Your comment would only make sense if the purpose of reading fiction were to accomplish some other goal. Can you really not see the difference between, say, reading a textbook and reading a novel?
Re:I wonder about the Nebulas
on
2006 Nebula Awards
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's not an easy read, but it's a *great* read nonetheless.
And in this sentence, we have everything I dislike about literary criticism in a nutshell.
Not everything that's easy to read is good, of course; most of what's easy to read is crap. But pretty much everything that's hard to read is crap, because if you have to struggle to read it, then its other qualities just don't matter.
The critical world has pushed for almost a century now the idea that good writing has to be difficult -- which has led to a glut of truly awful, highly praised mainstream fiction, and the marginalization of good storytellers into genre fiction. Folks, the writers who created the literary canon of the 19th century and before weren't trying to show off their distinctive prose style. (For the great stylists, that was just what came naturally.) They were telling stories, and they wanted lots of people to read those stories.
Now, I haven't read Norrell, but people whose judgement I trust have told me that it's exactly the kind of pretentious crap that has ruined mainstream writing and is now invading SF, thickly layered language games that distract the reader from any virtues the story itself might have. In contrast, Haldeman's prose is always elegant and concise. I voted for Camouflage, and I'm glad it won; it's not his best ever (I'd say that's actually All My Sins Remembered, not The Forever War, as good as that was) but it's very good stuff.
Well, one of the reasons the Titanic sank was because the compartmentalization was incomplete; once it took a certain amount of water, it was riding low enough that more water could come in over the bulkheads. There's probably a lesson here.
Good god. I think you should look up "ad hominem" while you're double-checking the meaning of "anecdotal".
[sigh] I'm going to try this one more time:
Your argument is wrong. It would be wrong whether you had multiple PhD's or you were an elementary-school dropout. I am not judging your argument on your level education (somewhere between these two extremes, I'm guessing.) I am judging it on its own merits, and have found it wanting.
However, I was proposing (snarkily, I admit) that the reason you are making this argument may be that you have never learned how to construct a better one.
Do you see the distinction now?
Then you will see that my list is not anecotal at all...
Your list is anecdotal. Period. You may believe that people like them are everywhere, but that does not change the fact that a short list of famous names is anecdotal by its nature. If I were to present a short list of highly successful people with PhD's, that would also be anecdotal.
Now, if you want to go along clinging to your beliefs about the nature of creativity and success, go ahead. I doubt I'm going to change your mind with a late-night argument on Slashdot.
"Programming" is creating code that, when compiled, produces a binary that needs nothing more than an operating system or JIT compiler to run.
"Scripting" is making funky text documents that need another program to do something. PHP, HTML, and Perl are technically scripting.
But a JIT compiler is "another program." For that matter, so is an operating system.
The distinction between "programming languages" and "scripting languages" is becoming sillier every day, as erstwhile scripting languages become increasingly powerful tools for developing big, powerful apps. Unless you're writing rather specialized drivers that only talk to the bare metal, you're not really doing anything that's more "real programming" in Java, or even C, than you are in Perl or PHP.
My post wasn't an ad hominem; I wasn't saying that your argument was wrong because you're uneducated, but rather that your argument's lack of merit may be a result of your lack of education.
Anyway.
"Anecdotal" here is being used as in the phrase "anecdotal evidence," which is, really, no evidence at all. In other words, no one is denying that Gates, Kamen, et al. did what they did as dropouts; the point you're missing is that a few counterexamples do not disprove a general principle. You can find successful dropouts just as you can find people who survived car crashes because they weren't wearing their seatbelts and were thrown clear of the car, who smoke three packs a day and live to see their great-grandchildren graduate from college, who grow up in poverty but pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become tycoons, who have unprotected sex with hundreds of partners but never catch a disease -- none of which changes the reality that wearing your seatbelt is a good idea, smoking is bad for you, most people who are born poor stay that way, and that careless promiscuity is a really good way to get AIDS.
