...we get to protest and apply political and social pressure to change the rules. If you find it unsettling that rules change from time to time, think deeply about what that says regarding your mental condition.
Eh, no, it's not a *totally* nonsexual thing. (1) Guys are still going to be turned on by exposed breasts, regardless of the reason. (2) I've heard numerous times from women that they do get somewhat sexually aroused (for their mate) when they are breastfeeding.
Truthfully, breastfeeding is a fairly direct expression of one's sexuality.
"The legal system needs to employ a few game hackers..."
Amusingly, I worked at a game company where one of the PHB's (producer) actually was arguing that we needed to hire a game hacker to improve our security.
Did not work, big time. Building security and hacking a game are not the same skill set (one is a superset of the other, guess which).
I have broadband internet from Earthlink through Time Warner Cable in New York City. No cable TV or phone. I'm happy with it, moderately cheap, run web/email servers, IP technically dynamic but it hasn't changed in a year, etc.
However, don't get Earthlink digital phone. That sucks fucking shit, horrible service, no one can fix anything. They even *lost* our phone number! (Lot of stories about that online if you search.)
"And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys. It also follows hard on the heels..."
Lesson #1 I learned as an engineer: When your company gets bought, go. Go as soon as possible. The principals know this (leave the day after they're contractually allowed).
Other lessons: When your bank gets bought out, go (as soon as possible). When your doctor moves away and hands you off to a partner, go (as soon as possible). Generally whenever decisions get handed to a body you didn't initially make an agreement with, you need to go.
I think there's a few things that Americans over-compensate for, because we don't have any actual legitimate culture going back any more than 200 years. We've got no real ethnicity of or own, no language of our own creation, no really old architecture, no common food, etc. Results include the following:
(a) All of our national heroes fought battles with guns. (No medieval Joan-of-Arc heroes, e.g.) So, to be an American patriot you must wield a gun. Hence our mania about gun ownership.
(b) Our national identity really should be based on the Constitution, but that's words and abstract ideas, and words and abstract ideas are hard for people (Even for our current President: "Stop waving a damned piece of paper in my face!"). So, we sadly latch on to some related fruffery like the flag, and lots of people honestly believe that *that* is what they are pledging loyalty, citizenship, fighting wars, etc.
In some sense we've got nothing *else* that Joe Sixpack can actually understand as what it means to be American. Distressingly.
Another paper by the libertarian-leaning CATO institute also said this: Banks, financial lenders, and mortgage providers "work better" if they are responsible and provide only secure financial investments, and are therefore not likely to enter a worldwide financial meltdown. For that reason, financial oversight legislation is neither necessary nor desirable. QED.
I'd say that's biased as to what coast you grew up on. For us on the East coast, it's pretty obvious that typing any zip code into Excel gets mangled unless you do something special to it.
The lot of posts like "women are just different and don't like CS, accept it" are missing the point. Insight to the youngsters -- it didn't used to be this way. When I was in college about 20 years ago, there was a good supply of women in my math and CS courses. They weren't there for a lucrative career, they wren't chasing a dot-com industry that didn't exist yet. They were smart and geeky and interested in the world.
(And, in a good proportion of cases, damned hot. If you haven't had they joy of 1 or 2 totally cute, smart babes in all your math/CS courses then I do feel sorry for you.)
So something is changing in the culture or CS courses that's turned of women. In fact, it's happened with breathtaking, distressing speed. And it's not about the money, I don't think; the women scientists I knew were the *least* motivated by a big strike-it-rich payday.
I read a paper written about 10 years ago evangelizing teaching all object-oriented programming and asserting in passing that OOP will be more attractive to women for some stupid reason. Obviously that, at least, has not been the case.
I teach college math (usually part-time, at a NYC community college).
(1) I see a number of people who didn't like math in high school, or were convinced they were bad at it. Then they're pleasantly surprised when they hit "real" college math that it's interesting and intriguing and deep for them. I would recommend that your daughter at least *try* a college math class like statistics or calculus -- she doesn't have to declare a major right away, try it with an eye of making up her mind about what she wants to do.
(2) I wish someone had told me, at that age, about what I do right now. Primarily I'm pursuing music with my rock band (other friends are artists, etc.). When you're an artist you do need a day job of some sort. If you get a master's degree in math, you can get along pretty well teaching part-time at community colleges, be in an intellectual and not brain-dead environment (like temping our waitressing), and still have gobs of time for your art. I also teach nights, which segues perfectly into a weekend schedule where I'm up all night at clubs and bars, etc. There's lots of demand for remedial math education in colleges these days. At least consider this as an outside option if she wants to be an artist.
