You know, the word 'religionist' isn't useful or descriptive at all. Plenty of 'religions' believe masturbation, pre-marital sex, and even rape are totally ok, so don't get all religions mixed up in the same bag and don't use the term 'religionist' as an ad hominem for 'backwater idiot' because plenty of religious people- Christian, conservative, Buddhist, and otherwise- are quite rational and pleasant.
I think you lack a bit of imagination...it presumes a serious breakthrough in energy production to say we'll manufacture this stuff on a large scale, but we *are* pursuing serious breakthroughs in energy production. If we ever get both cold fusion and cool new elements, we'll be able to make cool new elements in surplus. Going for broke is kinda the basis of futurism and the long term goal of careful, incremental science.
Speaking of periodic trends, I bet some of you are wondering just why we care about ultra heavy elements that last for roughly.0000000000002 seconds before falling apart.
The deal is, there's a rough property of periodic trends and neutron/proton ratios in which certain ratios stick together well, and one of the hopes is that once we're synthesizing some really, really heavy stuff the ratios will be such that it all sticks together again, and we will have stable, completely synthetic, super-heavy elements with cool properties.
Well, I suppose it's nice that someone finally ruled you can't patent the genetic code itself, but the net change will be practically nothing.
If they can still patent every single technique and tool involved in examining, testing, or isolating the gene then who gives a crap if they pretend they own the code? We'll still end up reinventing the wheel every time we'd like to look at any known gene; either that or we'll pay thousands of dollars in patent fees per procedure. I suppose it's nice that some district court judge finally made the biggest No Flipping Duh ruling of the genetic age, but I think it changes very little in practical terms.
Similarly, there are segments of the deaf population who do not feel that being deaf is a flaw that needs fixing. If you ask "wouldn't you like to be able to hear stuff?" many will respond negatively, possibly suggesting that the better fix would be to alter other people's prejudices.
Yeah, but liking who they are and standing up to supposed prejudice isn't entirely why they do it: part of it is simple pride, fear, and solidarity with their group. I had a speaker in some civics class point out once that sometimes homeless people will feel as if they've sold out and abandoned their community when they get a job and a solid residence; sometimes they'll even return to the street out of loneliness and guilt. I have a damn hard time imagining someone remaining homeless just to stick it to prejudice against the homeless, and there's clearly no moral confusion about fixing homelessness, but it's analogous to deaf persons who chose to stay deaf. Sometimes deaf people refuse implants for fear of losing what makes them special, sometimes they're afraid of selling out or losing friends, and it's almost never exclusively about sticking it to prejudice or thinking you're completely perfect as you already exist.
Yeah...that's something I never understand about people who figure gay isn't a choice. I have no clue either way, but homosexuality seems sort of anti-Darwinian. If you're genetically programmed for entirely non-procreative sex then you're programmed for eliminating your own genes, which is by any interpretation of evolutionary science a little fucked up. If we go beyond the most typical mating systems in humans like marriage and such then I suppose surrogacy or some such can provide a way of procreating, but even then it doesn't seem to fit evolutionary anthropology very well: how do you, as a gay man, come to be if homosexuals must pass their genes through a social mechanism that doesn't exist until you were already gay and needed it to exist?
Anyway, it all sort of confuses me. I don't know if I'm a tad homophobic, but I think they're pretty valid scientific questions.
You know, I feel your pain, but sometimes the trade-off might be quite worth it. I never had formal grammar until my junior year, yet my writing has few noticeable grammatical errors and my style/fluidity usually far exceeds that of others my age; this while I still can't figure out a basic sentence by the actual rules of grammar. I've sort of wondering whether burying kids in grammar from 5th grade through 9th deadens them to interesting syntax and truly fluid ways of writing. After all, tons of extremely famous authors specifically and consistently break certain grammatical rules to wonderful effect.
I know someone whose child needs to get book from home during school because the teaching is so slow, boring and dumbed down that there's no point to listening when she grasped everything in the first five minutes.
For once, think of the bright children!
