It seems some people who some articles about how to intertwine social justice issues with math classes, which sounds a bit dodgy but there are a lot of dumb ideas that appear in published articles if you look hard enough. That has always been true. Those articles got bound up into a book.
For you and me, we recognize there is a world of difference between a dodgy book that exists somewhere on this planet and what is actually required material in a college math course. For you and me, we recognize that flesh and blood tenured math professors are weird birds who care about math, math, math and are not going to bother teaching anything that appears outside of the textbook, a book that was written by some weird bird who cared about math, math, math, as well.
But the very gullible who hang out, say, at the National Review are all up in arms about avocado toast and what they are guessing might be in a college math textbook they are too prissy to ever read.
When every single course is lecturing not so much the subject matter, but leftist ideology, we have problems with our education system. Biology courses are filled with anti-American rhetoric and promotion of 3rd wave feminism. Even Math and Physics lectures are filled with anti-American rhetoric.
So in the Dr. Who Universe, this particular Gallifreyan regenerates 12 times into a male. But poof! Number 13 is a woman! Kind of stretches the suspension of disbelief a bit. If viewed through the lens that any Gallifreyan can regenerate into either a male or female, then why only one out of 13 for this particular Gallifreyan? Does the lack of "diversity" in regenerations indicate that Gallifreyan DNA favors males?
Canon already addressed your question.
#12 explicitly says that his exact face was chosen as a reminder about a human he saved (a character also played by Peter Capaldi), at the urging of Donna when he was leaving all to die in Pompeii. So, no, it is not random, even if it is not necessarily controllable.
So the answer to your question is that some part of The Doctor presumably "decided" to be female at this moment in time. For whatever reason, he did not decide so before. It could just be a matter of habit that some Gallifreyans form.
I see what you just did. Out of one side of your mouth, your claim to know what "SJWs" think. Out of the other side of your mouth, you mock them for possibly thinking what you pretend to believe they think. All in one breath, too. Nice.
The basic concept of Voyager was superb: a bunch of enemies from the alpha have to reconsider all the rules in order to work together and survive. But the writers chickened out -- the sparks between Janeway and Chakotay was dropped on the floor, and Janeway was left to ossify into smarmy Miss By The Book who kept quoting Federation SOP while enemies in the Delta quadrant made them suffer for it. Well, that was supposed to be her starting place where reality and personal relationships draw her out into something else.
If you are genuinely better than the average bear and getting regular promotions, there might not be a good reason to jump jobs.
It is the people who are perceived as average or below average that companies will happily leave plugged into a nowhere position, where the wages and skills will stagnate. The best way to get out of that rut is change jobs, where they will be forced to stretch themselves in something new.
This got hashed out in CA years ago, and IIRC the court ultimately agreed with the ex-employee that in a high skills field the ex-employer would need to pay more than the former salary to compensate for the aging of skills and loss in promotion opportunities. So, effectively non-competes are unenforceable in CA because no employer wants to put in the contract that if the employee chooses to leave the company may decide to give them a big fat raise and pay them for two years to do nothing, i.e. to achieve clear enough "meeting of minds" to make the contract enforceable was too onerous a burden for employers.
Idaho has chosen to go the other way. Which gives a strong incentive for the most skilled workers to leave the state.
Yes, it is understood that a former manager should absolutely not be asking around for former colleagues/reports to go to his/her new company. But there is nothing that can be done about former colleagues who take the initiative, and the former boss can rightly pick up the referral bonus if they are asked to forward the resume.
Back when Arnold Swarzenegger was governor of CA and got in a tussle about the budget, he had the bright idea to only pay every CA employee the minimum wage as a stopgap cash preserving tactic until the crisis was over, effective immediately. The CA head of IT told the governor that change would take 10 months. The best guess about why was that the skilled and knowledgeable cobol programmers were probably on contract, and the contracts are all suspended during a budget crisis.
I do not think that a big company will go under from some headline grabbing crisis. What will happen will be a death by a thousand cuts, as there are more outages and even the smallest routine change takes longer and longer -- no one will choose to work with them. Since the CEO will be desperate for a scapegoat, the genuinely effective IT people will be put under greater and greater pressure, until the only people to work there will be contractors who are there are the 6 months wages and are incentivized to hit short term milestones not care how ugly things will get down the road.
Juniors take serious investment, and hiring them as cheap labor is another good sign you're just not in a terribly healthy company.
It just means that management thinks that there is not all that much left to do that is genuinely hard. Which might be true. But, boy, it will suck for the conscientious engineers who stick around when that guess is wrong.
