Solar has a very low capacity factor (~20%-30%) which means we need to find a way to store the electricity.
We have that and we're making it better fast. Batteries are already available at reasonable price points and the cost is falling steadily.
The majority of storage is done thru pumped-hydro.
Some is but that's going to change as solar and becomes more popular. You'll see homes and businesses with battery packs in steadily increasing numbers in the coming decades. It's already cheap enough that I can buy a battery pack to power my home for an entire day for under $10K and the price keeps falling.
Tesla's gigafactory is not going to be able to produce enough batteries for grid level storage.
Why do you presume it will be the only factory producing batteries? It is almost inevitable that there will be more factories like it and probably sooner than you think. Never mind the fact that they already ARE producing batteries for grid storage.
This plan will end up costing trillions and still will not work. It will also will cost trillions in grid improvements and probably tens of trillions in storage. I am sure Musk likes the idea of the US giving him trillions, but I think their are better and cheaper options.
What options do you think are "better and cheaper" in the long run? Nuclear fission will never happen for political reasons if nothing else. Fossil fuels are a dead end that will choke the planet. Fusion doesn't exist yet. Hydro is fine but limited. Geothermal same thing. Seriously, what do you think is better? I think distributed solar and industrial scale wind are easily the least worst option available to most of us. The cost is already competitive and falling fast. Nothing else available is meaningfully cleaner. Nothing else out there is as easy to distribute. We're going to be investing trillions into energy one way or another so why not pick the one that is clean and that we know works?
if you lived in Arizona, that would be great. Where I am, you'd get maybe a quarter to third of the power you'd normally want to use, and that might not be a bad thing at the lower prices that are coming. But what you're proposing is a more a backup or emergency strategy for over half the county.
Not at all. Stop it with the claim that a solution has to be perfect in every respect to be worth doing. Even if rooftop solar doesn't cover 100% of your energy needs it still is a fantastic idea and certainly is more than a backup/emergency idea. I've already done the math and with current technology I could be net zero or better to the grid with my house if I had a solar covered roof and I live in a northern state not noted for intense sun. I'm hardly the only one in that situation. Roofs are nothing but wasted space right now. Rather than covering green fields with solar panels it makes absolute sense to cover roof tops with them. With the cost of solar panels and batteries getting low enough there really is no good argument not to if you can plan for periods of time longer than the current year. Most of the US gets more than enough sunlight to justify rooftop solar as a big part of our energy portfolio. Rooftop PV has an estimated capacity of around 818TWh/year which is enough to cover about 20% of our total energy needs. Total solar capacity is something like 400TWh/year which is over 100X our current total energy usage.
If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,"
We've easily got that much space sitting mostly unused on roofs. Even better it's already right where we need most of the electricity. Obviously Musk and Co are already well aware of this fact. It just requires an investment horizon longer than the end of your nose.
Nope, airports in the US are generally privately-owned/managed locations.
Don't know where you got this idea but this is not true. Most airports in the us are owned by public government entities of one form or another. Airport operations are typically contracted out to private companies. Twenty seconds on google would have cleared that up for you.
Private shopping malls are also free to establish policies that would seem to be in violation of basic constitutional rights - because they are on private property, and because governments are not implementing those policies.
No they do not get to violate your constitutional rights just because it is private property. The extent of their remedies in the event that you haven't committed a crime on their property is to ask you to leave. That's hardly a violation of your constitutional rights.
So the idea was to get the engineers (who are really technicians and troubleshooters in the show; ; the real engineers are back at Mars designing the next-generation starships) to cut corners to come up with something workable even if it's very risky, or to come up with some new approach that takes less time (again, risky).
I'm wondering if you haven't actually worked as an engineer by that statement or if you do you have an exceptionally rare ivory tower job. I've got nearly three decades experience as a working engineer and I can assure you that a good portion of nearly every real world engineer's time is spent troubleshooting and fixing technical problems. Exactly the sort of stuff you are describing on the show. Very few engineers worthy of the title manage to stay back at the home office designing product without getting their hands dirty fixing the inevitable problems that result when their design breaks or is asked to do what it wasn't designed for. Engineers are asked all the time to come up with stop gap solutions as well as ways to same money, time, or other resources. Think Apollo 13. You seriously want to claim those guys were just "technicians and troubleshooters" just because they were coming up with workable-but-risky solutions? The "real engineers" aren't just drawing stuff on a white board in the office - the job is actually much more diverse than that and the good news is that it's much more interesting as a result.