It's not for everyone (or almost anyone), but if I'd known this at her age I would have saved myself ~6 years in the wrong career track.
Have you noticed, in the US in the last 8 years: (1) inability to protect us from terrorist attack, (2) war against the wrong country, (3) inability to win that war, (4) new torture centers, (5) widespread spying on our own people, (6) corruption of our agencies dedicated to science and oversight, (7) corruption of agencies trying to protect us from disastrous hurricanes et. al., (8) infiltration of religious principles into our government, (9) commencement of holding people in prison forever without a trial, (10) destruction of our financial system?
To me, this looked like the very first election that was actually about policies instead of personalities in my ~40 years in the US. Note that Democrats (Obama's party) also won many Congressional and Senate seats across the board, so it's clearly not just about one person's personality.
"Randomness is objective, not dependent on the observer, and there are theoretical observers who could predict the outcome of a die roll; there are no such observers for radioactive decay, or the emission of Hawking radiation, or of shot noise."
This is a completely philosophical claim and non-scientific. There are two primary camps for probability interpretations. (1) The "frequentist" camp, where probability is an objective statement about the ratio of successes over many trials (i.e., no statement can be made about one single trial). (2) The "Bayesian" camp, where probability is a subjective statement about the observer's belief about the next trial.
It sounds like you're in the "frequentist" (objective) camp, and thus can't make any probability statement about individual trials in the first place. Others will differ. The distinction is not subject to scientific testing.
What is it with all the reasonable, calm, long-range-planning national leaders all of a sudden? Geez, we won't have any fun at all if it keeps going like this (fun = sociopathic world interactions)...
Slashdot Mirror
Don't think MySpace has a built-in feature, but there's a 3rd-party web app for it here:
http://makedatamakesense.com/myspace/export/
...we get to protest and apply political and social pressure to change the rules. If you find it unsettling that rules change from time to time, think deeply about what that says regarding your mental condition.
"It's a totally nonsexual thing."
Eh, no, it's not a *totally* nonsexual thing.
(1) Guys are still going to be turned on by exposed breasts, regardless of the reason.
(2) I've heard numerous times from women that they do get somewhat sexually aroused (for their mate) when they are breastfeeding.
Truthfully, breastfeeding is a fairly direct expression of one's sexuality.
I agree. It's very much like the Halting Problem proof.
As a college math/CS teacher, this is what I call "PHB thinking".
"The Department of Education is not only unconstitutional (and thus, illegal), it DOESN'T WORK..."
My impression of the parent:
<fingers-in-ears> La la la la la I can't hear you! </fingers-in-ears>
"We all learned PEMDAS in algebra class..."
Please put a stake through that shit, it's flat-out wrong. As a college math teacher I have to deal with the wreckage it produces.
(1) What is 20/4*5?
(2) What is the inverse of exponents?
(3) How do you briefly explain operations on powers?
Etc.
"The legal system needs to employ a few game hackers..."
Amusingly, I worked at a game company where one of the PHB's (producer) actually was arguing that we needed to hire a game hacker to improve our security.
Did not work, big time. Building security and hacking a game are not the same skill set (one is a superset of the other, guess which).
College adjunct faculty.
O(2^n)
I have broadband internet from Earthlink through Time Warner Cable in New York City. No cable TV or phone. I'm happy with it, moderately cheap, run web/email servers, IP technically dynamic but it hasn't changed in a year, etc.
However, don't get Earthlink digital phone. That sucks fucking shit, horrible service, no one can fix anything. They even *lost* our phone number! (Lot of stories about that online if you search.)
"Since most people came in with OO experience only, doing functional programming through [sic] people for a loop at first..."
So, you're not really talking about people's first programming course here, are you?
Unfortunately, they can't all be first.
"And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys. It also follows hard on the heels..."
Mmmm, I'd love a new pair of shoes. What?
Lesson #1 I learned as an engineer: When your company gets bought, go. Go as soon as possible. The principals know this (leave the day after they're contractually allowed).
Other lessons: When your bank gets bought out, go (as soon as possible). When your doctor moves away and hands you off to a partner, go (as soon as possible). Generally whenever decisions get handed to a body you didn't initially make an agreement with, you need to go.
I think there's a few things that Americans over-compensate for, because we don't have any actual legitimate culture going back any more than 200 years. We've got no real ethnicity of or own, no language of our own creation, no really old architecture, no common food, etc. Results include the following:
(a) All of our national heroes fought battles with guns. (No medieval Joan-of-Arc heroes, e.g.) So, to be an American patriot you must wield a gun. Hence our mania about gun ownership.
