Brain chemistry. There's a "sense of the profound" that's a product of brain chemistry. It can happen naturally on those rare occasions when you actually learn something profound. Or, you can smoke pot*, and have the same "sense of the profound" from whatever random crap you happen to be thinking. This is not a new kind of perception, it's a chemical illusion, no more valid than the brain chemistry that makes you hear voices, or makes you unable to stop obsessing on stupid shit.
*It's likely that all or most oddball mind-altering effects of pot (other than the most obvious) are from various crap that was once commonly used in the preparation/preservation, and not THC.
Youtube gets plenty screwed up without ISP throttling. There are days when I can't watch some videos on Youtube at the lowest resolution, but others are fine in HD, and my ISP is on Google's "nice" list for Youtube.
My wifi with the EM clutter from 20 visible Wifi networks, as measured from across my apartment: dial-up speed on some days, around 100 mbps on others. I wouldn't use it for an ISP speed test.
It's totally unexpected at 30 degrees. At 0, 45, and 90 degrees the intuitive model of polarization as a vector predicts the measured value, but it fails at all other angles. At 60 degrees, explaining why 25%, not 33%, of light gets through is the perfect introduction to quantum mechanics. And kids should at least get that introduction - that the rules of the universe are more odd than you might guess, but still you can work them out, and that's modern physics.
You can also explain, with no more math, that one photon passing through 2 filters, and 2 entangled photons passing through two separate filters work the same way. A result that shouldn't surprise anyone, even though its implications are quite weird. You don't really need to understand those implications in high school, but seeing enough to believe that the physicists are just telling colorful stories, that this stuff is actually real, would be great.
Besides which, is there any language that is completely dead? Honest question.
PL/S is, as far as I know and dearly hope, quite dead. If not someone needs to drive a stake through its heart, saw off its head, and bury it at a crossroads. If you think the 5 languages listed are bad, you haven't tried PL/S.
C++ is a bad language to do complex OOP shit in - use a managed language for that.
C++ is an awesome language to do low-level coding in thanks to automatic resource cleanup. All the speed of C, none of the error-prone "allocate at the top, free at the bottom, never ever return from the middle". When I write code that, back in the days before out-of-order execution would have been hand-tuned assembly, I choose C++ and let the optimizer work it's magic. And std::algorithms is quite handy for the sort of shit that make you dust off your algorithms book from college, all carefully tuned and well-tested.
He has a good point though. Python's fundamental flaw is that it allows both tabs and spaces as indentation. If it had picked one, and made the other a syntax error, it could have been a great concept.
Curly braces are meaningless clutter. Indention level is what matters to the human eye, and all that the compiler needs. But you have to freaking normalize indention if you're going to take that path, or it ruins the whole deal.
Duck-typing in C: we do it with macros. And people mostly get that macros are dangerous to over-use, and limit the abuse of the concept (mostly).
Duck-typing: in C++ we do it with templates. The new-ish "concepts" approach that will eventually make it into the C++ standard is duck typing, but it's pretty clearly meant for well-reviewed library code to solve problems with no other good solution.
While duck-tying should be seen as an anti-pattern in OOP, there are still dark corners where you need it.
Quantum mechanics is one of those topics that is really hard to use intuition to figure out what will happen, especially when you were only given a glimpse of simple effects and not an actual foundation in the subject.
The experiment with two polarizing films, if explained properly, will reset intuitions about light. That's why it's so valuable. The intuitive explanation predicts X, the student, hands-on, measures Y, there you go. If you do this the first week that you explain what polarization is, people don't head down the wrong path with intuition in the first place. To me, that's a big deal.
The double-slit experiment is one that no one really gets a correct intuition on, but you can at least show hands-on that the obvious idea doesn't work.
Similarly, relativity, if properly explained with geometry, is straightforward. You can't really do hands-on experiments there, but there's plenty of stuff visible to the human eye that you can at least present to the class as photos or videos.
You can't make someone wealthy by giving them money - look at lottery winners after a few years. Wealth is a matter of habits more than funding, and we seem dead-set as a culture against teaching people how to be wealthy - instead we revile the wealthy as bad examples.
