Other than providing a gimmick to make this different than previous missions, what's the point? Land something in a sea of methane and look for what? Sail around to find more liquid methane?
You're probably right. Aw hell, scratch the 'probably'. Speaking purely personally though, this is the first time in the past 10 years I've actually felt a stirring in my heart about space exploration. This Titan thing actually brought back some of the magic of space that used to come through so vividly in the science fiction of the 80s (before the post-modernist hacks stank up the place). Huh, let's just say that as a taxpayer, I wouldn't be in the least upset if this mission actually happened. In fact, I'd be out there cheering it on all the way. Go figure:). Guess science is far from unemotional eh?
You forgot to note that he said "join their clause", rather than "join their cause", thus making himself just as guilty of typo's as the submitter of the article.
And this is exactly the kind of problem government is ideally placed to solve. By being the big bad grown up that all the kids can point to and say, "I don't wanna be fair. But HE's making me". And voila, everyone's forced to be fair. And they can all pat themselves on the back and say that they weren't sissies who backed down 'cause like see [sic] everyone did. It's 3:36 in the morning, I'm tired and I won't proofread anymore. *Phbbt*
To summarize my rather flippant point above: since the market won't allow a company to do a "nice thing" for the consumer for fear of lowering profits (which would be poor reward eh?), it is ok for government to step in and make everyone do the nice thing. Since all companies are affected equally, advertisers have no alternative but to swallow it. Everyone wins. Even the advertisers because now consumers won't be put off by their products, the ads for which were a shining example of douchebaggery. See, sometimes a solution really is good for all concerned.
You never know. Impressionable kids going away with wrong info is a more serious issue than "buzzkilling". Hence my request for modding him/her funny (it wasn't really, I just didn't want it taken seriously:P). Besides, with the kind of greasy grasp of physics I've seen on here lately, there was a 50/50 chance it wasn't a joke:P.
I understand your preference for visual ways of comprehending mathematics. The problem is that such ways can be great for purposes of understanding the concepts* but that's about it. Mathematics is almost like an extra sense organ that shows us things we cannot otherwise see. Sure, you can describe colors in terms of touch to a blind man but there's not much he can then do with it. The equations that everyone seems to hate (sometimes with good reason because of the way they are presented with no motivation - unless you derive an equation yourself from fundamental axioms/assumptions with full understanding of the same, it will mean NOTHING to you, EVER!) are the key to finding out what's truly important about a particular mathematical animal. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the value of an equation is literally infinite because it lets us describe vast panoramas of experience in terms of the few things that really matter - that are really beautiful. An equation is like the strand of DNA that holds all the information that defines a living being, just waiting to be used to create one. It is a matter of profound and personal sorrow to me that most people live their entire lives without seeing how the essence of the universe can displayed on a piece of paper using a few symbols!
Numbers are probably the least important part of mathematics. Mathematics is about ideas, plain and simple. The idea of a simple triangle, a sphere, a higher dimensional manifold, the ideas of change (calculus). Speaking to a programmer - numbers are merely the input and output to the source code that is the equation. Sure, as a non-programmer (for the most part), I prefer to see a program as primarily the grinder that the input goes through to become the output, but we all know that misses the beauty of what's going on inside.
The other thing about visual aids is that they are almost always (and I speak from experience) personal - very rarely are they useful to any but a small section of learners. You are very correct that the equations and symbols are but a way of expressing mathematical insight. But they have evolved over the ages (and after passing through many loving hands) to be as nearly consistent as anyone could make them. If you look at original papers by inventors of new ideas and the ideas as expressed in textbooks a hundred years later, you will see what I mean.
That's the beauty of math and science - the original inventor RARELY understands or can explain his own idea better than his intellectual descendants decades down the road. And this made possible only because we have adopted a symbolism that is stable across the nations and through time and which only keeps getting better. This is why as textbooks in the humanities keep getting more and more complicated over the years, math books (college and later - I did not do high school in the US so I have no personal knowledge of that) keep getting more concise and more lucid and more profound as people keep finding more and more connections between previously unrelated things - thus cutting down on clutter.
Just a quick example and I'll shut up:). Classical electromagnetism (Maxwell) was a beautiful construct - difficult to understand for the scientists of the time but not too much. Then, it's intimate connections to special relativity were formalized and the resulting equations became much simpler! I'll say it again, because it's so counter-intuitive. Two difficult subjects come together and the amalgam is somehow simpler (partly) because the resulting mathematics is much more elegant and cleaner. There are many stories like this that accentuate the importance of equations and good formalism and notation not merely as a computational aid as so many people believe - but as a means of understanding the deeper connections between ideas.
In the end, as I used to tell my physics students - if you understand the concepts but cannot solve** the problems, you have not un
... leading us through the construction of small simple games and telling us why the hard boring stuff (like math) is important.
Kids want to learn stuff we just suck the joy out of learning because we don't give them cool things to work on that teach teh lesson that -- cool things require lots of hard boring stuff to accomplish but the end result is awesome.
