You get two levels. We have Florida, a part of the United States. You have England, a part of Britain, a part of Great Britain a part of the United Kingdom, a part of the Commonwealth of Nations.
And Florida is called a state, and the United States is called a country. Every level with the exception of the Commonwealth is called a country. But only the UK has a foreign policy, to the best of my knowledge, although for some reason the UK gets four teams in FIFA.
But most seriously, given how other people are likely to be confused, and given our assumption that the UK government would be making daylight savings time rules, I would assume that whomever said England meant the UK.
While I am not a fan boy of Apple and don't run their stuff I must admit they do it right. The combination of innovate ideas, first out of the shoot and an eye to style has always had MS drooling.
What? Apple has always arrived second or worse (well, with the exception of the 80's.) They're just very very good at taking the bleeding edge and exposing it to other users. I had a touch-screen (Windows) smart phone several years before the iPhone. It worked great, and ran Office and other apps. Apple just was very good at taking a geeky thing and bringing it to the masses. See also: MP3 player, tablet PCs, *nix.
Now add Google in the mix and Android and just what is left for MS? They run a distant 3rd at best and frankly if they did have tech at the helm its too little too late in my opinion.
Oh how short your memory. Remember when the XBox was an also ran behind Sony and Nintendo. And frankly, Android took off in large part because the iPhone was AT&T exclusive. Otherwise Apple would have that market so locked down that Google would be at the window looking in as well. But MS will build that market share. I doubt the Windows 7 phone will do it, but the Windows 8 phone....
Since I'm getting a new phone soon, and you seem to be an Android fan, what's the advantage of Android over an iPhone?
Except your artificial dividing line isn't actually used by scientists. Again, the overwhelming majority of scientists accept evolution, particularly those scientists in fields related to biology.
The point of science class is to teach science, not to give comfort to anti-science kooks.
Yes, the point of science class is to teach science. First, if giving religious fundamentalists a fig leaf (so to speak) to learn science while still believing in creationism, then more science is taught. First, they don't disrupt the class. Second, and more importantly, they are open to learning some science. No one ever convinced anyone they were wrong but a drip at a time.
To address your other point, science class is to teach science. Science doesn't have to oppose religion, even when religion says something historical directly contradicted by science ( that is, predictive knowledge... snake bites cure diseases science can contradict, but historical knowledge always includes the caveat "And our deity just changed something outside the laws of nature." Not saying any time should be devoted to that possibility in a science class, except to allow the students who would otherwise ignore the teacher being receptive to their words.
The kids have to pass the goddamned tests, whether they agree with what they're being tested on or not. The tests should not be massaged with weasel words and dubious concepts.
I agree the test should not be massaged with weasel words, but fuck the rest of your statement. Kids should learn because it exposes them to new ways of thinking. Because they they know more and can make better decisions. Because it benefits them and society. Fuck having to learn anything because it's on a test. The test is nothing but a metric designed to measure things we care about. It should always be considered a means and never an end.
I don't claim any special pedagogic knowledge either, but I'd say your entire first paragraph (minus the last sentence) would be the best way to have gone forward. It's reasonable to expect a child to understand the evidence and the reasoning. And that girl would probably have recognized that. And she has to be able to work with the world as other people see it.
I disagree on the "child abuse" line though. Since I don't see the conflict between science and religion, and happen to believe in both (well, a more nuanced version than the strawman you mocked), I don't see a problem with that
You can't let the creationists control the language. They know nothing about the subject, why would we humor them?
Because I want to convince people. The best way to convince people is to start with common ground. For instance, you want to convince children that evolution is accurate, like me. So you start with the more important half that they don't contradict. And then 1/3 of them will extrapolate that to different species, and 1/3 will once you tell them to, and 1/3 just are dumb anyway (fractions invented). Then you get more kids understanding the mechanism and what it means for the future. And if they want to disbelieve the past, I don't give a shit. Because it's science, not history; I care about educating children so they can do stuff in the future. I don't care about winning a point.
Sure, change the terms. But you can watch yeast evolve in a few days to be more tolerant of alcohol. Strong foundations and all.
No, some branches of philosophy do this. Certainly not all.
I dispute your point by asking what branch of philosophy is evidence driven. But honestly, while I'm interested in the answer, I find this offtopic. I dispute your unstated assumption that somehow I'm incorrect because I described what a field did when it's a subfield that does it. The same assine reply could be used to say that "science doesn't study atoms" or "physics doesn't study atoms".
you can embrace that level of Cartesian doubt. All you've done is make everything provisional. Guess what? That's the way science already treats knowledge.