Obviously you need to go BDD, and chop out pieces and put them back, until the customer on the operation table signs off on the passing test cases as adequate.
While we are speculating... Sometimes the oddball thing that attracts some kooks with real skills but needing brushing up in newer technology, just does not mainstream. To become profitable enough to become genuinely stable, they have to imagine who could be sold their service and sell, sell, sell. However the newer crops include people with no experience and wobbly potential. Your course may not have changed at all, it might have even improved, yet the graduates are very different. You get stuck with two choices: (1) dumb down the course so a gobsmacking number are not failed out, thus scaring away future enrollees, (2) pretend you are producing the same great students you did before, and hope that you can live without the bridges you are implicitly burning with the employers who once thought well of you.
The main advantage of the audiolingual method is not actually whether you learn more material in class or retain more material when tested after ignoring the subject for a year. The real advantage is you have practice with useful coherent sentences and can sub out words to easily create new sentences that you are capable of saying out loud to another human being. Yes, the grammar is sometimes crap, but the meaning is sufficiently clear that the locals in that foreign country you are visiting understand. Thus the audiolingual method is a launchpad for you to teach yourself the language in situ, not necessarily a superior means to score high on a test. This is much like how a child learns language, and it works, providing you actually dive in.
As for the analogy between phonics and coding, I would expect experts to simply look inside "the loop", and then check the initialization, update, and exit conditions for the loop carefully if they sense there is need to parse it out carefully. Of course, they are capable of "phonetically sounding it out" and checking these things in the first place, much like I am capable of phonetically sounding out most any word. Rarely do I do so, though.
Thanks for your opinion, poseur. You may know a thing or two about throwing together the easy, casual parties (who doesn't?), but the breadth of the topic is well beyond you.
I have a life and things to do that require planning in advance.
Me too, but I reserve that kind of planning work and chores. If I'm going to enjoy life, I can't sit down and plan every detail of my life and accommodate your every detail. If having a regimented life is satisfying to you, I guess, but I can't imagine that most human beings would thrive on an highly structured life.
False Choice. Making commitments has exactly nothing to do with "a regimented life". We are talking about whether it is even within your skillset to make a single social commitment a month and actually show up, short of a genuine emergency (which is why Brooks jokes about "mom has bubonic plague", because of so many fake emergencies). No one is forcing you to make a commitment in any given week. And making 1 or more than 1 is entirely voluntary. But can you do this commitment thing ever without first fantasizing about the excuses you might have to make or how oppressed you might feel? If it is really so hard, the problem is you.
Exactly. If everyone is cancelling 50% of the time near the last minute, you have to schedule 5 things on a Saturday to be reasonably certain of not having anything better to do than watch TV.
On the other hand, attending a party, meeting for brunch in the city, or just chilling in an afternoon, well that hasn't seemed to change. We could blow that off in the past, and we can blow that off now.
Spoken like someone who has never grown up and thrown a real party.
A real host throwing an adult party considers the guest list, who would like hit it off with whom, what kind of food would please everyone, and possible activities to help warm up the guests. As yeses, come in, additional guests might even be invited to make sure everyone can meet someone they have something in common, to avoid the usual cliques making anyone feel left out. That is basically impossible when 25 yeses might mean 15 people showing or 7 people showing. And that can also mean throwing out $400 of untouched food at the end of the event.
The truth is that the skills for throwing parties started to evaporate in GenX, so lots of GenXers do not have a clue. What you may think of as normal may have been normal enough in your savage circle of friends who are lousy entertainers but do not know any better. The millennials are decidedly worse.
IME, half the supposedly awesome firefighters are truly great people and excellent engineers. The other half are proverbial chainsmokers who leave smouldering butts wherever they have been -- they do get a lot of practice fighting fires.
There are enough managers who cannot tell the difference that they are places where people get promotions for crap work and rushing to fix the emergencies they created, not everywhere, but they exist.
It really depends on whether quality work matters.
I believe strongly that we humans have about ~3 hours per day of very focused attention, in which we can effectively deal with genuinely difficult problems. Some people have jobs that are a hard, but even hard jobs might be such that 3 hours of strong focus intermixed with 4 hours of paint-by-numbers programming, plus an hour to handle email, and they are done for the day and have provided good value to their employer.
Some people are doing easy stuff that any intern could do after a couple days mentoring. Well, yes, you might be effective enough crunching away for 12 hours. It is because the stuff you are working on is neither difficult nor important, so turning the crank and provided mediocre quality is acceptable.
