... We keep bases all around the world, protecting everybody, so that they don't have to spend their own money on a military...
That's how you keep other people under without having to fire a shot... in the end --- it comes out to be a lot cheaper than shooting. It's not 1955 anymore!
I don't even know which hole this one crawled out from, but you are way delusional my friend.
1: it becomes out of date
-- Subjects that become out of date in a year are normally not taught in school or even in university, and certainly no textbooks are written for them. Math had been math for 100 years before and will remain that for 100 years later; Euler's formula is yet to become out of date, if you know what that is.
2: there is no discussion with other people
-- You haven't seen a good textbook, probably because your ass is glued to the sofa in front of a TV. Any good textbook has a discussion derived from experience with hundreds of people, and done directly with you --- match that with any youtube video.
3: there's no guarantee the book you want is there
-- Dow, did you fall from the moon or something? There is no guarantee for anything! but textbooks are all there in fact... find out where your local library is and go check it out (oh, sorry, I forgot you are busy playing console with your TV)
4: it's a hell of a lot harder to disseminate a physical book
5: the costs are substantially higher for production
-- well that's the one you are correct for a change
6: you can't take a book everywhere
-- I think I can hear/. laughing on this one, my friend, before there were Kindles people used to carry books on the subway. Book is as portable as it gets.
7: a book can eventually be lost forever - digital can be infinitely transferred and remixed
-- That's why google is digitizing books, check out google-books after you finish your computer game
8: you can share your improvements to a video a lot easier than you can share your improvements to a book with the world - that includes translations
-- Every book goes through careful writing, editing, and approval, and in case of textbook, also certification process insuring it meets certain standards. It is not uncommon for a textbook to go through several external reviewers and rounds of incorporating comments and improvements. Comparing a load of subquality videos to a good textbook does not even deserve commenting, and is just done by people who don't have any f#cking idea of what they are talking about. But I can forgive you since your worldview apparently grew out of watching youtube videos.
You don't need to continue -- put down your video console and get out into the Real World, you prick.
If you think it takes longer to prep a youtube video than writing a book, you might want to look at how Khan does his videos - they take maybe twice as long as the recording to prep, maximum. In addition to the purest of pure delusion of the fact that books takes months of not years to publish, let alone the same process to update them each year. Unless you wish to insult every writer that exists by telling them that writing is easy, to which I guarantee you authors would disagree. Way to shit on authors, though! At best I can compare the effort in a well though out social networking post with khan academy, because khan uses social networking.
I said books take a lot longer to prepare and write than videos. I personally know people who had been writing textbooks, and yes, it takes YEARS to do that, not an hour Mr. Khan spends per "video". People in universities take sabbaticals (if you know what that means) to write a textbook. Your comparing a load of crappy youtube videos with a good textbook is insult to every textbook writer and months and years of time they invested in trying to share hard learned knowledge and experience with knobs like yourself in real classroom.
I don't know what your bias is against Khan but it's clear and you're full of (sh)it.
No one has any bias against Khan, people have bias against VC-blown publicity trying to sell the people who can't think for themselves that they need to revolutionize on eating fast food until they get cholesterol problems and obesity... or
Finding solutions to problems almost never means solving fundamental problems from scratch, and rarely requires a deep understanding of the principles involved. Most of the time, it is a simple matter of taking a few known formulas, mashing them together and producing the result. Remember, the world only needs so many rocket scientists. The guy that designs the toilet on a 747 doesn't really need to know fluid dynamics, tensile material theory, or aerodynamics, just autocad.
I like the way you think -=Geoskd, keep designing toilets on 747 while we take over biotech and space ----your friends from China:)
If anything, Khan should be commended for apparently doing what some teachers have not - and for free, no less.
Teachers in fact had been doing this for ages - your local library has tons of books on every subject written by the Teachers. Book is superior to a youtube video in every way - it takes longer to prep and put some thought in, longer to write and figure how to explain, and slower to read and more time to understand. Tons of youtube videos in place of a normal book is like McDonalds in place of a normal restaurant (if you are a McDonalds kid no offense). And the fanfare is basically the same too btw...
