See a pain specialist. There are a huge range of treatments for chronic pain, and other drugs that arn't narcotics that may help, but are not part of what other doctors work with. Off the top of my head are Lyrica, Gabapentin and Ketamine. I have CRPS type II, so I know what nerve damage pain is like, and the fact is that narcotics are not that effective, although they stop you caring that you hurt so much. I've been on Tramadol, Morphine, Oxycontin and Fentanyl over the years, and only the latter really stopped the pain, at a cost of being seriously shit-faced.
Now I'm on Gabapentin (which suppresses nerves firing) and Ketamine (which binds to NMDA receptors and reduces the rate and intensity of signals from the spine to the brain). These both have unfortunate side effects, but at least I am only slightly intellectually impaired, and I have emotions again. I see my pain-specialist later today, and am about to try another drug that has potential to reduce my pain further.
See a pain specialist, and don't be satisfied if it's just a "block shop". There is hope out there.
See a pain specialist. There are a huge range of treatments for chronic pain, and other drugs that arn't narcotics that may help, but are not part of what other doctors work with. Off the top of my head are Lyrica, Gabapentin and Ketamine. With scoliosis it may be that Botox could help if guarding is a significant contributor to your pain.
I see potential danger. Tuna are already a highly refined predator. What if the cages break and a group escape? Then you have a disease resistant fast growing population of predators loose in the seas. What could this mean for other species? Could this throw the ecological balance way out of whack?
I've worked in population modelling in the past, and predator/prey ecology is complicated, chaotic and inherently unpredictable. Forget Lotke-Volterra models, although they are nice equations, they are not realistic in real world situations where there are many species with many interactions. Super-Tuna would be another apex-predator, as nothing else can catch them except humans because they swim so fast. Messing with apex predators ALWAYS does weird stuff to ecology, and it's never good.
Mind you, a lot of Kiwis prefer to live and work in Oz (note that the parent poster, Michael Woodhams is a Kiwi in Oz). NZ has its own problems (unemployment, cost of living, crime and racial violence from a minority of Maori come to mind), as does Oz (abandonment of socialist values, nanny-state mentality of both sides of politics, increasing violence and unemployment).
I'd put NZ and Oz pretty even, as we have a hell of a lot more room if that side of freedom matters. Having had the "pleasure" of living and working in the USA, when US citizens use the words "freedom" and "democracy" they do not mean what we from Westminster system countries think they mean.
There are a lot of ex-pat Poms in my neighbourhood, from what they say I can understand why you'd want to move.
NZ is a lot more like the UK in terms of climate and size, even though it has boiling mud, parrots that eat cars and thinly-disguised cannibals. Oz has a climate to die for (and in the wrong places I mean that quite literally!) and a LOT of room. We also have some very deadly wildlife - people who fear venomous creatures (snakes, spiders, octopus, shellfish, platypus, jellyfish) and things with big teeth (sharks and crocs) or birds that can kick you to death while disemboweling you (cassowaries) might want to think twice about where in Oz they want to live.
There is a problem with wallabies eating poppy crops in Tasmania. The real story is that the plants are very immature and there is no alkaloid in them. There are circular patches being made in the crops, but this is due to the normal feeding behaviour of wallabies and not because they are bouncing around in circles stoned. No wallabies are falling to the ground stoned. The farmers are setting up patches of preferred feed plants outside the poppy fields to prevent it happening in the future, as Tasmania is one of the leading exporters of opium for medical use, and they want to diminish the impact on revenue.
It's a little more complicated than that. In the USA, and in Korea (and a few other places in Asia) any teaching role at a University tends to be called "professor", regardless of tenure or chair. Indeed I meet teachers from community college when I lived in the US that were introduced to me as "professor" who were confused when I asked what their chair was.
In Universities based on the Oxbridge model, tenure alone does not make one a Professor. Holding a chair does though. At that point in your career you can only really lose your job if found guilty of a major case of academic fraud or gross sexual impropriety with a student. The chief qualifications are an excellent publication record and being very good at politics and grant applications.
Associate Professor is really a courtesy title, and indicates that maybe one day you might hold a chair. It also relates to pay scale.
The raised alert is due to the spread in Australia. There are now over 1200 confirmed cases here, with over 1000 of these in the state of Victoria. This is probably a measure of the effectiveness of testing, and our public health system. There are 4 patients in Vic who are in intensive care, but these are all people who "have pre-existing conditions that put them at very high risk". Although it hasn't been stated I wouldn't be surprised if these people have HIV/AIDS or some other serious disorder.
