The problem is that - and I'm sort of assuming here, so pardon me if I'm wrong - I think the answer wouldn't really help and would make many people angry. The reason those schools work is that they're the schools where parents who care about their children's schooling go. They're generally a minority, which is reflected in how the average school is fairly poor. If the parents care, they'll get involved in the school, they'll push for better teachers, better courses, better structure, etc. All of this has already happened, so now we're left with a good chunk of those parents all being at schools that already work well.
The thing is, I don't see how to apply this on a wider level because most parents in the US do not care about education. Some people even seem to revel in their lack of it. This is the big differentiating factor between the US and the countries that you mention. Over there, education seems to be valued more, though I cannot really tell why precisely. If you just decided to emulate the small schools that work, you'd probably see the whole edifice collapse after a very short time since there would be no pressure to keep them running that way; the parents wouldn't give a toss (at least, the majority of them), which would make the children not give a toss, which would make the good teachers leave quite quickly, and then the whole thing falls apart.
Most "solutions" only focus on one part of the problem, but like most *real* (as opposed to idealized and partisan) issues, it's a combination of tightly interlinked factors which need to be addressed simultaneously. You need to motivate the parents and the children, you need to have an efficient administration structure (including personnel, evaluation methods, etc.) and you need competent and motivated teachers.
The physics dept over here still has computers running on Windows 98 because the scanner parts they're using don't work with anything else. They're dog slow, they don't support USB keys and they run on the shittiest screens I've ever seen, but they're the only thing that runs those old parts. At least they have the best firewall ever made: they aren't networked.
I couldn't read in the car for years, I'd just get a big headache and feel sick. Then I started having to take the bus to university, 30 minutes both ways, for 3-5 days a week. It took me a few months but I adapted and now I can read anywhere just fine. So yes, you can most certainly adapt.
With today's snivelling, cowardly politicians, all that would happen is that the first ever so slightly powerful dictator could start taking over country after country and steamroll through everything. Either die to protect your country, or make a deal with the invader for a lofty, safe position in exchange for abdication? I know what most of them would choose.
A much more interesting but tangentially related idea I read was that politicians would have to surrender all personal assets (money, property, you name it) on becoming elected, which would become state property. Once they retire, their payoff would be proportional to how well the country is doing as a whole compared to how it was when they started. This would stop corrupt, self-serving politicians dead in their tracks, and then perhaps your idea of self-sacrifice could work.
Hahahaha. Phone OEMs are bad at making UIs, but they look like fucking geniuses compared to car manufacturers. Seems like you haven't used so-called "modern" dash computers.
The problem is, you needed an entire paragraph to get your point across (and that's assuming people know what Crysis is, which is fine on PC but not so much on mobile). They need to make it sound impressive in five words or less, otherwise the fickle market has already turned their collective head elsewhere.
It would be a revolution in the sense that it would be, as far as I know, the first time general relativity is shown wrong factually. This is different from the quantum mechanics/relativity problem, which is that the two are not compatible (so we know something's missing, but we don't know where).
I can't even begin to imagine the mathematics required, but I'm fairly sure that when you start talking about general relativity you need to drop Euclidean space. Then you can enjoy tensors. And geodesics (ie. the path that a free-moving object would follow, which no longer is necessarily a line). And so much more stuff I've forgotten and have no wish to remember.
I still have nightmares from my Electromagnetism III class.
Wait, so your solution to young managers not having experience is to delay them getting experience until they're older? How does that solve anything apart from pissing on young people?
Assuming that there is any sort of provision to waive the restriction under chosen circumstances (and if there aren't, then the law could use a bit of a fixing), we're talking about magnets here. This isn't as though they're using a whole PCB from China with their firmware or something. Magnets. You can't do much spying with a piece of metal. If the random testing they do on all components anyway passes, I don't see any reason to find this problematic. China already has a near monopoly on rare earth materials so it's not particularly surprising that this is happening.
The good thing to do would be to try to plan ahead and develop internal facilities so that eventually it's roughly breaking even to use US magnets instead. The danger isn't in the magnets but in the dependency on another country.
I don't know in what world you live in but most people agree that Civilization IV is the best Civ around, with some going as far as saying that V is even better with the expansions. Beloved game sequels fall into all sorts of categories, it's the fans which fall in a select few, one of which is the nostalgia-goggled fan who'll never ever accept that a sequel or reboot can actually be better than the original. The new XCOM is also a game that most people will say keeps the spirit of the original while managing to find its own style and doing so with excellent results.