Another part of the engineer's job they don't tell you about in school is how much time you'll spend writing and revising documentation. And it's been my experience that a large portion of the engineers out there are rather bad at this mundane but very important task. They tend to overlook details rather routinely and they forget that they aren't writing primarily for themselves. The point of engineering documentation is to describe something so OTHER PEOPLE can understand what needs to be done efficiently and to the smallest relevant detail. That's something they could teach in colleges but do not for some reason.
Probably not unreasonable by itself. It would be possible to turn it into an unreasonable search depending on what they do with the information. If they automate a deep dive into your background then somewhere along the line they probably have crossed a line violating 4th amendment rights. But merely attaching names to faces in a place where they are already asking for your id anyway probably isn't too big a deal. It just automates basically what they are doing already.
It's because colleges are the most left leaning places in America. I'd bet more American flags are burned at American colleges than in Russia and all middle eastern countries combined.
Possibly true but that's what free speech means. I do find it curious that the most educated parts of the population tend as a general group to lean left in their politics. I think that says something meaningful but I'll leave it to you to fill in the blank.
It's not that republicans hate education.
Some do, most don't. It is true that a LOT of blue collar republicans think people who go to college are "elitist" snobs. Many certainly do not place a high value on scientific education particularly the more virulently bible thumping amongst them. You know, the ones who think prayer in school is a good thing and that "evolution is just a theory". Those folks certainly do not value education very highly.
I think the fact that they made an unqualified idiot like DeVos secretary of education speaks a lot to what republicans value.
They also hate teachers as a collective group because they are staunchly democrat. More specifically teacher's unions fund democrats. That's a major reason why republicans are so eager to pass so called right to work bills - it hurts teacher's unions which as a body seldom support the political right. Has nothing to do with them hating education per-se but it does have a everything to do with them being willing to tear down big parts of the educational system in pursuit of power.
If the internet is analogous to a network of roads, can't the road owners install toll booths to collect toll for certain (high-speed) lanes?
They can but when substantial numbers of roads become toll roads it hurts the economy badly. Roads are a public good. Read up on what that means. Same thing applies to internet delivery. When companies are allowed to discriminate between traffic for their own interest rather that that of the end consumer that is not a good thing.
And incidentally, I have NEVER heard anyone say "phys" or "econ". They might abbreviate it like that in some writing, but it's not spoken.
If you haven't heard someone shorten economics to econ in the spoken language you clearly have never actually studied the subject or been inside of a business school. The word economics is routinely shortened to econ when talking about the subject.
"Maths" is correct. "Math" is what illiterate people say.
"Maths" is what illogical people say who want to sound like they have a lisp. Maths is only "correct" if you live in england or parts of the commonwealth. Say it in the US and they'll look at you like you just grew horns.
he word “mathematics” can be considered as a singular and as a plural noun. Nobody shortens economics or physics.
People shorten the word economics to econ all the flipping time. Wander into any business school for about 20 seconds if you don't believe me. I used the shortened version of physics as an extreme example of why maths is not a contraction.
Mathematics is both singular and plural. Math is also singular and plural AND it is a short version of both mathematics and mathematical. Maths is not a contraction as some here are claiming though it is a form of abbreviation. And frankly it just sounds silly like the speaker has a lisp.
You are claiming it is a contraction, not merely an abbreviation. Typically when you do a contraction you put in an apostrophe to indicate the missing letters. So the proper contraction would be "math's" not "maths" if you want to get pedantic about it. Of course common usage in the UK allows for dropping the apostrophe but that doesn't make it technically correct if you give half a shit about consistent grammar. Mathematics is both singular and plural as it refers to both the subject as a whole (singular) and the components of that subject (plural). Likewise "math" is both singular and plural in the same way. Adding the s on the end does not add any value to the contraction because unlike other contractions (it is = it's != its) it doesn't change the meaning. So why add an unnecessary s?
What really blows your argument out of the water is that it is NOT a contraction. People use maths as a short version of both mathematics and mathematical. So it cannot be a contraction, it has to be something else. To my mind it's just unnecessary complication.
