America-bashing sucks, yes. But so does mindless chauvinistic patriotism. The fact of the matter is, there are ways in which America is seriously behind Europe and Asia (no, I'm not talking about MP4 wristwatches) and there's no reason we shouldn't learn from their experience. The mindless fury with which many Americans react to any suggestion that the USA is not absolutely, positively #1 in every single way is a much bigger problem for the country than anti-American bigotry... not to mention that a lot of the bigotry is a reaction to that particular type of arrogance.
I'm not usually one to rag on the editors for shitty or misleading summaries, but that one was completely pointless.
Um, the summary was pretty much taken from the title of the article, and it's reasonably well borne out. Also from TFA:
Not surprisingly, the majority of products we found are cell phones and PDAs not stocked by US cell phone carriers.
So yeah, maybe you can get that shiny new Japanese phone in the US, but it's not exactly useful. It's probably true that there are very few high-tech items you can't physically obtain here, but many of them depend on infrastructure that's just not present in that giant third-world country located between Canada and Mexico.
Look in the corporate space. Oracle is everywhere. SQLServer is around (not popular in my experience). Mysql is nowhere.
Define "coprorate space." Big companies tend to be Oracle or SQL Server shops, true; really big companies tend to be Oracle or DB2. But there are a lot of small and medium-sized businesses using MySQL -- and because there a lot more SMBs than there are megacorporations, and because DBA demand doesn't scale linearly (a 10,000-employee corporation doesn't need a hundred times as many DBAs as a hundred-employee corporation) there's plenty of MySQL work out there. Postgres, unfortunately, not so much.
The Constitution allows the President to suspend civil liberties (even habeas corpus) in cases of warfare, or for national defense. And the interesting thing is that the determination of national defense purposes lies with the executive branch.
Can you provide a citation on that? Article I, Section 9 states "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." -- but that is in Article I, which lays out the powers and limitations of Congress, not the President. Article II describes the role of the President, and I honestly can't see anything there that backs up your claim. (Not to mention that the US is neither in a state of rebellion nor being invaded at the moment.)
Jefferson was quite sane, and he knew that things had indeed gone beyond a political solution. But it should take a lot before anyone ever gets to that point. There had been mutterings about rebellion in the Colonies since at least the 1720's, but except for isolated local incidents (which were quickly crushed) it never came to anything before 1776, and up through 1770 or so most people thought, quite rightly, that the idea was pretty dumb, because the Colonies simply didn't have the resources to make it work.
Americans often don't realize how profoundly lucky we were, I think. Ours could very easily have been one in the long, depressing series of wars of colonial liberation in which the colonists Throw Off The Hated Chains Of Oppression only to descend into dictatorship. We were lucky that Washington didn't want a crown, lucky that it was Washington rather than Arnold who ended up as the hero of the day, deeply lucky that the authoritarians among the Founders generally didn't get their way. A million things could have gone wrong; we threaded the needle and -- just barely -- got it right. Meanwhile, South America and Africa have provided many tragic examples of how difficult this is.
Also, our "Revolution" was a war of colonial liberation, not a revolution in the ordinary sense; as bad as colonial rebellions often are, internal revolutions, attempts to replace a government in place by armed force, are generally worse. To tell the truth, I'm not sure I can think of a single example that's really worked out well -- and the ascending scale of horror represented by the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution show how easily they can work out badly.
Sometimes revolution is the best of several bad choices, yes. But that's the best it can ever be. People who talk about it casually have no idea what they're playing with.
It's just naive to wait for some politician to protect your privacy when you have the tools to insure this yourself.
As long as those tools are legal. The US already has ridiculous export restrictions on crypto (as though people in other countries aren't capable of writing this stuff on their own!) and IIRC, the UK government has argued for a central, government-run crypto key database, such that it would be illegal to encrypt anything in a way that law enforcement can't immediately crack. What's naive is thinking that just because the tools exist, you'll always be able to use them without getting your door kicked down in the middle of the night, a flashlight shined in your face as you're hauled out bed and cuffed, and a booming voice asking, "Citizen, what are you trying to hide?"
Short of armed revolution, which is not something that any sane person should want to become necessary, our best defense against government intrusion is to get politicians on board. Laws protecting citizens from abuses of power can and do work; for most of its existence, the Bill of Rights has been a sterling example. On those occasions when the government chooses to disregard these laws, it is the responsibility of We The People to put it back in its place -- and it is far preferable to do that with ballots than with bullets.
