But normal people won't read the writings. It doesn't matter how precisely it is written if most people would have to look up every fifth word. That may be precise, but it is not efficient.
Hmmm, but they do seem to be doing a good job against the RIAA:) . At least in part, it was worth it. And perhaps the ones that Obama poached had good reasons for wanting to leave anyway.
I don't trust that they are telling me which ones are paid advertisements and which ones are normal search results. I never click the paid ads at the top of the list on Google, because I don't actually trust any ad on the internet (we all know how easy it is to buy an ad for nefarious purposes -- it's harder to get that kind of link-love and then turn bad). So Bing doesn't tell me the cut-off line between {ad, potentially worrying, not what the crowd chose} and {chosen by link love, only as dangerous as average -- maybe a little less}.
The little previews are kind of cute, and a reasonably neat idea. I like that they don't go for the mini-page-rendering, because those (a) are too heavy and (b) don't actually tell you anything.
I was once trying to learn C++. I had Eclipse laying around on my computer, so I figured I would download the convenient C++ plugin, and learn in Eclipse. A few days later, I determined that Eclipse was absolutely not fit for C++ development. This is because I eventually figured out that Eclipse was playing a dirty trick on me. I expect that no matter which IDE you use, you have a reasonable expectation that every last print statement that was fired off before a seg-fault will arrive at the console, so you can debug by seeing where the program halted. This works with Eclipse & java, it works with C++ & command-line, and it does not work with Eclipse & C++. I only realized this out after a couple of days of trying to understand what I was doing wrong, and eventually noticing an inconsistency in the print statements, and then running on command-line. So unless you just want Eclipse for the very heavy editor, I would stay far, far away from Eclipse's C++.
There are several problems involved in having public schools teach people to be well-rounded in their personal lives. These problems are pretty modern, and I certainly don't have a complete list.
Cooking, dating, even hygiene have a fair amount of culture attached to them. Anything that has cultural influences cannot be taught in schools these days, because you can't teach every culture. You have to pick pretty much just one or maybe two, which leaves somebody out (because even the smallish, fairly homogeneous towns have at least two outliers these days). And that opens you up to unending legal problems, quite probably culminating in getting the teacher and/or principle in question fired and thrown out of the profession permanently. Any of these sorts of things has to be watered down so far that it gets really bland and boring (here's some basic nutrition facts, don't f*ck until you're married, and try to shower daily). These classes might actually even cause kids/teens to tune out of the actually relevant information they might get at home.
"Being good people/citizens" is left totally up to somebody else. Anybody else. Being good citizens involves voicing your opinions; doing so in the confines of a classroom makes you a bad teacher/student (at least in the public school, where people who don't agree with you can't just walk away/argue properly/throw punches). Teaching students to be good people gets into motivation for being good people, which gets into morality, which quickly blurs into religion. Woops, so much for that. "Being good" can be taught reasonably well without the religious background, but it takes more skill than most elementary school teachers have.
It's only peripherally their job/mandate. Kids are supposed to go home and learn this stuff. Sadly, governments believe more and more that the schools can substitute for sucky parenting, but they can't. The more the government tries to claim that the schools should/can, the less parents realize that the daycares/schools are incompetent at this and it's the parent's job to pick up the slack.
Sorry for the long rant. There's just so much to say about what's wrong out there, and why. Hey, at least we have made some progress in some areas in the past few decades. Now, many young guys believe they really ought to be able to cook (not shrugging it off as "women's work"). And women can get into tech.
Actually, I forget the details. They may not be particularly restricted during the artificial sweetener phase. I really should go locate that story again . . . okay this is kind of a lousy summary, but it's the study I'm thinking of: http://www.thedailygreen.com/healthy-eating/eat-safe/fake-sugar-study-44031708
No. There is another effect, one which was not widely publicized when it came out but saw enough of the light of day for me to hear about it. And no, it's not just aspartame that is at fault here.