"Mathematics" both singular plural and "mathematic" is not a word, you would shorten it to be conjugated with an s as there is no singular form without one.
Mathematic is not a word but math is the most sensible shortening of the word mathematics. Math also is a proper shortening of the word mathematical. Do you shorten mathematical to mathl? Math is a sensible shortening of both mathematics and mathematical. Maths is not. If you want a contraction then you need to throw an apostrophe in there to indicate letters are missing. (yes we all understand what you mean but english is inconsistent enough without you aiding the process)
Economic is the singular, economics is a plural
Economics is both singular and plural depending on usage Anyway missing the point. You don't shorten Economics to Econs. You don't shorten Physics to Physs. QED it is illogical to shorten Mathematics to Maths.
Finally, yes "I attended a Maths class today" is correct and proper English.
In England maybe. Definitely not in the US. If you say I went to maths class in the US people are going ask you when you developed a lisp.
In high-school tier, math equations are easy to type.
You type derivatives and integrals? Not to mention geometry and trig. What kind of weak math were you taking in high school? And even the equations that are easy to type are generally still easier to write with a pen/stylus.
In college tier, you probably should have a copy of Matlab, Mathematica or some other similar program that makes it easier to type those equations. If not, that's a case to have subsidized software infrastructure.
Why would I buy a heavy duty program like that to take notes? It's faster and more helpful to do it on paper. There isn't a program I've ever seen that is as fast to write equations as a pen and paper. I'd love it if there were one but nobody has made it yet. Not even the current generation tablet computers have nailed that particular problem adequately.
In case of a diagram, there's MsPaint. Or if necessary, you can take said diagram from the textbook instead.
Great, now you want people to take notes in two applications at the same time? No thanks.
Maths is the correct short form of mathematics (notice the "s" on the end of both words) in the English language. Only ignorant Americans say "math", as though it were the only one.
Do you study econs and physs too? Why leave the s on mathematics but not economics or physics or any other word in the language for that matter. The word math is plural and understood to be. Nobody say "I did a math today" because it refers to the subject, not an instance of it.
I believe that note taking is generally a bad thing. At least some brain power has to be diverted from paying attention into taking notes.
Note taking CAN be useful. It just usually isn't and most people do it very poorly. If the material in question is in your book, it's probably a waste of time. Annotate the book or handouts instead of transcribing.
In my grad school they usually just handed out some notes before class which you could then annotate as needed. WAY more helpful than trying to transcribe the discussion. In medical schools they usually assign one person to take notes for the whole class and that person rotates so nobody has to do it more than once or twice. They then work really hard to make a very detailed set of notes which everyone can benefit from and everybody else just spends their effort paying attention.
I would have liked one to take notes with...as that I type WAAAY faster than I can hand write....not to mention even I cannot read my own handwriting 30 minutes later, it's that bad.
Pretty hard to type a diagram or a math equation.
Can they not block internet connectivity in the classrooms?
Nope. Even if they turn off wifi (which they wont) the students still can connect through a cell phone or cellular connection.
You could argue it prepares them for the modern workplace, where people have to learn to concentrate in the face of such distractions.
That only matters if you already know what you are doing and the goal isn't to master the subject material. Distracting students just results in poor quality learning.
If a student is going to bring a computing device into a lecture maybe it should tell them, in real time, how much of their education loan each minute of messing around on facebook etc is costing them.
Why would they give a shit? Especially children who aren't the ones paying anyway?
Other than businesses wanting to sell more laptop computers or students wanting to surf the web during class, who ever claimed computer use during a lecture or seminar would enhance engagement with course content?
FAR too many people think it will help. In some cases it can but the problem is that people think these cases generalize more than they actually do. It's just a modern day version of letting students use a fancy calculator as a crutch to get answers rather than having to do the heavy lifting to actually learn from first principles and gain the intuition that results.
Plus for too many students the computer is just a HUGE distraction. Why would a kid pay attention to a boring history or math class when they could be doing something fun on social media?
Boy are people going to lack back and laugh at these kinds of Luddite posts in ten years.
Luddite? Dude, I was working with this stuff as far back as 20 years ago and think it's so awesome I worked on it full time for nearly 5 years. I just also have actual experience with it so my perspective is tempered by reality. I know what it can do and what it can't and where it is useful. It's not going away but the big money in VR is actually in its application to AR. The direct applications of VR are considerably more limited.
