Of course, one theory is that the Portuguese got that map from the great Chinese treasure fleets before they had ever gone there themselves. I highly recommend the book "1421: The Year China Discovered the World" by Gavin Menzies, in case you haven't read it yet. A lot of what he writes seems to be solid.
I think it's generally true that US Ph.D.s take longer because of extra coursework required. Since studying chemistry in undergraduate in many European countries (and Australia as well, from my experiences there) means you actually study chemistry (and not all the electives and general education requirements we have in the US), European students are considered more knowledgable in their field after getting their Bachelor's. After the Ph.D., though, it seems comparable.
For physical sciences in the US, four years (including the coursework) is considered good, but five years is more the norm, and in some areas (synthetic organic chemistry) 7 is not uncommon. 12 seems like a lot, though.
I would disagree with this. I can only speak from personal experience, but I didn't get a Ph.D. to stay in academia. In fact, one of the reasons I picked the research group I did was because of my advisor's contacts in industry. I thought a Ph.D. would be good to develop my research skills under a more free environment, and it was.
Am I in the minority? I don't think so. At least, many of my friends wanted to make a difference in the world, and thought a Ph.D. was the best way. And if they didn't think that at the beginning, more thought like that at the end (after doing a lot of theoretical work, a lot of people start looking for more applied problems).
"We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative."
I disagree that tolerance grows quickly. In central Africa, they have a pepper that they like to add to food. Looks like a habanero, but I don't know the actual species (just called "pepe" or "piment" locally, which is a generic name for "pepper"). I spent two years trying to eat that damn thing, and I still was no where near even what other members of my family can do (who haven't lived anywhere peppers are heavily used).
So, I'd guess it's part genetics as well. I do enjoy the taste of milder peppers, but as the pepper gets hotter, all other flavor goes away for me.
As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I can tell you that the process is pretty upfront. A volunteer talks with community members to figure out how much money will be needed (and what the community will contribute...the community has to provide as least 25%, in order to give more incentive to maintenance after the volunteer has left). Once that much money is raised (usually from friends and family, although I still donate to random projects in the country I was posted in), the volunteer goes to the capital, collects the money, then heads back to the village to start construction. No money is used for salaries of the organization: the volunteers are already there and supported by taxpayer money. So, donations go straight to the project with no overhead. The only exception is if the volunteer leaves the country before the project is completed. If another volunteer doesn't take it over, the donated money goes into the general country fund.
No organization is perfect, but in my experience these projects are pretty good. I've seen wells dug, schools built, and even a bridge, on top of a lot of educational programs.
Sage-fed does not equate to tasty, even if sage as an herb is quite useful (different species of sage, perhaps, or processing in the body kills all the good flavors). Maybe I just need to find mule deer living in conditions where sage is not so plentiful.
Ah. Yeah, I've heard that the biological journals are somewhat different.
I agree with your comments about Science/Nature. I have other journals that I prefer as far as article quality (being able to reproduce and understand results based on what's in the article), but those articles do make getting funding easier, so that's what we do. I wonder if it'd be better to boycott the glamorous journals, and how much harder it would be to get funding. Maybe it doesn't really matter.
I have to disagree with you about your last statement, though. I've only submitted to Science/Nature a few times, but once it's rejected, we always do a rewrite for submission to a lower-impact journal, and add citations/figures/information. I don't know how often you're submitting to Science/Nature, but I only do it every few years, so it's not that much of a hassle, and it makes for nicer articles.
A limit to 30 citations? Really? That's curious. What field are you in? I've published in quite a few chemistry/physics journals, and the only time I've run into limits is for Science and Nature (which also limit article length). I like having a well-reference article, so I might choose to not publish in any journal that prevented me from doing a complete bibliography (unless the number of words in the article is also limited, in which case is makes some sense). You have my sympathy.:-)
I think Africa actually would notice a bit. China has invested a decent amount of money there, and floods the market with cheap (read, "affordable") products. Now, these products are low quality, and people don't generally like them (local slang for a cheap, low quality product was "chinois" [Chinese], in Cameroon at least), but they're there. None of the kitchen faucets I bought ever lasted more than 6 months, but given the choice between a faucet that allows me to have running water in the kitchen, and not having running water in the kitchen...well, I'd pay the 3 dollars every six months to get the faucet when the old one broke.
It seems like people forget that most of Africa is "developing". A loss of outside investment and products could knock a lot of countries back down to "undeveloped". Maybe a lot of Westerners don't notice a big difference between the two, but there definitely is one.