To put it in more technical terms, any data set of a reasonable size will have outliers. The reason we have a special word for such data is because they're not representative of the way things usually are.
I do have to apologize for my cheap shot above. Lots of highly educated people don't understand this either.
I know this is heresy, but bear with me for a moment. No, HTML isn't Turing-complete, and anyone who's done any kind of dynamic content work with Javascript, PHP, etc. is well aware of HTML's limitations. Nonetheless, writing a web page in plain HTML is much, much closer to "real" programming than it is to the way most people interact with computers.
Most people do something on a computer that gets an immediate response. Hit a key in a word processor, see the letter you typed appear on screen. Click a mouse button in a game, shoot the bad guy. Type a URL into a browser, get a page.
OTOH, writing a page in HTML (using a text editor, I mean) even a page that just says "Hello, world" on a colored background, requires understanding the concept of code. Instead of action-and-response, you have text that makes the computer do something that does not follow immediately from the text at the time you enter it. This may seem trivial to techies, but it's an enormous conceptual leap for most users -- and once they've made that leap, programming as a concept is no longer nearly so mysterious.
This is the way it worked for me, as an adult. I was the kind of user whom non-techies think of as "computer-literate," which meant I could use all kinds of different programs and do some low-level troubleshooting, but I simply had no understanding of what programming was, and in fact had a kind of mental block against it dating from when my Dad tried to teach me C when I was a teenager in the 80's. It wasn't that I couldn't learn it, but I had convinced myself that I couldn't learn it, and that amounted to the same thing.
In the 90's, I decided that I really wanted to at least learn how to make a decent web page, so I started doing "view source" on every page I liked, and got reasonably competent at reusing other people's HTML. Next I started writing my own. Then I realized that a lot of the stuff I wanted to do would be a lot easier if I learned this Javascript thing people were talking about, and, well, off I went. By the time I found my way back to C (and C++, and PHP, and Java, and Perl, and MATLAB, and Python, and R, in roughly that order) I realized this programming stuff wasn't so mysterious and scary after all.
During my academic CS career, I saw a lot of people go this same route. Don't sell HTML short.
I love that picture -- it's one of my desktops -- but it doesn't make me feel insignificant at all. It makes me feel pretty damn proud to be a member of the species that can not only see things like that, but make at least a good attempt at understanding them.
And as your you WW2 comment, what has that got to do with anything?
There is a certain number of Americans who seem to feel that our contribution to winning WW2 (after Germany and Japan had been running wild on the rest of the world for two years, and we'd been sitting safe behind our ocean walls...) now justifies any insult we want to throw at any other country that was involved in the war, in any capacity. People who do this apparently can't think of anything to brag about that's happened in the last 61 years.
No, they are indeed singling out homosexuals, because all of the other standards for sexual conduct described apply equally to homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. It would be entirely possible to read this law to say that two men or two women holding hands is illegal, but a man and a woman is not.
I think maybe you missed the point of grandparent's point #3. Even with the admittedly dumbed-down environment in many schools, it's still socially unacceptable to be a high achiever. It's regrettably true that in many school districts, a kid can pass and get a diploma just by showing up, but you still don't get straight A's without putting in a fair amount of work. And kids who do put in that work, because they want to, you know, learn stuff, get pretty much zero encouragement from the educational system and active discouragement from their peers. Meanwhile, the kids who work really hard at carrying a ball down a field are lionized by school and students alike. This is a much more serious and longer-term problem than the economic trends of the moment.
But Democratic legislators do break away from the party line more often than Republican ones do. This is a simple fact, easily verified by a look at voting records.
So how do you explain the fact that, by any reasonable measure, living standards worldwide have been rising for the last few centuries? Who's losing here?
I'm not denying that we're animals, with animal instincts. Among animals, however, we have the (as far as we know) unique trait that we can predict the consequences of our actions, and channel our instincts accordingly.