What we're seeing right now is 2D platform gamers telling everyone that 3D graphics is just a fad that will never take off.
No what you are seeing is someone who actually worked with the technology telling you that the use cases and financial payoff for it aren't where you think they are.
Now I get interrogated about what is so damn endearing about strapping this blindbox on my head, and all I can really say is... it's the future whether you want it or not.
Ahh so just because you do it means that everyone else will? Sorry my friend but it doesn't work like that. What will happen is that the technology in that "blindbox" will be used to make some really cool AR applications. Unless someone comes up with some amazing use case that no one has thought of yet, you simply aren't going to see widespread adoption of VR. A few hard core gamers will enjoy it and you'll see some marketing uses but that's probably about it. I think the technology has a bright future but not in the way many VR fanbois imagine.
And your example that people are using smartphones like you used a PC 20 years ago is clearly absurd. They aren't used in the same way or for the same purposes unless you take such a generic perspective as to render the comparison meaningless.
Despite Mark Zuckerberg's early enthusiasm for virtual reality, the technology has stubbornly remained a hard sell for Facebook. Now, in yet another sign that VR is failing to capture the imagination of the public,
I've been saying this for well over a decade and I speak from first hand professional experience in the industry. There is no killer use case for VR among the general public. I spent the better part of 5 years of my career immersed (no pun intended) in VR technology as my day job and it was as obvious then as it is now that there is no big market for it no matter how cheap they make the headsets. Yes it's fun and cool as a demo but it's impractical, expensive, and has no obvious utility in every day life that cannot be served by alternative (albeit not identical) means. A TV with good sound is a good enough substitute for actually being at a sports game or concert for most people most of the time. Few people actually gain much from the added immersion of VR over playing a game through a monitor. Aside from a few tiny niches like flight simulators and some other training and demo applications there simply isn't much utility in VR to most people in every day life. Certainly not enough to invest even a modest sum of money in a VR headset that they will seldom if ever use.
Some of what they are doing with VR will be applicable to AR and AR has HUGE and obvious applications among the general public. So if you think of VR as a research project with AR as the ultimate goal then it's a worthwhile endeavor. If you think of VR as an end unto itself then you have drunk the kool-aid too deeply and need to go to rehab. Never say never but VR is very unlikely to ever gain widespread popularity among the general public.
I was about to disagree with you based on the depth of the gravity well on earth vs. the moon but in reality it would probably be more efficient (in a large scale) to go to the moon, build projectiles, then move them to earth orbit since that transfer requires much less energy.
We don't have to involve the moon at all to have more than enough firepower to destroy earth. I fail to see how the efficiency the orbital mechanics would be significant in a shooting war when the warheads coming from Earth are more than adequate to wipe out civilization already without any of the bother of building a moon base. While the same missile shot from the moon could reach earth a bit faster and require less energy, it wouldn't get to earth quick enough to prevent a retaliatory launch so no tactical advantage is gained that I can see.
But for smaller scales, it's far more efficient to just go to earth orbit and drop things back down. Not that it's especially efficient anyway of course. It just doesn't involve nuclear fallout if you use the weapons.
Pretty much exactly my point. Even if we had an extensive infrastructure on the moon it would still remain true I think.
Any Chinese person I know would scoff at that threat, only Americans are so dedicated to law and order.
Americans aren't the ones with the giant firewall. (Our government is more subtly evil in how it spys on us) You seem to have missed the point. The point isn't that the Chinese government will catch everyone, merely that they will deter VPNs through threats of jail and/or other punishment. I'm sure lots of people will ignore the laws but the stakes just got higher.
Breaking the law is a way of life in many places (and in some places in the US, ask any NYer).
Every citizen breaks the law dozens of times a day. Nevertheless the punishments for some "crimes" are much harsher depending on the locale. China punishes some stuff harshly that wouldn't even be a crime in the US, particularly political dissension.
Also, if they block VPNs, then the people will just start tunnelling over SSH. Can they block all VPN an SSH connections? That would basically disable a huge portion of the internet.
They don't have to. They just put you in jail or worse you if they catch you using a VPN.