In any profession, there are people who work hard, because they care about what they do. Is he that person? I have no idea, nor does it matter. All I know, and all I said in my post, was that one of his points is completely believable.
I'm not defending the public school system. I'm not defending teachers (although I do think there are good teachers out there). I'm not even defending the original poster. I just felt like you were focusing too much on an inconsequential point, and your argument will be better without it. If this didn't come through in my original post, that's my mistake.
My high school: 1600 students, five minutes between classes. High school across town: 1500 students (maybe 1600, maybe 1400, but you get the picture), five minutes between classes. Seven periods during the day, starting at 8, ending at 3:20. Can't remember how long lunch was, but each class was 53 minutes long. 53*7=371, so 39 minutes for lunch (also removing 30 minutes for breaks...5 minutes times the six in-between times).
If he's standing during the five minutes between classes (I remember some of our teachers doing that, but I don't know if it was required), that leaves 39 minutes to sit down during the day (if he brought his lunch and doesn't have to wait in line anywhere for it). I imagine he's sitting down in the meeting during his free period, but maybe it's standing room only.
I had to write this response, because you were hammering very hard on the "dubiously short time between classes" thing, and what he claims is exactly what I had growing up. You had time to get from one end of the school to the other between classes, if you didn't stop at your locker and walked fast. That was how it was designed, in order to keep people from loitering. If that meant you had to carry your backpack with you during the day, that's what you did.
"When I went to school, classes ran for 5 hours, with an hour lunch."
Wow. Life wasn't like that in southern Wisconsin, although it was more than a couple few years ago when I was in high school.
I guess my point was, what's the difference between believing in magic and believing in God? From what I know, there's no scientific evidence that points to God existing, or a soul, or heaven/hell, and yet the vast majority of politicians publicly state that they believe these things.
"I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven," "I dabbled in Christianity at one time. I never joined a convent." "I believe in Santa Claus, but I've never gone to the North Pole to look for him."
I'm having a hard time drawing a distinction between these three statements that isn't rather arbitrary, at least from a scientific standpoint. The best I can come up with is that historical evidence suggests that Jesus Christ was a real person, but the leap from "real person" to "Son of God" is quite large.
"I dabbled in Christianity at one time. I never joined a convent."
What's the difference? Sometimes people want to believe things that science doesn't support. I'm not going to hold it against her that her mind was open to things she doesn't understand. I would get upset if she said, "I'm going to take 50% of NSF's budget and reallocate it to a new Department of Magic", but she didn't. It would be an issue if it was related to a policy decision, not simply a curiosity in her personal life. What was Einstein's quote? "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
MacOS makes it easier to get to your apps with the dock, but its really difficult to have multiple windows open.
Can I ask what you mean by this? I'm writing this with multiple windows from multiple programs open across four desktops, and I love it. All of that love is due to Expose. F8, F9, F10, and F11 are probably my favorite features of OSX.
My biggest gripe with OSX is probably that when I open a new terminal window, it always opens up in the home directory instead of the directory I'm currently typing in (if I open it from the keyboard while focused on another terminal window). If I want to go to the home directory from an arbitrary directory, it's easy enough to "cd". It's much harder to type "cd RANDOM_DIR/SUBDIR1/SUBDIR2/YET_ANOTHER_SUBDIR/STILL_GOING". From what I remember when I was using Linux (admittedly, it's been a few years), Ctrl-N created a new terminal window located in the directory you were currently in.
I however agree that his word carries more weight than the GP's, for no other reason than that he is experienced with the present situations in many of the world's countries; he doesn't glean all his information from behind an electronic display, enacted as a 5th-hand source to the various political-media organisations.
I've seen something like this written several times already in this thread, and I have to question it. How much is really seen by the members of our armed forces abroad?
I ask because I served my country as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years. Living in the community, I saw how attitudes/behaviors changed when foreigners were around. Things certainly got filtered, and the filters kicked up a notch when a member of the State Department (embassy worker) came through. Volunteers and State Department people lived in different worlds there. Same country, but different worlds.
One foreigner changes the situation (I certainly wasn't part of the "true" culture, even after two years). A group of foreigners changes the situation even more (especially if they all move together in fancy cars). A group of foreigners with guns/power? I'd be curious to know if any of the interactions are the same. Any military people with Peace Corps experience around to comment on this?