No, science makes certain key assumptions. Without the axioms of causality and consistency (of the rules of science), there is no scientific method, no validating experiments, etc. Science may revisit its results, and refine its methodology to isolate problems/rectify misconceptions. But it can never revisit certain axioms.
Of course it does. I mean, it has only been the most wildly successful method for understanding the universe and bettering the human condition. There's no reason to hold it superior to bankrupt theologies which have nothing but drag humanity down and made us grovel to phantoms in the night.
Right. Science accomplished things. Science is a good tool. Science is not able to find Truth. It needs to recognize the distinction. Because, frankly, there have been plenty of tools that worked but had no Truth.
If you accord groundless assertions the same intellectual weight as empirical evidence, just shut down education, science and technology, because you've already given up on being rational
Hold up. Philosophy does this, and it practically epitomizes rationality. Science cannot prove it's own validity... we assume that the scientific method works, but there's a chance that tomorrow we'll wake up and find that causality was just a coincidence.
That's intellectually weighty, and you can have a conversation about it perfectly rationally.
That said, I'm still going to plan for the future. That is, science and empirical learning are great for planning the future. Wonderful for inventing stuff. A deeper understanding of how things are likely to react is always useful. And it's interesting.
What it isn't, is Truth. What it doesn't do is in any way disprove Adam and Eve, just means that the universe would have to have been created as though it were billions of years old.
That said, Truth doesn't belong in a science class. Science is useful and needs to be learned. But it needs to get over itself.
Advanced physics teaching that the sun goes around the earth?
I'd welcome that. After all, that's exactly as accurate as saying that the earth goes around the sun. In reality, they orbit the the a point (the center of the system's mass) that, while inside the sun, is not at the sun's center of mass.
Advanced anything should get away from spreading rules of thumb as rules of fact, and should not avoid adding complexity.
I'd like to preemptively state that I know I reduced a many-body problem to a 2 body problem. But I never learned how to properly solve the 3+ body problem:).
So teacher says something ala "Don't be ridiculous! That stuff you've been told isn't science, in fact it's all lies, and you won't pass the exams saying things like that."
Idiot teachers like that need to be disciplined or fired. First, you can teach without being an ass. There's not really an effective manner of communicating. Second, you cannot claim absolute truth in a science class. (If so, please scientifically disprove the brain in a jar thought experiment.) A proper 5 minute explanation of the difference between science and religion/philosophy would have been far more useful.
Simple, increase pay for teachers and slash taxes for them. Hell, that should be the norm, otherwise the government is taxing it's own money that it is givving to the teachers.
In the US, the counties pay the teachers, and the state and federal governments tax them. The state and federal governments also give money to the counties. But it's far simpler to have government employees pay taxes just like everyone else than deal with the complexities of exempting them, esp since multiple governments tax them.
I've long been confused by why so many Christians are so adamantly opposed to the principles behind evolution.
I agree with your analysis about the size of the universe/speed of light, and also how a 6000-year-old world is compatible with either. But the reason is fairly obvious. Adamant atheists framed the question as "evolution disproves genesis, which disproves the bible, which disproves Christianity... haha". Most people are poor at reframing debates, and thus attack the easiest part of that argument to refute... that evolution happened. That they do so in a naive manner is pretty understandable.
I also tend to agree that biology is no where near as useful as physics, but the idea that either is an elective is scary.
The way to deal with it is to tell the student that whether or not they accept evolution, the overwhelming majority of scientists do
That's a retarded position. First, micro-evolution, as an ongoing phenomenon, is science. And no one argues about it.
To not distinguish between that and the evolutionary origin of the species is doing these kids a disservice. Yes, the two are related, but understanding them both is important.
If a kid needs to believe that the world was created 6 thousand years ago, fine. But I'd rather have that kid, and have him understand the consequences of overusing anti-biotics than have a kid who understood macro-evolution but doesn't get evolving immunities.
So start by explaining microevolution, and explain how that leads to macroevolution. And then you can tell that kid that he's free to think that divine intervention replaced macroevolution (as consistent divine intervention can replace gravity), but that's a theological, not science, matter.
The "six or seven-figure ad budget" is a ridiculous statement considering that a single ad exec may make that much at major corporations. The video game I'm working on has an EIGHT FIGURE ad budget (i.e. over $10M). Starbucks does spend remarkably little on advertising but is still in the 8-figure range and there are chains like McDonalds that spend NINE FIGURES (i.e. $700M+) annually.