And our debt is nearly equal to that. And we are adding to that debt at a rate of approximately the entire budget of the US military EVERY YEAR. Basically we are borrowing the entire cost of the US military every single year which we then have to repay with interest. You think there isn't an opportunity cost that arises from that? Just because the US has a large GDP doesn't mean it is infinite or that we can't outspend our means.
One. Literally one million. A quick search shows that adding up the top 9 contracters is under 900,000 people, and a large portion of each of those companies actually sits outside the defense industry.
You have to add in the supply chain for those contractors which I assure you is considerably larger than 1 million people. The actual size of the impact of defense spending is a substantially larger percent of our economy than the 4% of GDP we spend on the federal military budget. Some military spending is necessary and proper. When that spending exceeds the military spending of the next 8 largest countries combined it's pretty hard to argue that we are being responsible with taxpayer money.
Again, our GDP is almost 18 trillion dollars. That's a lot of "nothing" we make. Our defense budget is only about 3.3% of that. For supporting 1% of the population, it's a little disproportionate, but not unreasonable.
It's absolutely unreasonable when we have congress running a $600 Billion deficit every year and they are talking about taking away health care from millions of people including the poor and elderly. Much of the money we spend on the military does not improve our society. It's just money wasted on weapons and combat resources we don't need and won't use.
Slashdot Mirror
Solar has a very low capacity factor (~20%-30%) which means we need to find a way to store the electricity.
We have that and we're making it better fast. Batteries are already available at reasonable price points and the cost is falling steadily.
The majority of storage is done thru pumped-hydro.
Some is but that's going to change as solar and becomes more popular. You'll see homes and businesses with battery packs in steadily increasing numbers in the coming decades. It's already cheap enough that I can buy a battery pack to power my home for an entire day for under $10K and the price keeps falling.
Tesla's gigafactory is not going to be able to produce enough batteries for grid level storage.
Why do you presume it will be the only factory producing batteries? It is almost inevitable that there will be more factories like it and probably sooner than you think. Never mind the fact that they already ARE producing batteries for grid storage.
This plan will end up costing trillions and still will not work. It will also will cost trillions in grid improvements and probably tens of trillions in storage. I am sure Musk likes the idea of the US giving him trillions, but I think their are better and cheaper options.
What options do you think are "better and cheaper" in the long run? Nuclear fission will never happen for political reasons if nothing else. Fossil fuels are a dead end that will choke the planet. Fusion doesn't exist yet. Hydro is fine but limited. Geothermal same thing. Seriously, what do you think is better? I think distributed solar and industrial scale wind are easily the least worst option available to most of us. The cost is already competitive and falling fast. Nothing else available is meaningfully cleaner. Nothing else out there is as easy to distribute. We're going to be investing trillions into energy one way or another so why not pick the one that is clean and that we know works?
if you lived in Arizona, that would be great. Where I am, you'd get maybe a quarter to third of the power you'd normally want to use, and that might not be a bad thing at the lower prices that are coming. But what you're proposing is a more a backup or emergency strategy for over half the county.
Not at all. Stop it with the claim that a solution has to be perfect in every respect to be worth doing. Even if rooftop solar doesn't cover 100% of your energy needs it still is a fantastic idea and certainly is more than a backup/emergency idea. I've already done the math and with current technology I could be net zero or better to the grid with my house if I had a solar covered roof and I live in a northern state not noted for intense sun. I'm hardly the only one in that situation. Roofs are nothing but wasted space right now. Rather than covering green fields with solar panels it makes absolute sense to cover roof tops with them. With the cost of solar panels and batteries getting low enough there really is no good argument not to if you can plan for periods of time longer than the current year. Most of the US gets more than enough sunlight to justify rooftop solar as a big part of our energy portfolio. Rooftop PV has an estimated capacity of around 818TWh/year which is enough to cover about 20% of our total energy needs. Total solar capacity is something like 400TWh/year which is over 100X our current total energy usage.
If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,"
We've easily got that much space sitting mostly unused on roofs. Even better it's already right where we need most of the electricity. Obviously Musk and Co are already well aware of this fact. It just requires an investment horizon longer than the end of your nose.
Nope, airports in the US are generally privately-owned/managed locations.
Don't know where you got this idea but this is not true. Most airports in the us are owned by public government entities of one form or another. Airport operations are typically contracted out to private companies. Twenty seconds on google would have cleared that up for you.