Most cases do not have people being very sick. One sufferer is on the record as saying "I've had paper cuts that were worse". This doesn't stop the media using phrases like "the deadly swine flu". I have to wonder if the morbidity in Mexico is due to them having gung-ho immune systems due to the environment in places like Mexico City, in which case the disease will have a high morbidity once it hits India, as Indians have amazing immune systems.
It's hard enough for a gifted child to grow up emotionally balanced and ethically clear-minded. Far too many gifted kids end up on drugs or worse. In most normal schools the gifted runs a strong chance of being socially isolated. The kid doesn't usually notice this (after all his real friends are books) but he does when he has to interact with normal people later in life.
I'm currently working in a school for gifted kids, and the main emphasis is on them getting this social stuff together. In some cases it's working, in others you can see that the kids need a really big dose of reality and relax. Too many of them don't get jokes, ride bikes, climb trees or jump in rivers.
As for your contention there is no proof, just go to the literature. Social isolation amongst the gifted is commonly observed, especially between 10 and 16 years old. I also lived it as a child, and have the physical scars to show what can happen to a smart-alec kid who tries to mix with the other kids without pretending to be some one he isn't (cool knife Pete - oh shit, that really hurts when it hits bone).
Being a child genius is really hard unless you have an amazing support network. Most 140+ kids have parents and teachers who have no idea what it's like.
My apologies.
The inability to differentiate between those two words gets right up my nose. The scary thing is the number of people who would have seen nothing wrong with that sentence. I am now punishing myself by self-flagellation with a dictionary.
This has been an ongoing debate in education for years. The only area where there does seem to be a real significant gender difference is in the ability to visualise 3D spatial relationships, and there is a reasonable explanation from evolutionary biology, in that this skill does seem to assist in hunting large mammals, and a better hunter would have been a more desirable mate. The effect (if it does exist) is not huge though. There seem to be as many studies showing the effect does not exist as that say it does, so the source isn't breaking any new ground.
The word you are trying to spell is "losers". "looser" is an adjective that means "less tight". I have no idea what "loosers" means, as it looks like the plural of "looser", and I don't know how to parse the plural of an adjective.
It seems odd to me that the Smalltalk implementations are all so far to the right and so far up, especially the latter. Smalltalk is usually considered to have a very high amount of bang per LOC, at least 15 times more than C++. If they are considering superclasses in the code size count are they considering libc for gcc, or the entire dotNet libraries for C#?
I have to wonder how good the smalltalkers were that implemented the benchmarks. Until you get your head around it, smalltalk code is bloated. Then as you learn to think the right way your code shrinks to a beautifully expressive minimalism.
Harvey's "Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals" has to be on your list. It's one of the first works that reports on real medical experiments, rather than just quoting the Ancients.
Robert Hookes' "Micrographia" is an astounding read. In it he describes some really early adventures with microscopy, but also shows what it was like back in the 17th century when so much was being discovered. My opinion is that it should be required reading for all would-be scientists - if you don't get excited then science is probably not really for you.
It seems ironic that a company that represents book publisher doesn't have anyone that can actually read, and that the first listed book on BookaBooka is "EU LAW: Text, Cases and Materials"!
The fires are still burning, indeed today is rated as bad as "Black Saturday". "After the firestorm" is still some time off. As of yesterday, there were 120 separate fires, 4 of which are major fires. The combined fire front is around 1000km.
There could be an argument that you benefit from the BBC even if you don't watch them, as they keep the country informed and produce their educational programs. Is the net effect of having a neutral broadcaster that is not subject to all the vagaries of market forces existing worth the licence fee?
Notes help a lot of students learn, as taking notes means they are doing something, which is better than nothing. Ideally a classroom will be so inspiring that all students are actively engaged at all times, so needing very few notes, but that is unfortunately not easy to do.
I'll have to tell my Pain Specialist, who is one of the top men in his field, that his lifetime of study and work is probably wrong, because someone on/. thinks so.
In my case there are short-circuits between the motor and sensory nerves. Less movement = less pain, although total immobility causes other problems. As for my "problem resurfacing", CRPS is pretty much for life if you've got type II. It's all about minimising pain, and although I can type for an hour with Dvorak, 10 minutes with qwerty has me throwing up from the pain.