Gee, for decades it was SOP to simply call any woman who ever asserted something bad happened to them a slut, because we all "know" bad things do not happen to good girls. Now that the old song does not work anyone, it is because these kinds of allegations are finally gaining traction that we should not believe them.
No, the skepticism has always been there, only the exact arguments why this skepticism today must be believed keep changing, well, a little bit. It is plausible that the pendulum will (or has) swing too far. But I would like to evidence such is the case, rather than just a lot of handwaving.
It is always possible for someone to get unlucky and get lied about. But some people do like to use that as an excuse to live their life dancing ten toes over the line, and then exclaim it was not them but bad luck that got them into trouble when they stumbled just a little. Most of the "unlucky" people are far less than innocent. The fact that there are a very few people who are unlucky and innocent does not tell us anything important.
You can push all of history onto a continuum, and while that is not wrong, it occludes important parts of the story. The rate of innovations has been increasing. With the rise of certain hominid species, it jumped up. With the rise of agriculture, it jumped up much further. With the rise of laws and writing, it jumped up much much further. With the rise of the printing press, it jumped up much much much much further.
Even then, China and the Ottoman Empire had the kernel idea of the steam engine sitting around for centuries and no reason to believe anything would happen with it. But certain capitalist social changes brought the steam engine forward, and then the rate of innovation skyrocketed beyond what anyone had ever dreamed in the previous 300,000 year history of humanity.
... If you can't see how late-stage capitalism has actually worked against the creation of new ideas and innovation and the erosion of social structures and human well-being, you just haven't been paying attention.
There is more than a kernel of truth to that. But let's keep in mind that the migratory hunter gatherers also sometimes thought that bunching people up into fixed agricultural communities degraded the human condition through forms of social control that never existed before. Your complaint has been true about approximately every important innovation since forever. We has so much more technological innovation now, that there are inevitably proportionally more plausible arguments about how our humanity is being taken away.
I am not saying that those arguments are wrong or right. Personally, I think the invention of the smart phone has kicked off a planet wide social experiment that is both positively thrilling and terrifying at the same time. I think we do need to consider these negatives arguments about capitalism within the bigger picture.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems some people who some articles about how to intertwine social justice issues with math classes, which sounds a bit dodgy but there are a lot of dumb ideas that appear in published articles if you look hard enough. That has always been true. Those articles got bound up into a book.
For you and me, we recognize there is a world of difference between a dodgy book that exists somewhere on this planet and what is actually required material in a college math course. For you and me, we recognize that flesh and blood tenured math professors are weird birds who care about math, math, math and are not going to bother teaching anything that appears outside of the textbook, a book that was written by some weird bird who cared about math, math, math, as well.
But the very gullible who hang out, say, at the National Review are all up in arms about avocado toast and what they are guessing might be in a college math textbook they are too prissy to ever read.
When every single course is lecturing not so much the subject matter, but leftist ideology, we have problems with our education system. Biology courses are filled with anti-American rhetoric and promotion of 3rd wave feminism. Even Math and Physics lectures are filled with anti-American rhetoric.
THAT requires a citation.
So in the Dr. Who Universe, this particular Gallifreyan regenerates 12 times into a male. But poof! Number 13 is a woman! Kind of stretches the suspension of disbelief a bit. If viewed through the lens that any Gallifreyan can regenerate into either a male or female, then why only one out of 13 for this particular Gallifreyan? Does the lack of "diversity" in regenerations indicate that Gallifreyan DNA favors males?
Canon already addressed your question.
#12 explicitly says that his exact face was chosen as a reminder about a human he saved (a character also played by Peter Capaldi), at the urging of Donna when he was leaving all to die in Pompeii. So, no, it is not random, even if it is not necessarily controllable.
So the answer to your question is that some part of The Doctor presumably "decided" to be female at this moment in time. For whatever reason, he did not decide so before. It could just be a matter of habit that some Gallifreyans form.
I see what you just did. Out of one side of your mouth, your claim to know what "SJWs" think. Out of the other side of your mouth, you mock them for possibly thinking what you pretend to believe they think. All in one breath, too. Nice.
The basic concept of Voyager was superb: a bunch of enemies from the alpha have to reconsider all the rules in order to work together and survive. But the writers chickened out -- the sparks between Janeway and Chakotay was dropped on the floor, and Janeway was left to ossify into smarmy Miss By The Book who kept quoting Federation SOP while enemies in the Delta quadrant made them suffer for it. Well, that was supposed to be her starting place where reality and personal relationships draw her out into something else.