You are missing the point: people are not decrying Khan Academy, they are decrying the fact that Khan himself brags about not been sufficient "pro" in the fields he is "teaching", and him skimming through the topics, spinning that like "who needs the details anyway duh:-D", figures. They are decrying the fact that after Mr. Khan fanfared as the world's teacher, the world will be filled with amateur-expert students who will not know how to derive the formula for the roots of a quadratic polynomial and who will think that *that's all right* because Mr. Khan said so in his youtube video.
As for the Khan Academy itself, video lecture is not different from a plain old book - some guy is dumping a ton of info on you without feedback or interactivity; really, the only difference is your being used to watching TV & movies instead of reading books. Any good textbook in fact is a way way better than these videos (if you are going to argue with that you probably had never read a really good textbook) -- you can skip forward and come back to places you didn't understand and read again...
Actually Higgs mechanism and particle only explains mass of the boson carriers of the electroweak force -- W+/- and Z bosons -- which otherwise would have to be massless just like photons. It doesn't explain the mass of electrons or quarks, inertial, gravitational, or rest.
It is interesting how misguided the general media are on this subject and how no one from the physics community is going on a "crusade" to "correct" this;)
Not to engage into a discussion, but to set things straight - communist states are a form of government - your link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state - communism, however, is formally an ideology - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism, ideology which is above all economical - from the named wikipedia article "Communism is a revolutionary socialist movement to create a classless, moneyless, and stateless social order structured upon common ownership of the means of production." So, in this sense, communism is in fact an economic system above all. The states that build upon it make a form of government referred to as communist state, but that's not what communism is. You are mixing up communist states and communism, which is a form of societal organization that is primarily economical, to be precise: defined by "common ownership of the means of production".
More properly, neither side "owes" anything to the other - it's an employment *contract* for a reason.
It's fine for both sides to try and get as much as they can. It's when they start whining that no-one will take the short end of the stick that there's a problem.
This is how things are done in modern western business administration, you should learn a little about Japanese companies. There is this thing called humanity, as in - we are all humans, and maybe I need to think about my employees not as just another pen on my desk
Communism is actually an economic system, totalitarianism is a form of government. And fascism is an ideology, what was described is called capitalism - an economic system. You got it all messed up my friend...
I'd advise....get a few years experience under your belt, grind out the W2 lifestyle, and when you have generated experience, you are good AND, you've attained some contacts.....incorporate yourself, and become a hired gun contractor.
That's where the big bucks can start coming in, and you can save a ton of your own money in tax write offs.
Why is it everybody seems to think that once you get "incorporated" you are starting to shovel in the green? Maybe because it is that "nowadays most of the entertainment-addled high-schoolers think they are going to become the next Bill Gates."
The truth of the matter is that being successful in business requires a completely different set of skills and abilities than being able to do a good job in pretty much anything (including IT), including actually being able to *sell* and the infamous "people skill": face it - best programmers are worst salespersons. And the second truth - most of the new businesses/individual hired gun contractors go bankrupt before even starting to bring in any money; so, if you want your savings to go down the drain - by all means do "incorporate" yourself.
And finally - big bucks start coming in not when you incorporate yourself, but when other people start working for you and you start pocketing the money they made. Read Carl Max's "The Capital".
What good did _thinking_ ever do:)
On the other note:
"SOS SOS !!!...
Hello, this is the German coast guard, what is your situation?...
We are sinking! SOS! Repeat! We are sinking!.........
What are you thinking about?..."
For Christs sake - parliament's job is to legislate, for that you need to have at least a general idea about the law and preferably also actually know current law (remind you "law" and "common sense" are not at all the same thing). Executive's branch job is to manage and organize, that's why ideally you should have professional "managers" and leaders for a President. Unfortunately our presidents typically come out of the parliament, which is why they are lawyers, but perhaps one lawyer in 500 can be a good manager and a good leader after all, I don't know. None of these guy's job is to "solve" any problems - solving problems is the job for engineers:).
I struggled to read through the paper (rather than the misleading nature blurb).
The authors consider that either (i) the quantum state, |+> or |->, is equivalent to the physical description of the object, or that (ii) there is some other description which produces the outcomes of the quantum calculations, as if it was |+> or |-> say, statistically. They conclude that in (i) experiments are possible where the quantum magnitudes cancel each other, so say outcome of a certain measurement for <Q|+-> system is zero, while if (ii) was true than such scenario is not possible. Their paper is, basically, reminiscent of saying that, if light diffracted on a hole was a "probability" wave rather than "quantum" wave, then there would be no negative interference fringes, because probabilities cannot cancel.