The argument that it's fake doesn't look all that convincing to me. Basically, it's saying "this story sounds like another murder two years ago that turned out to have nothing to do with spam" -- so what? Most organized crime murders, regardless of the motive, look pretty similar. And there are a lot of organized crime murders in Russia.
In the perpetual shadow behind the collector, things are going to get very cold, and any waste heat can easily be bled off there.
That depends on what your definition of the word "cold" is... there's no conductive loss in vacuum, which means all the heat needs to be bled off by radiation. There's a reason we use (partial) vacuum as an insulator here on Earth.
It's irrelevant, since lg(n) is a constant multiple of log(n) -- more generally, a logarithm of any base is a constant multiple of a logarithm of any other base -- therefore O(lg(n)) = O(log(n)).
Why exactly should YOUR problem be GOOGLE's concern ?
If it's one person's problem, it's not Google's concern. If it's a whole bunch of people's problem -- many of them the same people who made Google what it is today -- then it damn well is Google's concern. If it's enough people's problem, it's the government's problem, because that's what governments are for.
there's no such thing as a "we the people" decided
The very first words of the document which sets out the purpose and structure of the government of the United States of America disagree with you. If you can't handle that, you might as well find a deserted island to move to, because otherwise you're not going to get away from it, in the US or any other decent country. (There are lots of countries whose governments are not founded on this principle, of course; they tend not to be nice places to live.) Of course, there are certain things you're going to have to give up... such as that internet thingie we're using to have this discussion, which was created by the people's tax dollars, and still largely depends on infrastructure either run by the government or by companies which depend on government allowances for their existence.
this will drive down the wage of older worker to the point where the cost of deciding if someone is fit for the job is shared between the employer and the employee
People who say things like that are both remarkable in their casual ability to dismiss the livelihoods of millions of decent, hard-working people, and desperately naive in thinking that employer and employee are negotiating on anything like level ground. One of the major purposes of labor law is to go some way toward redressing the enormous imbalance of power that exists between a collective entity like Google and one guy like Reid. If you're okay with big companies treating individuals like disposable parts, well, that's your opinion and you're entitled to it -- but most of us disagree, and everyone, including you whether you acknowledge it or not, benefits as a result.
By the example you chose, you show how absurd discrimination, in the sense it's usually used, actually is in terms of hiring practices. Google doesn't discriminate against athletes at all (AFAIK) -- if you happen to be a skateboarder who's also a good programmer, they'll hire you without caring about what else you do with your time. OTOH, if they do care about your skateboarding, they're idiots. Unfortunately, in some specific categories -- historically the big ones have been race, sex, religion, and yes, age; this last being particularly pronounced in the tech world -- this idiocy has reached institutional levels, which is why we have anti-discrimination laws. If one company refuses to hire older workers, or finds excuses to fire them, regardless of their level of actual ability, it's not actually that big a deal. When the entire industry does so, it's a much bigger problem; and "we the people" have decided that the problem this creates has reached the level where it must be addressed by law.
AFAICT, everyone got switched over the to new-style comments system by default. And unchecking the "I am willing to test the new discussion system" box doesn't fix it -- you have to change your preferences. Once that's done, the change seems to stick.
If any editors are reading this: the new system sucks. I tried to make myself use it for a while, and it seemed like it sucked worse every minute. I mean, I really tried. Please rethink this; it's just a terrible idea, and if it becomes the only way to use/. it will probably be the death of the site. It makes Windows ME look like a successful product launch by comparison.
This is what happens when people with too much money and creativity decide to do something completely useless. How about they strip off the rockets and find a way to make a house for homeless people?
So why are you anonymously trolling on Slashdot instead of out there feeding the poor, curing cancer, or rescuing lost puppies?
the Sumerians (who, it is theorized by people who eschew any knowledge of modern science in favor of decades-old myths, used more than the 10% of our brains that we use today
The US was, in part, founded by fundamentalists. Of course these same fundamentalists were escaping persecution by a religious majority and saw the need to not allow a single religion to dominate all of society.
You're collapsing over a century and a half of history into a single event, there. The fundamentalists who colonized parts of what is now the US were not the same people who created the US as a country -- for a matter of perspective, the Constitutional Convention was farther away in years from Plymouth Rock than we are, today, from the Mexican-American War. The Puritan Pilgrims were profoundly intolerant of those who did not share their beliefs, and members of other sects were routinely harassed and chased out of areas they controlled (when they weren't just killed outright, that is.) The Puritans, on both sides of the Atlantic, were the Taliban of their day.