Dvorak layout is based on far more than that. Dvorak looked at the relative frequencies of words, of letters, of 2 and 3 letter groups and used a few mechanical principles (keystrokes that alternate hands are faster, the 1st and 2nd fingers are stronger than the others, the right hand is stronger for right handed people, that moving up is easier than moving down, that consecutive strokes with the same finger are easier if the finger is tracking down etc.).
Dvorak layouts exist for many languages, and the left-handed layout is different to the right. There are also one handed Dvorak layouts for each hand for those who can't use the other hand. And it's a simple mathematical process to develop a Dvorak layout for any alphabetic language.
I use Dvorak because I have CRPS from damage to the brachial plexus. Not only can I type with a lot less movement (except for the letter f), which means a lot less pain, but I'm much faster than I ever was with qwerty.
As for the article, if his research was as good as he claims, then he would have mentioned that qwerty is the way it is so that salesmen could put a typewriter on a desk, insert a piece of paper and type "typewriter" just using the top row. This was to impress the Boss quickly, and then go into the spiel about why he needed a $300 machine. Sales are lost in the first 20 seconds of a presentation.
The reality is that our kids are influenced most strongly by the following, in decreasing order:
peers media teachers parents
With my teens, I take an approach of "What do your mates think about issue X?" as a way to address things. It lets me start at where the kids are, and seems to increase the chances that they'll take what I say onboard.
This has allowed me to deal with things like my 16yo's experiments with cross-dressing (which was extremely challenging for me), and my 13yo's suspension over beating the crap out of a gay kid (one of those aggressively promiscuous types). My kids come to me for advice on things I'd have never raised with my parents, so I think I'm doing something right.
I do filter the web, using Dans Guardian. It's not bullet proof, but it helps let me decide when the younger kids get unfiltered content. I think this is important for my younger kids, as they havent the mental development to know what is crap and what isn't. I don't want my 8yo to get the idea that the Time Cube guy has any credibility.
This is one of the things I don't understand about America and Americans. My understanding is that your Constitution includes the Right to bear arms so you can rise up against an oppressive or corrupt government. Ignoring the question as to whether Oswald was simply exercising his constitutional rights, why do Americans allow their Democracy to be defined by Corporations that have their own interests, and not the nation's, at heart? Why does anyone who tries to exercise that right get put in gaol or executed?
Surely you have enough people with guns to force the issue.
By the way, this is a serious question, not a troll, and I accept that Democracy here in Australia is not what it was.
How is this different from how we used to pay by the hour and meg back in the 70's? I remember having to prune cycles from my jobs to keep them within budget, as CPU time was expensive.
As a maths teacher I agree with your 1st and last sentences. Everything between I take great umbrage to.
One of the reasons we have so many people graduating High School with little to no mathematical sense is the argument that "we have calculators so arithmetic is not so important". Consider polynomials. The best introduction to this important branch of maths is decimal arithmetic, as any radix representation of number is a polynomial. Students struggle with rates and ratio, because they cannot deal with rational arithmetic.
Geometry and algebra are two ways to consider deductive reasoning. Formal logic makes more sense if it can be cast upon a framework already constructed.
The equation of a line is a crucial concept. Almost all applied maths and numerical computing is essentially refinement of the idea that the only equations we can always be sure of solving with real numbers are linear. Without a solid grasp of this concept (which is difficult for a distressingly large number of students) there can be no understanding of calculus, nor can someone understand statistics (so they can't really understand democracy) or finance.
Studies do not involve "continuous time" until senior years. Until then it is far more important that students learn about days, hours, minutes and seconds, and their relationships with the shape of the earth and the seasons.
There is a shocking lack of diversity in K-12 maths education in developed countries. Part of the problem is the lack of mathematicians who are passionate about the subject working in K-12. Part of the problem is curriculum bloat. Part of the problem is really bad textbooks that purport that there is "one right way" to solve problems.
How many 12 year olds can extract square roots these days? Or can tell you that 19 x 21 is 399 without resorting to machines or lengthy sums? Or can even tell you what all those zeroes mean when they do a "long multiplication"?
By all means teach algorithmic theory and programming in LOGO or Squeak in maths in school. Teach them about memory. Teach them to consider the efficiency of their methods. Doing so and we might just start teaching maths again.