Jesus was a Nazi?
If you are genuinely better than the average bear and getting regular promotions, there might not be a good reason to jump jobs.
It is the people who are perceived as average or below average that companies will happily leave plugged into a nowhere position, where the wages and skills will stagnate. The best way to get out of that rut is change jobs, where they will be forced to stretch themselves in something new.
This got hashed out in CA years ago, and IIRC the court ultimately agreed with the ex-employee that in a high skills field the ex-employer would need to pay more than the former salary to compensate for the aging of skills and loss in promotion opportunities. So, effectively non-competes are unenforceable in CA because no employer wants to put in the contract that if the employee chooses to leave the company may decide to give them a big fat raise and pay them for two years to do nothing, i.e. to achieve clear enough "meeting of minds" to make the contract enforceable was too onerous a burden for employers.
Idaho has chosen to go the other way. Which gives a strong incentive for the most skilled workers to leave the state.
Yes, it is understood that a former manager should absolutely not be asking around for former colleagues/reports to go to his/her new company. But there is nothing that can be done about former colleagues who take the initiative, and the former boss can rightly pick up the referral bonus if they are asked to forward the resume.
Back when Arnold Swarzenegger was governor of CA and got in a tussle about the budget, he had the bright idea to only pay every CA employee the minimum wage as a stopgap cash preserving tactic until the crisis was over, effective immediately. The CA head of IT told the governor that change would take 10 months. The best guess about why was that the skilled and knowledgeable cobol programmers were probably on contract, and the contracts are all suspended during a budget crisis.
I do not think that a big company will go under from some headline grabbing crisis. What will happen will be a death by a thousand cuts, as there are more outages and even the smallest routine change takes longer and longer -- no one will choose to work with them. Since the CEO will be desperate for a scapegoat, the genuinely effective IT people will be put under greater and greater pressure, until the only people to work there will be contractors who are there are the 6 months wages and are incentivized to hit short term milestones not care how ugly things will get down the road.
Juniors take serious investment, and hiring them as cheap labor is another good sign you're just not in a terribly healthy company.
It just means that management thinks that there is not all that much left to do that is genuinely hard. Which might be true. But, boy, it will suck for the conscientious engineers who stick around when that guess is wrong.
Obviously you need to go BDD, and chop out pieces and put them back, until the customer on the operation table signs off on the passing test cases as adequate.
While we are speculating... Sometimes the oddball thing that attracts some kooks with real skills but needing brushing up in newer technology, just does not mainstream. To become profitable enough to become genuinely stable, they have to imagine who could be sold their service and sell, sell, sell. However the newer crops include people with no experience and wobbly potential. Your course may not have changed at all, it might have even improved, yet the graduates are very different. You get stuck with two choices: (1) dumb down the course so a gobsmacking number are not failed out, thus scaring away future enrollees, (2) pretend you are producing the same great students you did before, and hope that you can live without the bridges you are implicitly burning with the employers who once thought well of you.
The main advantage of the audiolingual method is not actually whether you learn more material in class or retain more material when tested after ignoring the subject for a year. The real advantage is you have practice with useful coherent sentences and can sub out words to easily create new sentences that you are capable of saying out loud to another human being. Yes, the grammar is sometimes crap, but the meaning is sufficiently clear that the locals in that foreign country you are visiting understand. Thus the audiolingual method is a launchpad for you to teach yourself the language in situ, not necessarily a superior means to score high on a test. This is much like how a child learns language, and it works, providing you actually dive in.
As for the analogy between phonics and coding, I would expect experts to simply look inside "the loop", and then check the initialization, update, and exit conditions for the loop carefully if they sense there is need to parse it out carefully. Of course, they are capable of "phonetically sounding it out" and checking these things in the first place, much like I am capable of phonetically sounding out most any word. Rarely do I do so, though.
I think my best shot is to sign up for the Facebook Rollerball team.
Thanks for your opinion, poseur. You may know a thing or two about throwing together the easy, casual parties (who doesn't?), but the breadth of the topic is well beyond you.
I have a life and things to do that require planning in advance.
Me too, but I reserve that kind of planning work and chores. If I'm going to enjoy life, I can't sit down and plan every detail of my life and accommodate your every detail. If having a regimented life is satisfying to you, I guess, but I can't imagine that most human beings would thrive on an highly structured life.