It's probably a perfectly accurate statement. Any company with a six-figure ad budget can afford these ads. Joe's Homemade Lemonade probably cannot. What's ridiculous is that you think only big players will do this, as opposed to practically every company of moderate size.
People are missing half the point; sure free energy is nice, but the price of copper is way too high. Bonus points for achieving a viable form of alchemy.
LOL. I'll never understand why it's so evil to make sure I don't see ads for products I'll never ever possibly consider buying (like tampons).
No one is concerned over that. They're concerned about the tracking/profile building/data mining necessary to do it. Just like most people have no problem with a homeowner shooting a criminal who has a gun in their house to prevent murder or rape, but some people think that the cost of getting to that action (people owning guns, the added risks in being able to find the intruder, the possibility of error, etc.) may be so high that they support gun control.
The company that provides the same amount of product (for less due to savings) with 10% of the workers is good for society
Sometimes it is (dishes and textile manufacture), sometimes it is in the short term but bad in the long term (agricultural lack of diversity), sometimes it's simply bad (don't hire all those people to clean up pollution, just dump it and externalize the cost.)
There's a moral difference as well. When you invent a process that uses half the raw materials, the worst case is that the resources get warehoused. With human capital, you're talking unemployment, starvation, and civil unrest. And not everyone gets used now. There's like 10% unemployment now, and there was 0% in the middle ages (except with nobility). And people aren't interchangable, so it's not like we can simpley have everyone only work 90% as hard.
At least in the past specialization was less, so free time could be distributed more equitably.
Actually, I didn't. I just tried it. Here's what it found for (random letters) in the past month: http://www.11news.us/01/asiasoft-passport.html On the first page. Yes, it's about an upcoming event in June 2010.
And I'm out of moderator points. Between the "oh, you're looking for something obscure... here's something that's spelled similarly" mentalality, and constantly returning pages from 2003 about technical subjects, it's pretty hard to find anything on Google that I care about. Except for using them to find large corporate sites.
Add the fact that spam copies are constantly higher than the original, and I see no solution.
If the dollar fails China will be SOL. No one to sell too and all those nice investments up in smoke.
China has been very good at taking the US dollars they've earned and investing them in 3rd world countries. China is diversified in a way that puts any company or government or billionaire to shame.
That would meanhe would have to respect research. Hell,the fucking article doesn't say that more features sell software. In fact, it says quite the opposite. It says solve a problem better than anyone else, without worrying about your competitors.It has good advice. But read it and discuss it with your boss. Especially the many paragraphs about the importance of spoiling your programmers. HEll, Sposky talks about why overtime is bad in Joel On Software.
I mean we're going to contaminate something that's been isolated for a long long time.
RTFA. They stopped for 18 years because of that worry. They have a way to prevent contamination. They'll use a thermal lance to finish the last of the hole, withdraw and wait for the water to re-freeze. Apparently, they will then be able to capture a small isolated bubble of the water next year. I don't get how that works, but they have been pretty careful.
They don't have to cry to the government to stop you winning by counting cards. They are allowed to simply bar you from gambling at their tables. There's no law that says they are REQUIRED to let everyone gamble.
According to "Bringing Down the House", while most casinos can simply ban you, in Atlantic City they cannot kick you out for counting cards. Oh, they'll enter you in a database that keeps you out of all other casinos, and they'll bring in a fresh deck every hand, and in general they will make it so you cannot win. But then cannot ban you.
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You get two levels. We have Florida, a part of the United States. You have England, a part of Britain, a part of Great Britain a part of the United Kingdom, a part of the Commonwealth of Nations.
And Florida is called a state, and the United States is called a country. Every level with the exception of the Commonwealth is called a country. But only the UK has a foreign policy, to the best of my knowledge, although for some reason the UK gets four teams in FIFA.
But most seriously, given how other people are likely to be confused, and given our assumption that the UK government would be making daylight savings time rules, I would assume that whomever said England meant the UK.
What? Apple has always arrived second or worse (well, with the exception of the 80's.) They're just very very good at taking the bleeding edge and exposing it to other users. I had a touch-screen (Windows) smart phone several years before the iPhone. It worked great, and ran Office and other apps. Apple just was very good at taking a geeky thing and bringing it to the masses. See also: MP3 player, tablet PCs, *nix.
Oh how short your memory. Remember when the XBox was an also ran behind Sony and Nintendo. And frankly, Android took off in large part because the iPhone was AT&T exclusive. Otherwise Apple would have that market so locked down that Google would be at the window looking in as well. But MS will build that market share. I doubt the Windows 7 phone will do it, but the Windows 8 phone....