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See a pain specialist. There are a huge range of treatments for chronic pain, and other drugs that arn't narcotics that may help, but are not part of what other doctors work with. Off the top of my head are Lyrica, Gabapentin and Ketamine. I have CRPS type II, so I know what nerve damage pain is like, and the fact is that narcotics are not that effective, although they stop you caring that you hurt so much. I've been on Tramadol, Morphine, Oxycontin and Fentanyl over the years, and only the latter really stopped the pain, at a cost of being seriously shit-faced.
Now I'm on Gabapentin (which suppresses nerves firing) and Ketamine (which binds to NMDA receptors and reduces the rate and intensity of signals from the spine to the brain). These both have unfortunate side effects, but at least I am only slightly intellectually impaired, and I have emotions again. I see my pain-specialist later today, and am about to try another drug that has potential to reduce my pain further.
See a pain specialist, and don't be satisfied if it's just a "block shop". There is hope out there.
See a pain specialist. There are a huge range of treatments for chronic pain, and other drugs that arn't narcotics that may help, but are not part of what other doctors work with. Off the top of my head are Lyrica, Gabapentin and Ketamine. With scoliosis it may be that Botox could help if guarding is a significant contributor to your pain.
I see potential danger. Tuna are already a highly refined predator. What if the cages break and a group escape? Then you have a disease resistant fast growing population of predators loose in the seas. What could this mean for other species? Could this throw the ecological balance way out of whack?
I've worked in population modelling in the past, and predator/prey ecology is complicated, chaotic and inherently unpredictable. Forget Lotke-Volterra models, although they are nice equations, they are not realistic in real world situations where there are many species with many interactions. Super-Tuna would be another apex-predator, as nothing else can catch them except humans because they swim so fast. Messing with apex predators ALWAYS does weird stuff to ecology, and it's never good.
Mind you, a lot of Kiwis prefer to live and work in Oz (note that the parent poster, Michael Woodhams is a Kiwi in Oz). NZ has its own problems (unemployment, cost of living, crime and racial violence from a minority of Maori come to mind), as does Oz (abandonment of socialist values, nanny-state mentality of both sides of politics, increasing violence and unemployment).
I'd put NZ and Oz pretty even, as we have a hell of a lot more room if that side of freedom matters. Having had the "pleasure" of living and working in the USA, when US citizens use the words "freedom" and "democracy" they do not mean what we from Westminster system countries think they mean.
There are a lot of ex-pat Poms in my neighbourhood, from what they say I can understand why you'd want to move.
NZ is a lot more like the UK in terms of climate and size, even though it has boiling mud, parrots that eat cars and thinly-disguised cannibals. Oz has a climate to die for (and in the wrong places I mean that quite literally!) and a LOT of room. We also have some very deadly wildlife - people who fear venomous creatures (snakes, spiders, octopus, shellfish, platypus, jellyfish) and things with big teeth (sharks and crocs) or birds that can kick you to death while disemboweling you (cassowaries) might want to think twice about where in Oz they want to live.
There is a problem with wallabies eating poppy crops in Tasmania. The real story is that the plants are very immature and there is no alkaloid in them. There are circular patches being made in the crops, but this is due to the normal feeding behaviour of wallabies and not because they are bouncing around in circles stoned. No wallabies are falling to the ground stoned. The farmers are setting up patches of preferred feed plants outside the poppy fields to prevent it happening in the future, as Tasmania is one of the leading exporters of opium for medical use, and they want to diminish the impact on revenue.
It's a little more complicated than that. In the USA, and in Korea (and a few other places in Asia) any teaching role at a University tends to be called "professor", regardless of tenure or chair. Indeed I meet teachers from community college when I lived in the US that were introduced to me as "professor" who were confused when I asked what their chair was.
In Universities based on the Oxbridge model, tenure alone does not make one a Professor. Holding a chair does though. At that point in your career you can only really lose your job if found guilty of a major case of academic fraud or gross sexual impropriety with a student. The chief qualifications are an excellent publication record and being very good at politics and grant applications.
Associate Professor is really a courtesy title, and indicates that maybe one day you might hold a chair. It also relates to pay scale.
The raised alert is due to the spread in Australia. There are now over 1200 confirmed cases here, with over 1000 of these in the state of Victoria. This is probably a measure of the effectiveness of testing, and our public health system. There are 4 patients in Vic who are in intensive care, but these are all people who "have pre-existing conditions that put them at very high risk". Although it hasn't been stated I wouldn't be surprised if these people have HIV/AIDS or some other serious disorder.
