I have not. But I'm not really in the market for anything especially challenging at the moment. I'll keep it in mind for later, though. The toughest one I've had so far was a Stanford databases class. I thought that one was pretty challenging until a student pointed to a copy of a midterm from the traditional version of the class the same instructor teaches in person, and I was surprised by the much greater difference in difficulty. I got an 80% on the MOOC midterm without applying a lot of effort, but I couldn't have gotten more than 20% on the traditional midterm, if that.
I agree 100%. Many of the classes I've taken have been light to moderate, a couple fairly rigorous, but none of them matched the demands of any of my undergraduate courses (admittedly at a tough private college). The rigorous ones might have come close to a couple of big-lecture entry-level classes I audited at a state university which weren't particularly demanding, but even there I think the total amount of education and challenge still goes to the traditional school.
That said, it is still learning. Engaging, educational, entertaining, and satisfying. I do read nonfiction books on my own, but changing the pace with lectures and quizzes is refreshing. I'm getting a lot out of the experience. How it compares to a traditional college environment is mostly irrelevant for me now; in the future, if they're talking about accredited classes and full degrees in MOOCs, that may be a different issue.
I've taken about 10 courses, and haven't "completed" any of them by the traditional academic standard of doing all the homework and tests. But I don't care, I'm not worried about that. I'm at a busy period in my life, definitely don't have a good schedule, and tend to get behind. I'm still enjoying the lectures, doing readings as I feel like it, sometimes doing quizzes or assignments, and often wrapping up the class weeks after it's officially over. I'm still 100% satisfied with this process, still feel like I'm getting a lot out of the courses, and try to go out of my way if they give me the option in the post-course survey to explain how much I appreciate what I'm getting, even if I look like a "dropout" to the traditionalists.
If it's safe, why does the bag of diatomaceous earth I bought claim it's harmful and should be kept away from children, pets, and everything else? The sales guy told me the same thing about it being safe, but when I got it home and looked at the packaging it said otherwise?
I have no problem doing nothing. Or rather, given no requirements, I have no problem filling my time with constructive (well, mostly) things to keep myself occupied. I spent half a year unemployed after the dot-com bust, and other than plummeting into debt it was one of the best times of my life.
Naturally, this prediction comes when I'll be 68 and at full retirement age. That practically guarantees it'll come true, and I'll watch all the snotty kids enjoying the good life I had to earn for myself through decades of work.
I don't care about kids educational programming, but as an adult I'd like some. There was a brief window where I caught a lot of neat stuff on the History channel and loved it. Given the option I would gladly watch quite a bit of science or history on television, but it's hard to find. It's sad when a cooking show is the most educational, scientific, nonfiction you can find on air.
Roku with Hulu and Netflix is technically very easy with just one straightforward remote. No recording necessary, because you're streaming everything. Not sure about having a guide, but both give some hints and recommendations. Hulu may have some sort of favorites list to remind you to catch weekly shows: I'm not entirely sure, that's my wife's arena.
Sports is a difficult issue. You'll pay a lot for addon packages, though they exist. I've satisfied myself with paying for less expensive audio and listening via the laptop, but it's not quite the same.
Most of the ageism seems to come with the hiring company. If you're at a company that's already supporting you, and it appears they are, then you're not going to have problems as long as you stay. Obstacles may only start to crop up if/when you want to move. Even then I think the horror stories are exaggerated - we've got programmers in their 40's or 50's here who were relatively new hires, but we're a smaller and perhaps nontraditional company. I think you ought to still have plenty of options, but you may struggle if you try to pick certain large and established firms with a reputation for ageism, including most of the gaming industry.
Best of luck to you! I'm actually still pushing back my plans to reinvent myself as a programmer (trying to get through kids before changing career paths) and I know I won't get to it before I'm 40. Despite the general negativity about my prospects, I don't expect that to stop me from eventually making the transition.