If we don't force kids through things for which they aren't ready, the bright kids - like your friend's child - will stop suffering the endless days of boredom as other kids struggle pointlessly with it. Doing something like this counts as thinking of all children if it works. Get the bright kids some additional tutors, better classes, or some genuinely interesting side projects, don't simply insist that making the regular classroom any less rigorous, even temporarily, will punish the bright kids. Such insistence is exactly why we're here, failing, which is TFA's entire point: there's a hell of a lot more to improving childhood education, including the education of child geniuses, than simply doing more work at a higher level earlier.
Good for Peter Gray, daring to hypothesize the possibility of better results through some mechanism other than simply shoving more work down their throats at a young age.
I could be wrong, but I thought sound waves moving through air carried a surprisingly small amount of energy. When it comes with tangible vibrations, waves so strong they pulsed through the ground and other solids to reach you, the net effect might create significant amounts of energy, but just loud noises probably wouldn't give you much in the energy department, especially at 18% yield.
We should probably wait until Obama's first four years are over.
I'm always amused when people say something like this...you all remember we're not actually required to elect presidents for two terms, right? I think relatively few people of either party believe he's doing well enough, so far, to deserve a second term in any case.
people will skate on luck and denial and write off the risk against the guaranteed cost of preventative measures.
I'm pretty sure TFA's entire point is that sometimes the guaranteed cost of preventative measures does exceed the statistical risk times the economic risk of actual damage. Skating by on luck totally works if luck, even including the cost of failures at or somewhat above statistical norms, costs less over the long run than the preventative measure.
I actually have a car analogy here: I don't insure my vehicle for theft or comprehensive damage, because it would cost $400 a year with a $500 deductible on a vehicle only worth $2000. I'm refusing the preventative measure, but only because the likely cost of relying on the preventative measure far exceeds the cost of just buying another car, provided my car gets stolen or totaled less than every two years.
Information security, like insurance, becomes a transaction on many levels, and many products or preventions in both arenas aren't really worth the cost.
Um...compared to the stuff you're talking about a 200 lb human, even one carrying an M4 and covered in full body kevlar, is a downright bargain in the weight department. Armor, machine guns, imaging, and remote controls? How little do you think that stuff weighs?
...I don't see why patients should not be able to voluntarily accept this or other untested treatments provided that a full disclaimer is made.
Because even with full disclaimers which absolve the patient, doctor, or insurance companies of various liabilities, it's still everyone's problem if the tests go horribly wrong. We're not actually going to ban them from insurance coverage or Medicare payments for side-effects of the experiments based on those waivers; even if they signed a document to accept the risk it would be disheartening, distasteful, and somewhat inhumane allowing them to suffer untreated for decades, or die in agony, should the treatment end horrifically.
Seriously, didn't anyone in the entire state of Texas watch the Fox Network between 1992 and 2001? Don't they realize people think DNA databasing represents a a conspiracy at work, or at best a gross invasion of privacy?
Benign or not, such actions require some notice and some collaboration. I'm sure many, many parents would gladly help the program if were they asked openly and satisfied of the limitations on using their child's sample.
I love the hypocrisy of Slashdot. "Conform to our non-conformist believes or DIE!!!"
If you think this is bad read the liquid hate that spews out in every topic even vaguely related to biology, evolution, Texas, etc. Every time I point out that the anti-creationist, anti-Republican slashdotters are just judgmental pricks bashing on other judgmental pricks I get the sort of responses which include "creationism gets mocked because creationism is ridiculous" and "well at least I don't believe a magical sky wizard created it all" and the like.
It's amazing how accepting and tolerant liberals (and Christians, I freely admit) can be until it's time to accept or tolerate someone who disagrees with them in the slightest.
Years later, when a publisher was trying to persuade him to make a longer Foundation work
This notion set off a massive warning bell in my head. Nothing could be worse than something once finished which gets re-written into something 8 times longer, or something written specifically for length in the first place. Exhibit one: Moby Dick. Exhibit two: much of Charles Dickens. If this is true you've probably convinced me to never read Foundation, or at least to track down the original short stories rather than trudge through a novelization of a short yet clearly complete, cerebral, and influential story.
