A better metaphor might be the thermostat for a furnance. It is called the "appestat". Basically, when your body sense your stomach is full and your body sense it has enought nutrients (usually from plant foods), your appetite thermostat shuts off your appetite. See Dr. Fuhrman's book "Eat to Live" for a discussion of this.
So, if you get your calories from strained fruit juice or milk, your stomach does not feel full for long as liquid just passes through. If you eat leafy vegetables you will fill up your stomach on about 200 calories and your appestat will click off. If you eat a steak, you will fill up your stomach with 3000 calories (more than ten times as much) and your body will still feel like it is missing out on some plant nutrients so your appestat may take a while to click off.
When you exercise, your appestat setting tends to go up to balance the extra calories burned, which is why exercise, while otherwise great for you health, has only a slight value for weight loss.
See Dr. Joel Fuhrman for a good understanding of this (bot how to be healthy and lose weigt by eating a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans): http://www.diseaseproof.com/
Most chronic disease including obesity can be treated with nutritional intervention, which moslty comes down to eating a variety of plant foods, heavy on the vegetables.
It's true this guy lost weight, but he may have increased his disease risk. Also, it probably took a lot of will power that almost no one can keep up for years. A whole foods diet, heavy on stuff like vegetables fruits, and beans, with fiber to fill the stomach, and nutrients to satiate the metabolism, is a much more sustainable diet for the rest of his life.
Non-starchy vegetables, beans and fruits give you about 200 to 400 calories when filling up your stomach with lots of essential nutrients. (See "Eat to Live" by Dr. Fuhrman.) Fill up your stomach on meat and dairy and oil (plus maybe a little processed starch) and that will give you 3000 calories or so before your stomach is filled up (but little of the plant-derived phytochemicals your body needs for optimal health). That explains the mathematical basics of all anyone needs to know about weight loss and health.:-)
And so, as Dr. Fuhrman says, "make the salad the main dish".
BTW, if you are an Inuit descendent (Eskimo) several hundred years ago, eating free range fish from unpolluted waters, incuding the contents of fish's stomachs with some plant algae, as well as seaweed and some other occasional plant stuff, you can probably get away with a meat-heavy diet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_diet
The reports focus on the professor eating twinkies, but they slight that he was also eating vegetables, too, which may have helped him manage his hunger cravings and stay on his "diet". He could have easily eaten more vegetables and less junk food and got better results.
At any weight, there is no doubt some variation in metabolism based on genetics, activity level, and gut bacteria. With that said, I doubt the difference is huge.
You can't tell what those people are eating at other times.
Dr. Joel Fuhmran goes into detail to a proven approach to weight loss and increasing health by eating more vegetables and fruits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
Thinking about what he says, I'd suggest the person eating the salad is puttng a lot of dressing on it and adding lots of hidden calories that way.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html This applies equally well to financial organizations: "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing."
Ripples may not be remembered individually, but each changes the nature of the universe, and also together they can make bigger waves with futher effects. Also, as in the Time Paradox book I cited in another reply, people may have different time focuses -- past present, and the future -- which effect how they value different experiences or expectations. Also, to the extent the universe, or even multiverse, is a mystery, how do we know what is remembered or forgotten for sure across the great mystery...
Plus things can matter a lot to yourself at the time, depending on the roots you have grown -- family, community, friends, hobbies, causes, humor, health, a connection to nature or the infitite, and so on. A depression and carelessness or hurtfulness can also come from physical problems like vitamin D deficiency, lack of Omega-3/DHA, lack of whole foods, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, and so on.
You can also have a practical morality, or one that emerges from local experience or upbringing, whether you have a belief in a specific god or gods. So, there are a lot of assumptions there... See Kai Nielsen: http://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Without-God-Kai-Nielsen/dp/0879755520
Or even Albert Einstein: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "
A great related book: http://www.thetimeparadox.com/ "Welcome to The Time Paradox, a new book by Philip Zimbardo & John Boyd. The Time Paradox is not a single paradox but a series of paradoxes that shape our lives and our destinies. For example: * Paradox 1: Time is one of the most powerful influences on our thoughts, feelings, and actions, yet we are usually totally unaware of the effect of time in our lives. * Paradox 2: Each specific attitude toward time--or time perspective--is associated with numerous benefits, yet in excess each is associated with even greater costs. * Paradox 3: Individual attitudes toward time are learned through personal experience, yet collectively attitudes toward time influence national destinies."
One issue is that once no one has a private life, all the foibles humans have become known and the baseline changes (so, you learn everyone belches, etc.)
I'm not saying that is necessarily good, I'm just saying that at least that is a possibility.
Re:Those Were The Days My Friends, We Thought...
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
A lot of the "benefits" of object-oriented systems had little to do directly with things like data abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance.
In the case of Smalltalk (which I do like) they had to do with: * garbage collection * a good set of libraries with consistently named functions * message passing (not quite the same as objects, though usually related) * good tools including inspectors and debuggers (where you could restart code with corrections) * GUIs and related support * a virtual machine * machine-architecture independent virtual images of computing structures * version control * a way of naming functions with keyword syntax where the meaning of arguments was clear * a full numerical tower including fractions as a special case of representation * often, an event loop * probably other good stuff
Visual Basic had some of these even without having pure objects. A language like C++ has none of these even while having objects. Which mix is better depends on the task.
Ultimately, what matters most about object-oriented programming is actually "message passing". Alan Kay has said he misnamed it. He should have called it message-oriented programming. Example: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3265 "For me, the bottom line is that modern, mainstream OO languages have been sold to us as a bill of goods. There's really nothing "real-world" about mainstream OO. I believe Alan Kay lamented the fact that he didn't call OO message-oriented programming."