I am pretty sure this paper will go out to trash after the first round of reviews, if it ever gets there. In a way, they do try to restate the Bell's Theorem, and there are no references to the Bell's theorem AT ALL ! Then yes, the states are prepared independently in their example, but are measured together, so THERE IS *entanglement* in fact ! The writing is very poor - they don't say clearly what the quantum scenario predictions are, what the "statistical" scenario predictions are, neither they even define clearly what the "quantum" or "statistical" scenarios are - their definition of "seismic" theorem basically comes down to "If the coin is flipped only once, there is no way to determine by observing only the coin which method was used. The outcome heads is compatible with both. The statistical view says something similar about the quantum system after preparation." Not to mention, finally, that any self-respecting quantum theory student did a calculation of the sort (probabilistic picture + negative interference of quantum states) in their late university years.
I can only feel sorry for the researchers at the Imperial College of London who apparently had been away from the developments in physics for the past 50 years since Bell's inequalities had been formulated and "hidden variables" and locality debate raged on. I can only suggest them to visit wikipedia before going ahead with submitting this paper, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_theorem. Also it is very frustrating that nature would publish a blurb like that, after the series of scandals regarding pubs in nature, such as about quite recent stem cell research "discoveries" in Korea, it really makes you think twice about what the hell their editors are thinking.
OK, so he is saying with so much energy produced in the future the dumped heat will overheat the planet. Well that's easy - just build the Planet Cooler (sim-earth anyone?). But seriously, there is a number of solutions - eg dump heat to the space. This kinda debases his theory, not to say that it was not Dead On Arrival, eg, because we'll have lots of other issue before we can even get where he wants this to be.
It is interesting how history never teaches people. I am sure some while ago they were saying that population growth won't sustain itself because there won't be any more rock to carve caves into...
On the more serious point, as a physicist, I am much dismayed to see such a post. I don't really understand why many of my colleagues like to throw in a bunch of arbitrary numbers, make a bunch of arbitrary assumptions, back it up with some realistically looking "fundamental" arguments, and put this on display as something. Take Drake equation for example - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#The_equation - an equation someone sometime wrote to argue that there got to be other extraterrestrial civilizations out there. The argument basically goes as - assume fraction of start systems with planets is 0.1, assume fraction of liveable planets is 0.1, assume probability of life is 0.1,..., finally there is whole lot of starts in the Galaxy! so if we multiply all of that, we still get something that's bigger than 1 !!!:) well, this might look sensible on the surface, but where all these numbers came from? why is it that the probability of life appearance is say 0.1, not 0.00000000001? A set of arbitrary numbers plugged into even a meaningful formula still produces an arbitrary number. Unfortunately, this article is just another example of this misapprehension.
The exponential growth is nonsense, that much is clear to everyone, but that is not the point at all... The example with the bounding surface of human bodies expanding at the speed of light, someone made here, is an excellent one to highlight the absurdity of this whole issue...
This is ridiculous - clouds are private for-profit run companies. To ask "what's needed for freedom in the cloud" is almost the same as to ask "why can't I set up my tent in a mall". The short answer - don't use the cloud - that just about summarizes it all. Someone set up the cloud for you, you want to play in it, so you WILL abide by THEIR rules. What freedom???
It is interesting to note that, as with most online comment threads, the conversation here *barely* touches the author's original question, instead people posted 500 messages about trolls and moderation:(...
I think notion that people don't use math in their lives is very much misguided. Example of compound interest in another post above was an excellent point. We think we don't need and don't use math, but that's only until we go to a bank for a loan, try to check our bill from a vendor, endeavor on a nontrivial household construction project requiring some geometry, or try to understand something about politics and economics around us. Then we remember and apply our math skills, but somehow this doesn't factor in the argument about "uselessness" of math education.
Slashdot Mirror
... a nice synchronous kick in the but by 8 referees would be THE optimal solution ... why no one thought about that before?
... We keep bases all around the world, protecting everybody, so that they don't have to spend their own money on a military ...