This is true even of sex. Not only is sexual behavior largely determined by culture (nobody is born understanding the concept of foreplay) but an awful lot of the way we think about sex has to do with how we're going to suppress one of its major functions -- reproduction. That is in no way instinctive, but IMNSHO it's one of the nicer features of the civilized world.
Life is about competition and survival. The only thing that makes us (which applies to any group you might be in) BETTER is that the other guys are WORSE.
You know, for most of human history, most people -- or at least most nations -- believed exactly that. The result was a never-ending race to the bottom, constant squabbling, cruelty on a vast scale; societies where humanity managed, briefly, to rise above the muck, such as the height of Rome, were inevitably brought down and buried by barbarians who saw their (relative) wealth and could conceive of no other path than to try to steal it.
This really didn't change until the late 18th c., at which point people started realizing, however dimly, that wealth is not a zero-sum game, that there were points of stable equilibrium above the combination of crushing power and grinding poverty. And to be sure, the ramifications took a long time to work out. Liberty, equality, fraternity turned into the Reign of Terror and the conquests of Napoleon; aggressive colonial expansion shattered ancient cultures and all too often led to outright genocide; the US required a Civil War to do away with its remaining Old Wolrd aristocracy; Britannia's rule of the waves may have been largely benign, but it was bought with sword and flame; last and worst, the grotesque auto-da-fe of World War One and the long shadow it cast on the twentieth century, including World War Two and the Cold War, serve to remind us that we're not done yet.
But -- the fact of the matter is that on average, life is better, for more people, all over the world, than it has ever been before. And this is not because we have managed to take from others, but because we have built for ourselves. Competition, yes, but competition according to a set of rules, with the understanding that there can be more than one winner. Survival, yes, but with a recognition that we can do more than simply survive.
Welcome to the modern world. Look around, take in the sights. You'll probably see some things that will shock you, and other things it will be hard for you to understand at first, but once you get used to how things work around here, I think you'll enjoy your stay.
Knowledge is not like gold and silver, aka "specie." There is not a limited supply. Because one nation has more does not mean another has less, or benefits from it less. The idea that we have to guard our sacred knowledge in order to stay strong seems to me very much like modern-day mercantilism, and just as doomed as that archaic worldview turned out to be.
Just becaues you personally disagree with a law doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you.
True enough, but as a practical matter, it depends on the size of the "you" you're talking about. If I decide that I, personally, disagree with the law against murder, and go around killing people whenever I feel like it -- well, you can bet that the cops and courts will express their disagreement with me, in fairly dramatic fashion, because the vast majority of people agree that the law against murder is a good thing. OTOH, if a substantial portion of the population of a large country disagrees with a law, and goes about casually breaking it on a daily basis, then individual perpetrators may still be caught and prosecuted, but most people who want to break the law will keep doing so because they know that the odds of themselves in particular suffering for it are pretty slim.
This isn't just true of piracy. It's true, notably, of drug use, particularly with respect to marijuana. It's true of speeding (where it's not so much a matter of disagreeing with the law as it is of not caring about it.) In some places which have completely fallen apart, it's even true of killing people. Please note that I'm not saying any of these actions are morally comparable to each other, just that widespread casual disregard for a law, any law, makes individual enforcement unlikely if not impossible, regardless of what that law actually is.
Remember, this article was written by and for people who study for years to learn to speak in Buzzword(tm). They hear Microsoft(tm) say "we're innovating!" and they believe it, because Microsoft(tm) has lots of money, and everything they say must be Truth(tm)!
Neither of those is quite true -- a lot of entities public and private are throwing a lot of money at data mining research, reasonably expecting a big payoff, and sometimes it gets very good results indeed. The basic problem is that, as with any worthwhile CS question, doing it well is hard. It is very easy to come up with false connections between data. Sorting the wheat from the chaff in any kind of automated or even semi-automated fashion, OTOH, is an enormous challenge.