False Choice. Making commitments has exactly nothing to do with "a regimented life". We are talking about whether it is even within your skillset to make a single social commitment a month and actually show up, short of a genuine emergency (which is why Brooks jokes about "mom has bubonic plague", because of so many fake emergencies). No one is forcing you to make a commitment in any given week. And making 1 or more than 1 is entirely voluntary. But can you do this commitment thing ever without first fantasizing about the excuses you might have to make or how oppressed you might feel? If it is really so hard, the problem is you.
Exactly. If everyone is cancelling 50% of the time near the last minute, you have to schedule 5 things on a Saturday to be reasonably certain of not having anything better to do than watch TV.
On the other hand, attending a party, meeting for brunch in the city, or just chilling in an afternoon, well that hasn't seemed to change. We could blow that off in the past, and we can blow that off now.
Spoken like someone who has never grown up and thrown a real party.
A real host throwing an adult party considers the guest list, who would like hit it off with whom, what kind of food would please everyone, and possible activities to help warm up the guests. As yeses, come in, additional guests might even be invited to make sure everyone can meet someone they have something in common, to avoid the usual cliques making anyone feel left out. That is basically impossible when 25 yeses might mean 15 people showing or 7 people showing. And that can also mean throwing out $400 of untouched food at the end of the event.
The truth is that the skills for throwing parties started to evaporate in GenX, so lots of GenXers do not have a clue. What you may think of as normal may have been normal enough in your savage circle of friends who are lousy entertainers but do not know any better. The millennials are decidedly worse.
"put out a fire" Oh, boy.
IME, half the supposedly awesome firefighters are truly great people and excellent engineers. The other half are proverbial chainsmokers who leave smouldering butts wherever they have been -- they do get a lot of practice fighting fires.
There are enough managers who cannot tell the difference that they are places where people get promotions for crap work and rushing to fix the emergencies they created, not everywhere, but they exist.
It really depends on whether quality work matters.
I believe strongly that we humans have about ~3 hours per day of very focused attention, in which we can effectively deal with genuinely difficult problems. Some people have jobs that are a hard, but even hard jobs might be such that 3 hours of strong focus intermixed with 4 hours of paint-by-numbers programming, plus an hour to handle email, and they are done for the day and have provided good value to their employer.
Some people are doing easy stuff that any intern could do after a couple days mentoring. Well, yes, you might be effective enough crunching away for 12 hours. It is because the stuff you are working on is neither difficult nor important, so turning the crank and provided mediocre quality is acceptable.
Gee, for decades it was SOP to simply call any woman who ever asserted something bad happened to them a slut, because we all "know" bad things do not happen to good girls. Now that the old song does not work anyone, it is because these kinds of allegations are finally gaining traction that we should not believe them.
No, the skepticism has always been there, only the exact arguments why this skepticism today must be believed keep changing, well, a little bit. It is plausible that the pendulum will (or has) swing too far. But I would like to evidence such is the case, rather than just a lot of handwaving.
It is always possible for someone to get unlucky and get lied about. But some people do like to use that as an excuse to live their life dancing ten toes over the line, and then exclaim it was not them but bad luck that got them into trouble when they stumbled just a little. Most of the "unlucky" people are far less than innocent. The fact that there are a very few people who are unlucky and innocent does not tell us anything important.
You can push all of history onto a continuum, and while that is not wrong, it occludes important parts of the story. The rate of innovations has been increasing. With the rise of certain hominid species, it jumped up. With the rise of agriculture, it jumped up much further. With the rise of laws and writing, it jumped up much much further. With the rise of the printing press, it jumped up much much much much further.
Even then, China and the Ottoman Empire had the kernel idea of the steam engine sitting around for centuries and no reason to believe anything would happen with it. But certain capitalist social changes brought the steam engine forward, and then the rate of innovation skyrocketed beyond what anyone had ever dreamed in the previous 300,000 year history of humanity.
... If you can't see how late-stage capitalism has actually worked against the creation of new ideas and innovation and the erosion of social structures and human well-being, you just haven't been paying attention.
There is more than a kernel of truth to that. But let's keep in mind that the migratory hunter gatherers also sometimes thought that bunching people up into fixed agricultural communities degraded the human condition through forms of social control that never existed before. Your complaint has been true about approximately every important innovation since forever. We has so much more technological innovation now, that there are inevitably proportionally more plausible arguments about how our humanity is being taken away.
I am not saying that those arguments are wrong or right. Personally, I think the invention of the smart phone has kicked off a planet wide social experiment that is both positively thrilling and terrifying at the same time. I think we do need to consider these negatives arguments about capitalism within the bigger picture.
The right kind of vest is the fastest weight loss program known to man. Your pounds will suddenly leave you before you can blink.