Sorry this will be a little long, but I promise it's good:
So you feed your lab rats a fair number of their calories via yogurt (because it's easy to tamper with). They do reasonably well on this diet, and they don't overeat compared to their activity level -- they stay a reasonable weight. Now you leave half the rats on the regular yogurt diet, and switch the other half to part regular, and part yogurt that has artificial sweetener instead of sugar. You don't let them overeat for now. After a while, you switch group B back to only yogurt with real sugar in it. And their weight takes off! What happened? The trick is that animals have an innate sense of how many calories they are eating, partly based on how sweet the food is. But this sense is apparently not fixed, it is possible to mess with it. And break it. The rats who had taken on what tasted like lots of calories but turned out to be very few, had their calorie sensors broken because "sweet" was no longer an accurate way to measure. So now they happily eat way to much sweet without the normal internal limits, and balloon up.
Same with humans, probably. Yeah, some people will get fat and get type 2 diabetes without the help, but folks who get fat and are told to get thin by any means "or else", well . . . they might switch to diet. And lose all possibility of self-limiting. As trimmer and trimmer people are told that they are too fat (doctors have been lowering the range of "normal" for a while now), more and more people will fall into the break-your-calorie-sensor trap that is artificial sweetening.
I suspect that there will be a slight evolutionary trend toward people who think that artificial sweeteners taste nasty (yes, some components of ability to taste are genetic, and a bunch more come via the nurture route -- also usually from one's parents).
Multivitamins are different from fresh fruit and veggies. The trouble is this: the vitamins we know about are not really the whole story. They are more like narrow-band tracers that we understand and can generally be used to locate a wider band of nutrients. The narrow band is helpful, but it is better for you to get the the wider range of neighbors. And the more we refine something (to make it into a pill or a supplement to dump into food or whatever), the more we strip away the nearby neighbors and get something that is purely the tracer nutrient.
Plus, taking vitamins is a sort of crutch to keep you from noticing the good cravings and seeking out the food with the nutrient you need. If you can only get high-calorie, low-nutrient food, then yeah you should take the vitamins. But you are still missing some stuff, like fiber. And medical science is not perfect, it doesn't know everything you need. In a decade or two, it could be discovered that one or five really helpful nutrients had been historically overlooked, and people who were relying on the vitamin crutch were not getting the completeness they expected. Not really the vitamin manufacturers' fault, somewhat the doctors' fault, and quite your fault for not eating good food.
The crucial factor here is time. If you are working 1.5 - 3 jobs just to get by, taking care of the kids as much as you can because daycare's expensive, and probably doing this without help because you're divorced / never married and the rest of your family is in the same shape, they you're not going to spend all of your copious free time on cooking. The strategy becomes "what can I feed us that will be healthy enough, tasty enough that the kids will eat it, keep us full 'til morning, and can be prepared, eaten, and cleaned up after before I pass out?" Also, if you are a certain level of poor, you don't have a decent kitchen setup, so you have to add "can be prepared in in my alleged kitchen" to the mix. For an easy-to-get-through book about the trade-offs of being poor, look up "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America" by Barbara Ehrenreich. She's clear, to the point, doesn't philosophize much, and uses good-old-fashioned finding-out-what-it's-like-by-doing-it investigation techniques. The one flaw I would point out about her experiences is that she refused to share rent with anybody; that's the only way most poor people make it at all.
I never bothered to try coffee. I figure it's just a bitter drink that's bad for you, and I want a fairly simple relationship with sleep. I have had a couple of occasions to be rather unhappy about drinking a caffeinated soda at the wrong time of day, and that's enough. Plus I have no sense of smell, so I don't actually know about the (allegedly) lovely smell. I am a coder. I have a BS in CS (I know lots of people use caffeine to get through school but I'm not one of them), and now have a coding-heavy SDET job (don't really want to sign up for a pager). We do exist. We are even plural:) . Oh and I will give my daylight saving time & coffee & mass societal sleep disorders rant at the drop of a hat.
Slashdot Mirror
But normal people won't read the writings. It doesn't matter how precisely it is written if most people would have to look up every fifth word. That may be precise, but it is not efficient.