Yeah, I over-emphasized a bit with the phrase "hard-core, tinker-happy nerds" but I still think the underlying point stands. You and your friends are probably underwhelmed because iPad isn't such a great product, but my point is that the IdeaPad is way beyond what anyone should have hoped for from Apple.
Um...I guess so...I don't think the parent was insulting "religionists" per say, unless they're offended by the word fanatic. And most of the "religionists" we're talking about here would probably be *happy* with the title Fanatic.
People keep talking as if Apple really missed the boat with iPad, but the truth is they only missed the boat for hard-core, tinker-happy nerds...and they've made a very specific point of missing that boat for at least the last decade. They're marketing to fanboys who want it to be trendy and 'just work', not to nerds.
So it's nice that this might be what you hoped for from the iPad. But why did you hope iPad would be what you wanted in the first place?
Alright, so Texas currently dominates the textbook market in two ways:
1. They're a really big market
2. They have clear guidelines which make them easy to market to (market being a verb now) and thus books get written for Texas which many other states ultimately buy.
So stop bashing religion, Texas, etc. and find another textbook-writing standard behind which your state can rally. Get involved and badger your own school board or state standards boards to buy something better, while providing them a specific "something better" to look at. As usual Slashdotters are just using the idiocy of a couple dozen Texan fundamentalists to mock religion as a whole rather than addressing specific problems with reasonable solutions.
I think I blame schools giving grades for effort. It reinforces the idea that putting in a lot of effort is laudable, even if you don't achieve anything.
Well, I think putting in a lot of effort is laudable. People almost never achieve anything new or impressive without " a lot of effort", not even geniuses. The point in giving hard-working idiots bad grades is to teach them that effort does not equal competence and prevent them from blocking competent people from good opportunities, not to convince them that effort doesn't matter compared with results.
You want people who suck at something but work hard to go try a subject in which their hard work will achieve results, not convince them that only results matter.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, the word 'religionist' isn't useful or descriptive at all. Plenty of 'religions' believe masturbation, pre-marital sex, and even rape are totally ok, so don't get all religions mixed up in the same bag and don't use the term 'religionist' as an ad hominem for 'backwater idiot' because plenty of religious people- Christian, conservative, Buddhist, and otherwise- are quite rational and pleasant.
I think you lack a bit of imagination...it presumes a serious breakthrough in energy production to say we'll manufacture this stuff on a large scale, but we *are* pursuing serious breakthroughs in energy production. If we ever get both cold fusion and cool new elements, we'll be able to make cool new elements in surplus. Going for broke is kinda the basis of futurism and the long term goal of careful, incremental science.
Speaking of periodic trends, I bet some of you are wondering just why we care about ultra heavy elements that last for roughly .0000000000002 seconds before falling apart.
The deal is, there's a rough property of periodic trends and neutron/proton ratios in which certain ratios stick together well, and one of the hopes is that once we're synthesizing some really, really heavy stuff the ratios will be such that it all sticks together again, and we will have stable, completely synthetic, super-heavy elements with cool properties.
Well, I suppose it's nice that someone finally ruled you can't patent the genetic code itself, but the net change will be practically nothing.
If they can still patent every single technique and tool involved in examining, testing, or isolating the gene then who gives a crap if they pretend they own the code? We'll still end up reinventing the wheel every time we'd like to look at any known gene; either that or we'll pay thousands of dollars in patent fees per procedure. I suppose it's nice that some district court judge finally made the biggest No Flipping Duh ruling of the genetic age, but I think it changes very little in practical terms.
Huh...slavery versus advances in medical science and you manage to imply it's a toss-up. For the love of god someone mod this a troll.
Similarly, there are segments of the deaf population who do not feel that being deaf is a flaw that needs fixing. If you ask "wouldn't you like to be able to hear stuff?" many will respond negatively, possibly suggesting that the better fix would be to alter other people's prejudices.