The term ivory tower is used to talk of someone who is disconnected from the everyday world, who's engaged in over-specialized research; it has little to do with not seeing reality. This is exactly the situation a lot of academics find themselves in, but it's not necessarily something they desire. There is a huge disconnect between current top-tier research and basically everything else (even amongst academics of the same branch, your field of expertise is pretty much alien to everyone who isn't in it), but it's largely because of how insanely far we've come and how difficult what's left is to do. You need years of experience to begin grasping what's being researched at the top end. That causes a massive disconnect which is hard to bridge, but again not all scientists actually like this disconnect, they're just stuck with it.
So basically what you're saying is that we should put sharks with lasers into cars to reduce the number of transportation accidents? I know you never mentioned lasers, but I felt like I needed to correct you there.
There is nothing worse to most people than someone pointing out fallacies and logical errors as they crop up. It is entirely the correct thing to do, but it makes you look like a pompous arse who's only there to nitpick and not to address "the fundamental issues". It is sad that this is the case, but doing so would only detract from your original intent of swaying anyone at all.
I think the big thing here is that we don't need amazing scientists, we need amazing popular scientists. I don't particularly like the English term for this; a more appropriate term would be simplifiers or plain and simply teachers. We need people who can take complicated concepts, as seen by the common layperson, and explain them using simple words that everyone can get. Not only that, but those simple words must also form a cohesive, easily understandable whole. Even further, they must be interesting to listen to and provoke thought and discussion. These are all much more important for the current debates than a very focused degree in physics or biology.
In this sense, people like Bill Nye are exactly what we need. You don't need a very deep scientific education to understand the fundamentals of how evolution or astrophysics work. This is all we're ever broaching anyway: the fundamentals. The stuff you learn in your PHD are so far beyond most people's understanding that attempting to simplify them would be futile and would not bring anything worthwhile to the discussion. The vast majority of the debate is still centered on stuff that was determined a hundred years ago. When and if someone asks a question that is much more specific (usually in an attempt to catch you off-guard and to try to weasel in a contradiction of sorts), you can either dig by yourself through the numerous publicly available papers on the subject (which you can read and understand, with some appropriate attention to detail, even with a BSc level of education) or, in the case of someone like Nye, you can probably just ask someone a lot more knowledgeable to explain it to you and then work out a way of making it understandable for everyone else.
A lot of people criticize scientists for being stuck in ivory towers, looking down on the mere mortals below. The truth is that they don't particularly appreciate being in such a position, but modern science is just so damn complicated that most scientists are in fact unable to explain things to someone who doesn't have years of experience in that particular field under their belt. Even in the case of simpler concepts, they're just so used to their specific lexicon that they struggle to explain it in another way. It's similar (and I'm not trying to insult anyone here) to attempting to explain the computer to someone from the Medieval Age: not only does that person have no idea what the thing is, you're not even speaking the same language. This is what makes popular scientists so valuable, since they are able to bridge the scientific community with the population at large.
If the majority of people read their religious texts as metaphorical tales or fables (which is pretty much what they are), I think we'd have a lot fewer issues with religion overall. The problem is that so many people read them as actual facts and historical events.
Science is inherently about skepticism. Challenging one's views, improving upon them, outright invalidating them on occasion. If you're skeptical about science, you should be even more skeptical about religion, which is about none of those things.
Few people actually have the time or means to setup a dedicated computer as a router, so while yes, your comment is somewhat related, it is not particularly relevant to anyone who'd actually be in the market for a Netgear/Linksys router.
Do they really have worse personal liberties than the US, though? If he came back, he'd be jailed, most likely without a fair trial, and maybe even "disappear" mysteriously, all because he told the truth. Calling him a criminal is like calling the Founding Fathers criminals because they rebelled against Great Britain.
Um, the vast majority of cloud backup services are versioned, which invalidates your entire point. As much as slashdotters love to bash on basically any tech that's appeared since 1997 (and even some well before that), there are some intelligent and competent people working on these new technologies and they have indeed thought about problems like those. I know, how bewildering!
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that - and I'm sort of assuming here, so pardon me if I'm wrong - I think the answer wouldn't really help and would make many people angry. The reason those schools work is that they're the schools where parents who care about their children's schooling go. They're generally a minority, which is reflected in how the average school is fairly poor. If the parents care, they'll get involved in the school, they'll push for better teachers, better courses, better structure, etc. All of this has already happened, so now we're left with a good chunk of those parents all being at schools that already work well.