It's a good thing I didn't grow up with your definitions of "boring" and "cool". Your statement that math is important is laudable but it is deeply contaminated by the addenda that it is also hard and boring. From my point of view, computing is merely a quaint little example of how a teeny tiny fraction of most aesthetically superb* piece of... magic is the only word for it... created by the human race can be applied for purposes of relieving the human mind of repetitive calculations (and perhaps entertainment).
Teaching with the attitude I inferred from your post (and please correct me if my inference was in error) would simply create a bunch of superficial coders. I've seen firsthand the results of "real-world numerical" teaching styles taken to the extreme in (for instance) early physics education. It prevents students from seeing some of the grandest mysteries ever encountered and how our scientific ancestors frakking solved them instead of just staring stupidly at them. Imparting (among other things of course) the magnificence of the intersection of mathematics and reality (especially in everyday situations) should be one of the critical goals of science education.
Now, of course I wouldn't advocate that teaching philosophy in a college level programming course - you're there to learn to code, not contemplate mathematical mysteries:P. But we're discussing pre-college stuff. Rarely does one see any but the most superficial math in programming courses and that's fine. What I object to is actually institutionalizing that weird attitude. It's like the difference between a stripper and a ballet dancer - in one case, the details of the music aren't all that important;).
Just because the current way of teaching is not the best way doesn't mean that "cool" should be the new standard for good education:P. Cool is fine for kiddies, mature children should be introduced to the concept of "profound" as soon as possible. The horrible way we do it now grants the senile old farts a monopoly over it and that's just stupid.
"consider that the solid state transistor responsible for every single computing advance in the last few decades exists solely because quantum mechanics had been discovered (or invented?)"
What? they had solid state transistors before quantum mechanics was anything but a hypotheses from a math formula.
The first transistor was not developed until 1947 in Bell Labs. Even (unverified) claims were not made until 1925, long after QM hit puberty:P.
Also, your phrase "hypotheses [sic] from a math formula" is inexplicable. Further, quantum mechanics (developed in the early 1900s) is crucial in formulating the idea of band structure in a solid ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_band_structure ). Without this, even the idea of a semiconductor is meaningless. Perhaps you were confusing solid state transistors with vacuum tube triodes?
"Yet, how many really get the science behind it?"
that sentence make no sense. Science is just exploration.
You don't need to understand the mechanics of a thing to measure it or develop something from it.
I'm in the twilight zone:P. Your last sentence above was the WHOLE POINT of my post. Or do you only read and respond to 2 random sentences in every post? Baffling. Oh, and the statement you say makes no sense is quite straightforward. If you had read the earlier part of the post, you would have seen the distinction I made between science and technology. The essence of my post was the observation that when most people declare their opinions for or against "science", what they are really judging is technology - the actual "science" is far below their radar even for everyday things (like computers - hence the transistor example). You can't judge what you don't even think about in most cases.
I could cite solid state textbooks at the graduate level but that would be overkill for the simple example I picked - wikipedia is quite accurate in that respect.
I'm quite willing to engage in meaningful discourse, but please try to at least google and verify some things before you post.
Popular again? When was it ever popular? I hope we technocrats aren't the latest victims of the "good ol' days" syndrome.
My point is that science was never popular. At best it was identified with it's real-world manifestation (that we call technology) and at worst with all the evils that beset the god-fearing majority as a result of some busybodies "who just can't leave well enough alone". I don't think most people really have an opinion on science in the abstract sense until it morphs into something they can see or touch or otherwise sense.
If this thread is considering the question "how to make tech popular again", there are several answers out there already that are working (slowly but surely). The fact that technology can stand relatively independent of the deeper ideas that create it (assuming there's at least a handful of people who get the big picture) is good - it prevents the emergence of a ruling technocracy (something that I, even as a beginning scientist, have no wish to see in my lifetime). In this day and age, this fact has already made tech popular. But it has the disadvantage of creating a subclass of people that can make and work the technology without having to internalize the accompanying physical insights into how the universe works*. This, by the way, is the only way I've found to explain the engineers who work with terrorists (not their psyches - I'm no psychologist - just the reason it's even possible). Sad as it is, you don't really have to understand the solutions to the mysteries of the Universe that our scientific ancestors spent their lives exploring once some brilliant engineer who has done that figures out how to use that knowledge. Once that original bit of insight from the scientist and the subsequent intuitive leap to tech by the engineer are in place, anyone with the money and minimal expertise can repeat the miracle. The very reproducibility of tech without any need for ritual or mantras may yet prove deadly for science (and indeed, society). In my more idiotic/pessimistic moods, I sometimes wish we had continued to do things like the Pythagoreans. But of course, where discovering the truth is concerned, such dramatized secrecy as exists in pathetic little conspiracies or the big religions ultimately leads to a dead end. Open source ftw, eh?:P
Anyway, I'm rapidly veering off on a tangent. The main point here was to make that distinction between science and tech and emphasize that science was never "popular" in any meaningful sense of the word. For the hyper-sensitive in the readership, please try not to read any qualitative judgments into that distinction (or if you do, recognize that you're just projecting:P).