If you do real-time programming or parallel programming, with message queues and semaphores and event loops, in a way, you are doing message-oriented programming. http://www.google.com/#q=message-oriented+programming
And here is why it is always hard to model the real world as simplistic "objects" because of various data-representation problems (including splitting and joining representations of "objects" as needs change):
"Data and Reality [Excerpts]" http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
==== From the preface to the Second Edition of Data and Reality:
Preface to the Second Edition
Despite critical acclaim, outside of a small circle of enthusiastic readers this book has been a sleeper for over twenty years. Publishers have recently offered to market and distribute it with more vigor if I would provide a new revised edition, but I've resisted. Laziness might be seen as the excuse, but I'm beginning to realize there's a better reason.
A new revised edition would miss the point of the book. Many texts and reference works are available to keep you on the leading edge of data processing technology. That's not what this book is about. This book addresses timeless questions about how we as human beings perceive and process information about the world we operate in, and how we struggle to impose that view on our data processing machines. The concerns at this level are the same whether we use hierarchical, relational, or object-oriented information structures; whether we process data via punched-card machines or interactive graphic interfaces; whether we correspond by paper mail or e-mail; whether we shop from paper-based catalogs or the web. No matter what the technology, these underlying issues have to be understood. Failure to address these issues imperils the success of your application regardless of the tools you are using.
That's not to say the technical matrix of the book is obsolete or antiquated. The data record is still a fundamental component of the way we organize computer information. Sections of the book exploring new models including behavioral elements are precursors of object orientation.
The scope of the book extends beyond computer technology. The questions aren't so much about how we process data
Re:Those Were The Days My Friends, We Thought...
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
Cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I "The Digi-Comp I is a functioning, mechanical digital computer sold in kit form. It was originally manufactured from polystyrene parts by E.S.R., Inc. starting in 1963 and sold as an educational toy for $5.95."
Before I was "programming", I was doing digital electronics with things like flip-flop circuits from Radio Shack. When I was around nine or so I build my first "computer" from ideas in a book for kids that was just made out of a few switches and wires and a light bulb (to get at "and" and "or" gates).
The time I most felt "in control" of a computer was using Forth on a Commodore VIC and a Commodore 64 -- you could have a sense of everything that was going on, reset the computer and still have your data in memory, actually change things at various memory addresses by hand and see results, and FORTH was just high enough a level language to feel you were sort of talking to the computer.:-) So, FORTH on a Commodore sort of bridged the low level of assembler and the high level of BASIC, but being better than either in many ways. FORTH was what taught me something about bottom up programming and refactoring.
I guess we should maybe be a bit more understanding when someone who has never had the early experiences you and I had? Hard to imagine what they think (or don't think) is going on in there.:-) It's hard at this point to really think about all the years of early experiences that went into shaping me as a software developer -- and all the levels of confusion along the way that slowly cleared up (in most cases.:-)
Re:Those Were The Days My Friends, We Thought...
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I remember typing in a long basic game from probably that same book, on a teletype that my school had for a timeshared regional PDP-10 in the late 1970s.
I think you can learn a lot by just retyping stuff.
While I first started learning programming on the KIM-1, in my early teens, it was very confusing (working in assembly).
I think programming really gelled for me by playing with Radio Shack TRS-80 computers in the store and reading and doing the BASIC exercises in the TRS-80 "User's Manual for Level I" by David A. Lien -- with pencil on paper, as I did not have a computer but could afford to get the manual.:-)
I think it did make a difference it had some funny cartoons. Others think so, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80 "Level I Basic was based on Li-Chen Wang's free Tiny BASIC, additional functions added by Radio Shack. It achieved a measure of noteworthiness due in large part to its outstanding manual, written by David Lien, which presented lessons on programming with text and humorous graphics, making the subjects very easy to understand"
But, then typing in a couple of larger basic computer games and figuring out the typos built on that.
Except the USA has lots of nukes, plagues, military robots, computer viruses, and who knows what else that stand ready to defend US elite privileged scarcity-based litigious world view until the end -- or even after the end. So, no matter where you go in the world, US socioeconomic dogmatic religious policies (backed by the force of law) can have a big "impact". And since the USA's elite-tilted market economy is essentially though of as "God" by many (ignoring "the love of money is the root of all evil"?), whatever the USA does to promote or defend its version of "the market" and related laws is, by definition, "supremely good", even were it to mean the end of humanity. The USA has inched a little closer to that by reelecting a lot of economic conservatives just now.
By a Harvard University professor of Divinity:
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation" http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm "A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar. Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies...."
The slogan "Better dead than Red" is another example of this thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. So "Better dead than live in a world of prosperity for all" could perhaps be a new mantra of the USA in the 21st century when 3D printing and shared information make widespread abundance possible, but everyone does not want to accept the shift to a new paradigm? See also James P. Hogan's prescient sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear" about this theme.
3D printing might totally reshape our socioeconomic landscape in the next couple of decades. So, essentially, producing a car with 3D printing is a *religious* threat to the US social paradigm built around scarcity. And religious threats can cause all sorts of crazy things to happen. I can hope that saner heads prevail and that the scarcity ideologues eventually give in gracefully when they think about the benefits to their children and children's children of a world that works for everyone.
From Einstein, on religion: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source."
Even as I agree with your point: http://www.robots-dreams.com/2010/02/3d-printing-robot-parts-is-a-reality-already-video.html "We often get into discussions and debates about the potential for 3D printing, especially as it relates to robotics. We tend to take the positive side of the debate, and paint a rosy picture of what we believe to be a not-too-distant future where researchers, developers, and even hobbyists will be able to crank out real-world manifestations of their dream concepts, and test them under practical conditions at reasonable cost and with very short timeframes.... Well, now we have a great example to actually show them..."