Is there some cleanup that can be done after bedtime? Also, I know all kids are different, but ours doesn't seem to need that much of a cooldown period. Ten or fifteen minutes of reading right at the end sets the tone for bedtime. We can even have tickle fights after the bath, and by the time we're done with books she's okay. If yours doesn't work that way, I realize that won't help, but you might try condensing it a little and see if you get anything out of it?
That's almost exactly the schedule my daughter is on, and she's turning 2. Nobody gives us funny looks about it, though. It is true we don't get out much in the evenings anymore (each of us parents usually does something on our own once a week, but honestly we're pretty tired a lot of the time anyway so quiet time is good). It's one of the best things we did for her happiness and our sanity to get on a consistent and extensive sleep schedule.
She's a good sport if we have to push her a little now and then, but we've noticed a direct correlation between her going to bed later and then sleeping worse, waking up more often, waking up earlier (unintuitive, but true) and being worse at nap time, plus being crankier when awake of course.
Bottle conditioning just means letting the final bit of fermentation occur in the bottle, which carbonates it naturally. Homebrewers rely on this because they don't have ways to inject CO2 into the system. Some traditional breweries use this method still, mostly smaller or older operations, though there are other exceptions. I'm not really aware of any significant changes in the character of the beer based on bottle conditioning other than it does leave a bit of yeast behind as sediment in the bottle. Many drinkers find this mostly a detriment - you're leaving that last bit behind or getting a cloudier/yeastier beer if you pour it all out. It may be appealing to some, or in the case of some wheats or strongly flavored yeasts provide a little extra to the experience. I'm not sure if that's what Zod was talking about, or if he just meant that many of the places which still bottle condition have what he considers to be better beers in general.
The can may spoil it for you, but "skunk" is actually a technical term. It's a chemical process where some of the hop chemicals react with sunlight and convert into something else which literally provides a slightly skunky smell. If you want a good reference, Corona is a classic case of a heavily skunked beer. (I think that's why a lot of people drink it with the lime, to cover up the smell.) It's also part of the Mexican lager standard style - in their case they expose the beer to a burst of ultraviolet light during production specifically to create the effect, and can get away with clear bottles because additional skunking won't make much difference.
Miller, on the other hand, created a variation of the hop chemical which provides bitterness but doesn't react to light. That's how they can get away with clear bottles for one of their lines of beer - it won't skunk no matter what.
I fully understand that. The opportunity cost of an old favorite versus a tempting new unknown is always a tough call. Speaking of four-packs, the Unibroue stuff (particularly Trois Pistoles and Fin Du Monde) are among my favorites of all time. If you like Belgian style and haven't tried them, they're worth a shot.
If that doesn't impress the holy fuck out of you, then engineering probably isn't for you.
There's no arguing there's some serious *science* that goes into the precision and consistency of a macrobrew. But there's a difference between appreciating the engineering and enjoying a flavor.
I've paid $25 for a bottle of beer. I think I've heard of people paying $50 for limited editions. That's probably a factor of 50 - 100 over the cheapest stuff, and in line with the examples you cited. Now you won't find that in restaurants very much, true, but I think the fancy beer market just goes on in other arenas. Even if the range is half or a quarter that of whiskey or wine, I think the required aging in those markets explains the rest of the difference. Beer rarely needs more than a few months of time invested, at most a handful of years in the extreme cases.
At the middle school level? Every teacher should know more about every subject than their students. By high school that may not be a reasonable expectation. But yes, a math teacher should know more about English or history than a 12-year-old.
That said, computers are funny, because that may not properly be a subject taught at the school, and also because of generation gaps in understanding modern tech. It may be excusable now; in a generation it would be as shameful as getting shown up in any other subject.
Oh, forgot to add. The local liquor store has two floor-to-ceiling sets of shelves where you can assemble your own mixed six-packs. I was surprised to notice the other day they'd reorganized and a full three shelves (out of 12 - 14 total) contained only cans, none of them macrobrews like Bud/Miller/Coors. All were craft brews.