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* As an example, consider that the solid state transistor responsible for every single computing advance in the last few decades exists solely because quantum mechanics had been discovered (or invented?) and it's consequences for the properties of matter fairly well understood by then. Tons of people work with microprocessors on every level imaginable. Yet, how many really get the science behind it? More importantly, is it really necessary? Not really, if the intention is to use the damn thing. Even well known (and useful) electronics textbooks like The Art of Electronics play the game that way (as they should). But that is the essence of the distinction between science and tech.
If whoever was helping with the "extracurricular" learning knew a large amount about pretty much everything, and could generate interest in all of history, politics, math, literacy, science (how to use experiments and record-keeping to assist curiosity), the various trivia that we learned from science (earth goes around the sun), basic accounting, etc.>
In other words, if we could get The Doctor to do this unschooling, it would actually make sense:). Using the TARDIS for busing might just make this exercise in surrealism complete:P
Nicely done (and in good taste too:)). Pity you're all alone in a sea of mediocre pseudo-wits:(.
I'm not offended as an Indian (by the over-abused and lame tech support jokes that litter the desolate landscape of this thread); I'm offended as a connoisseur of good comedy . Seriously dudes (who-probably-lost-their-jobs-to-outsourcing-and-are-surprisingly-hard-to-feel-sympathy-for-at-this-particular-moment), that meme is about as funny as the one about Soviet Russia or even *shudder* sharks with lasers. It is scary that Fark is so much better at meme-based humor than the supposedly godlike nerds that inhabit this realm.
No, it's just that I never engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
You are welcome to whatever sense of victory makes you feel good.
In other words, you argue until you can't think of anything to rebut with and then it's "nanana I can't hear you!"
Winning an argument on the Internet is like peeing yourself in a dark wool suit. Gives you a warm feeling, but nobody else notices.
Spouting cliches is cute, but in the end, nothing more than mental masturbation - hope you came. Just because a person assumes an argument should reach a logical conclusion doesn't mean he/she is automatically an attention-whore. To my mind, this was a discussion I was carrying on with several people individually in this sub-thread. I (unlike you and several others) abhorred ridiculous generalizations and focused on very specific points that were neither refuted nor admitted. That lack of either acceptance or rebuttal (for anything BUT an obvious troll) to me is the classic signature of the lazy debater.
Do you really think you're the only person who has stumbled upon the profound realization* that winning an argument on the internet doesn't matter? Of course it doesn't matter to other people in the real world, but if it truly didn't matter personally to YOU, you might want to think long and hard about why the fark you post anything on here in the first place. It's the thrill of the fight - an intellectual version of that strange thing called "sports", that millions of people seem to find important in the so-called real world everyday.
To extend your quaint little "simile" in a manner befitting its stature, your solution to the dilemma seems to be to just hold it in and stand in the cold:P.
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*sarcasm, in case it wasn't obvious.
Interesting. I did not know that. I wouldn't mind it in that case. However, I still think that a script that relies upon letter joining is much more difficult than it needs to be, especially in the case of English, where it serves no linguistic purpose (but it does serve the purpose of making writing faster and sometimes, only sometimes, prettier).
Take Devanagari for instance (the script used for Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and perhaps more) - letters and words are joined to denote meaning, sometimes pronunciation.
My previous post logically implies that cursive may be a VERY efficient method of self-annotation (diaries, margin notes, journals, etc.) but if your goal is to communicate with someone ELSE using your handwriting, it is all but useless. And it WAS useful at one point ONLY because good penmanship was dictatorially enforced, usually at the painful end of a stick across one's knuckles. Forcing people to communicate via cursive is a bit like forcing everyone to speak only in rhyming verse. That's all I'm saying.
Cursive is an anachronistic holdover from uncivilized times. Good riddance. The idea of cursive isn't too bad, it's just that people evolve their own idiosyncratic "cursive" styles that might as well be their own personal code. I imagine teachers are glad that their time isn't wasted on code-breaking anymore and they can actually focus on content. If anything, they should teach kids to write in print more legibly if the goal of handwriting is actual communication as opposed to pseudo-artistic nonsense.
especially when referring to a qualitative attribute such as visibility; what's visible to one person may not be visible to another
Right. That's why the definition of "visible light" should rely more on some species-wide feature than on some feature that varies wildly from one person to another.
It would be accurate to say people emit some light within the wavelength range that is normally visible.
It would be inaccurate to say people emit visible light.