Analogies like this are always dangerous, but I'd say data mining now is about where language development was in the mid-1950's, when FORTRAN was first being developed. IOW, we have a set of tools that kind of work, most of the time, for certain applications -- but we can pretty much guarantee that they're not the best possible tools, and that we will build better ones. Consider how much work is still going on in language development half a century later, and you can see how much room there is for further development.
Chicago getting tac nuked by terrorists, reaction woul probably along the lines of FAE carpet bombing the sponcer nation
Based on recent experience, our reaction would be to flatten some other nation, preferably one that's hostile to the actual sponsor, in the nearby region.
A good way to determine how best to ignite an interest in science would be to ask actual scientists what it was that initially got them interested in figuring out the Why and How of things. I'll bet that most of them could give a pretty detailed accounting of that, and I'll bet you further that few, if any, of them were smitten while watching watered-down educational cartoons.
Honestly? Most would probably say either, "I don't know, I've just always been fascinated by ___," or, "Well, one day I kind of lucked into ___."
This is going to sound kind of brutal, but the truth is, most kids probably aren't going to get interested in science, and there's nothing we can do to change that. They will, if we're lucky, get interested enough in the results of science -- everything from pretty Hubble pictures to new medical treatments -- to continue supporting the people who do the actual work. But science is hard, and it involves lots of that icky math stuff, and the people who do it are, you know, nerds. Good luck with getting any more than a very small minority of kids to put in the time and effort, and make the social sacrifices required, to become real working scientists. Ever. Meanwhile, the quiet, smart ones will keep on studying, keep on working, and eventually turn themselves into the adults whose labor will change the world.
Another is to point out evolution's flaws (something evolutionists get very testy about, btw. They don't like their faith questioned anymore than religious people do)
This is simply not true. Evolutionary biologists find flaws in existing theories of evolution fairly often, and the theories are adjusted accordingly over time. This is simply how all science, including biology, works; there is no crisis of faith as you claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment would only make sense if the purpose of reading fiction were to accomplish some other goal. Can you really not see the difference between, say, reading a textbook and reading a novel?
It's not an easy read, but it's a *great* read nonetheless.
And in this sentence, we have everything I dislike about literary criticism in a nutshell.
Not everything that's easy to read is good, of course; most of what's easy to read is crap. But pretty much everything that's hard to read is crap, because if you have to struggle to read it, then its other qualities just don't matter.
The critical world has pushed for almost a century now the idea that good writing has to be difficult -- which has led to a glut of truly awful, highly praised mainstream fiction, and the marginalization of good storytellers into genre fiction. Folks, the writers who created the literary canon of the 19th century and before weren't trying to show off their distinctive prose style. (For the great stylists, that was just what came naturally.) They were telling stories, and they wanted lots of people to read those stories.
Now, I haven't read Norrell, but people whose judgement I trust have told me that it's exactly the kind of pretentious crap that has ruined mainstream writing and is now invading SF, thickly layered language games that distract the reader from any virtues the story itself might have. In contrast, Haldeman's prose is always elegant and concise. I voted for Camouflage, and I'm glad it won; it's not his best ever (I'd say that's actually All My Sins Remembered, not The Forever War, as good as that was) but it's very good stuff.
Well, one of the reasons the Titanic sank was because the compartmentalization was incomplete; once it took a certain amount of water, it was riding low enough that more water could come in over the bulkheads. There's probably a lesson here.
If your school requires you to use .NET for CS classes, it's time to find a different school.
Good god. I think you should look up "ad hominem" while you're double-checking the meaning of "anecdotal".
...
[sigh] I'm going to try this one more time:
Your argument is wrong. It would be wrong whether you had multiple PhD's or you were an elementary-school dropout. I am not judging your argument on your level education (somewhere between these two extremes, I'm guessing.) I am judging it on its own merits, and have found it wanting.
However, I was proposing (snarkily, I admit) that the reason you are making this argument may be that you have never learned how to construct a better one.
Do you see the distinction now?