In between the Mayflower Compact and the Bill of Rights came the English Civil War and the rule of Cromwell, which provided everyone in the English-speaking world with a nice little object lesson on just where religious intolerance tended to lead; if that wasn't enough, on the Continent there was the Thirty Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession. The Americans who separated church and state had both the benefit of hindsight and the wisdom to learn from it; their ancestors who celebrated the first Thanksgiving most definitely had not.
Yeah, visualizing your own data while you're working with it is a good idea. And sometimes you luck into something that will be useful for your audience, as well. Honestly, though, I think it's not so much a matter of graphic design skills -- I'll reiterate what I said, that the simplest figure is usually the best, though of course this isn't always true -- as it is of separating the wheat from the chaff. There's a lot of visual chaff in journals and textbooks these days.
Well, the purpose of this particular contest was scientific visualization -- the kind of stuff that goes into conference posters and journal articles and ultimately textbooks -- so the "PowerPoint for the board of directors" standard isn't necessarily the best one to apply. What works for a general audience isn't necessarily the same thing that works for professionals in the field, or students studying to become such. Like everyone else, I ooh and aah over pretty Hubble photos even though I know that's not how astronomers look at the sky; and astronomers probably think microarray heat maps look pretty cool too, but they don't actually lead to any biological insight.
Visualize this: God created the earth 6000 years ago.
I can visualize that just fine; Genesis has some great imagery. I can also visualize a cow licking the first man out of a block of salt. Now, do you have some data we can throw into those visualizations? Let us know when you get some.
There are times when visualization becomes an end in itself, not a tool for understanding. If what you want to do is create art from the natural world, that's great -- the showcased entries are undeniably beautiful, and I especially wouldn't mind having a the bat flight poster on my wall -- but it's a mistake to think that this is necessarily the best way to convey scientific information. There really are "two types of people in the world" when it comes to this sort of thing: call them visual learners and verbal learners, geometers and algebraists, GUI people and command-line people, what-have-you. For people in the first group, looking at a picture can often lead to great flashes of insight. For people in the second group, of which I happen to be a member, the best way to understand something is to read a well-written description or an elegantly proved theorem. Figures may be helpful, but the simpler (not necessarily the prettier) the better, and usually only as a kind of "capstone" after understanding the concept as written down.
The reason this bugs me is that in my field, bioinformatics, journal articles and textbook entries are getting glossier and more picture-laden all the time, and I don't think it's helping. Everyone who publishes any article having anything to do with microarray experiments has to include (at least one) heat map, with its pretty but useless bunch of colored dots; if they did hierarchical clustering on the results, they throw in an absurdly complex and impossible-to-interpret dendrogram attached to the side. Discussions of the biological processes under study, in both bioinformatics and classical biology, are filled with brightly colored, oversimplified illustrations that contribute more to the cost and sheer physical weight of textbooks than they do to understanding. And clearly written explanations are scarce, because so much effort has been put into the figures that there's none left over for thinking about the use of language (including math) or, hell, simple proofreading.
I'm not saying visualization isn't important; it is, and people who do it well are valuable. There are times when even I struggle to understand a paragraph, then look at the accompanying figure and get that "ah hah!" moment. Until modern computer graphics became cheap and widely available, visual learners were often left in the dust, and I'm glad that's not the case anymore. But I do think maybe the pendulum has swung a little too far in the visual direction, and for us algebraists, that's a real problem.
Well, it would have been funny, but Moses parted the Red Sea not Jesus. Its also not funny becasuse this only works with distiled water the NaCl in sea water would prevent this from working. Sorry still a miracle...but keep trying I am sure God finds your ignorance a pleasant diversion.
Maybe you missed the whole "walking on water" part during your mandatory daily Bible study?
"Still a miracle"... or maybe "still an ancient folktale that has about as much credibility as a record of actual events as does the Wizard of Oz."
Armies of high-tech nations have always gone through fits of believing this, and always been proved wrong. The kind of mil-tech that makes the Tom Clancy crowd cream their jeans is great (except when it isn't) but in the end it comes down to the grunts.