This statement is exactly what I wanted to hear when I posted my first reply.:-)
No, that's why scientists should stop listening to the idiots who suggest making technical terms sound less jargonistic [sic]. Technical terms should be just that - TECHNICAL, with a precise meaning unrelated (or at least independent of any colloquial meaning). A physicist knows what the terms "visible light" or "auditory range (for sound)" mean (at this time, they are convenient placeholders for numerical ranges) and also know that the precise ranges are historical accidents. There is no particular significance to the boundaries between frequency ranges (in fact, there are no hard boundaries at all) - the crude divisions are based simply on the kind of interactions those frequencies have with matter.
IMO, we should have just made up new words for scientific terms instead of reusing old ones just because they seemed to fit loosely - they come with a LOT of baggage and cause great confusion among non-scientists. Radiation, microwaves, theory, energy, force,... need I go on? The best butchery of scientific terminology can be found in the immortal words of Obi Wan Kenobi:
The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things.
I used this example to teach my students the importance of units:)
if there could be a physiological basis for some of the spiritual things for which we don't yet have a fully satisfying explanation
Spiritual things ARE precisely those things for which we don't have a fully satisfying explanation:). The unknown breeds dragons in map margins*. Spirituality is the tracer dye that pinpoints PhD theses of future students;). I could keep going but I sense (my 7th sense actually) that you already know all this;).
Masochistic is right. I just spent all of last week trying to find and fix a vacuum leak in my experiment. Luckily it was a (relatively) straightforward setup and after I got to the point where I wanted to strangle someone (or wreck the lab with a hammer - I'm not too fussy about my violent outbreaks:)) I just swore a terrible oath at the thing and machined a new one from scratch.
I'm not complaining about the work (it's sorta like having an irritating kid - no matter what, it's still your kid:)), but vacuum leaks can be seriously frustrating, especially the ones that show up with a delay so you have not the slightest farking clue where the damn thing is leaking.
Since I feel like venting (no pun intended:P), I'll let y'all in on just how one leak checks a vacuum chamber. The leak-checker is just a glorified pump that can pump down to really low pressures. The stuff coming out of the chamber is also directed into a mass spectrometer that is tuned to register and count (usually) helium atoms. You spray helium gas over the outside of the vacuum chamber and if there is a leak, some helium gets sucked in and registers on the spectrometer. The bigger the leak, the bigger the count and a simple calculation converts this into ccs of helium coming in per second with a pressure difference of 1 atmosphere across the leak (1 atm outside and ~0 inside) - that by the way is where the unit standard ccs per min (sccm) or standard cubic feet per min (scfm) comes from - you may have encountered these units in several diverse places (anywhere that gas flows are controlled through pipes). Of course, these days most of this is automated but we have this really cool leak-checker (Air Force surplus from the dawn of time:)) that is so freakin' awesome and not too automated. It's from the 60's and still works perfectly o.O
The bottom line is that finding a small leak* in a man-sized chamber is difficult to begin with. Imagine how insanely difficult it would be to do this in the frakking LHC! And there, since they deal with subatomic particles, they need even better vacua than I do. Gawd I'm glad I'm not the guy in charge of finding leaks - I'd probably start gibbering and running around in little circles if I had to deal with it:P.
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*Here, small usually means somewhere around 1E-9 std.cc/s - at this rate, it would take more than 25 thousand years for a vacuum chamber the size of a beer stein to fill up due to air bleeding in from the outside. Much more than that actually since the rate would go down when the pressure difference decreases but this will do for now. And yet, such small leak rates can wreak havoc in delicate experiments (for instance, in a recent one where I was trying to measure the flow conductance of nanoholes - very tiny flows and leaks can screw things to hell).
The highway safety researchers estimated that cellphone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002.
And how exactly were those estimates made? Even if I accept that this is true (it probably is), does that mean that ALL OTHER accidents and fatalities can be attributed to single causes as well? If you subtract out the cellphone and drug/alcohol related fatalities, what do we attribute the remainder to? - passenger distraction? Crying babies? What?
I don't give a shit if some idiot cellphone user kills himself. It's me and the other thousands of others he'll pass on the road that I worry about.
Again, I sympathize. To be perfectly fair though you would have to replace "idiot cellphone user" with "idiot cellphone user/donut eater/coffee drinker/spouse arguer/passenger converser/etc..." and I would agree with you in a heartbeat.
It is no different from the whole 'smoking in public' shitstorm. I WISH people would smoke in the bus I ride to and from work. It would cover up the effing stink at least:P. For the record, I am not a smoker but it galls me that people get so frakking self-righteous about these things without realizing the magnitude of hypocrisy they are indulging in (not necessarily referring to you ol' chap).
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, yeah. First thing I thought of too. This better be a sailboat they're planning to use. Wait, does Titan have strong winds?
Other than providing a gimmick to make this different than previous missions, what's the point? Land something in a sea of methane and look for what? Sail around to find more liquid methane?
You're probably right. Aw hell, scratch the 'probably'. Speaking purely personally though, this is the first time in the past 10 years I've actually felt a stirring in my heart about space exploration. This Titan thing actually brought back some of the magic of space that used to come through so vividly in the science fiction of the 80s (before the post-modernist hacks stank up the place). Huh, let's just say that as a taxpayer, I wouldn't be in the least upset if this mission actually happened. In fact, I'd be out there cheering it on all the way. Go figure :). Guess science is far from unemotional eh?