Well, I think transcending irony is the most important issue.:-) http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially... irony.:-)"
You could recycle plastic you already have with better home technology, in theory. Just like you can build a machine shop from "scrap": http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/index.html
What does it mean to say it is "cheaper" to mass produce things than print them on demand if you need to incur costs when you store them, ship them around, wait for them, secure them, deal with sending back wrong orders, keep track of stuff, and still need to repair and replace stuff on demand anyway? If that made sense, why do people have 2D printers at home when it is probably "cheaper" in some sense to print everything at a large central facility and have it mailed to you in boxes once a month?
If your 3D printer breaks, you ask your friend to print you a replacement part. Or you use another 3D printer you have at home. What do you do when you misconfigure a Debian system and it won't boot? You use another computer to surf the web looking for a solution and to create a boot CD-ROM or boot USB Flash drive.
Anyway, maybe it is good that it is "just a hobby" (even as that is not quite true), because 3D printers are part of ushering in "the end of work (as we know it)".
Up to $100,000 SBIR phase One for US small businesses. Letter of intent due by: November 20, 2010
Very significant because of the involvement of all these US agencies (NIH, DOD, NSF, USDA, DHS).
And it's all ironic, given the high unemployment.:-) But, that's the problem of our age, irony.:-) Solutions are here collected by me for a happy roboticized world::-)
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics" http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
The difference comes down to the fact that how a person chooses to grow as an individual, or what a person should do to be a good friend, neighbor and citizen, may both have very little to do with how someone else wants to enslave that person to do work for them.
Of course, one person's view of being enslaved (say, to rabid nationalism or even just professional ethics that involve not taking a political position for a personal view of social justice) may be another person's view of progress and social uplift. And work as in "doing productive stuff" and "hard fun" and "making things happen" and "helping others" may well have many good qualities which are irrespective of who is defining the work (and the workplace) and who is getting the fruits of the work.
Still, ask yourself, what would be the "perfect" education for a slave these days? How far away are we from that with our public school system? http://www.thewaronkids.com/
This is a typical example of the intent behind it connected to the "marketplace" and not personal growth (or even just citizenship):
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over" http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html "What if the solution to American students' stagnant performance levels and the wide achievement gap between white and minority students wasn't more money, smaller schools, or any of the reforms proposed in recent years, but rather a new education system altogether? That's the conclusion of a bipartisan group of scholars and business leaders, school chancellors and education commissioners, and former cabinet secretaries and governors. They declare that America's public education system, designed to meet the needs of 100 years ago when the workplace revolved around an assembly line, is unsuited to today's global marketplace. Already, they warn, many Americans are in danger of falling behind and seeing their standard of living plummet."
While I completely agree with the title of the article that we should start over with our education system, I disagree with the approach as well as "the marketplace" as a primary aspiration. See my other posts on this article for unschooling alternatives). http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1847578&cid=34099866 And see this for other real solutions to the jobs crisis transcending marketplace problems resulting from a combination of limited demand through saturation and the falling value of most paid humor labor due to robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
It's true that eventually black slaves in the USA were kept from learning how to read (though that was not the case at first, only when they were getting uppity). But, what would you want a personal slave in the 21st century be able to do for you, and would reading, writing, and arithmetic be part of it? Sort your emails according to written criterion you supply? Drive your car while reading all the road signs and navigating efficiently? Be good in bed just the way you like it through extensive study of writings on the topic? Have brilliant engaging conversations about whatever you wanted to talk about based on being informed about current events? Build for you a comfortable house without a leaky roof by being able to follow blueprints precisely?
Remember, the Egyptians must have had many very technically skilled slaves (for the time) to build the pyramids. Slavery is not incompatible with some forms of learning. Even if eventually the slaves might choose to revolt in some way:
And also a lot of great math comes from great physics, and is easier to understand that way. My young kid really liked the "derivative machine" cartoon in this series, as well as other animations connecting physics with the math (especially calculus) it inspired:
"The Mechanical Universe... and Beyond" http://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html
Even if at the end, Nobel Laurette Roald Hoffman extols the wonders of Bisphenol-A.:-) http://www.chemicalsubstanceschimiques.gc.ca/challenge-defi/batch-lot-2/bisphenol-a/index-eng.php "Canada is the first country in the world to take action on bisphenol A, thanks to our Chemicals Management Plan. This Plan was introduced in 2006 to review the safety of widely-used chemicals that have been in the marketplace for many years, and to update our knowledge and understanding of these chemicals."
I made something like this poem up once before (maybe I heard it before, too?). Here is another try at it:
The circle of knowledge, a poem by Paul D. Fernhout
All philosophy is anthropology;
All anthropology is psychology;
All psychology is biology;
All biology is chemistry;
All chemistry is physics;
All physics is math;
All math is philosophy.:-)
What's interesting about these sorts of discussions is that they are much more approachable for everyone than if we were arguing over calculus type things. And, these sorts of calculation are sometimes much more amenable to reasonable discussions and amendments and improvements related to bounds than overly precise ones about exact outcomes.
As Freeman Dyson said: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html "As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. Since I am heretic, I am accustomed to being in the minority. If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic. We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, "Too bad he has lost his marbles", and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role."
Back of the envelope calculations can give us a better idea of the range and scale of possibility, even if someone probably needs to do more detailed calculations to really make things work. So, we can answer "Might it fly?" with ballpark figures, whereas, "What is the best way to make it fly, given certain constraints and goals?" might take calculus or something else (evolutionary annealing algorithms or whatever).
It's been said (Knuth) that "premature optimization is the root of all evil": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization but related to that may be the notion that teaching people optimization techniques and high precision math (like calculus or even the full times table) as opposed to basic approximation (like working with only one degree of precision or round numbers) may be the root of all extreme dumbness and math illiteracy?:-)
By the way, related to general errors in assumptions (or calculations), especially in relation to the LHC at CERN: http://reason.com/archives/2008/09/02/a-1-in-1000-chance-of-gotterda "At the Global Catastrophic Risk conference, Future of Humanity Institute research associate Toby Ord asked an interesting question: How certain should we be about safety when there could be a risk to the survival of the human species? As Ord argued, "When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in their modeling of the problem, or a mistake in their calculations.""