All this "class warfare" tripe is a scheme by one set of wealthy people to attack a different set of wealthy people. Don't participate. Instead, change your habits to those which accumulate wealth, and encourage others to do likewise. That's real change.
The catholics, jews, christians, muslims and other organized religious types believe that every sperm is sacred, so even rape babies, and medically questionable babies must be brought to term.
That's painting with a heck of a broad brush! That belief is rare among Catholics, and almost non-existent otherwise. Also, you forgot Hindus and Buddhists. (To judge by average age of lost virginity, Hindus are the most sexually uptight people on the planet.)
Meanwhile you'll usually find that the average pro-choice person's only real bitching point about pro-lifer's is the religious angle.
The world certainly would be a better place if people could overcome their blind, stupid prejudices.
You don't need to know anything except where to find food, but humans should know more than they need to, or what's the point of it all?
Neither relativity nor QM is all that hard to understand. The math can be hard to understand, but the more important consequences of both can be explained geometrically. And, really, you only need algebra and trig to do the math for the basic results in special relativity and in very simple quantum mechanical systems.
I think it's more important to do some simple experiments to show what QM is about, and why the physicists aren't just making all this up - just measuring the light that passes through 2 polarizing filters, and doing a double slit experiment, and explaining that the results are the same if you do one photon at a time, that would be great! Just showing pictures of gravitational lensing and Cherenkov radiation and other visible consequences of relativity would be great!
These are basic facts about the world, and as such there's really no excuse for not teaching these facts along with some evidence to back them up.
The majority of Americans, 58%, are pro-life if you take that to mean "abortion should be legal in only a few circumstances, or outright illegal" (only 39% support legal abortion in "all" or "most" circumstances). Very few of those 58% are "anti-contraception" as that's a fairly extreme religious view (even most Catholics don't buy it).
Your belief seems to be: * Some people support X * Some people who support X support Y * Therefore, all who support X support Y
Which makes me wonder if you've ever even thought deeply about the issue.
Is this what they teach kids today? The everything ever done by white men must be evil, and it's just a matter of deconstructing the appropriate documents to show it? That the published reasoning behind the Constitution can be ignored, as the authors were just a bunch a lying rapists anyhow?
I know the Constitution is awfully inconvenient to fans of totalitarianism - why, it limits the power of the ruler, heck, it limits the entire central government - and some people think we should just ignore it as a historical curiosity. But this is really reaching as a reason to attack it.
Perhaps you've been missing the stories on how robots will replace 1/3 of workers in 20 years? Robotics is slowly climbing the "unskilled labor" curve, able to do more mindless repetitive tasks for us. Of course, people fear change, and so just like every automation revolution that has dramatically improved our live, this will have it share of Luddites, but one way or another people will be excited.
Effectively free unlimited internet pron? People are exicited about/by that, mere "arrangement of pixels on the screen" or no!
the real issue is that Science and Tech are just evolving at a pace that it becomes difficult to comprehend the implications
Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are both about 100 years old now (really!). Why aren't they taught in high school? High schools mostly teach science that was the state of the art around the time of the US civil war (really!).
We're so culturally bought into the idea that math is hard, that modern physics is full of baffling ideas that normal people can't make sense of, and so we don't even try to teach what we should. Especially if you go on to college: someone who specializes in the works of Shakespeare should know as much about quantum physics as someone who specializes about quantum physics should know about Shakespeare - he should be able to at least give a summary of the most important work.
We've had 100 years now to figure out how to teach the basic rules of the universe we live in to high school students, but we have simply abandoned the idea a "uncool" and "too hard".
Because your neighbors started working harder. Women's lib and all that. Two earners per household became the norm for important social reasons, and so if you didn't have that, you were suddenly visibly less well off than your neighbors.
I'd love to see us retreat from that. I'd love to walk back to 1 net earner, but rather than "1 parent working", instead have "both parents working part time, with plenty of time for the kids". It would mean fewer toys, but entertainment is so cheaply available these days that I don't think we'd be bored. (Ideally, IMO, you'd work full time in your 20s as you mastered your chose profession, then back off once you had 5-10 years experience.)
But that's a social problem IMO, not an economic one really.