Then you will see that my list is not anecotal at all
Your list is anecdotal. Period. You may believe that people like them are everywhere, but that does not change the fact that a short list of famous names is anecdotal by its nature. If I were to present a short list of highly successful people with PhD's, that would also be anecdotal.
Now, if you want to go along clinging to your beliefs about the nature of creativity and success, go ahead. I doubt I'm going to change your mind with a late-night argument on Slashdot.
"Programming" is creating code that, when compiled, produces a binary that needs nothing more than an operating system or JIT compiler to run.
"Scripting" is making funky text documents that need another program to do something. PHP, HTML, and Perl are technically scripting.
But a JIT compiler is "another program." For that matter, so is an operating system.
The distinction between "programming languages" and "scripting languages" is becoming sillier every day, as erstwhile scripting languages become increasingly powerful tools for developing big, powerful apps. Unless you're writing rather specialized drivers that only talk to the bare metal, you're not really doing anything that's more "real programming" in Java, or even C, than you are in Perl or PHP.
My post wasn't an ad hominem; I wasn't saying that your argument was wrong because you're uneducated, but rather that your argument's lack of merit may be a result of your lack of education.
Anyway.
"Anecdotal" here is being used as in the phrase "anecdotal evidence," which is, really, no evidence at all. In other words, no one is denying that Gates, Kamen, et al. did what they did as dropouts; the point you're missing is that a few counterexamples do not disprove a general principle. You can find successful dropouts just as you can find people who survived car crashes because they weren't wearing their seatbelts and were thrown clear of the car, who smoke three packs a day and live to see their great-grandchildren graduate from college, who grow up in poverty but pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become tycoons, who have unprotected sex with hundreds of partners but never catch a disease -- none of which changes the reality that wearing your seatbelt is a good idea, smoking is bad for you, most people who are born poor stay that way, and that careless promiscuity is a really good way to get AIDS.
To put it in more technical terms, any data set of a reasonable size will have outliers. The reason we have a special word for such data is because they're not representative of the way things usually are.
I do have to apologize for my cheap shot above. Lots of highly educated people don't understand this either.
Yes, HTML is a programming language.
I know this is heresy, but bear with me for a moment. No, HTML isn't Turing-complete, and anyone who's done any kind of dynamic content work with Javascript, PHP, etc. is well aware of HTML's limitations. Nonetheless, writing a web page in plain HTML is much, much closer to "real" programming than it is to the way most people interact with computers.
Most people do something on a computer that gets an immediate response. Hit a key in a word processor, see the letter you typed appear on screen. Click a mouse button in a game, shoot the bad guy. Type a URL into a browser, get a page.
OTOH, writing a page in HTML (using a text editor, I mean) even a page that just says "Hello, world" on a colored background, requires understanding the concept of code. Instead of action-and-response, you have text that makes the computer do something that does not follow immediately from the text at the time you enter it. This may seem trivial to techies, but it's an enormous conceptual leap for most users -- and once they've made that leap, programming as a concept is no longer nearly so mysterious.
This is the way it worked for me, as an adult. I was the kind of user whom non-techies think of as "computer-literate," which meant I could use all kinds of different programs and do some low-level troubleshooting, but I simply had no understanding of what programming was, and in fact had a kind of mental block against it dating from when my Dad tried to teach me C when I was a teenager in the 80's. It wasn't that I couldn't learn it, but I had convinced myself that I couldn't learn it, and that amounted to the same thing.
In the 90's, I decided that I really wanted to at least learn how to make a decent web page, so I started doing "view source" on every page I liked, and got reasonably competent at reusing other people's HTML. Next I started writing my own. Then I realized that a lot of the stuff I wanted to do would be a lot easier if I learned this Javascript thing people were talking about, and, well, off I went. By the time I found my way back to C (and C++, and PHP, and Java, and Perl, and MATLAB, and Python, and R, in roughly that order) I realized this programming stuff wasn't so mysterious and scary after all.