Wow, a video version links to lots of stuff on 9/11 investigations being problematical.
Guess that just goes to show that Information is not knowledge. A related poem I wrote a while back:
On Information, Knowledge, Intelligence, Wisdom, Virtue, and Effectiveness
By Paul D. Fernhout
Information is not knowledge,
Knowledge is not intelligence,
Intelligence is not wisdom,
Wisdom is not virtue, and
Virtue is not effectiveness.
So, to have is not to organize,
To organize is not to embody,
To embody is not to value,
To value is not to act, and
To act (especially in ignorance)
is not necessarily to succeed.
But don't sweat "early reading". A kid is learning all the time. If they learn to read nature and computers and blocks and people and social situations and sand and water and pets and so on for seven to ten years (while listening to you read stories and other information aloud), they are learning in general a lot more than they would by trying to learn such things from books and other print media on the computer. If a kid wants to learn to read early (age two to four), fine. And of course, all kids should probably be exposed to reading material and the power of the written word (like adding things to shopping lists, or making signs). But if you go back two hundred years, learning to read at a later age was quite common, and kids catch up very fast. Don't let a stupid schooling lockstep age-focused paradigm harm your kid. Some kids also learn best to read by writing first (John Holt talks about this -- and how if you kid expresses an interest in writing, even just by scribbling stuff with no relation to regular letters, build on that). Note also that late reading in a homechooling/unschooling situation (where kids make their own choices) is different than late reading in a school-based print-based academic environment (where late reading is often a sign of some underlying health issue or just a broad, often justified, rejection of the authoritarian school paradigm, and problem piles upon problem if you can't read).
Contrast the probably true as far as it goes for compelled schooled children:
"Waiting Rarely Works: Late Bloomers Usually Just Wilt" http://www.readingrockets.org/article/11360 "In the simplest terms, these studies ask: Do struggling readers catch up? The data from the studies are clear: Late bloomers are rare; skill deficits are almost always what prevent children from blooming as readers. This research may be counter-intuitive to elementary teachers who have seen late-bloomers in their own classes or heard about them from colleagues. But statistically speaking, such students are rare. (Actually, as we'll see, there is nearly a 90 percent chance that a poor reader in first grade will remain a poor reader.)"
with what happen when early reading is not emphasized because the environment is more flexible:
"Children Teach Themselves to Read" http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read "In marked contrast to all this frenzy about teaching reading stands the view of people involved in the "unschooling" movement and the Sudbury "non-school" school movement, who claim that reading need not be taught at all! As long as kids grow up in a literate society, surrounded by people who read, they will learn to read. They may ask some questions along the way and get a few pointers from others who already know how to read, but they will take the initiative in all of this and orchestrate the entire process themselves. This is individualized learning, but it does not require brain imaging or cognitive scientists, and it requires little effort on the part of anyone other than the child who is l
And who decides what knowledge or skills (including unquestioned immediate obedience to authority as exemplified in classrooms?) are important to a child's present or future, or the present or future of the culture they live in?
Who picks the hoops a person is forced to jump through (in a democracy)? The person? His or her parents? Neighbors? Elected officials in the community? Big foundations? How should these different voices be balanced in a democracy? What are we trying to achieve as a culture? Do some of these voices (business concerns?) have a stronger influence than others (like Gatto suggest)?
What different views are there on this? http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm "The history of the development of Western schooling is a complex and meandering thing, but I think it is worth looking at in a very abbreviated form here. A little insight into the logics and basis for contemporary compulsory schooling might be useful to social ecologists."
Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome did not have compulsory education, were they not "advanced" for their time?
The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) had no compulsory schooling as we know it hundreds of years ago, but the USA borrowed ideas from their society for its constitution.
The USA did not have compulsory education for most of the 1700s and 1800s. Was US American not advanced for its time? Was it perhaps in some ways more advanced back then, as Gatto suggests, with more independent self-educated people with a higher degree of literacy?
Anyway, another reply by someone else (who you may have confused with me?) makes a related point.
There are lots of better educational alternatives than compulsory mainstream public schooling listed here: http://www.educationrevolution.org/
And if you say, you can't trust the parents to look out for their own children's interests, then what does that say about the value of thirteen years of compulsory schooling?
Anyway, there are lots of alternative ideas out there if you look around with an open mind. But the whole point of compulsory schooling is to close people's minds and distract them. That may not be the intentional purpose of most schoolteachers, but it is the end result of the systemic process, and as Gatto suggests, that process is doing exactly what it was designed to do, so if you give it more resources, it will only dumb people down faster and more comprehensively.
Slashdot Mirror
A better metaphor might be the thermostat for a furnance. It is called the "appestat". Basically, when your body sense your stomach is full and your body sense it has enought nutrients (usually from plant foods), your appetite thermostat shuts off your appetite. See Dr. Fuhrman's book "Eat to Live" for a discussion of this.
So, if you get your calories from strained fruit juice or milk, your stomach does not feel full for long as liquid just passes through. If you eat leafy vegetables you will fill up your stomach on about 200 calories and your appestat will click off. If you eat a steak, you will fill up your stomach with 3000 calories (more than ten times as much) and your body will still feel like it is missing out on some plant nutrients so your appestat may take a while to click off.
When you exercise, your appestat setting tends to go up to balance the extra calories burned, which is why exercise, while otherwise great for you health, has only a slight value for weight loss.
See Dr. Joel Fuhrman for a good understanding of this (bot how to be healthy and lose weigt by eating a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans):
http://www.diseaseproof.com/
Most chronic disease including obesity can be treated with nutritional intervention, which moslty comes down to eating a variety of plant foods, heavy on the vegetables.