I don't really agree. There are a *lot* of beer snobs/connoisseurs who would consider, say, New Belgium "good" rather than merely "good for camping." I do share your love for tasty European beers, (though by the time they make it here half of them are skunked or otherwise aged and not nearly as enjoyable as they would be in Europe--I'm taking my chances when I buy an import), but some of the American canned stuff these days is on the same level of craft.
If your argument is that all American beers are simply inferior to European beers, then I don't agree with you, but I understand why you wouldn't want them in a can, because that's a subset of you not wanting them under all circumstances.
If your argument is there's good American stuff, but it's not available in cans, I'm going to repeat my statement that I think a good number of true craft breweries are going to cans, and you just might not have noticed yet.
I do see some European stuff in cans, but most of that is geared toward the middle rather than high end of the market. Guinness, Murphy's, Stella, though I think maybe there's more of that now than there used to be.
I'm not arguing at all about the low quality of the majority of macrobrews, and I also don't argue that the majority of American beers sold are cheap.
My point was that you can't assume just based on the form factor that what's inside is one of those cheap macrobrews. One reason they don't sell a 30-pack of Fat Tire in cans is because it would retail at around $40, and few people want to shell that out at once. Also, it's got a higher alcohol content, so maybe you don't need to drink quite as many in a given night to have the same amount of fun.
Your reflexive disdain is outdated. Lots of craft brewers are going to cans, at least here in Colorado. Much easier to take camping, lighter, probably cheaper and just as easy to recycle. Also, unlike even brown glass, and much better than pale glass, a can won't let *any* light through, so the beer is less likely to skunk.
I once drove for 40 miles on the Interstate in North Dakota using only my knees, just to see how far I could go without hands. It was a controlled experiment, though, and I had my hands free and ready to grab the wheel when necessary. Yes, I was under 30 at the time.
My only fear is that, since movie theaters are dying left and right, we need something else for idiots to obsess about. Restrooms should exist for a few more years, though, until Google Loo is released in 2017.
2018: doing the "potty dance" is officially renamed the Google Loo boogaloo.
One should accept the inevitable. Treating death as something "wrong" is illogical.
However, there's a difference between inevitable and "has to happen right now." In that respect, the desire to delay the inevitable for a little while may be perfectly rational. In other words: darn it, I'm not done yet!
Some atheists assert they cannot know definitively if a god exists or not, but that they have seen no evidence to support the assertion that one does. (Hypothetical orbital teapots, invisible unicorns, etc. One cannot prove they do not exist, but likewise, no evidence exists to say that they do exist either.) This is sensible atheism, founded on reason and rationality. They typically don't have an agenda or opinion about people who do believe in a deity. They simply don't share that belief.
You had a huge stretch above where you didn't seem to be acknowledging this group as existing, and I was about to argue with you before finding this post. There's a lot of blurriness in the definitions, and also in how people self-identify, and it seemed to be you were insisting everyone in the quoted group had to be called agnostic, when plenty of them are going to self-identify as atheist. I see a lot of people who may also put themselves into the group above and self-identify as agnostic, while I know plenty of other "agnostics" who are wishy-washy; or dabble in lots of things because hey, there's no evidence for anything, try it all; or secretly think they're atheists but use the softer term so as not to ruffle feathers of family or co-workers, and so on. As far as I can tell there's a roughly even split between the "agnosticism=sensible, atheism=hardline" group and the "agnosticism=wishy-washy, atheism=sensible" group, and the endless bickering between those two groups over semantics just muddies the whole issue.
Then there are "atheists" who jump the shark.... Usually when a deist referrs to "athiesm" as a religion, they are referring to this latter demographic.
This may be true, but I don't really believe in letting an outside group have priority when it comes to setting the definitions. It disregards and disrespects all the "sensible" atheists you pointed out above, and allows the theists to attack all atheists for being hypocrites, and then treat them all as shark jumpers. I find it more appropriate and sensible to educate the theists about the broader range of atheism, and then say if they want to pick a bone with the shark-jumpers that's all well and good, but they're flat-out wrong if they try to say all atheists are shark jumpers.
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His little known nutella "Ratatouille with Reza"?