Slashdot Mirror
America-bashing sucks, yes. But so does mindless chauvinistic patriotism. The fact of the matter is, there are ways in which America is seriously behind Europe and Asia (no, I'm not talking about MP4 wristwatches) and there's no reason we shouldn't learn from their experience. The mindless fury with which many Americans react to any suggestion that the USA is not absolutely, positively #1 in every single way is a much bigger problem for the country than anti-American bigotry ... not to mention that a lot of the bigotry is a reaction to that particular type of arrogance.
I'm not usually one to rag on the editors for shitty or misleading summaries, but that one was completely pointless.
Um, the summary was pretty much taken from the title of the article, and it's reasonably well borne out. Also from TFA:
Not surprisingly, the majority of products we found are cell phones and PDAs not stocked by US cell phone carriers.
So yeah, maybe you can get that shiny new Japanese phone in the US, but it's not exactly useful. It's probably true that there are very few high-tech items you can't physically obtain here, but many of them depend on infrastructure that's just not present in that giant third-world country located between Canada and Mexico.
Look in the corporate space. Oracle is everywhere. SQLServer is around (not popular in my experience). Mysql is nowhere.
Define "coprorate space." Big companies tend to be Oracle or SQL Server shops, true; really big companies tend to be Oracle or DB2. But there are a lot of small and medium-sized businesses using MySQL -- and because there a lot more SMBs than there are megacorporations, and because DBA demand doesn't scale linearly (a 10,000-employee corporation doesn't need a hundred times as many DBAs as a hundred-employee corporation) there's plenty of MySQL work out there. Postgres, unfortunately, not so much.
The Constitution allows the President to suspend civil liberties (even habeas corpus) in cases of warfare, or for national defense. And the interesting thing is that the determination of national defense purposes lies with the executive branch.
Can you provide a citation on that? Article I, Section 9 states "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." -- but that is in Article I, which lays out the powers and limitations of Congress, not the President. Article II describes the role of the President, and I honestly can't see anything there that backs up your claim. (Not to mention that the US is neither in a state of rebellion nor being invaded at the moment.)
Jefferson was quite sane, and he knew that things had indeed gone beyond a political solution. But it should take a lot before anyone ever gets to that point. There had been mutterings about rebellion in the Colonies since at least the 1720's, but except for isolated local incidents (which were quickly crushed) it never came to anything before 1776, and up through 1770 or so most people thought, quite rightly, that the idea was pretty dumb, because the Colonies simply didn't have the resources to make it work.
Americans often don't realize how profoundly lucky we were, I think. Ours could very easily have been one in the long, depressing series of wars of colonial liberation in which the colonists Throw Off The Hated Chains Of Oppression only to descend into dictatorship. We were lucky that Washington didn't want a crown, lucky that it was Washington rather than Arnold who ended up as the hero of the day, deeply lucky that the authoritarians among the Founders generally didn't get their way. A million things could have gone wrong; we threaded the needle and -- just barely -- got it right. Meanwhile, South America and Africa have provided many tragic examples of how difficult this is.
Also, our "Revolution" was a war of colonial liberation, not a revolution in the ordinary sense; as bad as colonial rebellions often are, internal revolutions, attempts to replace a government in place by armed force, are generally worse. To tell the truth, I'm not sure I can think of a single example that's really worked out well -- and the ascending scale of horror represented by the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution show how easily they can work out badly.
Sometimes revolution is the best of several bad choices, yes. But that's the best it can ever be. People who talk about it casually have no idea what they're playing with.
Yeah, the RIAA can't send you to Gitmo.
Yet.
It's just naive to wait for some politician to protect your privacy when you have the tools to insure this yourself.
As long as those tools are legal. The US already has ridiculous export restrictions on crypto (as though people in other countries aren't capable of writing this stuff on their own!) and IIRC, the UK government has argued for a central, government-run crypto key database, such that it would be illegal to encrypt anything in a way that law enforcement can't immediately crack. What's naive is thinking that just because the tools exist, you'll always be able to use them without getting your door kicked down in the middle of the night, a flashlight shined in your face as you're hauled out bed and cuffed, and a booming voice asking, "Citizen, what are you trying to hide?"
Short of armed revolution, which is not something that any sane person should want to become necessary, our best defense against government intrusion is to get politicians on board. Laws protecting citizens from abuses of power can and do work; for most of its existence, the Bill of Rights has been a sterling example. On those occasions when the government chooses to disregard these laws, it is the responsibility of We The People to put it back in its place -- and it is far preferable to do that with ballots than with bullets.
Because that would go contrary to the Democrat party principles:
There is no such thing as the "Democrat party."
If something moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it!