During my academic CS career, I saw a lot of people go this same route. Don't sell HTML short.
Perhaps you need the education to understand what "anecdotal" means in this context.
I love that picture -- it's one of my desktops -- but it doesn't make me feel insignificant at all. It makes me feel pretty damn proud to be a member of the species that can not only see things like that, but make at least a good attempt at understanding them.
And as your you WW2 comment, what has that got to do with anything?
...) now justifies any insult we want to throw at any other country that was involved in the war, in any capacity. People who do this apparently can't think of anything to brag about that's happened in the last 61 years.
There is a certain number of Americans who seem to feel that our contribution to winning WW2 (after Germany and Japan had been running wild on the rest of the world for two years, and we'd been sitting safe behind our ocean walls
No, they are indeed singling out homosexuals, because all of the other standards for sexual conduct described apply equally to homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. It would be entirely possible to read this law to say that two men or two women holding hands is illegal, but a man and a woman is not.
I think maybe you missed the point of grandparent's point #3. Even with the admittedly dumbed-down environment in many schools, it's still socially unacceptable to be a high achiever. It's regrettably true that in many school districts, a kid can pass and get a diploma just by showing up, but you still don't get straight A's without putting in a fair amount of work. And kids who do put in that work, because they want to, you know, learn stuff, get pretty much zero encouragement from the educational system and active discouragement from their peers. Meanwhile, the kids who work really hard at carrying a ball down a field are lionized by school and students alike. This is a much more serious and longer-term problem than the economic trends of the moment.
Thanks!
But Democratic legislators do break away from the party line more often than Republican ones do. This is a simple fact, easily verified by a look at voting records.
So how do you explain the fact that, by any reasonable measure, living standards worldwide have been rising for the last few centuries? Who's losing here?
I'm not denying that we're animals, with animal instincts. Among animals, however, we have the (as far as we know) unique trait that we can predict the consequences of our actions, and channel our instincts accordingly.
This is true even of sex. Not only is sexual behavior largely determined by culture (nobody is born understanding the concept of foreplay) but an awful lot of the way we think about sex has to do with how we're going to suppress one of its major functions -- reproduction. That is in no way instinctive, but IMNSHO it's one of the nicer features of the civilized world.
Life is about competition and survival. The only thing that makes us (which applies to any group you might be in) BETTER is that the other guys are WORSE.
You know, for most of human history, most people -- or at least most nations -- believed exactly that. The result was a never-ending race to the bottom, constant squabbling, cruelty on a vast scale; societies where humanity managed, briefly, to rise above the muck, such as the height of Rome, were inevitably brought down and buried by barbarians who saw their (relative) wealth and could conceive of no other path than to try to steal it.
This really didn't change until the late 18th c., at which point people started realizing, however dimly, that wealth is not a zero-sum game, that there were points of stable equilibrium above the combination of crushing power and grinding poverty. And to be sure, the ramifications took a long time to work out. Liberty, equality, fraternity turned into the Reign of Terror and the conquests of Napoleon; aggressive colonial expansion shattered ancient cultures and all too often led to outright genocide; the US required a Civil War to do away with its remaining Old Wolrd aristocracy; Britannia's rule of the waves may have been largely benign, but it was bought with sword and flame; last and worst, the grotesque auto-da-fe of World War One and the long shadow it cast on the twentieth century, including World War Two and the Cold War, serve to remind us that we're not done yet.
But -- the fact of the matter is that on average, life is better, for more people, all over the world, than it has ever been before. And this is not because we have managed to take from others, but because we have built for ourselves. Competition, yes, but competition according to a set of rules, with the understanding that there can be more than one winner. Survival, yes, but with a recognition that we can do more than simply survive.
Welcome to the modern world. Look around, take in the sights. You'll probably see some things that will shock you, and other things it will be hard for you to understand at first, but once you get used to how things work around here, I think you'll enjoy your stay.