I have not. But I'm not really in the market for anything especially challenging at the moment. I'll keep it in mind for later, though. The toughest one I've had so far was a Stanford databases class. I thought that one was pretty challenging until a student pointed to a copy of a midterm from the traditional version of the class the same instructor teaches in person, and I was surprised by the much greater difference in difficulty. I got an 80% on the MOOC midterm without applying a lot of effort, but I couldn't have gotten more than 20% on the traditional midterm, if that.
I agree 100%. Many of the classes I've taken have been light to moderate, a couple fairly rigorous, but none of them matched the demands of any of my undergraduate courses (admittedly at a tough private college). The rigorous ones might have come close to a couple of big-lecture entry-level classes I audited at a state university which weren't particularly demanding, but even there I think the total amount of education and challenge still goes to the traditional school.
That said, it is still learning. Engaging, educational, entertaining, and satisfying. I do read nonfiction books on my own, but changing the pace with lectures and quizzes is refreshing. I'm getting a lot out of the experience. How it compares to a traditional college environment is mostly irrelevant for me now; in the future, if they're talking about accredited classes and full degrees in MOOCs, that may be a different issue.
I've taken about 10 courses, and haven't "completed" any of them by the traditional academic standard of doing all the homework and tests. But I don't care, I'm not worried about that. I'm at a busy period in my life, definitely don't have a good schedule, and tend to get behind. I'm still enjoying the lectures, doing readings as I feel like it, sometimes doing quizzes or assignments, and often wrapping up the class weeks after it's officially over. I'm still 100% satisfied with this process, still feel like I'm getting a lot out of the courses, and try to go out of my way if they give me the option in the post-course survey to explain how much I appreciate what I'm getting, even if I look like a "dropout" to the traditionalists.
If it's safe, why does the bag of diatomaceous earth I bought claim it's harmful and should be kept away from children, pets, and everything else? The sales guy told me the same thing about it being safe, but when I got it home and looked at the packaging it said otherwise?
I have no problem doing nothing. Or rather, given no requirements, I have no problem filling my time with constructive (well, mostly) things to keep myself occupied. I spent half a year unemployed after the dot-com bust, and other than plummeting into debt it was one of the best times of my life.
Naturally, this prediction comes when I'll be 68 and at full retirement age. That practically guarantees it'll come true, and I'll watch all the snotty kids enjoying the good life I had to earn for myself through decades of work.
I don't care about kids educational programming, but as an adult I'd like some. There was a brief window where I caught a lot of neat stuff on the History channel and loved it. Given the option I would gladly watch quite a bit of science or history on television, but it's hard to find. It's sad when a cooking show is the most educational, scientific, nonfiction you can find on air.
Roku with Hulu and Netflix is technically very easy with just one straightforward remote. No recording necessary, because you're streaming everything. Not sure about having a guide, but both give some hints and recommendations. Hulu may have some sort of favorites list to remind you to catch weekly shows: I'm not entirely sure, that's my wife's arena.
Sports is a difficult issue. You'll pay a lot for addon packages, though they exist. I've satisfied myself with paying for less expensive audio and listening via the laptop, but it's not quite the same.
Most of the ageism seems to come with the hiring company. If you're at a company that's already supporting you, and it appears they are, then you're not going to have problems as long as you stay. Obstacles may only start to crop up if/when you want to move. Even then I think the horror stories are exaggerated - we've got programmers in their 40's or 50's here who were relatively new hires, but we're a smaller and perhaps nontraditional company. I think you ought to still have plenty of options, but you may struggle if you try to pick certain large and established firms with a reputation for ageism, including most of the gaming industry.
Best of luck to you! I'm actually still pushing back my plans to reinvent myself as a programmer (trying to get through kids before changing career paths) and I know I won't get to it before I'm 40. Despite the general negativity about my prospects, I don't expect that to stop me from eventually making the transition.
