting discussion about the differences between beliefs and symbols.
Continuing this on Slashdot would be foolishness.
Are you one of the Grammar Nazis?
Think about it and you will realize that more than 95% of posters who attempt to correct errors in grammar or spelling are called Grammar Nazis, Spelling Nazis or Soup Nazis.
And more than 80% of all statistics are made up on the spot.