I have some experience with the Cameroonian educational system, loosely modeled on the French and English systems (depending on the province), and which is quite harsh (on a scale of 0-20, 10 is a fail, and it's expected that the class average is 10...i.e. half the students in any class are expected to fail). This means it's not common for a student to make it past the university level without repeating at least one year (I taught at a university, and did have several students like this...they were quite intelligent by any nation's standards).
What happens here is that you have a wide range of ages in classes (ten year olds and sixteen year olds in the same class, for instance, or even fifteen year olds with twenty five years olds...this is no exaggeration), which results in discipline problems and difficult teaching environments (well, the overcrowding and lack of resources doesn't help, either). Older kids bully young kids into doing their homework for them, disrupt the class during teaching periods, generally make life difficult for everyone, and eventually manage a pass, because after repeating a class two or three times you'll probably manage to remember something.
I'm not saying that we should pass everyone, but you can cause as many problems by failing everyone, too.
I've been using a MacBook Pro as my work machine for the past year, and I feel less stress on the hand than when I was using a regular mouse.
I attribute this mainly to the fact that I'm not clicking/scrolling in exactly the same way every time (using two finger scrolling, tap-to-left-click, and two finger tap-to-right-click) , since I can do it anywhere on the pad. It's much better than a regular mouse, and I'm starting to prefer it even to a trackball.
It's the same way in Cameroon. I was surprised by that at first, but it really makes a lot of sense. I've never seen it in Europe or the US, though, and I wonder why not.
There are still good stations out there, and with the Internet, you can listen to them wherever you are. Check out 89.3 The Current out of Minneapolis. Great stuff.
Okay, I can't access them via the radio (seeing as how I haven't lived in Minneapolis for several years), but they are still a good radio station who's going strong. At least, until everyone discovers them, runs up their bandwidth costs, and forces them to drop the live Internet stream. On second thought, forget I mentioned them.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, after reading through quite a few of those references, I'm happy to say that I learned something new today.
I am disappointed, though. I thought his book was really fun to read, and it's a big letdown to find out that it has very little basis in fact.
Has it? Could you point me to some of the more relevant articles in the literature? I would be very interested to read that.
Of course, one theory is that the Portuguese got that map from the great Chinese treasure fleets before they had ever gone there themselves. I highly recommend the book "1421: The Year China Discovered the World" by Gavin Menzies, in case you haven't read it yet. A lot of what he writes seems to be solid.
CH4 is called methane, though. CH3-H, like a methyl hydride. And ethane (ethyl hydride), etc.
So maybe a hydroxyl hydride should be called hydroxane?
I think it's generally true that US Ph.D.s take longer because of extra coursework required. Since studying chemistry in undergraduate in many European countries (and Australia as well, from my experiences there) means you actually study chemistry (and not all the electives and general education requirements we have in the US), European students are considered more knowledgable in their field after getting their Bachelor's. After the Ph.D., though, it seems comparable.
For physical sciences in the US, four years (including the coursework) is considered good, but five years is more the norm, and in some areas (synthetic organic chemistry) 7 is not uncommon. 12 seems like a lot, though.
I would disagree with this. I can only speak from personal experience, but I didn't get a Ph.D. to stay in academia. In fact, one of the reasons I picked the research group I did was because of my advisor's contacts in industry. I thought a Ph.D. would be good to develop my research skills under a more free environment, and it was.
Am I in the minority? I don't think so. At least, many of my friends wanted to make a difference in the world, and thought a Ph.D. was the best way. And if they didn't think that at the beginning, more thought like that at the end (after doing a lot of theoretical work, a lot of people start looking for more applied problems).
Sadly, Pandora doesn't work outside the U.S.
"We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative."
Maybe I just need to go through seven proxies.
I disagree that tolerance grows quickly. In central Africa, they have a pepper that they like to add to food. Looks like a habanero, but I don't know the actual species (just called "pepe" or "piment" locally, which is a generic name for "pepper"). I spent two years trying to eat that damn thing, and I still was no where near even what other members of my family can do (who haven't lived anywhere peppers are heavily used).
So, I'd guess it's part genetics as well. I do enjoy the taste of milder peppers, but as the pepper gets hotter, all other flavor goes away for me.
Well, I'd like to suggest another charity, then.
http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate
As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I can tell you that the process is pretty upfront. A volunteer talks with community members to figure out how much money will be needed (and what the community will contribute...the community has to provide as least 25%, in order to give more incentive to maintenance after the volunteer has left). Once that much money is raised (usually from friends and family, although I still donate to random projects in the country I was posted in), the volunteer goes to the capital, collects the money, then heads back to the village to start construction. No money is used for salaries of the organization: the volunteers are already there and supported by taxpayer money. So, donations go straight to the project with no overhead. The only exception is if the volunteer leaves the country before the project is completed. If another volunteer doesn't take it over, the donated money goes into the general country fund.