The thing is, I don't see how to apply this on a wider level because most parents in the US do not care about education. Some people even seem to revel in their lack of it. This is the big differentiating factor between the US and the countries that you mention. Over there, education seems to be valued more, though I cannot really tell why precisely. If you just decided to emulate the small schools that work, you'd probably see the whole edifice collapse after a very short time since there would be no pressure to keep them running that way; the parents wouldn't give a toss (at least, the majority of them), which would make the children not give a toss, which would make the good teachers leave quite quickly, and then the whole thing falls apart.
Most "solutions" only focus on one part of the problem, but like most *real* (as opposed to idealized and partisan) issues, it's a combination of tightly interlinked factors which need to be addressed simultaneously. You need to motivate the parents and the children, you need to have an efficient administration structure (including personnel, evaluation methods, etc.) and you need competent and motivated teachers.
The physics dept over here still has computers running on Windows 98 because the scanner parts they're using don't work with anything else. They're dog slow, they don't support USB keys and they run on the shittiest screens I've ever seen, but they're the only thing that runs those old parts. At least they have the best firewall ever made: they aren't networked.
I think the idea is that eventually you'll have 3 40" 4K monitors :)
At least, that's what I'd like to see.
The lizard pen of that facility is apparently really cool. A bit big for the lizards, though, and I'm not sure why it's so close to the reactor...
I couldn't read in the car for years, I'd just get a big headache and feel sick. Then I started having to take the bus to university, 30 minutes both ways, for 3-5 days a week. It took me a few months but I adapted and now I can read anywhere just fine. So yes, you can most certainly adapt.
With today's snivelling, cowardly politicians, all that would happen is that the first ever so slightly powerful dictator could start taking over country after country and steamroll through everything. Either die to protect your country, or make a deal with the invader for a lofty, safe position in exchange for abdication? I know what most of them would choose.
A much more interesting but tangentially related idea I read was that politicians would have to surrender all personal assets (money, property, you name it) on becoming elected, which would become state property. Once they retire, their payoff would be proportional to how well the country is doing as a whole compared to how it was when they started. This would stop corrupt, self-serving politicians dead in their tracks, and then perhaps your idea of self-sacrifice could work.
use QNX and put on a better UI
Hahahaha. Phone OEMs are bad at making UIs, but they look like fucking geniuses compared to car manufacturers. Seems like you haven't used so-called "modern" dash computers.
The problem is, you needed an entire paragraph to get your point across (and that's assuming people know what Crysis is, which is fine on PC but not so much on mobile). They need to make it sound impressive in five words or less, otherwise the fickle market has already turned their collective head elsewhere.
It would be a revolution in the sense that it would be, as far as I know, the first time general relativity is shown wrong factually. This is different from the quantum mechanics/relativity problem, which is that the two are not compatible (so we know something's missing, but we don't know where).
I can't even begin to imagine the mathematics required, but I'm fairly sure that when you start talking about general relativity you need to drop Euclidean space. Then you can enjoy tensors. And geodesics (ie. the path that a free-moving object would follow, which no longer is necessarily a line). And so much more stuff I've forgotten and have no wish to remember.
I still have nightmares from my Electromagnetism III class.
Wait, so your solution to young managers not having experience is to delay them getting experience until they're older? How does that solve anything apart from pissing on young people?
The US won the space race, but they're losing the space marathon.
Assuming that there is any sort of provision to waive the restriction under chosen circumstances (and if there aren't, then the law could use a bit of a fixing), we're talking about magnets here. This isn't as though they're using a whole PCB from China with their firmware or something. Magnets. You can't do much spying with a piece of metal. If the random testing they do on all components anyway passes, I don't see any reason to find this problematic. China already has a near monopoly on rare earth materials so it's not particularly surprising that this is happening.
The good thing to do would be to try to plan ahead and develop internal facilities so that eventually it's roughly breaking even to use US magnets instead. The danger isn't in the magnets but in the dependency on another country.
I don't know in what world you live in but most people agree that Civilization IV is the best Civ around, with some going as far as saying that V is even better with the expansions. Beloved game sequels fall into all sorts of categories, it's the fans which fall in a select few, one of which is the nostalgia-goggled fan who'll never ever accept that a sequel or reboot can actually be better than the original. The new XCOM is also a game that most people will say keeps the spirit of the original while managing to find its own style and doing so with excellent results.