Why? If 10 infected people try to enter, catching 9 of them in quarantine is worlds better than catching none of them. It's not like this is a zombie apocalypse, and if each infected person who sneaks though manages to kill 1-2 others before quarantine is imposed, that's saving 13-14 lives right there, and giving only 1 chance, not 10 chances, of a larger outbreak that could kill thousands.
Capitalism will not / can not tolerate unemployment in large amounts. It causes the value of labor to asymptotically approach zero due to the law of supply and demand.
Only within a given skill set. The value of unskilled labor is already approaching 0, but skilled trades still make good money. Supply and demand: just pick something with steady demand and limited supply.
One social benefit we should certainly provide is easier access to technical training, which IMO is mostly about policing tech schools for "product quality". Vocational schools these days are eager to lend you the money to take the classes, but the usefulness (in finding a job) of the provided training varies substantially from school to school.
Inflation doesn't measure what you think it measures. It does not measure buying power in a way that's absolute over time - it measures buying power in a way that's relative to your neighbors over time.
A car is a great example - inflation measures the cost of "a car" - say an entry level car vs an entry-level car today. But there's no equivalent to a typical 60s car that it would be remotely legal to buy in the US today - they were so dangerous, and had such high emissions, that cars that cheap aren't allowed to be sold. You might try the Tata Nano as a good reference point for a 60s car (though the Nano's emissions are still vastly improved).
So, the number of hours you have to work to buy enough car that your neighbors think you're middle class is more now - to begin with, you need 2 of them! But the number of hours you'd have to work today to buy a Tata Nano - a car similar in practical functionality to a 60s car, is far lower, as that car is vastly cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars.
So, if you want the same standard of living as the 60s, it's far easier to get that. If you want the same standard of living as your neighbors, that keeps requiring more work to achieve. Which shows we're a bunch of workaholics addicted to keeping up with the Joneses, which is hardly news, but I don't think that was the point your were making? If it was, I totally agree.
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Brain chemistry. There's a "sense of the profound" that's a product of brain chemistry. It can happen naturally on those rare occasions when you actually learn something profound. Or, you can smoke pot*, and have the same "sense of the profound" from whatever random crap you happen to be thinking. This is not a new kind of perception, it's a chemical illusion, no more valid than the brain chemistry that makes you hear voices, or makes you unable to stop obsessing on stupid shit.
*It's likely that all or most oddball mind-altering effects of pot (other than the most obvious) are from various crap that was once commonly used in the preparation/preservation, and not THC.
Youtube gets plenty screwed up without ISP throttling. There are days when I can't watch some videos on Youtube at the lowest resolution, but others are fine in HD, and my ISP is on Google's "nice" list for Youtube.
Back in the day EMACS and VI was the holy war to have. These days I'm baffled there are people who still don't use an IDE for real projects.
My wifi with the EM clutter from 20 visible Wifi networks, as measured from across my apartment: dial-up speed on some days, around 100 mbps on others. I wouldn't use it for an ISP speed test.
It's totally unexpected at 30 degrees. At 0, 45, and 90 degrees the intuitive model of polarization as a vector predicts the measured value, but it fails at all other angles. At 60 degrees, explaining why 25%, not 33%, of light gets through is the perfect introduction to quantum mechanics. And kids should at least get that introduction - that the rules of the universe are more odd than you might guess, but still you can work them out, and that's modern physics.
You can also explain, with no more math, that one photon passing through 2 filters, and 2 entangled photons passing through two separate filters work the same way. A result that shouldn't surprise anyone, even though its implications are quite weird. You don't really need to understand those implications in high school, but seeing enough to believe that the physicists are just telling colorful stories, that this stuff is actually real, would be great.
Besides which, is there any language that is completely dead? Honest question.
PL/S is, as far as I know and dearly hope, quite dead. If not someone needs to drive a stake through its heart, saw off its head, and bury it at a crossroads. If you think the 5 languages listed are bad, you haven't tried PL/S.
C++ is a bad language to do complex OOP shit in - use a managed language for that.
C++ is an awesome language to do low-level coding in thanks to automatic resource cleanup. All the speed of C, none of the error-prone "allocate at the top, free at the bottom, never ever return from the middle". When I write code that, back in the days before out-of-order execution would have been hand-tuned assembly, I choose C++ and let the optimizer work it's magic. And std::algorithms is quite handy for the sort of shit that make you dust off your algorithms book from college, all carefully tuned and well-tested.