No organization is perfect, but in my experience these projects are pretty good. I've seen wells dug, schools built, and even a bridge, on top of a lot of educational programs.
This is why I don't like eating mule deer.
Sage-fed does not equate to tasty, even if sage as an herb is quite useful (different species of sage, perhaps, or processing in the body kills all the good flavors). Maybe I just need to find mule deer living in conditions where sage is not so plentiful.
Ah. Yeah, I've heard that the biological journals are somewhat different.
I agree with your comments about Science/Nature. I have other journals that I prefer as far as article quality (being able to reproduce and understand results based on what's in the article), but those articles do make getting funding easier, so that's what we do. I wonder if it'd be better to boycott the glamorous journals, and how much harder it would be to get funding. Maybe it doesn't really matter.
I have to disagree with you about your last statement, though. I've only submitted to Science/Nature a few times, but once it's rejected, we always do a rewrite for submission to a lower-impact journal, and add citations/figures/information. I don't know how often you're submitting to Science/Nature, but I only do it every few years, so it's not that much of a hassle, and it makes for nicer articles.
A limit to 30 citations? Really? That's curious. What field are you in? I've published in quite a few chemistry/physics journals, and the only time I've run into limits is for Science and Nature (which also limit article length). I like having a well-reference article, so I might choose to not publish in any journal that prevented me from doing a complete bibliography (unless the number of words in the article is also limited, in which case is makes some sense). You have my sympathy. :-)
That's an interesting perspective. Now I'm curious to see if that would happen. It's too bad that it requires a major collapse to test.
I think Africa actually would notice a bit. China has invested a decent amount of money there, and floods the market with cheap (read, "affordable") products. Now, these products are low quality, and people don't generally like them (local slang for a cheap, low quality product was "chinois" [Chinese], in Cameroon at least), but they're there. None of the kitchen faucets I bought ever lasted more than 6 months, but given the choice between a faucet that allows me to have running water in the kitchen, and not having running water in the kitchen...well, I'd pay the 3 dollars every six months to get the faucet when the old one broke.
It seems like people forget that most of Africa is "developing". A loss of outside investment and products could knock a lot of countries back down to "undeveloped". Maybe a lot of Westerners don't notice a big difference between the two, but there definitely is one.
I agree with this. I generally use Skim on OSX instead of Preview or Adobe, because I found it fit my needs better. Maybe it'll work for you.
In any profession, there are people who work hard, because they care about what they do. Is he that person? I have no idea, nor does it matter. All I know, and all I said in my post, was that one of his points is completely believable.
I'm not defending the public school system. I'm not defending teachers (although I do think there are good teachers out there). I'm not even defending the original poster. I just felt like you were focusing too much on an inconsequential point, and your argument will be better without it. If this didn't come through in my original post, that's my mistake.
My high school: 1600 students, five minutes between classes. High school across town: 1500 students (maybe 1600, maybe 1400, but you get the picture), five minutes between classes. Seven periods during the day, starting at 8, ending at 3:20. Can't remember how long lunch was, but each class was 53 minutes long. 53*7=371, so 39 minutes for lunch (also removing 30 minutes for breaks...5 minutes times the six in-between times).
If he's standing during the five minutes between classes (I remember some of our teachers doing that, but I don't know if it was required), that leaves 39 minutes to sit down during the day (if he brought his lunch and doesn't have to wait in line anywhere for it). I imagine he's sitting down in the meeting during his free period, but maybe it's standing room only.
I had to write this response, because you were hammering very hard on the "dubiously short time between classes" thing, and what he claims is exactly what I had growing up. You had time to get from one end of the school to the other between classes, if you didn't stop at your locker and walked fast. That was how it was designed, in order to keep people from loitering. If that meant you had to carry your backpack with you during the day, that's what you did.
"When I went to school, classes ran for 5 hours, with an hour lunch."
Wow. Life wasn't like that in southern Wisconsin, although it was more than a couple few years ago when I was in high school.
I guess my point was, what's the difference between believing in magic and believing in God? From what I know, there's no scientific evidence that points to God existing, or a soul, or heaven/hell, and yet the vast majority of politicians publicly state that they believe these things.