Yeah, but liking who they are and standing up to supposed prejudice isn't entirely why they do it: part of it is simple pride, fear, and solidarity with their group. I had a speaker in some civics class point out once that sometimes homeless people will feel as if they've sold out and abandoned their community when they get a job and a solid residence; sometimes they'll even return to the street out of loneliness and guilt. I have a damn hard time imagining someone remaining homeless just to stick it to prejudice against the homeless, and there's clearly no moral confusion about fixing homelessness, but it's analogous to deaf persons who chose to stay deaf. Sometimes deaf people refuse implants for fear of losing what makes them special, sometimes they're afraid of selling out or losing friends, and it's almost never exclusively about sticking it to prejudice or thinking you're completely perfect as you already exist.
Yeah...that's something I never understand about people who figure gay isn't a choice. I have no clue either way, but homosexuality seems sort of anti-Darwinian. If you're genetically programmed for entirely non-procreative sex then you're programmed for eliminating your own genes, which is by any interpretation of evolutionary science a little fucked up. If we go beyond the most typical mating systems in humans like marriage and such then I suppose surrogacy or some such can provide a way of procreating, but even then it doesn't seem to fit evolutionary anthropology very well: how do you, as a gay man, come to be if homosexuals must pass their genes through a social mechanism that doesn't exist until you were already gay and needed it to exist?
Anyway, it all sort of confuses me. I don't know if I'm a tad homophobic, but I think they're pretty valid scientific questions.
You know, I feel your pain, but sometimes the trade-off might be quite worth it. I never had formal grammar until my junior year, yet my writing has few noticeable grammatical errors and my style/fluidity usually far exceeds that of others my age; this while I still can't figure out a basic sentence by the actual rules of grammar. I've sort of wondering whether burying kids in grammar from 5th grade through 9th deadens them to interesting syntax and truly fluid ways of writing. After all, tons of extremely famous authors specifically and consistently break certain grammatical rules to wonderful effect.
I know someone whose child needs to get book from home during school because the teaching is so slow, boring and dumbed down that there's no point to listening when she grasped everything in the first five minutes.
For once, think of the bright children!
If we don't force kids through things for which they aren't ready, the bright kids - like your friend's child - will stop suffering the endless days of boredom as other kids struggle pointlessly with it. Doing something like this counts as thinking of all children if it works. Get the bright kids some additional tutors, better classes, or some genuinely interesting side projects, don't simply insist that making the regular classroom any less rigorous, even temporarily, will punish the bright kids. Such insistence is exactly why we're here, failing, which is TFA's entire point: there's a hell of a lot more to improving childhood education, including the education of child geniuses, than simply doing more work at a higher level earlier.
Good for Peter Gray, daring to hypothesize the possibility of better results through some mechanism other than simply shoving more work down their throats at a young age.
I could be wrong, but I thought sound waves moving through air carried a surprisingly small amount of energy. When it comes with tangible vibrations, waves so strong they pulsed through the ground and other solids to reach you, the net effect might create significant amounts of energy, but just loud noises probably wouldn't give you much in the energy department, especially at 18% yield.
We should probably wait until Obama's first four years are over.
I'm always amused when people say something like this...you all remember we're not actually required to elect presidents for two terms, right? I think relatively few people of either party believe he's doing well enough, so far, to deserve a second term in any case.
people will skate on luck and denial and write off the risk against the guaranteed cost of preventative measures.
I'm pretty sure TFA's entire point is that sometimes the guaranteed cost of preventative measures does exceed the statistical risk times the economic risk of actual damage. Skating by on luck totally works if luck, even including the cost of failures at or somewhat above statistical norms, costs less over the long run than the preventative measure.
I actually have a car analogy here: I don't insure my vehicle for theft or comprehensive damage, because it would cost $400 a year with a $500 deductible on a vehicle only worth $2000. I'm refusing the preventative measure, but only because the likely cost of relying on the preventative measure far exceeds the cost of just buying another car, provided my car gets stolen or totaled less than every two years.
Information security, like insurance, becomes a transaction on many levels, and many products or preventions in both arenas aren't really worth the cost.
Um...compared to the stuff you're talking about a 200 lb human, even one carrying an M4 and covered in full body kevlar, is a downright bargain in the weight department. Armor, machine guns, imaging, and remote controls? How little do you think that stuff weighs?
...I don't see why patients should not be able to voluntarily accept this or other untested treatments provided that a full disclaimer is made.