And Republicans have been doing such a wonderful job of keeping government limited.
The argument that it's fake doesn't look all that convincing to me. Basically, it's saying "this story sounds like another murder two years ago that turned out to have nothing to do with spam" -- so what? Most organized crime murders, regardless of the motive, look pretty similar. And there are a lot of organized crime murders in Russia.
In the perpetual shadow behind the collector, things are going to get very cold, and any waste heat can easily be bled off there.
... there's no conductive loss in vacuum, which means all the heat needs to be bled off by radiation. There's a reason we use (partial) vacuum as an insulator here on Earth.
That depends on what your definition of the word "cold" is
It's irrelevant, since lg(n) is a constant multiple of log(n) -- more generally, a logarithm of any base is a constant multiple of a logarithm of any other base -- therefore O(lg(n)) = O(log(n)).
Are those actually the names they use? That's great.
Why exactly should YOUR problem be GOOGLE's concern ?
... such as that internet thingie we're using to have this discussion, which was created by the people's tax dollars, and still largely depends on infrastructure either run by the government or by companies which depend on government allowances for their existence.
If it's one person's problem, it's not Google's concern. If it's a whole bunch of people's problem -- many of them the same people who made Google what it is today -- then it damn well is Google's concern. If it's enough people's problem, it's the government's problem, because that's what governments are for.
there's no such thing as a "we the people" decided
The very first words of the document which sets out the purpose and structure of the government of the United States of America disagree with you. If you can't handle that, you might as well find a deserted island to move to, because otherwise you're not going to get away from it, in the US or any other decent country. (There are lots of countries whose governments are not founded on this principle, of course; they tend not to be nice places to live.) Of course, there are certain things you're going to have to give up
this will drive down the wage of older worker to the point where the cost of deciding if someone is fit for the job is shared between the employer and the employee
People who say things like that are both remarkable in their casual ability to dismiss the livelihoods of millions of decent, hard-working people, and desperately naive in thinking that employer and employee are negotiating on anything like level ground. One of the major purposes of labor law is to go some way toward redressing the enormous imbalance of power that exists between a collective entity like Google and one guy like Reid. If you're okay with big companies treating individuals like disposable parts, well, that's your opinion and you're entitled to it -- but most of us disagree, and everyone, including you whether you acknowledge it or not, benefits as a result.
By the example you chose, you show how absurd discrimination, in the sense it's usually used, actually is in terms of hiring practices. Google doesn't discriminate against athletes at all (AFAIK) -- if you happen to be a skateboarder who's also a good programmer, they'll hire you without caring about what else you do with your time. OTOH, if they do care about your skateboarding, they're idiots. Unfortunately, in some specific categories -- historically the big ones have been race, sex, religion, and yes, age; this last being particularly pronounced in the tech world -- this idiocy has reached institutional levels, which is why we have anti-discrimination laws. If one company refuses to hire older workers, or finds excuses to fire them, regardless of their level of actual ability, it's not actually that big a deal. When the entire industry does so, it's a much bigger problem; and "we the people" have decided that the problem this creates has reached the level where it must be addressed by law.
AFAICT, everyone got switched over the to new-style comments system by default. And unchecking the "I am willing to test the new discussion system" box doesn't fix it -- you have to change your preferences. Once that's done, the change seems to stick.
/. it will probably be the death of the site. It makes Windows ME look like a successful product launch by comparison.
If any editors are reading this: the new system sucks. I tried to make myself use it for a while, and it seemed like it sucked worse every minute. I mean, I really tried. Please rethink this; it's just a terrible idea, and if it becomes the only way to use
until someone actually sees evidence of one species literally and directly leading to another, we still can't say it's a settled "fact"
Knock yourself out.
This is what happens when people with too much money and creativity decide to do something completely useless. How about they strip off the rockets and find a way to make a house for homeless people?
So why are you anonymously trolling on Slashdot instead of out there feeding the poor, curing cancer, or rescuing lost puppies?
the Sumerians (who, it is theorized by people who eschew any knowledge of modern science in favor of decades-old myths, used more than the 10% of our brains that we use today
There, fixed that for you.
The US was, in part, founded by fundamentalists. Of course these same fundamentalists were escaping persecution by a religious majority and saw the need to not allow a single religion to dominate all of society.