Since I'm getting a new phone soon, and you seem to be an Android fan, what's the advantage of Android over an iPhone?
If you think I was implying the mechanisms were different, I was unclear. I was talking about outcomes. Hell, I'm clearly not the only one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution#Outcomes
Yes, the point of science class is to teach science. First, if giving religious fundamentalists a fig leaf (so to speak) to learn science while still believing in creationism, then more science is taught. First, they don't disrupt the class. Second, and more importantly, they are open to learning some science. No one ever convinced anyone they were wrong but a drip at a time.
To address your other point, science class is to teach science. Science doesn't have to oppose religion, even when religion says something historical directly contradicted by science ( that is, predictive knowledge... snake bites cure diseases science can contradict, but historical knowledge always includes the caveat "And our deity just changed something outside the laws of nature." Not saying any time should be devoted to that possibility in a science class, except to allow the students who would otherwise ignore the teacher being receptive to their words.
I agree the test should not be massaged with weasel words, but fuck the rest of your statement. Kids should learn because it exposes them to new ways of thinking. Because they they know more and can make better decisions. Because it benefits them and society. Fuck having to learn anything because it's on a test. The test is nothing but a metric designed to measure things we care about. It should always be considered a means and never an end.
I don't claim any special pedagogic knowledge either, but I'd say your entire first paragraph (minus the last sentence) would be the best way to have gone forward. It's reasonable to expect a child to understand the evidence and the reasoning. And that girl would probably have recognized that. And she has to be able to work with the world as other people see it.
I disagree on the "child abuse" line though. Since I don't see the conflict between science and religion, and happen to believe in both (well, a more nuanced version than the strawman you mocked), I don't see a problem with that
Because I want to convince people. The best way to convince people is to start with common ground. For instance, you want to convince children that evolution is accurate, like me. So you start with the more important half that they don't contradict. And then 1/3 of them will extrapolate that to different species, and 1/3 will once you tell them to, and 1/3 just are dumb anyway (fractions invented). Then you get more kids understanding the mechanism and what it means for the future. And if they want to disbelieve the past, I don't give a shit. Because it's science, not history; I care about educating children so they can do stuff in the future. I don't care about winning a point.
Sure, change the terms. But you can watch yeast evolve in a few days to be more tolerant of alcohol. Strong foundations and all.
I dispute your point by asking what branch of philosophy is evidence driven. But honestly, while I'm interested in the answer, I find this offtopic. I dispute your unstated assumption that somehow I'm incorrect because I described what a field did when it's a subfield that does it. The same assine reply could be used to say that "science doesn't study atoms" or "physics doesn't study atoms".
No, science makes certain key assumptions. Without the axioms of causality and consistency (of the rules of science), there is no scientific method, no validating experiments, etc. Science may revisit its results, and refine its methodology to isolate problems/rectify misconceptions. But it can never revisit certain axioms.
Right. Science accomplished things. Science is a good tool. Science is not able to find Truth. It needs to recognize the distinction. Because, frankly, there have been plenty of tools that worked but had no Truth.
Hold up. Philosophy does this, and it practically epitomizes rationality. Science cannot prove it's own validity... we assume that the scientific method works, but there's a chance that tomorrow we'll wake up and find that causality was just a coincidence.
That's intellectually weighty, and you can have a conversation about it perfectly rationally.
That said, I'm still going to plan for the future. That is, science and empirical learning are great for planning the future. Wonderful for inventing stuff. A deeper understanding of how things are likely to react is always useful. And it's interesting.
What it isn't, is Truth. What it doesn't do is in any way disprove Adam and Eve, just means that the universe would have to have been created as though it were billions of years old.
That said, Truth doesn't belong in a science class. Science is useful and needs to be learned. But it needs to get over itself.
I'd welcome that. After all, that's exactly as accurate as saying that the earth goes around the sun. In reality, they orbit the the a point (the center of the system's mass) that, while inside the sun, is not at the sun's center of mass.
Advanced anything should get away from spreading rules of thumb as rules of fact, and should not avoid adding complexity.
I'd like to preemptively state that I know I reduced a many-body problem to a 2 body problem. But I never learned how to properly solve the 3+ body problem :).
Idiot teachers like that need to be disciplined or fired. First, you can teach without being an ass. There's not really an effective manner of communicating. Second, you cannot claim absolute truth in a science class. (If so, please scientifically disprove the brain in a jar thought experiment.) A proper 5 minute explanation of the difference between science and religion/philosophy would have been far more useful.