Man, if Nietzche or Sartre studied in today's america, or even burroughs or kerouac, they'd be behind bars by now.
Ever read Dostoevsky? Creative psychos do some of their best work behind bars =). Think of the extra literature we would have today.
You forgot to note that he said "join their clause", rather than "join their cause", thus making himself just as guilty of typo's as the submitter of the article.
*cough* =)
And this is exactly the kind of problem government is ideally placed to solve. By being the big bad grown up that all the kids can point to and say, "I don't wanna be fair. But HE's making me". And voila, everyone's forced to be fair. And they can all pat themselves on the back and say that they weren't sissies who backed down 'cause like see [sic] everyone did. It's 3:36 in the morning, I'm tired and I won't proofread anymore. *Phbbt*
To summarize my rather flippant point above: since the market won't allow a company to do a "nice thing" for the consumer for fear of lowering profits (which would be poor reward eh?), it is ok for government to step in and make everyone do the nice thing. Since all companies are affected equally, advertisers have no alternative but to swallow it. Everyone wins. Even the advertisers because now consumers won't be put off by their products, the ads for which were a shining example of douchebaggery. See, sometimes a solution really is good for all concerned.
You never know. Impressionable kids going away with wrong info is a more serious issue than "buzzkilling". Hence my request for modding him/her funny (it wasn't really, I just didn't want it taken seriously :P). Besides, with the kind of greasy grasp of physics I've seen on here lately, there was a 50/50 chance it wasn't a joke :P.
I think that was kinda funny :D. "Troll" is a bit harsh what? :P
Mod parent funny :D. (Coz' the very point of superconductors is NO resistive heating ;-)
**Long post warning**
:). Classical electromagnetism (Maxwell) was a beautiful construct - difficult to understand for the scientists of the time but not too much. Then, it's intimate connections to special relativity were formalized and the resulting equations became much simpler! I'll say it again, because it's so counter-intuitive. Two difficult subjects come together and the amalgam is somehow simpler (partly) because the resulting mathematics is much more elegant and cleaner. There are many stories like this that accentuate the importance of equations and good formalism and notation not merely as a computational aid as so many people believe - but as a means of understanding the deeper connections between ideas.
I understand your preference for visual ways of comprehending mathematics. The problem is that such ways can be great for purposes of understanding the concepts* but that's about it. Mathematics is almost like an extra sense organ that shows us things we cannot otherwise see. Sure, you can describe colors in terms of touch to a blind man but there's not much he can then do with it. The equations that everyone seems to hate (sometimes with good reason because of the way they are presented with no motivation - unless you derive an equation yourself from fundamental axioms/assumptions with full understanding of the same, it will mean NOTHING to you, EVER!) are the key to finding out what's truly important about a particular mathematical animal. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the value of an equation is literally infinite because it lets us describe vast panoramas of experience in terms of the few things that really matter - that are really beautiful. An equation is like the strand of DNA that holds all the information that defines a living being, just waiting to be used to create one. It is a matter of profound and personal sorrow to me that most people live their entire lives without seeing how the essence of the universe can displayed on a piece of paper using a few symbols!
Numbers are probably the least important part of mathematics. Mathematics is about ideas, plain and simple. The idea of a simple triangle, a sphere, a higher dimensional manifold, the ideas of change (calculus). Speaking to a programmer - numbers are merely the input and output to the source code that is the equation. Sure, as a non-programmer (for the most part), I prefer to see a program as primarily the grinder that the input goes through to become the output, but we all know that misses the beauty of what's going on inside.
The other thing about visual aids is that they are almost always (and I speak from experience) personal - very rarely are they useful to any but a small section of learners. You are very correct that the equations and symbols are but a way of expressing mathematical insight. But they have evolved over the ages (and after passing through many loving hands) to be as nearly consistent as anyone could make them. If you look at original papers by inventors of new ideas and the ideas as expressed in textbooks a hundred years later, you will see what I mean.
That's the beauty of math and science - the original inventor RARELY understands or can explain his own idea better than his intellectual descendants decades down the road. And this made possible only because we have adopted a symbolism that is stable across the nations and through time and which only keeps getting better. This is why as textbooks in the humanities keep getting more and more complicated over the years, math books (college and later - I did not do high school in the US so I have no personal knowledge of that) keep getting more concise and more lucid and more profound as people keep finding more and more connections between previously unrelated things - thus cutting down on clutter.
Just a quick example and I'll shut up
In the end, as I used to tell my physics students - if you understand the concepts but cannot solve** the problems, you have not un
... leading us through the construction of small simple games and telling us why the hard boring stuff (like math) is important.
Kids want to learn stuff we just suck the joy out of learning because we don't give them cool things to work on that teach teh lesson that -- cool things require lots of hard boring stuff to accomplish but the end result is awesome.