You're collapsing over a century and a half of history into a single event, there. The fundamentalists who colonized parts of what is now the US were not the same people who created the US as a country -- for a matter of perspective, the Constitutional Convention was farther away in years from Plymouth Rock than we are, today, from the Mexican-American War. The Puritan Pilgrims were profoundly intolerant of those who did not share their beliefs, and members of other sects were routinely harassed and chased out of areas they controlled (when they weren't just killed outright, that is.) The Puritans, on both sides of the Atlantic, were the Taliban of their day.
In between the Mayflower Compact and the Bill of Rights came the English Civil War and the rule of Cromwell, which provided everyone in the English-speaking world with a nice little object lesson on just where religious intolerance tended to lead; if that wasn't enough, on the Continent there was the Thirty Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession. The Americans who separated church and state had both the benefit of hindsight and the wisdom to learn from it; their ancestors who celebrated the first Thanksgiving most definitely had not.
Yeah, visualizing your own data while you're working with it is a good idea. And sometimes you luck into something that will be useful for your audience, as well. Honestly, though, I think it's not so much a matter of graphic design skills -- I'll reiterate what I said, that the simplest figure is usually the best, though of course this isn't always true -- as it is of separating the wheat from the chaff. There's a lot of visual chaff in journals and textbooks these days.
Well, the purpose of this particular contest was scientific visualization -- the kind of stuff that goes into conference posters and journal articles and ultimately textbooks -- so the "PowerPoint for the board of directors" standard isn't necessarily the best one to apply. What works for a general audience isn't necessarily the same thing that works for professionals in the field, or students studying to become such. Like everyone else, I ooh and aah over pretty Hubble photos even though I know that's not how astronomers look at the sky; and astronomers probably think microarray heat maps look pretty cool too, but they don't actually lead to any biological insight.
Visualize this: God created the earth 6000 years ago.
I can visualize that just fine; Genesis has some great imagery. I can also visualize a cow licking the first man out of a block of salt. Now, do you have some data we can throw into those visualizations? Let us know when you get some.
There are times when visualization becomes an end in itself, not a tool for understanding. If what you want to do is create art from the natural world, that's great -- the showcased entries are undeniably beautiful, and I especially wouldn't mind having a the bat flight poster on my wall -- but it's a mistake to think that this is necessarily the best way to convey scientific information. There really are "two types of people in the world" when it comes to this sort of thing: call them visual learners and verbal learners, geometers and algebraists, GUI people and command-line people, what-have-you. For people in the first group, looking at a picture can often lead to great flashes of insight. For people in the second group, of which I happen to be a member, the best way to understand something is to read a well-written description or an elegantly proved theorem. Figures may be helpful, but the simpler (not necessarily the prettier) the better, and usually only as a kind of "capstone" after understanding the concept as written down.
The reason this bugs me is that in my field, bioinformatics, journal articles and textbook entries are getting glossier and more picture-laden all the time, and I don't think it's helping. Everyone who publishes any article having anything to do with microarray experiments has to include (at least one) heat map, with its pretty but useless bunch of colored dots; if they did hierarchical clustering on the results, they throw in an absurdly complex and impossible-to-interpret dendrogram attached to the side. Discussions of the biological processes under study, in both bioinformatics and classical biology, are filled with brightly colored, oversimplified illustrations that contribute more to the cost and sheer physical weight of textbooks than they do to understanding. And clearly written explanations are scarce, because so much effort has been put into the figures that there's none left over for thinking about the use of language (including math) or, hell, simple proofreading.
I'm not saying visualization isn't important; it is, and people who do it well are valuable. There are times when even I struggle to understand a paragraph, then look at the accompanying figure and get that "ah hah!" moment. Until modern computer graphics became cheap and widely available, visual learners were often left in the dust, and I'm glad that's not the case anymore. But I do think maybe the pendulum has swung a little too far in the visual direction, and for us algebraists, that's a real problem.
Well, it would have been funny, but Moses parted the Red Sea not Jesus. Its also not funny becasuse this only works with distiled water the NaCl in sea water would prevent this from working. Sorry still a miracle...but keep trying I am sure God finds your ignorance a pleasant diversion.
... or maybe "still an ancient folktale that has about as much credibility as a record of actual events as does the Wizard of Oz."
Maybe you missed the whole "walking on water" part during your mandatory daily Bible study?
"Still a miracle"
Armies of high-tech nations have always gone through fits of believing this, and always been proved wrong. The kind of mil-tech that makes the Tom Clancy crowd cream their jeans is great (except when it isn't) but in the end it comes down to the grunts.