Knowledge is not like gold and silver, aka "specie." There is not a limited supply. Because one nation has more does not mean another has less, or benefits from it less. The idea that we have to guard our sacred knowledge in order to stay strong seems to me very much like modern-day mercantilism, and just as doomed as that archaic worldview turned out to be.
Just becaues you personally disagree with a law doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you.
True enough, but as a practical matter, it depends on the size of the "you" you're talking about. If I decide that I, personally, disagree with the law against murder, and go around killing people whenever I feel like it -- well, you can bet that the cops and courts will express their disagreement with me, in fairly dramatic fashion, because the vast majority of people agree that the law against murder is a good thing. OTOH, if a substantial portion of the population of a large country disagrees with a law, and goes about casually breaking it on a daily basis, then individual perpetrators may still be caught and prosecuted, but most people who want to break the law will keep doing so because they know that the odds of themselves in particular suffering for it are pretty slim.
This isn't just true of piracy. It's true, notably, of drug use, particularly with respect to marijuana. It's true of speeding (where it's not so much a matter of disagreeing with the law as it is of not caring about it.) In some places which have completely fallen apart, it's even true of killing people. Please note that I'm not saying any of these actions are morally comparable to each other, just that widespread casual disregard for a law, any law, makes individual enforcement unlikely if not impossible, regardless of what that law actually is.
Remember, this article was written by and for people who study for years to learn to speak in Buzzword(tm). They hear Microsoft(tm) say "we're innovating!" and they believe it, because Microsoft(tm) has lots of money, and everything they say must be Truth(tm)!
Semiliterate, buzzword-laden, and alternating restatements of the obvious with outright falsehoods. Yep.
Neither of those is quite true -- a lot of entities public and private are throwing a lot of money at data mining research, reasonably expecting a big payoff, and sometimes it gets very good results indeed. The basic problem is that, as with any worthwhile CS question, doing it well is hard. It is very easy to come up with false connections between data. Sorting the wheat from the chaff in any kind of automated or even semi-automated fashion, OTOH, is an enormous challenge.
Analogies like this are always dangerous, but I'd say data mining now is about where language development was in the mid-1950's, when FORTRAN was first being developed. IOW, we have a set of tools that kind of work, most of the time, for certain applications -- but we can pretty much guarantee that they're not the best possible tools, and that we will build better ones. Consider how much work is still going on in language development half a century later, and you can see how much room there is for further development.
Chicago getting tac nuked by terrorists, reaction woul probably along the lines of FAE carpet bombing the sponcer nation
Based on recent experience, our reaction would be to flatten some other nation, preferably one that's hostile to the actual sponsor, in the nearby region.
A good way to determine how best to ignite an interest in science would be to ask actual scientists what it was that initially got them interested in figuring out the Why and How of things. I'll bet that most of them could give a pretty detailed accounting of that, and I'll bet you further that few, if any, of them were smitten while watching watered-down educational cartoons.
Honestly? Most would probably say either, "I don't know, I've just always been fascinated by ___," or, "Well, one day I kind of lucked into ___."
This is going to sound kind of brutal, but the truth is, most kids probably aren't going to get interested in science, and there's nothing we can do to change that. They will, if we're lucky, get interested enough in the results of science -- everything from pretty Hubble pictures to new medical treatments -- to continue supporting the people who do the actual work. But science is hard, and it involves lots of that icky math stuff, and the people who do it are, you know, nerds. Good luck with getting any more than a very small minority of kids to put in the time and effort, and make the social sacrifices required, to become real working scientists. Ever. Meanwhile, the quiet, smart ones will keep on studying, keep on working, and eventually turn themselves into the adults whose labor will change the world.
Another is to point out evolution's flaws (something evolutionists get very testy about, btw. They don't like their faith questioned anymore than religious people do)
This is simply not true. Evolutionary biologists find flaws in existing theories of evolution fairly often, and the theories are adjusted accordingly over time. This is simply how all science, including biology, works; there is no crisis of faith as you claim.