That's how you keep other people under without having to fire a shot... in the end --- it comes out to be a lot cheaper than shooting. It's not 1955 anymore!
I don't even know which hole this one crawled out from, but you are way delusional my friend.
1: it becomes out of date
-- Subjects that become out of date in a year are normally not taught in school or even in university, and certainly no textbooks are written for them. Math had been math for 100 years before and will remain that for 100 years later; Euler's formula is yet to become out of date, if you know what that is.
2: there is no discussion with other people
-- You haven't seen a good textbook, probably because your ass is glued to the sofa in front of a TV. Any good textbook has a discussion derived from experience with hundreds of people, and done directly with you --- match that with any youtube video.
3: there's no guarantee the book you want is there
-- Dow, did you fall from the moon or something? There is no guarantee for anything! but textbooks are all there in fact... find out where your local library is and go check it out (oh, sorry, I forgot you are busy playing console with your TV)
4: it's a hell of a lot harder to disseminate a physical book
5: the costs are substantially higher for production
-- well that's the one you are correct for a change
6: you can't take a book everywhere
-- I think I can hear /. laughing on this one, my friend, before there were Kindles people used to carry books on the subway. Book is as portable as it gets.
7: a book can eventually be lost forever - digital can be infinitely transferred and remixed
-- That's why google is digitizing books, check out google-books after you finish your computer game
8: you can share your improvements to a video a lot easier than you can share your improvements to a book with the world - that includes translations
-- Every book goes through careful writing, editing, and approval, and in case of textbook, also certification process insuring it meets certain standards. It is not uncommon for a textbook to go through several external reviewers and rounds of incorporating comments and improvements. Comparing a load of subquality videos to a good textbook does not even deserve commenting, and is just done by people who don't have any f#cking idea of what they are talking about. But I can forgive you since your worldview apparently grew out of watching youtube videos.
You don't need to continue -- put down your video console and get out into the Real World, you prick.
If you think it takes longer to prep a youtube video than writing a book, you might want to look at how Khan does his videos - they take maybe twice as long as the recording to prep, maximum. In addition to the purest of pure delusion of the fact that books takes months of not years to publish, let alone the same process to update them each year. Unless you wish to insult every writer that exists by telling them that writing is easy, to which I guarantee you authors would disagree. Way to shit on authors, though! At best I can compare the effort in a well though out social networking post with khan academy, because khan uses social networking.
I said books take a lot longer to prepare and write than videos. I personally know people who had been writing textbooks, and yes, it takes YEARS to do that, not an hour Mr. Khan spends per "video". People in universities take sabbaticals (if you know what that means) to write a textbook. Your comparing a load of crappy youtube videos with a good textbook is insult to every textbook writer and months and years of time they invested in trying to share hard learned knowledge and experience with knobs like yourself in real classroom.
I don't know what your bias is against Khan but it's clear and you're full of (sh)it.
No one has any bias against Khan, people have bias against VC-blown publicity trying to sell the people who can't think for themselves that they need to revolutionize on eating fast food until they get cholesterol problems and obesity... or
Finding solutions to problems almost never means solving fundamental problems from scratch, and rarely requires a deep understanding of the principles involved. Most of the time, it is a simple matter of taking a few known formulas, mashing them together and producing the result. Remember, the world only needs so many rocket scientists. The guy that designs the toilet on a 747 doesn't really need to know fluid dynamics, tensile material theory, or aerodynamics, just autocad.
I like the way you think -=Geoskd, keep designing toilets on 747 while we take over biotech and space ----your friends from China :)
If anything, Khan should be commended for apparently doing what some teachers have not - and for free, no less.
Teachers in fact had been doing this for ages - your local library has tons of books on every subject written by the Teachers. Book is superior to a youtube video in every way - it takes longer to prep and put some thought in, longer to write and figure how to explain, and slower to read and more time to understand. Tons of youtube videos in place of a normal book is like McDonalds in place of a normal restaurant (if you are a McDonalds kid no offense). And the fanfare is basically the same too btw...
You are missing the point: people are not decrying Khan Academy, they are decrying the fact that Khan himself brags about not been sufficient "pro" in the fields he is "teaching", and him skimming through the topics, spinning that like "who needs the details anyway duh :-D", figures. They are decrying the fact that after Mr. Khan fanfared as the world's teacher, the world will be filled with amateur-expert students who will not know how to derive the formula for the roots of a quadratic polynomial and who will think that *that's all right* because Mr. Khan said so in his youtube video.