It's true this guy lost weight, but he may have increased his disease risk. Also, it probably took a lot of will power that almost no one can keep up for years. A whole foods diet, heavy on stuff like vegetables fruits, and beans, with fiber to fill the stomach, and nutrients to satiate the metabolism, is a much more sustainable diet for the rest of his life.
Non-starchy vegetables, beans and fruits give you about 200 to 400 calories when filling up your stomach with lots of essential nutrients. (See "Eat to Live" by Dr. Fuhrman.) Fill up your stomach on meat and dairy and oil (plus maybe a little processed starch) and that will give you 3000 calories or so before your stomach is filled up (but little of the plant-derived phytochemicals your body needs for optimal health). That explains the mathematical basics of all anyone needs to know about weight loss and health. :-)
And so, as Dr. Fuhrman says, "make the salad the main dish".
BTW, if you are an Inuit descendent (Eskimo) several hundred years ago, eating free range fish from unpolluted waters, incuding the contents of fish's stomachs with some plant algae, as well as seaweed and some other occasional plant stuff, you can probably get away with a meat-heavy diet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_diet
The reports focus on the professor eating twinkies, but they slight that he was also eating vegetables, too, which may have helped him manage his hunger cravings and stay on his "diet". He could have easily eaten more vegetables and less junk food and got better results.
At any weight, there is no doubt some variation in metabolism based on genetics, activity level, and gut bacteria. With that said, I doubt the difference is huge.
You can't tell what those people are eating at other times.
Also, vitamin D deficiency may be linked to obesity, so that is another variable:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Dr. Joel Fuhmran goes into detail to a proven approach to weight loss and increasing health by eating more vegetables and fruits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
Thinking about what he says, I'd suggest the person eating the salad is puttng a lot of dressing on it and adding lots of hidden calories that way.
...if you work so much indoors: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Adequate vitamin D may help prevent the flu, too.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
This applies equally well to financial organizations: "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing."
Ripples may not be remembered individually, but each changes the nature of the universe, and also together they can make bigger waves with futher effects. Also, as in the Time Paradox book I cited in another reply, people may have different time focuses -- past present, and the future -- which effect how they value different experiences or expectations. Also, to the extent the universe, or even multiverse, is a mystery, how do we know what is remembered or forgotten for sure across the great mystery...
Plus things can matter a lot to yourself at the time, depending on the roots you have grown -- family, community, friends, hobbies, causes, humor, health, a connection to nature or the infitite, and so on. A depression and carelessness or hurtfulness can also come from physical problems like vitamin D deficiency, lack of Omega-3/DHA, lack of whole foods, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, and so on.
You can also have a practical morality, or one that emerges from local experience or upbringing, whether you have a belief in a specific god or gods. So, there are a lot of assumptions there... See Kai Nielsen:
http://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Without-God-Kai-Nielsen/dp/0879755520
Or even Albert Einstein:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "
A great related book: http://www.thetimeparadox.com/
"Welcome to The Time Paradox, a new book by Philip Zimbardo & John Boyd.
The Time Paradox is not a single paradox but a series of paradoxes that shape our lives and our destinies. For example:
* Paradox 1: Time is one of the most powerful influences on our thoughts, feelings, and actions, yet we are usually totally unaware of the effect of time in our lives.
* Paradox 2: Each specific attitude toward time--or time perspective--is associated with numerous benefits, yet in excess each is associated with even greater costs.
* Paradox 3: Individual attitudes toward time are learned through personal experience, yet collectively attitudes toward time influence national destinies."
The book "The Light of Other Days" is in part about the loss of privacy (though through other means than the internet).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
One issue is that once no one has a private life, all the foibles humans have become known and the baseline changes (so, you learn everyone belches, etc.)
I'm not saying that is necessarily good, I'm just saying that at least that is a possibility.
In general I agree with you about the notion of different faces people want to present. My wife wrote an essay about that in relation to Facebook:
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html
A lot of the "benefits" of object-oriented systems had little to do directly with things like data abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance.
In the case of Smalltalk (which I do like) they had to do with:
* garbage collection
* a good set of libraries with consistently named functions
* message passing (not quite the same as objects, though usually related)
* good tools including inspectors and debuggers (where you could restart code with corrections)
* GUIs and related support
* a virtual machine
* machine-architecture independent virtual images of computing structures
* version control
* a way of naming functions with keyword syntax where the meaning of arguments was clear
* a full numerical tower including fractions as a special case of representation
* often, an event loop
* probably other good stuff
Visual Basic had some of these even without having pure objects. A language like C++ has none of these even while having objects. Which mix is better depends on the task.
Ultimately, what matters most about object-oriented programming is actually "message passing". Alan Kay has said he misnamed it. He should have called it message-oriented programming. Example:
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3265
"For me, the bottom line is that modern, mainstream OO languages have been sold to us as a bill of goods. There's really nothing "real-world" about mainstream OO. I believe Alan Kay lamented the fact that he didn't call OO message-oriented programming."
If you do real-time programming or parallel programming, with message queues and semaphores and event loops, in a way, you are doing message-oriented programming.
http://www.google.com/#q=message-oriented+programming
And here is why it is always hard to model the real world as simplistic "objects" because of various data-representation problems (including splitting and joining representations of "objects" as needs change):
"Data and Reality [Excerpts]"
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
==== From the preface to the Second Edition of Data and Reality:
Preface to the Second Edition
Despite critical acclaim, outside of a small circle of enthusiastic readers this book has been a sleeper for over twenty years. Publishers have recently offered to market and distribute it with more vigor if I would provide a new revised edition, but I've resisted. Laziness might be seen as the excuse, but I'm beginning to realize there's a better reason.