It's a good thing I didn't grow up with your definitions of "boring" and "cool". Your statement that math is important is laudable but it is deeply contaminated by the addenda that it is also hard and boring. From my point of view, computing is merely a quaint little example of how a teeny tiny fraction of most aesthetically superb* piece of ... magic is the only word for it ... created by the human race can be applied for purposes of relieving the human mind of repetitive calculations (and perhaps entertainment).
:P. But we're discussing pre-college stuff. Rarely does one see any but the most superficial math in programming courses and that's fine. What I object to is actually institutionalizing that weird attitude. It's like the difference between a stripper and a ballet dancer - in one case, the details of the music aren't all that important ;).
:P. Cool is fine for kiddies, mature children should be introduced to the concept of "profound" as soon as possible. The horrible way we do it now grants the senile old farts a monopoly over it and that's just stupid.
:P
Teaching with the attitude I inferred from your post (and please correct me if my inference was in error) would simply create a bunch of superficial coders. I've seen firsthand the results of "real-world numerical" teaching styles taken to the extreme in (for instance) early physics education. It prevents students from seeing some of the grandest mysteries ever encountered and how our scientific ancestors frakking solved them instead of just staring stupidly at them. Imparting (among other things of course) the magnificence of the intersection of mathematics and reality (especially in everyday situations) should be one of the critical goals of science education.
Now, of course I wouldn't advocate that teaching philosophy in a college level programming course - you're there to learn to code, not contemplate mathematical mysteries
Just because the current way of teaching is not the best way doesn't mean that "cool" should be the new standard for good education
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*imho ofc
"consider that the solid state transistor responsible for every single computing advance in the last few decades exists solely because quantum mechanics had been discovered (or invented?)"
What? they had solid state transistors before quantum mechanics was anything but a hypotheses from a math formula.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor
:P.
The first transistor was not developed until 1947 in Bell Labs. Even (unverified) claims were not made until 1925, long after QM hit puberty
Also, your phrase "hypotheses [sic] from a math formula" is inexplicable. Further, quantum mechanics (developed in the early 1900s) is crucial in formulating the idea of band structure in a solid ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_band_structure ). Without this, even the idea of a semiconductor is meaningless. Perhaps you were confusing solid state transistors with vacuum tube triodes?
"Yet, how many really get the science behind it?" that sentence make no sense. Science is just exploration.
You don't need to understand the mechanics of a thing to measure it or develop something from it.
I'm in the twilight zone :P. Your last sentence above was the WHOLE POINT of my post. Or do you only read and respond to 2 random sentences in every post? Baffling. Oh, and the statement you say makes no sense is quite straightforward. If you had read the earlier part of the post, you would have seen the distinction I made between science and technology. The essence of my post was the observation that when most people declare their opinions for or against "science", what they are really judging is technology - the actual "science" is far below their radar even for everyday things (like computers - hence the transistor example). You can't judge what you don't even think about in most cases.
I could cite solid state textbooks at the graduate level but that would be overkill for the simple example I picked - wikipedia is quite accurate in that respect.
I'm quite willing to engage in meaningful discourse, but please try to at least google and verify some things before you post.
Popular again? When was it ever popular? I hope we technocrats aren't the latest victims of the "good ol' days" syndrome.
:P
:P).
My point is that science was never popular. At best it was identified with it's real-world manifestation (that we call technology) and at worst with all the evils that beset the god-fearing majority as a result of some busybodies "who just can't leave well enough alone". I don't think most people really have an opinion on science in the abstract sense until it morphs into something they can see or touch or otherwise sense.
If this thread is considering the question "how to make tech popular again", there are several answers out there already that are working (slowly but surely). The fact that technology can stand relatively independent of the deeper ideas that create it (assuming there's at least a handful of people who get the big picture) is good - it prevents the emergence of a ruling technocracy (something that I, even as a beginning scientist, have no wish to see in my lifetime). In this day and age, this fact has already made tech popular. But it has the disadvantage of creating a subclass of people that can make and work the technology without having to internalize the accompanying physical insights into how the universe works*. This, by the way, is the only way I've found to explain the engineers who work with terrorists (not their psyches - I'm no psychologist - just the reason it's even possible). Sad as it is, you don't really have to understand the solutions to the mysteries of the Universe that our scientific ancestors spent their lives exploring once some brilliant engineer who has done that figures out how to use that knowledge. Once that original bit of insight from the scientist and the subsequent intuitive leap to tech by the engineer are in place, anyone with the money and minimal expertise can repeat the miracle. The very reproducibility of tech without any need for ritual or mantras may yet prove deadly for science (and indeed, society). In my more idiotic/pessimistic moods, I sometimes wish we had continued to do things like the Pythagoreans. But of course, where discovering the truth is concerned, such dramatized secrecy as exists in pathetic little conspiracies or the big religions ultimately leads to a dead end. Open source ftw, eh?