He has a good point though. Python's fundamental flaw is that it allows both tabs and spaces as indentation. If it had picked one, and made the other a syntax error, it could have been a great concept.
Curly braces are meaningless clutter. Indention level is what matters to the human eye, and all that the compiler needs. But you have to freaking normalize indention if you're going to take that path, or it ruins the whole deal.
Duck-typing in C: we do it with macros. And people mostly get that macros are dangerous to over-use, and limit the abuse of the concept (mostly).
Duck-typing: in C++ we do it with templates. The new-ish "concepts" approach that will eventually make it into the C++ standard is duck typing, but it's pretty clearly meant for well-reviewed library code to solve problems with no other good solution.
While duck-tying should be seen as an anti-pattern in OOP, there are still dark corners where you need it.
Quantum mechanics is one of those topics that is really hard to use intuition to figure out what will happen, especially when you were only given a glimpse of simple effects and not an actual foundation in the subject.
The experiment with two polarizing films, if explained properly, will reset intuitions about light. That's why it's so valuable. The intuitive explanation predicts X, the student, hands-on, measures Y, there you go. If you do this the first week that you explain what polarization is, people don't head down the wrong path with intuition in the first place. To me, that's a big deal.
The double-slit experiment is one that no one really gets a correct intuition on, but you can at least show hands-on that the obvious idea doesn't work.
Similarly, relativity, if properly explained with geometry, is straightforward. You can't really do hands-on experiments there, but there's plenty of stuff visible to the human eye that you can at least present to the class as photos or videos.
You can't make someone wealthy by giving them money - look at lottery winners after a few years. Wealth is a matter of habits more than funding, and we seem dead-set as a culture against teaching people how to be wealthy - instead we revile the wealthy as bad examples.
All this "class warfare" tripe is a scheme by one set of wealthy people to attack a different set of wealthy people. Don't participate. Instead, change your habits to those which accumulate wealth, and encourage others to do likewise. That's real change.
Because it's pretty normal for parents to believe their kids are perfect angels?
There a re plenty of pro-choice people who believe:
* Abortion should always be available and without needing a reason.
28% of Americans, in fact, per that linked survey.
The catholics, jews, christians, muslims and other organized religious types believe that every sperm is sacred, so even rape babies, and medically questionable babies must be brought to term.
That's painting with a heck of a broad brush! That belief is rare among Catholics, and almost non-existent otherwise. Also, you forgot Hindus and Buddhists. (To judge by average age of lost virginity, Hindus are the most sexually uptight people on the planet.)
Meanwhile you'll usually find that the average pro-choice person's only real bitching point about pro-lifer's is the religious angle.
The world certainly would be a better place if people could overcome their blind, stupid prejudices.
You don't need to know anything except where to find food, but humans should know more than they need to, or what's the point of it all?
Neither relativity nor QM is all that hard to understand. The math can be hard to understand, but the more important consequences of both can be explained geometrically. And, really, you only need algebra and trig to do the math for the basic results in special relativity and in very simple quantum mechanical systems.
I think it's more important to do some simple experiments to show what QM is about, and why the physicists aren't just making all this up - just measuring the light that passes through 2 polarizing filters, and doing a double slit experiment, and explaining that the results are the same if you do one photon at a time, that would be great! Just showing pictures of gravitational lensing and Cherenkov radiation and other visible consequences of relativity would be great!
These are basic facts about the world, and as such there's really no excuse for not teaching these facts along with some evidence to back them up.
What does "pro-life" mean to you?
The majority of Americans, 58%, are pro-life if you take that to mean "abortion should be legal in only a few circumstances, or outright illegal" (only 39% support legal abortion in "all" or "most" circumstances). Very few of those 58% are "anti-contraception" as that's a fairly extreme religious view (even most Catholics don't buy it).
Your belief seems to be:
* Some people support X
* Some people who support X support Y
* Therefore, all who support X support Y
Which makes me wonder if you've ever even thought deeply about the issue.