A new revised edition would miss the point of the book. Many texts and reference works are available to keep you on the leading edge of data processing technology. That's not what this book is about. This book addresses timeless questions about how we as human beings perceive and process information about the world we operate in, and how we struggle to impose that view on our data processing machines. The concerns at this level are the same whether we use hierarchical, relational, or object-oriented information structures; whether we process data via punched-card machines or interactive graphic interfaces; whether we correspond by paper mail or e-mail; whether we shop from paper-based catalogs or the web. No matter what the technology, these underlying issues have to be understood. Failure to address these issues imperils the success of your application regardless of the tools you are using.
That's not to say the technical matrix of the book is obsolete or antiquated. The data record is still a fundamental component of the way we organize computer information. Sections of the book exploring new models including behavioral elements are precursors of object orientation.
The scope of the book extends beyond computer technology. The questions aren't so much about how we process data
Cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I
"The Digi-Comp I is a functioning, mechanical digital computer sold in kit form. It was originally manufactured from polystyrene parts by E.S.R., Inc. starting in 1963 and sold as an educational toy for $5.95."
Before I was "programming", I was doing digital electronics with things like flip-flop circuits from Radio Shack. When I was around nine or so I build my first "computer" from ideas in a book for kids that was just made out of a few switches and wires and a light bulb (to get at "and" and "or" gates).
The time I most felt "in control" of a computer was using Forth on a Commodore VIC and a Commodore 64 -- you could have a sense of everything that was going on, reset the computer and still have your data in memory, actually change things at various memory addresses by hand and see results, and FORTH was just high enough a level language to feel you were sort of talking to the computer. :-) So, FORTH on a Commodore sort of bridged the low level of assembler and the high level of BASIC, but being better than either in many ways. FORTH was what taught me something about bottom up programming and refactoring.
I guess we should maybe be a bit more understanding when someone who has never had the early experiences you and I had? Hard to imagine what they think (or don't think) is going on in there. :-) It's hard at this point to really think about all the years of early experiences that went into shaping me as a software developer -- and all the levels of confusion along the way that slowly cleared up (in most cases. :-)
Yeah, I remember typing in a long basic game from probably that same book, on a teletype that my school had for a timeshared regional PDP-10 in the late 1970s.
I think you can learn a lot by just retyping stuff.
While I first started learning programming on the KIM-1, in my early teens, it was very confusing (working in assembly).
I think programming really gelled for me by playing with Radio Shack TRS-80 computers in the store and reading and doing the BASIC exercises in the TRS-80 "User's Manual for Level I" by David A. Lien -- with pencil on paper, as I did not have a computer but could afford to get the manual. :-)
I think it did make a difference it had some funny cartoons. Others think so, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
"Level I Basic was based on Li-Chen Wang's free Tiny BASIC, additional functions added by Radio Shack. It achieved a measure of noteworthiness due in large part to its outstanding manual, written by David Lien, which presented lessons on programming with text and humorous graphics, making the subjects very easy to understand"
But, then typing in a couple of larger basic computer games and figuring out the typos built on that.
I understood assembly better by using a "CARDIAC" cardboard computer later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_Computation
I think there is a lot to be said for imagining how the computer is working. It helps better later with design and debugging.
Kids these days... :-)
Although they may just learn to do some different things on another level...
Except the USA has lots of nukes, plagues, military robots, computer viruses, and who knows what else that stand ready to defend US elite privileged scarcity-based litigious world view until the end -- or even after the end. So, no matter where you go in the world, US socioeconomic dogmatic religious policies (backed by the force of law) can have a big "impact". And since the USA's elite-tilted market economy is essentially though of as "God" by many (ignoring "the love of money is the root of all evil"?), whatever the USA does to promote or defend its version of "the market" and related laws is, by definition, "supremely good", even were it to mean the end of humanity. The USA has inched a little closer to that by reelecting a lot of economic conservatives just now.
By a Harvard University professor of Divinity: ..."
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
"A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar. Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies.
The slogan "Better dead than Red" is another example of this thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. So "Better dead than live in a world of prosperity for all" could perhaps be a new mantra of the USA in the 21st century when 3D printing and shared information make widespread abundance possible, but everyone does not want to accept the shift to a new paradigm? See also James P. Hogan's prescient sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear" about this theme.
3D printing might totally reshape our socioeconomic landscape in the next couple of decades. So, essentially, producing a car with 3D printing is a *religious* threat to the US social paradigm built around scarcity. And religious threats can cause all sorts of crazy things to happen. I can hope that saner heads prevail and that the scarcity ideologues eventually give in gracefully when they think about the benefits to their children and children's children of a world that works for everyone.
From Einstein, on religion:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source."
An interesting essay by someon
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/02/printed-car
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/11/02/1359248/Car-Produced-With-a-3D-Printer
Even as I agree with your point: http://www.robots-dreams.com/2010/02/3d-printing-robot-parts-is-a-reality-already-video.html ... Well, now we have a great example to actually show them..."
"We often get into discussions and debates about the potential for 3D printing, especially as it relates to robotics. We tend to take the positive side of the debate, and paint a rosy picture of what we believe to be a not-too-distant future where researchers, developers, and even hobbyists will be able to crank out real-world manifestations of their dream concepts, and test them under practical conditions at reasonable cost and with very short timeframes.
Well, I think transcending irony is the most important issue. :-) ... irony. :-)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially
But copyright might come second? :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/msg/1e499c6db59117a2?hl=en&
Two links for videos of fixing something at home with a 3D printer:
"YouTube - Better Living With MakerBot - Episode 1: Kitchen Lamp"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBzyZSVK_Gs
"Better Living with MakerBot - Episode 2: The Wall Socket "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9tnqHS2vFo
You could recycle plastic you already have with better home technology, in theory. Just like you can build a machine shop from "scrap":
http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/index.html
What does it mean to say it is "cheaper" to mass produce things than print them on demand if you need to incur costs when you store them, ship them around, wait for them, secure them, deal with sending back wrong orders, keep track of stuff, and still need to repair and replace stuff on demand anyway? If that made sense, why do people have 2D printers at home when it is probably "cheaper" in some sense to print everything at a large central facility and have it mailed to you in boxes once a month?