Is there some cleanup that can be done after bedtime? Also, I know all kids are different, but ours doesn't seem to need that much of a cooldown period. Ten or fifteen minutes of reading right at the end sets the tone for bedtime. We can even have tickle fights after the bath, and by the time we're done with books she's okay. If yours doesn't work that way, I realize that won't help, but you might try condensing it a little and see if you get anything out of it?
That's almost exactly the schedule my daughter is on, and she's turning 2. Nobody gives us funny looks about it, though. It is true we don't get out much in the evenings anymore (each of us parents usually does something on our own once a week, but honestly we're pretty tired a lot of the time anyway so quiet time is good). It's one of the best things we did for her happiness and our sanity to get on a consistent and extensive sleep schedule.
She's a good sport if we have to push her a little now and then, but we've noticed a direct correlation between her going to bed later and then sleeping worse, waking up more often, waking up earlier (unintuitive, but true) and being worse at nap time, plus being crankier when awake of course.
"What for it"?
Wait are we whatting for?
Bottle conditioning just means letting the final bit of fermentation occur in the bottle, which carbonates it naturally. Homebrewers rely on this because they don't have ways to inject CO2 into the system. Some traditional breweries use this method still, mostly smaller or older operations, though there are other exceptions. I'm not really aware of any significant changes in the character of the beer based on bottle conditioning other than it does leave a bit of yeast behind as sediment in the bottle. Many drinkers find this mostly a detriment - you're leaving that last bit behind or getting a cloudier/yeastier beer if you pour it all out. It may be appealing to some, or in the case of some wheats or strongly flavored yeasts provide a little extra to the experience. I'm not sure if that's what Zod was talking about, or if he just meant that many of the places which still bottle condition have what he considers to be better beers in general.
The can may spoil it for you, but "skunk" is actually a technical term. It's a chemical process where some of the hop chemicals react with sunlight and convert into something else which literally provides a slightly skunky smell. If you want a good reference, Corona is a classic case of a heavily skunked beer. (I think that's why a lot of people drink it with the lime, to cover up the smell.) It's also part of the Mexican lager standard style - in their case they expose the beer to a burst of ultraviolet light during production specifically to create the effect, and can get away with clear bottles because additional skunking won't make much difference.
Miller, on the other hand, created a variation of the hop chemical which provides bitterness but doesn't react to light. That's how they can get away with clear bottles for one of their lines of beer - it won't skunk no matter what.
I fully understand that. The opportunity cost of an old favorite versus a tempting new unknown is always a tough call. Speaking of four-packs, the Unibroue stuff (particularly Trois Pistoles and Fin Du Monde) are among my favorites of all time. If you like Belgian style and haven't tried them, they're worth a shot.
If that doesn't impress the holy fuck out of you, then engineering probably isn't for you.
There's no arguing there's some serious *science* that goes into the precision and consistency of a macrobrew. But there's a difference between appreciating the engineering and enjoying a flavor.
I've paid $25 for a bottle of beer. I think I've heard of people paying $50 for limited editions. That's probably a factor of 50 - 100 over the cheapest stuff, and in line with the examples you cited. Now you won't find that in restaurants very much, true, but I think the fancy beer market just goes on in other arenas. Even if the range is half or a quarter that of whiskey or wine, I think the required aging in those markets explains the rest of the difference. Beer rarely needs more than a few months of time invested, at most a handful of years in the extreme cases.
At the middle school level? Every teacher should know more about every subject than their students. By high school that may not be a reasonable expectation. But yes, a math teacher should know more about English or history than a 12-year-old.
That said, computers are funny, because that may not properly be a subject taught at the school, and also because of generation gaps in understanding modern tech. It may be excusable now; in a generation it would be as shameful as getting shown up in any other subject.
Oh, forgot to add. The local liquor store has two floor-to-ceiling sets of shelves where you can assemble your own mixed six-packs. I was surprised to notice the other day they'd reorganized and a full three shelves (out of 12 - 14 total) contained only cans, none of them macrobrews like Bud/Miller/Coors. All were craft brews.