Or crudsicle. Which also makes a marvelous really-low-grade swear word.
Hmmm, but they do seem to be doing a good job against the RIAA :) . At least in part, it was worth it. And perhaps the ones that Obama poached had good reasons for wanting to leave anyway.
I don't trust that they are telling me which ones are paid advertisements and which ones are normal search results. I never click the paid ads at the top of the list on Google, because I don't actually trust any ad on the internet (we all know how easy it is to buy an ad for nefarious purposes -- it's harder to get that kind of link-love and then turn bad). So Bing doesn't tell me the cut-off line between {ad, potentially worrying, not what the crowd chose} and {chosen by link love, only as dangerous as average -- maybe a little less}.
The little previews are kind of cute, and a reasonably neat idea. I like that they don't go for the mini-page-rendering, because those (a) are too heavy and (b) don't actually tell you anything.
I was once trying to learn C++. I had Eclipse laying around on my computer, so I figured I would download the convenient C++ plugin, and learn in Eclipse. A few days later, I determined that Eclipse was absolutely not fit for C++ development. This is because I eventually figured out that Eclipse was playing a dirty trick on me. I expect that no matter which IDE you use, you have a reasonable expectation that every last print statement that was fired off before a seg-fault will arrive at the console, so you can debug by seeing where the program halted. This works with Eclipse & java, it works with C++ & command-line, and it does not work with Eclipse & C++. I only realized this out after a couple of days of trying to understand what I was doing wrong, and eventually noticing an inconsistency in the print statements, and then running on command-line. So unless you just want Eclipse for the very heavy editor, I would stay far, far away from Eclipse's C++.
Faster travel time.
Less street cleaning.
The fuel is more energy-dense.
There are several problems involved in having public schools teach people to be well-rounded in their personal lives. These problems are pretty modern, and I certainly don't have a complete list.
Cooking, dating, even hygiene have a fair amount of culture attached to them. Anything that has cultural influences cannot be taught in schools these days, because you can't teach every culture. You have to pick pretty much just one or maybe two, which leaves somebody out (because even the smallish, fairly homogeneous towns have at least two outliers these days). And that opens you up to unending legal problems, quite probably culminating in getting the teacher and/or principle in question fired and thrown out of the profession permanently. Any of these sorts of things has to be watered down so far that it gets really bland and boring (here's some basic nutrition facts, don't f*ck until you're married, and try to shower daily). These classes might actually even cause kids/teens to tune out of the actually relevant information they might get at home.
"Being good people/citizens" is left totally up to somebody else. Anybody else. Being good citizens involves voicing your opinions; doing so in the confines of a classroom makes you a bad teacher/student (at least in the public school, where people who don't agree with you can't just walk away/argue properly/throw punches). Teaching students to be good people gets into motivation for being good people, which gets into morality, which quickly blurs into religion. Woops, so much for that. "Being good" can be taught reasonably well without the religious background, but it takes more skill than most elementary school teachers have.
It's only peripherally their job/mandate. Kids are supposed to go home and learn this stuff. Sadly, governments believe more and more that the schools can substitute for sucky parenting, but they can't. The more the government tries to claim that the schools should/can, the less parents realize that the daycares/schools are incompetent at this and it's the parent's job to pick up the slack.
Sorry for the long rant. There's just so much to say about what's wrong out there, and why. Hey, at least we have made some progress in some areas in the past few decades. Now, many young guys believe they really ought to be able to cook (not shrugging it off as "women's work"). And women can get into tech.
Actually, I forget the details. They may not be particularly restricted during the artificial sweetener phase. I really should go locate that story again . . . okay this is kind of a lousy summary, but it's the study I'm thinking of: http://www.thedailygreen.com/healthy-eating/eat-safe/fake-sugar-study-44031708
No. There is another effect, one which was not widely publicized when it came out but saw enough of the light of day for me to hear about it. And no, it's not just aspartame that is at fault here.