If your 3D printer breaks, you ask your friend to print you a replacement part. Or you use another 3D printer you have at home. What do you do when you misconfigure a Debian system and it won't boot? You use another computer to surf the web looking for a solution and to create a boot CD-ROM or boot USB Flash drive.
Anyway, maybe it is good that it is "just a hobby" (even as that is not quite true), because 3D printers are part of ushering in "the end of work (as we know it)".
Related group I'm involved with:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/7079c386124045a0
Up to $100,000 SBIR phase One for US small businesses.
Letter of intent due by: November 20, 2010
Very significant because of the involvement of all these US agencies (NIH,
DOD, NSF, USDA, DHS).
And it's all ironic, given the high unemployment. :-) But, that's the :-) Solutions are here collected by me for a :-)
problem of our age, irony.
happy roboticized world:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century
economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Vitamin D is needed by the immune system: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7379094/Vitamin-D-triggers-and-arms-the-immune-system.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--NqqB2nhBE
And whole foods (especially vegetables, fruits, and legumes) help you have a disease resistant body:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
Though a good mental attitude, exercise, infrastructure, good sleep, thankfulness, meditating on the great mystery, etc. can help with general wellness, too.
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/guide/important-sleep-habits
The difference comes down to the fact that how a person chooses to grow as an individual, or what a person should do to be a good friend, neighbor and citizen, may both have very little to do with how someone else wants to enslave that person to do work for them.
Of course, one person's view of being enslaved (say, to rabid nationalism or even just professional ethics that involve not taking a political position for a personal view of social justice) may be another person's view of progress and social uplift. And work as in "doing productive stuff" and "hard fun" and "making things happen" and "helping others" may well have many good qualities which are irrespective of who is defining the work (and the workplace) and who is getting the fruits of the work.
Still, ask yourself, what would be the "perfect" education for a slave these days? How far away are we from that with our public school system?
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
This is a typical example of the intent behind it connected to the "marketplace" and not personal growth (or even just citizenship):
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
"What if the solution to American students' stagnant performance levels and the wide achievement gap between white and minority students wasn't more money, smaller schools, or any of the reforms proposed in recent years, but rather a new education system altogether? That's the conclusion of a bipartisan group of scholars and business leaders, school chancellors and education commissioners, and former cabinet secretaries and governors. They declare that America's public education system, designed to meet the needs of 100 years ago when the workplace revolved around an assembly line, is unsuited to today's global marketplace. Already, they warn, many Americans are in danger of falling behind and seeing their standard of living plummet."
While I completely agree with the title of the article that we should start over with our education system, I disagree with the approach as well as "the marketplace" as a primary aspiration. See my other posts on this article for unschooling alternatives).
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1847578&cid=34099866
And see this for other real solutions to the jobs crisis transcending marketplace problems resulting from a combination of limited demand through saturation and the falling value of most paid humor labor due to robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
It's true that eventually black slaves in the USA were kept from learning how to read (though that was not the case at first, only when they were getting uppity). But, what would you want a personal slave in the 21st century be able to do for you, and would reading, writing, and arithmetic be part of it? Sort your emails according to written criterion you supply? Drive your car while reading all the road signs and navigating efficiently? Be good in bed just the way you like it through extensive study of writings on the topic? Have brilliant engaging conversations about whatever you wanted to talk about based on being informed about current events? Build for you a comfortable house without a leaky roof by being able to follow blueprints precisely?
Remember, the Egyptians must have had many very technically skilled slaves (for the time) to build the pyramids. Slavery is not incompatible with some forms of learning. Even if eventually the slaves might choose to revolt in some way:
Sure, you got me there. :-) Thanks.
And also a lot of great math comes from great physics, and is easier to understand that way. My young kid really liked the "derivative machine" cartoon in this series, as well as other animations connecting physics with the math (especially calculus) it inspired:
"The Mechanical Universe... and Beyond"
http://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html
With so many great resources, learning both math and physics can be a lot more fun at an early age than slogging through a lot of paperwork:
http://www.fun-motion.com/list-of-physics-games/
Other sciences are part of that too, from chemistry through psychology and zoology, etc.
A great resource on chemistry, and how it connects with various logical and practical challenges:
"The World of Chemistry"
http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html
Even if at the end, Nobel Laurette Roald Hoffman extols the wonders of Bisphenol-A. :-)
http://www.chemicalsubstanceschimiques.gc.ca/challenge-defi/batch-lot-2/bisphenol-a/index-eng.php
"Canada is the first country in the world to take action on bisphenol A, thanks to our Chemicals Management Plan. This Plan was introduced in 2006 to review the safety of widely-used chemicals that have been in the marketplace for many years, and to update our knowledge and understanding of these chemicals."
I made something like this poem up once before (maybe I heard it before, too?). Here is another try at it:
The circle of knowledge, a poem by Paul D. Fernhout
All philosophy is anthropology; :-)
All anthropology is psychology;
All psychology is biology;
All biology is chemistry;
All chemistry is physics;
All physics is math;
All math is philosophy.
What's interesting about these sorts of discussions is that they are much more approachable for everyone than if we were arguing over calculus type things. And, these sorts of calculation are sometimes much more amenable to reasonable discussions and amendments and improvements related to bounds than overly precise ones about exact outcomes.
As Freeman Dyson said:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
"As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. Since I am heretic, I am accustomed to being in the minority. If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic. We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, "Too bad he has lost his marbles", and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role."
Back of the envelope calculations can give us a better idea of the range and scale of possibility, even if someone probably needs to do more detailed calculations to really make things work. So, we can answer "Might it fly?" with ballpark figures, whereas, "What is the best way to make it fly, given certain constraints and goals?" might take calculus or something else (evolutionary annealing algorithms or whatever).