Anyway, I'm rapidly veering off on a tangent. The main point here was to make that distinction between science and tech and emphasize that science was never "popular" in any meaningful sense of the word. For the hyper-sensitive in the readership, please try not to read any qualitative judgments into that distinction (or if you do, recognize that you're just projecting
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* As an example, consider that the solid state transistor responsible for every single computing advance in the last few decades exists solely because quantum mechanics had been discovered (or invented?) and it's consequences for the properties of matter fairly well understood by then. Tons of people work with microprocessors on every level imaginable. Yet, how many really get the science behind it? More importantly, is it really necessary? Not really, if the intention is to use the damn thing. Even well known (and useful) electronics textbooks like The Art of Electronics play the game that way (as they should). But that is the essence of the distinction between science and tech.
If whoever was helping with the "extracurricular" learning knew a large amount about pretty much everything, and could generate interest in all of history, politics, math, literacy, science (how to use experiments and record-keeping to assist curiosity), the various trivia that we learned from science (earth goes around the sun), basic accounting, etc.>
In other words, if we could get The Doctor to do this unschooling, it would actually make sense :). Using the TARDIS for busing might just make this exercise in surrealism complete :P
Blessed Ganesha, it's full of cows!
Nicely done (and in good taste too :)). Pity you're all alone in a sea of mediocre pseudo-wits :(.
I'm not offended as an Indian (by the over-abused and lame tech support jokes that litter the desolate landscape of this thread); I'm offended as a connoisseur of good comedy . Seriously dudes (who-probably-lost-their-jobs-to-outsourcing-and-are-surprisingly-hard-to-feel-sympathy-for-at-this-particular-moment), that meme is about as funny as the one about Soviet Russia or even *shudder* sharks with lasers. It is scary that Fark is so much better at meme-based humor than the supposedly godlike nerds that inhabit this realm.
Hey India, maned mission next time around, show us some drama.
You want them to send horses? o.O
No, it's just that I never engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
You are welcome to whatever sense of victory makes you feel good.
In other words, you argue until you can't think of anything to rebut with and then it's "nanana I can't hear you!"
Winning an argument on the Internet is like peeing yourself in a dark wool suit. Gives you a warm feeling, but nobody else notices.
Spouting cliches is cute, but in the end, nothing more than mental masturbation - hope you came. Just because a person assumes an argument should reach a logical conclusion doesn't mean he/she is automatically an attention-whore. To my mind, this was a discussion I was carrying on with several people individually in this sub-thread. I (unlike you and several others) abhorred ridiculous generalizations and focused on very specific points that were neither refuted nor admitted. That lack of either acceptance or rebuttal (for anything BUT an obvious troll) to me is the classic signature of the lazy debater.
:P.
Do you really think you're the only person who has stumbled upon the profound realization* that winning an argument on the internet doesn't matter? Of course it doesn't matter to other people in the real world, but if it truly didn't matter personally to YOU, you might want to think long and hard about why the fark you post anything on here in the first place. It's the thrill of the fight - an intellectual version of that strange thing called "sports", that millions of people seem to find important in the so-called real world everyday.
To extend your quaint little "simile" in a manner befitting its stature, your solution to the dilemma seems to be to just hold it in and stand in the cold
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*sarcasm, in case it wasn't obvious.
I guess I win by default then (no reply to my rebuttal)? Just a reminder:
:P
It goes - argument, counter-argument, lather, rinse, repeat
Quite irritating when people just stop arguing after one post instead of gracefully admitting the point. Ah well, what can you do?
Interesting. I did not know that. I wouldn't mind it in that case. However, I still think that a script that relies upon letter joining is much more difficult than it needs to be, especially in the case of English, where it serves no linguistic purpose (but it does serve the purpose of making writing faster and sometimes, only sometimes, prettier).
Take Devanagari for instance (the script used for Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and perhaps more) - letters and words are joined to denote meaning, sometimes pronunciation.
Self-reply but I have to add:
My previous post logically implies that cursive may be a VERY efficient method of self-annotation (diaries, margin notes, journals, etc.) but if your goal is to communicate with someone ELSE using your handwriting, it is all but useless. And it WAS useful at one point ONLY because good penmanship was dictatorially enforced, usually at the painful end of a stick across one's knuckles. Forcing people to communicate via cursive is a bit like forcing everyone to speak only in rhyming verse. That's all I'm saying.
This!
Cursive is an anachronistic holdover from uncivilized times. Good riddance. The idea of cursive isn't too bad, it's just that people evolve their own idiosyncratic "cursive" styles that might as well be their own personal code. I imagine teachers are glad that their time isn't wasted on code-breaking anymore and they can actually focus on content. If anything, they should teach kids to write in print more legibly if the goal of handwriting is actual communication as opposed to pseudo-artistic nonsense.
especially when referring to a qualitative attribute such as visibility; what's visible to one person may not be visible to another
Right. That's why the definition of "visible light" should rely more on some species-wide feature than on some feature that varies wildly from one person to another.