The term ivory tower is used to talk of someone who is disconnected from the everyday world, who's engaged in over-specialized research; it has little to do with not seeing reality. This is exactly the situation a lot of academics find themselves in, but it's not necessarily something they desire. There is a huge disconnect between current top-tier research and basically everything else (even amongst academics of the same branch, your field of expertise is pretty much alien to everyone who isn't in it), but it's largely because of how insanely far we've come and how difficult what's left is to do. You need years of experience to begin grasping what's being researched at the top end. That causes a massive disconnect which is hard to bridge, but again not all scientists actually like this disconnect, they're just stuck with it.
So basically what you're saying is that we should put sharks with lasers into cars to reduce the number of transportation accidents? I know you never mentioned lasers, but I felt like I needed to correct you there.
There is nothing worse to most people than someone pointing out fallacies and logical errors as they crop up. It is entirely the correct thing to do, but it makes you look like a pompous arse who's only there to nitpick and not to address "the fundamental issues". It is sad that this is the case, but doing so would only detract from your original intent of swaying anyone at all.
I think the big thing here is that we don't need amazing scientists, we need amazing popular scientists. I don't particularly like the English term for this; a more appropriate term would be simplifiers or plain and simply teachers. We need people who can take complicated concepts, as seen by the common layperson, and explain them using simple words that everyone can get. Not only that, but those simple words must also form a cohesive, easily understandable whole. Even further, they must be interesting to listen to and provoke thought and discussion. These are all much more important for the current debates than a very focused degree in physics or biology.
In this sense, people like Bill Nye are exactly what we need. You don't need a very deep scientific education to understand the fundamentals of how evolution or astrophysics work. This is all we're ever broaching anyway: the fundamentals. The stuff you learn in your PHD are so far beyond most people's understanding that attempting to simplify them would be futile and would not bring anything worthwhile to the discussion. The vast majority of the debate is still centered on stuff that was determined a hundred years ago. When and if someone asks a question that is much more specific (usually in an attempt to catch you off-guard and to try to weasel in a contradiction of sorts), you can either dig by yourself through the numerous publicly available papers on the subject (which you can read and understand, with some appropriate attention to detail, even with a BSc level of education) or, in the case of someone like Nye, you can probably just ask someone a lot more knowledgeable to explain it to you and then work out a way of making it understandable for everyone else.
A lot of people criticize scientists for being stuck in ivory towers, looking down on the mere mortals below. The truth is that they don't particularly appreciate being in such a position, but modern science is just so damn complicated that most scientists are in fact unable to explain things to someone who doesn't have years of experience in that particular field under their belt. Even in the case of simpler concepts, they're just so used to their specific lexicon that they struggle to explain it in another way. It's similar (and I'm not trying to insult anyone here) to attempting to explain the computer to someone from the Medieval Age: not only does that person have no idea what the thing is, you're not even speaking the same language. This is what makes popular scientists so valuable, since they are able to bridge the scientific community with the population at large.
If the majority of people read their religious texts as metaphorical tales or fables (which is pretty much what they are), I think we'd have a lot fewer issues with religion overall. The problem is that so many people read them as actual facts and historical events.
Science is inherently about skepticism. Challenging one's views, improving upon them, outright invalidating them on occasion. If you're skeptical about science, you should be even more skeptical about religion, which is about none of those things.
So is Jesus, yet a ton of people treat his (second or third hand reported) words as universal truths. Your point?
Few people actually have the time or means to setup a dedicated computer as a router, so while yes, your comment is somewhat related, it is not particularly relevant to anyone who'd actually be in the market for a Netgear/Linksys router.
Sounds like he'd do a fine job as a Slashdot editor then.
Do they really have worse personal liberties than the US, though? If he came back, he'd be jailed, most likely without a fair trial, and maybe even "disappear" mysteriously, all because he told the truth. Calling him a criminal is like calling the Founding Fathers criminals because they rebelled against Great Britain.
Um, the vast majority of cloud backup services are versioned, which invalidates your entire point. As much as slashdotters love to bash on basically any tech that's appeared since 1997 (and even some well before that), there are some intelligent and competent people working on these new technologies and they have indeed thought about problems like those. I know, how bewildering!