Is this what they teach kids today? The everything ever done by white men must be evil, and it's just a matter of deconstructing the appropriate documents to show it? That the published reasoning behind the Constitution can be ignored, as the authors were just a bunch a lying rapists anyhow?
I know the Constitution is awfully inconvenient to fans of totalitarianism - why, it limits the power of the ruler, heck, it limits the entire central government - and some people think we should just ignore it as a historical curiosity. But this is really reaching as a reason to attack it.
Perhaps you've been missing the stories on how robots will replace 1/3 of workers in 20 years? Robotics is slowly climbing the "unskilled labor" curve, able to do more mindless repetitive tasks for us. Of course, people fear change, and so just like every automation revolution that has dramatically improved our live, this will have it share of Luddites, but one way or another people will be excited.
Effectively free unlimited internet pron? People are exicited about/by that, mere "arrangement of pixels on the screen" or no!
Posts like this are the only reason I still read /.. Thanks Amicus - keep fighting the stupid.
the real issue is that Science and Tech are just evolving at a pace that it becomes difficult to comprehend the implications
Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are both about 100 years old now (really!). Why aren't they taught in high school? High schools mostly teach science that was the state of the art around the time of the US civil war (really!).
We're so culturally bought into the idea that math is hard, that modern physics is full of baffling ideas that normal people can't make sense of, and so we don't even try to teach what we should. Especially if you go on to college: someone who specializes in the works of Shakespeare should know as much about quantum physics as someone who specializes about quantum physics should know about Shakespeare - he should be able to at least give a summary of the most important work.
We've had 100 years now to figure out how to teach the basic rules of the universe we live in to high school students, but we have simply abandoned the idea a "uncool" and "too hard".
Because your neighbors started working harder. Women's lib and all that. Two earners per household became the norm for important social reasons, and so if you didn't have that, you were suddenly visibly less well off than your neighbors.
I'd love to see us retreat from that. I'd love to walk back to 1 net earner, but rather than "1 parent working", instead have "both parents working part time, with plenty of time for the kids". It would mean fewer toys, but entertainment is so cheaply available these days that I don't think we'd be bored. (Ideally, IMO, you'd work full time in your 20s as you mastered your chose profession, then back off once you had 5-10 years experience.)
But that's a social problem IMO, not an economic one really.
Why? If 10 infected people try to enter, catching 9 of them in quarantine is worlds better than catching none of them. It's not like this is a zombie apocalypse, and if each infected person who sneaks though manages to kill 1-2 others before quarantine is imposed, that's saving 13-14 lives right there, and giving only 1 chance, not 10 chances, of a larger outbreak that could kill thousands.
When it comes to life-threatening problems, 90% solutions are great solutions. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Capitalism will not / can not tolerate unemployment in large amounts. It causes the value of labor to asymptotically approach zero due to the law of supply and demand.
Only within a given skill set. The value of unskilled labor is already approaching 0, but skilled trades still make good money. Supply and demand: just pick something with steady demand and limited supply.
One social benefit we should certainly provide is easier access to technical training, which IMO is mostly about policing tech schools for "product quality". Vocational schools these days are eager to lend you the money to take the classes, but the usefulness (in finding a job) of the provided training varies substantially from school to school.
Inflation doesn't measure what you think it measures. It does not measure buying power in a way that's absolute over time - it measures buying power in a way that's relative to your neighbors over time.
A car is a great example - inflation measures the cost of "a car" - say an entry level car vs an entry-level car today. But there's no equivalent to a typical 60s car that it would be remotely legal to buy in the US today - they were so dangerous, and had such high emissions, that cars that cheap aren't allowed to be sold. You might try the Tata Nano as a good reference point for a 60s car (though the Nano's emissions are still vastly improved).
So, the number of hours you have to work to buy enough car that your neighbors think you're middle class is more now - to begin with, you need 2 of them! But the number of hours you'd have to work today to buy a Tata Nano - a car similar in practical functionality to a 60s car, is far lower, as that car is vastly cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars.
So, if you want the same standard of living as the 60s, it's far easier to get that. If you want the same standard of living as your neighbors, that keeps requiring more work to achieve. Which shows we're a bunch of workaholics addicted to keeping up with the Joneses, which is hardly news, but I don't think that was the point your were making? If it was, I totally agree.