Because even with full disclaimers which absolve the patient, doctor, or insurance companies of various liabilities, it's still everyone's problem if the tests go horribly wrong. We're not actually going to ban them from insurance coverage or Medicare payments for side-effects of the experiments based on those waivers; even if they signed a document to accept the risk it would be disheartening, distasteful, and somewhat inhumane allowing them to suffer untreated for decades, or die in agony, should the treatment end horrifically.
Seriously, didn't anyone in the entire state of Texas watch the Fox Network between 1992 and 2001? Don't they realize people think DNA databasing represents a a conspiracy at work, or at best a gross invasion of privacy?
Benign or not, such actions require some notice and some collaboration. I'm sure many, many parents would gladly help the program if were they asked openly and satisfied of the limitations on using their child's sample.
Yeah...most of the time water doesn't have much conductivity, really, but the chloride ions in a hot tub would screw you pretty fast.
Skin flakes, hairs, dust, gunk....almost none of the compounds in these are polar enough to conduct well.
I love the hypocrisy of Slashdot. "Conform to our non-conformist believes or DIE!!!"
If you think this is bad read the liquid hate that spews out in every topic even vaguely related to biology, evolution, Texas, etc. Every time I point out that the anti-creationist, anti-Republican slashdotters are just judgmental pricks bashing on other judgmental pricks I get the sort of responses which include "creationism gets mocked because creationism is ridiculous" and "well at least I don't believe a magical sky wizard created it all" and the like.
It's amazing how accepting and tolerant liberals (and Christians, I freely admit) can be until it's time to accept or tolerate someone who disagrees with them in the slightest.
Years later, when a publisher was trying to persuade him to make a longer Foundation work
This notion set off a massive warning bell in my head. Nothing could be worse than something once finished which gets re-written into something 8 times longer, or something written specifically for length in the first place. Exhibit one: Moby Dick. Exhibit two: much of Charles Dickens. If this is true you've probably convinced me to never read Foundation, or at least to track down the original short stories rather than trudge through a novelization of a short yet clearly complete, cerebral, and influential story.
Yeah, I over-emphasized a bit with the phrase "hard-core, tinker-happy nerds" but I still think the underlying point stands. You and your friends are probably underwhelmed because iPad isn't such a great product, but my point is that the IdeaPad is way beyond what anyone should have hoped for from Apple.
Um...I guess so...I don't think the parent was insulting "religionists" per say, unless they're offended by the word fanatic. And most of the "religionists" we're talking about here would probably be *happy* with the title Fanatic.
What We Wanted the IPad To Be
People keep talking as if Apple really missed the boat with iPad, but the truth is they only missed the boat for hard-core, tinker-happy nerds...and they've made a very specific point of missing that boat for at least the last decade. They're marketing to fanboys who want it to be trendy and 'just work', not to nerds.
So it's nice that this might be what you hoped for from the iPad. But why did you hope iPad would be what you wanted in the first place?
Alright, so Texas currently dominates the textbook market in two ways:
1. They're a really big market
2. They have clear guidelines which make them easy to market to (market being a verb now) and thus books get written for Texas which many other states ultimately buy.
So stop bashing religion, Texas, etc. and find another textbook-writing standard behind which your state can rally. Get involved and badger your own school board or state standards boards to buy something better, while providing them a specific "something better" to look at. As usual Slashdotters are just using the idiocy of a couple dozen Texan fundamentalists to mock religion as a whole rather than addressing specific problems with reasonable solutions.
Quit bitching and do something!
Just why is the parent flamebaiting?
I think I blame schools giving grades for effort. It reinforces the idea that putting in a lot of effort is laudable, even if you don't achieve anything.
Well, I think putting in a lot of effort is laudable. People almost never achieve anything new or impressive without " a lot of effort", not even geniuses. The point in giving hard-working idiots bad grades is to teach them that effort does not equal competence and prevent them from blocking competent people from good opportunities, not to convince them that effort doesn't matter compared with results.
You want people who suck at something but work hard to go try a subject in which their hard work will achieve results, not convince them that only results matter.