In the US, the counties pay the teachers, and the state and federal governments tax them. The state and federal governments also give money to the counties. But it's far simpler to have government employees pay taxes just like everyone else than deal with the complexities of exempting them, esp since multiple governments tax them.
I agree with your analysis about the size of the universe/speed of light, and also how a 6000-year-old world is compatible with either. But the reason is fairly obvious. Adamant atheists framed the question as "evolution disproves genesis, which disproves the bible, which disproves Christianity... haha". Most people are poor at reframing debates, and thus attack the easiest part of that argument to refute... that evolution happened. That they do so in a naive manner is pretty understandable.
I also tend to agree that biology is no where near as useful as physics, but the idea that either is an elective is scary.
That's a retarded position. First, micro-evolution, as an ongoing phenomenon, is science. And no one argues about it.
To not distinguish between that and the evolutionary origin of the species is doing these kids a disservice. Yes, the two are related, but understanding them both is important.
If a kid needs to believe that the world was created 6 thousand years ago, fine. But I'd rather have that kid, and have him understand the consequences of overusing anti-biotics than have a kid who understood macro-evolution but doesn't get evolving immunities.
So start by explaining microevolution, and explain how that leads to macroevolution. And then you can tell that kid that he's free to think that divine intervention replaced macroevolution (as consistent divine intervention can replace gravity), but that's a theological, not science, matter.
Don't worry, you can turn off Unicode URLs in most browsers.
It's probably a perfectly accurate statement. Any company with a six-figure ad budget can afford these ads. Joe's Homemade Lemonade probably cannot. What's ridiculous is that you think only big players will do this, as opposed to practically every company of moderate size.
People are missing half the point; sure free energy is nice, but the price of copper is way too high. Bonus points for achieving a viable form of alchemy.
What class warfare?
No one is concerned over that. They're concerned about the tracking/profile building/data mining necessary to do it. Just like most people have no problem with a homeowner shooting a criminal who has a gun in their house to prevent murder or rape, but some people think that the cost of getting to that action (people owning guns, the added risks in being able to find the intruder, the possibility of error, etc.) may be so high that they support gun control.
Sometimes it is (dishes and textile manufacture), sometimes it is in the short term but bad in the long term (agricultural lack of diversity), sometimes it's simply bad (don't hire all those people to clean up pollution, just dump it and externalize the cost.)
There's a moral difference as well. When you invent a process that uses half the raw materials, the worst case is that the resources get warehoused. With human capital, you're talking unemployment, starvation, and civil unrest. And not everyone gets used now. There's like 10% unemployment now, and there was 0% in the middle ages (except with nobility). And people aren't interchangable, so it's not like we can simpley have everyone only work 90% as hard.
At least in the past specialization was less, so free time could be distributed more equitably.
Actually, I didn't. I just tried it. Here's what it found for (random letters) in the past month: http://www.11news.us/01/asiasoft-passport.html On the first page. Yes, it's about an upcoming event in June 2010.
And I'm out of moderator points. Between the "oh, you're looking for something obscure... here's something that's spelled similarly" mentalality, and constantly returning pages from 2003 about technical subjects, it's pretty hard to find anything on Google that I care about. Except for using them to find large corporate sites.
Add the fact that spam copies are constantly higher than the original, and I see no solution.
China has been very good at taking the US dollars they've earned and investing them in 3rd world countries. China is diversified in a way that puts any company or government or billionaire to shame.
That would meanhe would have to respect research. Hell,the fucking article doesn't say that more features sell software. In fact, it says quite the opposite. It says solve a problem better than anyone else, without worrying about your competitors.It has good advice. But read it and discuss it with your boss. Especially the many paragraphs about the importance of spoiling your programmers. HEll, Sposky talks about why overtime is bad in Joel On Software.
RTFA. They stopped for 18 years because of that worry. They have a way to prevent contamination. They'll use a thermal lance to finish the last of the hole, withdraw and wait for the water to re-freeze. Apparently, they will then be able to capture a small isolated bubble of the water next year. I don't get how that works, but they have been pretty careful.
Last year's already designed hardware. You have it backwards... if we don't write new software, who's going to need more RAM/speed/space?
According to "Bringing Down the House", while most casinos can simply ban you, in Atlantic City they cannot kick you out for counting cards. Oh, they'll enter you in a database that keeps you out of all other casinos, and they'll bring in a fresh deck every hand, and in general they will make it so you cannot win. But then cannot ban you.