As for the Khan Academy itself, video lecture is not different from a plain old book - some guy is dumping a ton of info on you without feedback or interactivity; really, the only difference is your being used to watching TV & movies instead of reading books. Any good textbook in fact is a way way better than these videos (if you are going to argue with that you probably had never read a really good textbook) -- you can skip forward and come back to places you didn't understand and read again...
Actually Higgs mechanism and particle only explains mass of the boson carriers of the electroweak force -- W+/- and Z bosons -- which otherwise would have to be massless just like photons. It doesn't explain the mass of electrons or quarks, inertial, gravitational, or rest.
;)
It is interesting how misguided the general media are on this subject and how no one from the physics community is going on a "crusade" to "correct" this
The hype around discovery of new particles is proportional to the amount of money spent on the discovery
I think you are missing the poster's point - that was not about the issue but the attitude
join diaspora* (http://diasporaproject.org/) ... at least until it becomes second F
Not to engage into a discussion, but to set things straight - communist states are a form of government - your link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state - communism, however, is formally an ideology - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism, ideology which is above all economical - from the named wikipedia article "Communism is a revolutionary socialist movement to create a classless, moneyless, and stateless social order structured upon common ownership of the means of production." So, in this sense, communism is in fact an economic system above all. The states that build upon it make a form of government referred to as communist state, but that's not what communism is. You are mixing up communist states and communism, which is a form of societal organization that is primarily economical, to be precise: defined by "common ownership of the means of production".
Human Assets ... woooowwww...
More properly, neither side "owes" anything to the other - it's an employment *contract* for a reason.
It's fine for both sides to try and get as much as they can. It's when they start whining that no-one will take the short end of the stick that there's a problem.
This is how things are done in modern western business administration, you should learn a little about Japanese companies. There is this thing called humanity, as in - we are all humans, and maybe I need to think about my employees not as just another pen on my desk
Communism is actually an economic system, totalitarianism is a form of government. And fascism is an ideology, what was described is called capitalism - an economic system. You got it all messed up my friend...
There goes the point about the loyalty - screw and crap on your neighbors just to make a buck - welcome to modern America
I'd advise....get a few years experience under your belt, grind out the W2 lifestyle, and when you have generated experience, you are good AND, you've attained some contacts.....incorporate yourself, and become a hired gun contractor.
That's where the big bucks can start coming in, and you can save a ton of your own money in tax write offs.
Why is it everybody seems to think that once you get "incorporated" you are starting to shovel in the green? Maybe because it is that "nowadays most of the entertainment-addled high-schoolers think they are going to become the next Bill Gates."
The truth of the matter is that being successful in business requires a completely different set of skills and abilities than being able to do a good job in pretty much anything (including IT), including actually being able to *sell* and the infamous "people skill": face it - best programmers are worst salespersons. And the second truth - most of the new businesses/individual hired gun contractors go bankrupt before even starting to bring in any money; so, if you want your savings to go down the drain - by all means do "incorporate" yourself.
And finally - big bucks start coming in not when you incorporate yourself, but when other people start working for you and you start pocketing the money they made. Read Carl Max's "The Capital".
What good did _thinking_ ever do :)
On the other note:
"SOS SOS !!! ...
Hello, this is the German coast guard, what is your situation? ...
We are sinking! SOS! Repeat! We are sinking! ... ... ...
What are you thinking about?..."
Yes, if you just teach students the steps to reason about how to reason, that will fix everything
For Christs sake - parliament's job is to legislate, for that you need to have at least a general idea about the law and preferably also actually know current law (remind you "law" and "common sense" are not at all the same thing). Executive's branch job is to manage and organize, that's why ideally you should have professional "managers" and leaders for a President. Unfortunately our presidents typically come out of the parliament, which is why they are lawyers, but perhaps one lawyer in 500 can be a good manager and a good leader after all, I don't know. None of these guy's job is to "solve" any problems - solving problems is the job for engineers :).
I struggled to read through the paper (rather than the misleading nature blurb).