I don't really agree. There are a *lot* of beer snobs/connoisseurs who would consider, say, New Belgium "good" rather than merely "good for camping." I do share your love for tasty European beers, (though by the time they make it here half of them are skunked or otherwise aged and not nearly as enjoyable as they would be in Europe--I'm taking my chances when I buy an import), but some of the American canned stuff these days is on the same level of craft.
If your argument is that all American beers are simply inferior to European beers, then I don't agree with you, but I understand why you wouldn't want them in a can, because that's a subset of you not wanting them under all circumstances.
If your argument is there's good American stuff, but it's not available in cans, I'm going to repeat my statement that I think a good number of true craft breweries are going to cans, and you just might not have noticed yet.
I do see some European stuff in cans, but most of that is geared toward the middle rather than high end of the market. Guinness, Murphy's, Stella, though I think maybe there's more of that now than there used to be.
I'm not arguing at all about the low quality of the majority of macrobrews, and I also don't argue that the majority of American beers sold are cheap.
My point was that you can't assume just based on the form factor that what's inside is one of those cheap macrobrews. One reason they don't sell a 30-pack of Fat Tire in cans is because it would retail at around $40, and few people want to shell that out at once. Also, it's got a higher alcohol content, so maybe you don't need to drink quite as many in a given night to have the same amount of fun.
Your reflexive disdain is outdated. Lots of craft brewers are going to cans, at least here in Colorado. Much easier to take camping, lighter, probably cheaper and just as easy to recycle. Also, unlike even brown glass, and much better than pale glass, a can won't let *any* light through, so the beer is less likely to skunk.
I once drove for 40 miles on the Interstate in North Dakota using only my knees, just to see how far I could go without hands. It was a controlled experiment, though, and I had my hands free and ready to grab the wheel when necessary. Yes, I was under 30 at the time.
>
My only fear is that, since movie theaters are dying left and right, we need something else for idiots to obsess about. Restrooms should exist for a few more years, though, until Google Loo is released in 2017.
2018: doing the "potty dance" is officially renamed the Google Loo boogaloo.
Yes and no.
One should accept the inevitable. Treating death as something "wrong" is illogical.
However, there's a difference between inevitable and "has to happen right now." In that respect, the desire to delay the inevitable for a little while may be perfectly rational. In other words: darn it, I'm not done yet!
Some atheists assert they cannot know definitively if a god exists or not, but that they have seen no evidence to support the assertion that one does. (Hypothetical orbital teapots, invisible unicorns, etc. One cannot prove they do not exist, but likewise, no evidence exists to say that they do exist either.) This is sensible atheism, founded on reason and rationality. They typically don't have an agenda or opinion about people who do believe in a deity. They simply don't share that belief.
You had a huge stretch above where you didn't seem to be acknowledging this group as existing, and I was about to argue with you before finding this post. There's a lot of blurriness in the definitions, and also in how people self-identify, and it seemed to be you were insisting everyone in the quoted group had to be called agnostic, when plenty of them are going to self-identify as atheist. I see a lot of people who may also put themselves into the group above and self-identify as agnostic, while I know plenty of other "agnostics" who are wishy-washy; or dabble in lots of things because hey, there's no evidence for anything, try it all; or secretly think they're atheists but use the softer term so as not to ruffle feathers of family or co-workers, and so on. As far as I can tell there's a roughly even split between the "agnosticism=sensible, atheism=hardline" group and the "agnosticism=wishy-washy, atheism=sensible" group, and the endless bickering between those two groups over semantics just muddies the whole issue.
Then there are "atheists" who jump the shark. ... Usually when a deist referrs to "athiesm" as a religion, they are referring to this latter demographic.
This may be true, but I don't really believe in letting an outside group have priority when it comes to setting the definitions. It disregards and disrespects all the "sensible" atheists you pointed out above, and allows the theists to attack all atheists for being hypocrites, and then treat them all as shark jumpers. I find it more appropriate and sensible to educate the theists about the broader range of atheism, and then say if they want to pick a bone with the shark-jumpers that's all well and good, but they're flat-out wrong if they try to say all atheists are shark jumpers.