"I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven,"
"I dabbled in Christianity at one time. I never joined a convent."
"I believe in Santa Claus, but I've never gone to the North Pole to look for him."
I'm having a hard time drawing a distinction between these three statements that isn't rather arbitrary, at least from a scientific standpoint. The best I can come up with is that historical evidence suggests that Jesus Christ was a real person, but the leap from "real person" to "Son of God" is quite large.
"I dabbled in Christianity at one time. I never joined a convent."
What's the difference? Sometimes people want to believe things that science doesn't support. I'm not going to hold it against her that her mind was open to things she doesn't understand. I would get upset if she said, "I'm going to take 50% of NSF's budget and reallocate it to a new Department of Magic", but she didn't. It would be an issue if it was related to a policy decision, not simply a curiosity in her personal life. What was Einstein's quote? "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
MacOS makes it easier to get to your apps with the dock, but its really difficult to have multiple windows open.
Can I ask what you mean by this? I'm writing this with multiple windows from multiple programs open across four desktops, and I love it. All of that love is due to Expose. F8, F9, F10, and F11 are probably my favorite features of OSX.
My biggest gripe with OSX is probably that when I open a new terminal window, it always opens up in the home directory instead of the directory I'm currently typing in (if I open it from the keyboard while focused on another terminal window). If I want to go to the home directory from an arbitrary directory, it's easy enough to "cd". It's much harder to type "cd RANDOM_DIR/SUBDIR1/SUBDIR2/YET_ANOTHER_SUBDIR/STILL_GOING". From what I remember when I was using Linux (admittedly, it's been a few years), Ctrl-N created a new terminal window located in the directory you were currently in.
I however agree that his word carries more weight than the GP's, for no other reason than that he is experienced with the present situations in many of the world's countries; he doesn't glean all his information from behind an electronic display, enacted as a 5th-hand source to the various political-media organisations.
I've seen something like this written several times already in this thread, and I have to question it. How much is really seen by the members of our armed forces abroad?
I ask because I served my country as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years. Living in the community, I saw how attitudes/behaviors changed when foreigners were around. Things certainly got filtered, and the filters kicked up a notch when a member of the State Department (embassy worker) came through. Volunteers and State Department people lived in different worlds there. Same country, but different worlds.
One foreigner changes the situation (I certainly wasn't part of the "true" culture, even after two years). A group of foreigners changes the situation even more (especially if they all move together in fancy cars). A group of foreigners with guns/power? I'd be curious to know if any of the interactions are the same. Any military people with Peace Corps experience around to comment on this?
I have some experience with the Cameroonian educational system, loosely modeled on the French and English systems (depending on the province), and which is quite harsh (on a scale of 0-20, 10 is a fail, and it's expected that the class average is 10...i.e. half the students in any class are expected to fail). This means it's not common for a student to make it past the university level without repeating at least one year (I taught at a university, and did have several students like this...they were quite intelligent by any nation's standards).
What happens here is that you have a wide range of ages in classes (ten year olds and sixteen year olds in the same class, for instance, or even fifteen year olds with twenty five years olds...this is no exaggeration), which results in discipline problems and difficult teaching environments (well, the overcrowding and lack of resources doesn't help, either). Older kids bully young kids into doing their homework for them, disrupt the class during teaching periods, generally make life difficult for everyone, and eventually manage a pass, because after repeating a class two or three times you'll probably manage to remember something.
I'm not saying that we should pass everyone, but you can cause as many problems by failing everyone, too.
I've been using a MacBook Pro as my work machine for the past year, and I feel less stress on the hand than when I was using a regular mouse.
I attribute this mainly to the fact that I'm not clicking/scrolling in exactly the same way every time (using two finger scrolling, tap-to-left-click, and two finger tap-to-right-click) , since I can do it anywhere on the pad. It's much better than a regular mouse, and I'm starting to prefer it even to a trackball.
It's the same way in Cameroon. I was surprised by that at first, but it really makes a lot of sense. I've never seen it in Europe or the US, though, and I wonder why not.
There are still good stations out there, and with the Internet, you can listen to them wherever you are. Check out 89.3 The Current out of Minneapolis. Great stuff.
Okay, I can't access them via the radio (seeing as how I haven't lived in Minneapolis for several years), but they are still a good radio station who's going strong. At least, until everyone discovers them, runs up their bandwidth costs, and forces them to drop the live Internet stream. On second thought, forget I mentioned them. :-)