Most cases do not have people being very sick. One sufferer is on the record as saying "I've had paper cuts that were worse". This doesn't stop the media using phrases like "the deadly swine flu". I have to wonder if the morbidity in Mexico is due to them having gung-ho immune systems due to the environment in places like Mexico City, in which case the disease will have a high morbidity once it hits India, as Indians have amazing immune systems.
It's hard enough for a gifted child to grow up emotionally balanced and ethically clear-minded. Far too many gifted kids end up on drugs or worse. In most normal schools the gifted runs a strong chance of being socially isolated. The kid doesn't usually notice this (after all his real friends are books) but he does when he has to interact with normal people later in life.
I'm currently working in a school for gifted kids, and the main emphasis is on them getting this social stuff together. In some cases it's working, in others you can see that the kids need a really big dose of reality and relax. Too many of them don't get jokes, ride bikes, climb trees or jump in rivers.
As for your contention there is no proof, just go to the literature. Social isolation amongst the gifted is commonly observed, especially between 10 and 16 years old. I also lived it as a child, and have the physical scars to show what can happen to a smart-alec kid who tries to mix with the other kids without pretending to be some one he isn't (cool knife Pete - oh shit, that really hurts when it hits bone).
Being a child genius is really hard unless you have an amazing support network. Most 140+ kids have parents and teachers who have no idea what it's like.
My apologies. The inability to differentiate between those two words gets right up my nose. The scary thing is the number of people who would have seen nothing wrong with that sentence. I am now punishing myself by self-flagellation with a dictionary.
This has been an ongoing debate in education for years. The only area where there does seem to be a real significant gender difference is in the ability to visualise 3D spatial relationships, and there is a reasonable explanation from evolutionary biology, in that this skill does seem to assist in hunting large mammals, and a better hunter would have been a more desirable mate. The effect (if it does exist) is not huge though. There seem to be as many studies showing the effect does not exist as that say it does, so the source isn't breaking any new ground.
The word you are trying to spell is "losers". "looser" is an adjective that means "less tight". I have no idea what "loosers" means, as it looks like the plural of "looser", and I don't know how to parse the plural of an adjective.
It seems odd to me that the Smalltalk implementations are all so far to the right and so far up, especially the latter. Smalltalk is usually considered to have a very high amount of bang per LOC, at least 15 times more than C++. If they are considering superclasses in the code size count are they considering libc for gcc, or the entire dotNet libraries for C#?
I have to wonder how good the smalltalkers were that implemented the benchmarks. Until you get your head around it, smalltalk code is bloated. Then as you learn to think the right way your code shrinks to a beautifully expressive minimalism.
My youngest 2 kids both used Linux with no problems before the age of 5. Now who has a great-grandmother using Linux?
Harvey's "Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals" has to be on your list. It's one of the first works that reports on real medical experiments, rather than just quoting the Ancients.
Robert Hookes' "Micrographia" is an astounding read. In it he describes some really early adventures with microscopy, but also shows what it was like back in the 17th century when so much was being discovered. My opinion is that it should be required reading for all would-be scientists - if you don't get excited then science is probably not really for you.
It seems ironic that a company that represents book publisher doesn't have anyone that can actually read, and that the first listed book on BookaBooka is "EU LAW: Text, Cases and Materials"!
The fires are still burning, indeed today is rated as bad as "Black Saturday". "After the firestorm" is still some time off. As of yesterday, there were 120 separate fires, 4 of which are major fires. The combined fire front is around 1000km.
There could be an argument that you benefit from the BBC even if you don't watch them, as they keep the country informed and produce their educational programs. Is the net effect of having a neutral broadcaster that is not subject to all the vagaries of market forces existing worth the licence fee?
Notes help a lot of students learn, as taking notes means they are doing something, which is better than nothing. Ideally a classroom will be so inspiring that all students are actively engaged at all times, so needing very few notes, but that is unfortunately not easy to do.
I'll have to tell my Pain Specialist, who is one of the top men in his field, that his lifetime of study and work is probably wrong, because someone on /. thinks so.
In my case there are short-circuits between the motor and sensory nerves. Less movement = less pain, although total immobility causes other problems. As for my "problem resurfacing", CRPS is pretty much for life if you've got type II. It's all about minimising pain, and although I can type for an hour with Dvorak, 10 minutes with qwerty has me throwing up from the pain.