It's been said (Knuth) that "premature optimization is the root of all evil": :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization
but related to that may be the notion that teaching people optimization techniques and high precision math (like calculus or even the full times table) as opposed to basic approximation (like working with only one degree of precision or round numbers) may be the root of all extreme dumbness and math illiteracy?
By the way, related to general errors in assumptions (or calculations), especially in relation to the LHC at CERN:
http://reason.com/archives/2008/09/02/a-1-in-1000-chance-of-gotterda
"At the Global Catastrophic Risk conference, Future of Humanity Institute research associate Toby Ord asked an interesting question: How certain should we be about safety when there could be a risk to the survival of the human species? As Ord argued, "When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in their modeling of the problem, or a mistake in their calculations.""
There is also the risk of "social group think" perhaps leading to this:
"The CERN black hole"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXzugu39pKM
Seriously, the LHC cost billi
Wow, a video version links to lots of stuff on 9/11 investigations being problematical.
Guess that just goes to show that Information is not knowledge. A related poem I wrote a while back:
On Information, Knowledge, Intelligence, Wisdom, Virtue, and Effectiveness
By Paul D. Fernhout
Information is not knowledge,
Knowledge is not intelligence,
Intelligence is not wisdom,
Wisdom is not virtue, and
Virtue is not effectiveness.
So, to have is not to organize,
To organize is not to embody,
To embody is not to value,
To value is not to act, and
To act (especially in ignorance)
is not necessarily to succeed.
You're welcome.
Well, if you liked those, here are some other links accumulated from some years of homeschooling/unschooling... :-)
At a somewhat older age, this site on learning to read is interesting:
http://www.starfall.com/
We also like the original Electric Company with some episodes available on DVD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Company_(1971_TV_series)
And it looks like there is a new version but I don't know how good it is:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/28675624
But don't sweat "early reading". A kid is learning all the time. If they learn to read nature and computers and blocks and people and social situations and sand and water and pets and so on for seven to ten years (while listening to you read stories and other information aloud), they are learning in general a lot more than they would by trying to learn such things from books and other print media on the computer. If a kid wants to learn to read early (age two to four), fine. And of course, all kids should probably be exposed to reading material and the power of the written word (like adding things to shopping lists, or making signs). But if you go back two hundred years, learning to read at a later age was quite common, and kids catch up very fast. Don't let a stupid schooling lockstep age-focused paradigm harm your kid. Some kids also learn best to read by writing first (John Holt talks about this -- and how if you kid expresses an interest in writing, even just by scribbling stuff with no relation to regular letters, build on that). Note also that late reading in a homechooling/unschooling situation (where kids make their own choices) is different than late reading in a school-based print-based academic environment (where late reading is often a sign of some underlying health issue or just a broad, often justified, rejection of the authoritarian school paradigm, and problem piles upon problem if you can't read).
Contrast the probably true as far as it goes for compelled schooled children:
"Waiting Rarely Works: Late Bloomers Usually Just Wilt"
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/11360
"In the simplest terms, these studies ask: Do struggling readers catch up? The data from the studies are clear: Late bloomers are rare; skill deficits are almost always what prevent children from blooming as readers. This research may be counter-intuitive to elementary teachers who have seen late-bloomers in their own classes or heard about them from colleagues. But statistically speaking, such students are rare. (Actually, as we'll see, there is nearly a 90 percent chance that a poor reader in first grade will remain a poor reader.)"
with what happen when early reading is not emphasized because the environment is more flexible:
"Children Teach Themselves to Read"
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read
"In marked contrast to all this frenzy about teaching reading stands the view of people involved in the "unschooling" movement and the Sudbury "non-school" school movement, who claim that reading need not be taught at all! As long as kids grow up in a literate society, surrounded by people who read, they will learn to read. They may ask some questions along the way and get a few pointers from others who already know how to read, but they will take the initiative in all of this and orchestrate the entire process themselves. This is individualized learning, but it does not require brain imaging or cognitive scientists, and it requires little effort on the part of anyone other than the child who is l
And who decides what knowledge or skills (including unquestioned immediate obedience to authority as exemplified in classrooms?) are important to a child's present or future, or the present or future of the culture they live in?
Who picks the hoops a person is forced to jump through (in a democracy)? The person? His or her parents? Neighbors? Elected officials in the community? Big foundations? How should these different voices be balanced in a democracy? What are we trying to achieve as a culture? Do some of these voices (business concerns?) have a stronger influence than others (like Gatto suggest)?
What different views are there on this?
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
"The history of the development of Western schooling is a complex and meandering thing, but I think it is worth looking at in a very abbreviated form here. A little insight into the logics and basis for contemporary compulsory schooling might be useful to social ecologists."
Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome did not have compulsory education, were they not "advanced" for their time?
The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) had no compulsory schooling as we know it hundreds of years ago, but the USA borrowed ideas from their society for its constitution.
The USA did not have compulsory education for most of the 1700s and 1800s. Was US American not advanced for its time? Was it perhaps in some ways more advanced back then, as Gatto suggests, with more independent self-educated people with a higher degree of literacy?
Anyway, another reply by someone else (who you may have confused with me?) makes a related point.
There are lots of better educational alternatives than compulsory mainstream public schooling listed here:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
Why not just give the money that now goes to compulsory schools directly to the parents to let them decide how to spend it on their children's behalf? A related specific proposal:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
And if you say, you can't trust the parents to look out for their own children's interests, then what does that say about the value of thirteen years of compulsory schooling?
Anyway, there are lots of alternative ideas out there if you look around with an open mind. But the whole point of compulsory schooling is to close people's minds and distract them. That may not be the intentional purpose of most schoolteachers, but it is the end result of the systemic process, and as Gatto suggests, that process is doing exactly what it was designed to do, so if you give it more resources, it will only dumb people down faster and more comprehensively.
See also from a previous vice-provost of Caltech and a previous editor of Physics today that say related things:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/