(b) Our national identity really should be based on the Constitution, but that's words and abstract ideas, and words and abstract ideas are hard for people (Even for our current President: "Stop waving a damned piece of paper in my face!"). So, we sadly latch on to some related fruffery like the flag, and lots of people honestly believe that *that* is what they are pledging loyalty, citizenship, fighting wars, etc.
In some sense we've got nothing *else* that Joe Sixpack can actually understand as what it means to be American. Distressingly.
Another paper by the libertarian-leaning CATO institute also said this: Banks, financial lenders, and mortgage providers "work better" if they are responsible and provide only secure financial investments, and are therefore not likely to enter a worldwide financial meltdown. For that reason, financial oversight legislation is neither necessary nor desirable. QED.
I'd say that's biased as to what coast you grew up on. For us on the East coast, it's pretty obvious that typing any zip code into Excel gets mangled unless you do something special to it.
"The person who telecommutes would not get paid for that time, why should the person in office?"
Because in the former case, that is their commute.
The lot of posts like "women are just different and don't like CS, accept it" are missing the point. Insight to the youngsters -- it didn't used to be this way. When I was in college about 20 years ago, there was a good supply of women in my math and CS courses. They weren't there for a lucrative career, they wren't chasing a dot-com industry that didn't exist yet. They were smart and geeky and interested in the world.
(And, in a good proportion of cases, damned hot. If you haven't had they joy of 1 or 2 totally cute, smart babes in all your math/CS courses then I do feel sorry for you.)
So something is changing in the culture or CS courses that's turned of women. In fact, it's happened with breathtaking, distressing speed. And it's not about the money, I don't think; the women scientists I knew were the *least* motivated by a big strike-it-rich payday.
I read a paper written about 10 years ago evangelizing teaching all object-oriented programming and asserting in passing that OOP will be more attractive to women for some stupid reason. Obviously that, at least, has not been the case.
I teach college math (usually part-time, at a NYC community college).
(1) I see a number of people who didn't like math in high school, or were convinced they were bad at it. Then they're pleasantly surprised when they hit "real" college math that it's interesting and intriguing and deep for them. I would recommend that your daughter at least *try* a college math class like statistics or calculus -- she doesn't have to declare a major right away, try it with an eye of making up her mind about what she wants to do.
(2) I wish someone had told me, at that age, about what I do right now. Primarily I'm pursuing music with my rock band (other friends are artists, etc.). When you're an artist you do need a day job of some sort. If you get a master's degree in math, you can get along pretty well teaching part-time at community colleges, be in an intellectual and not brain-dead environment (like temping our waitressing), and still have gobs of time for your art. I also teach nights, which segues perfectly into a weekend schedule where I'm up all night at clubs and bars, etc. There's lots of demand for remedial math education in colleges these days. At least consider this as an outside option if she wants to be an artist.
It's not for everyone (or almost anyone), but if I'd known this at her age I would have saved myself ~6 years in the wrong career track.
Have you noticed, in the US in the last 8 years: (1) inability to protect us from terrorist attack, (2) war against the wrong country, (3) inability to win that war, (4) new torture centers, (5) widespread spying on our own people, (6) corruption of our agencies dedicated to science and oversight, (7) corruption of agencies trying to protect us from disastrous hurricanes et. al., (8) infiltration of religious principles into our government, (9) commencement of holding people in prison forever without a trial, (10) destruction of our financial system?
To me, this looked like the very first election that was actually about policies instead of personalities in my ~40 years in the US. Note that Democrats (Obama's party) also won many Congressional and Senate seats across the board, so it's clearly not just about one person's personality.
There's nothing in either article mentioning unions even a single time regarding this story. You're a liar and a propagandist.
"Randomness is objective, not dependent on the observer, and there are theoretical observers who could predict the outcome of a die roll; there are no such observers for radioactive decay, or the emission of Hawking radiation, or of shot noise."
This is a completely philosophical claim and non-scientific. There are two primary camps for probability interpretations. (1) The "frequentist" camp, where probability is an objective statement about the ratio of successes over many trials (i.e., no statement can be made about one single trial). (2) The "Bayesian" camp, where probability is a subjective statement about the observer's belief about the next trial.
It sounds like you're in the "frequentist" (objective) camp, and thus can't make any probability statement about individual trials in the first place. Others will differ. The distinction is not subject to scientific testing.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_interpretation
What is it with all the reasonable, calm, long-range-planning national leaders all of a sudden? Geez, we won't have any fun at all if it keeps going like this (fun = sociopathic world interactions)...