It would be accurate to say people emit some light within the wavelength range that is normally visible. It would be inaccurate to say people emit visible light.
This statement is exactly what I wanted to hear when I posted my first reply. :-)
No, that's why scientists should stop listening to the idiots who suggest making technical terms sound less jargonistic [sic]. Technical terms should be just that - TECHNICAL, with a precise meaning unrelated (or at least independent of any colloquial meaning). A physicist knows what the terms "visible light" or "auditory range (for sound)" mean (at this time, they are convenient placeholders for numerical ranges) and also know that the precise ranges are historical accidents. There is no particular significance to the boundaries between frequency ranges (in fact, there are no hard boundaries at all) - the crude divisions are based simply on the kind of interactions those frequencies have with matter.
... need I go on? The best butchery of scientific terminology can be found in the immortal words of Obi Wan Kenobi:
IMO, we should have just made up new words for scientific terms instead of reusing old ones just because they seemed to fit loosely - they come with a LOT of baggage and cause great confusion among non-scientists. Radiation, microwaves, theory, energy, force,
The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things.
I used this example to teach my students the importance of units :)
if there could be a physiological basis for some of the spiritual things for which we don't yet have a fully satisfying explanation
Spiritual things ARE precisely those things for which we don't have a fully satisfying explanation :). The unknown breeds dragons in map margins*. Spirituality is the tracer dye that pinpoints PhD theses of future students ;). I could keep going but I sense (my 7th sense actually) that you already know all this ;).
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*Lois McMaster Bujold
Masochistic is right. I just spent all of last week trying to find and fix a vacuum leak in my experiment. Luckily it was a (relatively) straightforward setup and after I got to the point where I wanted to strangle someone (or wreck the lab with a hammer - I'm not too fussy about my violent outbreaks :)) I just swore a terrible oath at the thing and machined a new one from scratch.
:)), but vacuum leaks can be seriously frustrating, especially the ones that show up with a delay so you have not the slightest farking clue where the damn thing is leaking.
:P), I'll let y'all in on just how one leak checks a vacuum chamber. The leak-checker is just a glorified pump that can pump down to really low pressures. The stuff coming out of the chamber is also directed into a mass spectrometer that is tuned to register and count (usually) helium atoms. You spray helium gas over the outside of the vacuum chamber and if there is a leak, some helium gets sucked in and registers on the spectrometer. The bigger the leak, the bigger the count and a simple calculation converts this into ccs of helium coming in per second with a pressure difference of 1 atmosphere across the leak (1 atm outside and ~0 inside) - that by the way is where the unit standard ccs per min (sccm) or standard cubic feet per min (scfm) comes from - you may have encountered these units in several diverse places (anywhere that gas flows are controlled through pipes). Of course, these days most of this is automated but we have this really cool leak-checker (Air Force surplus from the dawn of time :)) that is so freakin' awesome and not too automated. It's from the 60's and still works perfectly o.O
:P.
I'm not complaining about the work (it's sorta like having an irritating kid - no matter what, it's still your kid
Since I feel like venting (no pun intended
The bottom line is that finding a small leak* in a man-sized chamber is difficult to begin with. Imagine how insanely difficult it would be to do this in the frakking LHC! And there, since they deal with subatomic particles, they need even better vacua than I do. Gawd I'm glad I'm not the guy in charge of finding leaks - I'd probably start gibbering and running around in little circles if I had to deal with it
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*Here, small usually means somewhere around 1E-9 std.cc/s - at this rate, it would take more than 25 thousand years for a vacuum chamber the size of a beer stein to fill up due to air bleeding in from the outside. Much more than that actually since the rate would go down when the pressure difference decreases but this will do for now. And yet, such small leak rates can wreak havoc in delicate experiments (for instance, in a recent one where I was trying to measure the flow conductance of nanoholes - very tiny flows and leaks can screw things to hell).
The highway safety researchers estimated that cellphone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002.
And how exactly were those estimates made? Even if I accept that this is true (it probably is), does that mean that ALL OTHER accidents and fatalities can be attributed to single causes as well? If you subtract out the cellphone and drug/alcohol related fatalities, what do we attribute the remainder to? - passenger distraction? Crying babies? What?
I don't give a shit if some idiot cellphone user kills himself. It's me and the other thousands of others he'll pass on the road that I worry about.
Again, I sympathize. To be perfectly fair though you would have to replace "idiot cellphone user" with "idiot cellphone user/donut eater/coffee drinker/spouse arguer/passenger converser/etc..." and I would agree with you in a heartbeat.
:P. For the record, I am not a smoker but it galls me that people get so frakking self-righteous about these things without realizing the magnitude of hypocrisy they are indulging in (not necessarily referring to you ol' chap).
It is no different from the whole 'smoking in public' shitstorm. I WISH people would smoke in the bus I ride to and from work. It would cover up the effing stink at least