Sorry this will be a little long, but I promise it's good:
So you feed your lab rats a fair number of their calories via yogurt (because it's easy to tamper with). They do reasonably well on this diet, and they don't overeat compared to their activity level -- they stay a reasonable weight. Now you leave half the rats on the regular yogurt diet, and switch the other half to part regular, and part yogurt that has artificial sweetener instead of sugar. You don't let them overeat for now. After a while, you switch group B back to only yogurt with real sugar in it. And their weight takes off! What happened?
The trick is that animals have an innate sense of how many calories they are eating, partly based on how sweet the food is. But this sense is apparently not fixed, it is possible to mess with it. And break it. The rats who had taken on what tasted like lots of calories but turned out to be very few, had their calorie sensors broken because "sweet" was no longer an accurate way to measure. So now they happily eat way to much sweet without the normal internal limits, and balloon up.
Same with humans, probably. Yeah, some people will get fat and get type 2 diabetes without the help, but folks who get fat and are told to get thin by any means "or else", well . . . they might switch to diet. And lose all possibility of self-limiting. As trimmer and trimmer people are told that they are too fat (doctors have been lowering the range of "normal" for a while now), more and more people will fall into the break-your-calorie-sensor trap that is artificial sweetening.
I suspect that there will be a slight evolutionary trend toward people who think that artificial sweeteners taste nasty (yes, some components of ability to taste are genetic, and a bunch more come via the nurture route -- also usually from one's parents).
Multivitamins are different from fresh fruit and veggies. The trouble is this: the vitamins we know about are not really the whole story. They are more like narrow-band tracers that we understand and can generally be used to locate a wider band of nutrients. The narrow band is helpful, but it is better for you to get the the wider range of neighbors. And the more we refine something (to make it into a pill or a supplement to dump into food or whatever), the more we strip away the nearby neighbors and get something that is purely the tracer nutrient.
Plus, taking vitamins is a sort of crutch to keep you from noticing the good cravings and seeking out the food with the nutrient you need. If you can only get high-calorie, low-nutrient food, then yeah you should take the vitamins. But you are still missing some stuff, like fiber. And medical science is not perfect, it doesn't know everything you need. In a decade or two, it could be discovered that one or five really helpful nutrients had been historically overlooked, and people who were relying on the vitamin crutch were not getting the completeness they expected. Not really the vitamin manufacturers' fault, somewhat the doctors' fault, and quite your fault for not eating good food.
The crucial factor here is time. If you are working 1.5 - 3 jobs just to get by, taking care of the kids as much as you can because daycare's expensive, and probably doing this without help because you're divorced / never married and the rest of your family is in the same shape, they you're not going to spend all of your copious free time on cooking. The strategy becomes "what can I feed us that will be healthy enough, tasty enough that the kids will eat it, keep us full 'til morning, and can be prepared, eaten, and cleaned up after before I pass out?" Also, if you are a certain level of poor, you don't have a decent kitchen setup, so you have to add "can be prepared in in my alleged kitchen" to the mix. For an easy-to-get-through book about the trade-offs of being poor, look up "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America" by Barbara Ehrenreich. She's clear, to the point, doesn't philosophize much, and uses good-old-fashioned finding-out-what-it's-like-by-doing-it investigation techniques. The one flaw I would point out about her experiences is that she refused to share rent with anybody; that's the only way most poor people make it at all.
I never bothered to try coffee. I figure it's just a bitter drink that's bad for you, and I want a fairly simple relationship with sleep. I have had a couple of occasions to be rather unhappy about drinking a caffeinated soda at the wrong time of day, and that's enough. Plus I have no sense of smell, so I don't actually know about the (allegedly) lovely smell. I am a coder. I have a BS in CS (I know lots of people use caffeine to get through school but I'm not one of them), and now have a coding-heavy SDET job (don't really want to sign up for a pager). We do exist. We are even plural :) . Oh and I will give my daylight saving time & coffee & mass societal sleep disorders rant at the drop of a hat.