Dvorak layout is based on far more than that. Dvorak looked at the relative frequencies of words, of letters, of 2 and 3 letter groups and used a few mechanical principles (keystrokes that alternate hands are faster, the 1st and 2nd fingers are stronger than the others, the right hand is stronger for right handed people, that moving up is easier than moving down, that consecutive strokes with the same finger are easier if the finger is tracking down etc.).
Dvorak layouts exist for many languages, and the left-handed layout is different to the right. There are also one handed Dvorak layouts for each hand for those who can't use the other hand. And it's a simple mathematical process to develop a Dvorak layout for any alphabetic language.
I use Dvorak because I have CRPS from damage to the brachial plexus. Not only can I type with a lot less movement (except for the letter f), which means a lot less pain, but I'm much faster than I ever was with qwerty.
As for the article, if his research was as good as he claims, then he would have mentioned that qwerty is the way it is so that salesmen could put a typewriter on a desk, insert a piece of paper and type "typewriter" just using the top row. This was to impress the Boss quickly, and then go into the spiel about why he needed a $300 machine. Sales are lost in the first 20 seconds of a presentation.
The reality is that our kids are influenced most strongly by the following, in decreasing order:
peers
media
teachers
parents
With my teens, I take an approach of "What do your mates think about issue X?" as a way to address things. It lets me start at where the kids are, and seems to increase the chances that they'll take what I say onboard.
This has allowed me to deal with things like my 16yo's experiments with cross-dressing (which was extremely challenging for me), and my 13yo's suspension over beating the crap out of a gay kid (one of those aggressively promiscuous types). My kids come to me for advice on things I'd have never raised with my parents, so I think I'm doing something right.
I do filter the web, using Dans Guardian. It's not bullet proof, but it helps let me decide when the younger kids get unfiltered content. I think this is important for my younger kids, as they havent the mental development to know what is crap and what isn't. I don't want my 8yo to get the idea that the Time Cube guy has any credibility.
This is one of the things I don't understand about America and Americans. My understanding is that your Constitution includes the Right to bear arms so you can rise up against an oppressive or corrupt government. Ignoring the question as to whether Oswald was simply exercising his constitutional rights, why do Americans allow their Democracy to be defined by Corporations that have their own interests, and not the nation's, at heart? Why does anyone who tries to exercise that right get put in gaol or executed?
Surely you have enough people with guns to force the issue.
By the way, this is a serious question, not a troll, and I accept that Democracy here in Australia is not what it was.
How is this different from how we used to pay by the hour and meg back in the 70's? I remember having to prune cycles from my jobs to keep them within budget, as CPU time was expensive.
As a maths teacher I agree with your 1st and last sentences. Everything between I take great umbrage to.
One of the reasons we have so many people graduating High School with little to no mathematical sense is the argument that "we have calculators so arithmetic is not so important". Consider polynomials. The best introduction to this important branch of maths is decimal arithmetic, as any radix representation of number is a polynomial. Students struggle with rates and ratio, because they cannot deal with rational arithmetic.
Geometry and algebra are two ways to consider deductive reasoning. Formal logic makes more sense if it can be cast upon a framework already constructed.
The equation of a line is a crucial concept. Almost all applied maths and numerical computing is essentially refinement of the idea that the only equations we can always be sure of solving with real numbers are linear. Without a solid grasp of this concept (which is difficult for a distressingly large number of students) there can be no understanding of calculus, nor can someone understand statistics (so they can't really understand democracy) or finance.
Studies do not involve "continuous time" until senior years. Until then it is far more important that students learn about days, hours, minutes and seconds, and their relationships with the shape of the earth and the seasons.
There is a shocking lack of diversity in K-12 maths education in developed countries. Part of the problem is the lack of mathematicians who are passionate about the subject working in K-12. Part of the problem is curriculum bloat. Part of the problem is really bad textbooks that purport that there is "one right way" to solve problems.
How many 12 year olds can extract square roots these days? Or can tell you that 19 x 21 is 399 without resorting to machines or lengthy sums? Or can even tell you what all those zeroes mean when they do a "long multiplication"?
By all means teach algorithmic theory and programming in LOGO or Squeak in maths in school. Teach them about memory. Teach them to consider the efficiency of their methods. Doing so and we might just start teaching maths again.