The authors consider that either (i) the quantum state, |+> or |->, is equivalent to the physical description of the object, or that (ii) there is some other description which produces the outcomes of the quantum calculations, as if it was |+> or |-> say, statistically. They conclude that in (i) experiments are possible where the quantum magnitudes cancel each other, so say outcome of a certain measurement for <Q|+-> system is zero, while if (ii) was true than such scenario is not possible. Their paper is, basically, reminiscent of saying that, if light diffracted on a hole was a "probability" wave rather than "quantum" wave, then there would be no negative interference fringes, because probabilities cannot cancel.
I am pretty sure this paper will go out to trash after the first round of reviews, if it ever gets there. In a way, they do try to restate the Bell's Theorem, and there are no references to the Bell's theorem AT ALL ! Then yes, the states are prepared independently in their example, but are measured together, so THERE IS *entanglement* in fact ! The writing is very poor - they don't say clearly what the quantum scenario predictions are, what the "statistical" scenario predictions are, neither they even define clearly what the "quantum" or "statistical" scenarios are - their definition of "seismic" theorem basically comes down to "If the coin is flipped only once, there is no way to determine by observing only the coin which method was used. The outcome heads is compatible with both. The statistical view says something similar about the quantum system after preparation." Not to mention, finally, that any self-respecting quantum theory student did a calculation of the sort (probabilistic picture + negative interference of quantum states) in their late university years.
I can only feel sorry for the researchers at the Imperial College of London who apparently had been away from the developments in physics for the past 50 years since Bell's inequalities had been formulated and "hidden variables" and locality debate raged on. I can only suggest them to visit wikipedia before going ahead with submitting this paper, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_theorem. Also it is very frustrating that nature would publish a blurb like that, after the series of scandals regarding pubs in nature, such as about quite recent stem cell research "discoveries" in Korea, it really makes you think twice about what the hell their editors are thinking.
OK, so he is saying with so much energy produced in the future the dumped heat will overheat the planet. Well that's easy - just build the Planet Cooler (sim-earth anyone?). But seriously, there is a number of solutions - eg dump heat to the space. This kinda debases his theory, not to say that it was not Dead On Arrival, eg, because we'll have lots of other issue before we can even get where he wants this to be.
It is interesting how history never teaches people. I am sure some while ago they were saying that population growth won't sustain itself because there won't be any more rock to carve caves into... On the more serious point, as a physicist, I am much dismayed to see such a post. I don't really understand why many of my colleagues like to throw in a bunch of arbitrary numbers, make a bunch of arbitrary assumptions, back it up with some realistically looking "fundamental" arguments, and put this on display as something. Take Drake equation for example - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#The_equation - an equation someone sometime wrote to argue that there got to be other extraterrestrial civilizations out there. The argument basically goes as - assume fraction of start systems with planets is 0.1, assume fraction of liveable planets is 0.1, assume probability of life is 0.1, ..., finally there is whole lot of starts in the Galaxy! so if we multiply all of that, we still get something that's bigger than 1 !!! :) well, this might look sensible on the surface, but where all these numbers came from? why is it that the probability of life appearance is say 0.1, not 0.00000000001? A set of arbitrary numbers plugged into even a meaningful formula still produces an arbitrary number. Unfortunately, this article is just another example of this misapprehension.
The exponential growth is nonsense, that much is clear to everyone, but that is not the point at all... The example with the bounding surface of human bodies expanding at the speed of light, someone made here, is an excellent one to highlight the absurdity of this whole issue...
This is ridiculous - clouds are private for-profit run companies. To ask "what's needed for freedom in the cloud" is almost the same as to ask "why can't I set up my tent in a mall". The short answer - don't use the cloud - that just about summarizes it all. Someone set up the cloud for you, you want to play in it, so you WILL abide by THEIR rules. What freedom???
It is interesting to note that, as with most online comment threads, the conversation here *barely* touches the author's original question, instead people posted 500 messages about trolls and moderation :( ...
I think notion that people don't use math in their lives is very much misguided. Example of compound interest in another post above was an excellent point. We think we don't need and don't use math, but that's only until we go to a bank for a loan, try to check our bill from a vendor, endeavor on a nontrivial household construction project requiring some geometry, or try to understand something about politics and economics around us. Then we remember and apply our math skills, but somehow this doesn't factor in the argument about "uselessness" of math education.