Private shopping malls are also free to establish policies that would seem to be in violation of basic constitutional rights - because they are on private property, and because governments are not implementing those policies.
No they do not get to violate your constitutional rights just because it is private property. The extent of their remedies in the event that you haven't committed a crime on their property is to ask you to leave. That's hardly a violation of your constitutional rights.
So the idea was to get the engineers (who are really technicians and troubleshooters in the show; ; the real engineers are back at Mars designing the next-generation starships) to cut corners to come up with something workable even if it's very risky, or to come up with some new approach that takes less time (again, risky).
I'm wondering if you haven't actually worked as an engineer by that statement or if you do you have an exceptionally rare ivory tower job. I've got nearly three decades experience as a working engineer and I can assure you that a good portion of nearly every real world engineer's time is spent troubleshooting and fixing technical problems. Exactly the sort of stuff you are describing on the show. Very few engineers worthy of the title manage to stay back at the home office designing product without getting their hands dirty fixing the inevitable problems that result when their design breaks or is asked to do what it wasn't designed for. Engineers are asked all the time to come up with stop gap solutions as well as ways to same money, time, or other resources. Think Apollo 13. You seriously want to claim those guys were just "technicians and troubleshooters" just because they were coming up with workable-but-risky solutions? The "real engineers" aren't just drawing stuff on a white board in the office - the job is actually much more diverse than that and the good news is that it's much more interesting as a result.
Another part of the engineer's job they don't tell you about in school is how much time you'll spend writing and revising documentation. And it's been my experience that a large portion of the engineers out there are rather bad at this mundane but very important task. They tend to overlook details rather routinely and they forget that they aren't writing primarily for themselves. The point of engineering documentation is to describe something so OTHER PEOPLE can understand what needs to be done efficiently and to the smallest relevant detail. That's something they could teach in colleges but do not for some reason.
Probably not unreasonable by itself. It would be possible to turn it into an unreasonable search depending on what they do with the information. If they automate a deep dive into your background then somewhere along the line they probably have crossed a line violating 4th amendment rights. But merely attaching names to faces in a place where they are already asking for your id anyway probably isn't too big a deal. It just automates basically what they are doing already.
It's because colleges are the most left leaning places in America. I'd bet more American flags are burned at American colleges than in Russia and all middle eastern countries combined.
Possibly true but that's what free speech means. I do find it curious that the most educated parts of the population tend as a general group to lean left in their politics. I think that says something meaningful but I'll leave it to you to fill in the blank.
It's not that republicans hate education.
Some do, most don't. It is true that a LOT of blue collar republicans think people who go to college are "elitist" snobs. Many certainly do not place a high value on scientific education particularly the more virulently bible thumping amongst them. You know, the ones who think prayer in school is a good thing and that "evolution is just a theory". Those folks certainly do not value education very highly.
I think the fact that they made an unqualified idiot like DeVos secretary of education speaks a lot to what republicans value.
They also hate teachers as a collective group because they are staunchly democrat. More specifically teacher's unions fund democrats. That's a major reason why republicans are so eager to pass so called right to work bills - it hurts teacher's unions which as a body seldom support the political right. Has nothing to do with them hating education per-se but it does have a everything to do with them being willing to tear down big parts of the educational system in pursuit of power.
If the internet is analogous to a network of roads, can't the road owners install toll booths to collect toll for certain (high-speed) lanes?
They can but when substantial numbers of roads become toll roads it hurts the economy badly. Roads are a public good. Read up on what that means. Same thing applies to internet delivery. When companies are allowed to discriminate between traffic for their own interest rather that that of the end consumer that is not a good thing.
And incidentally, I have NEVER heard anyone say "phys" or "econ". They might abbreviate it like that in some writing, but it's not spoken.
If you haven't heard someone shorten economics to econ in the spoken language you clearly have never actually studied the subject or been inside of a business school. The word economics is routinely shortened to econ when talking about the subject.
"Maths" is correct. "Math" is what illiterate people say.
"Maths" is what illogical people say who want to sound like they have a lisp. Maths is only "correct" if you live in england or parts of the commonwealth. Say it in the US and they'll look at you like you just grew horns.
he word “mathematics” can be considered as a singular and as a plural noun. Nobody shortens economics or physics.
People shorten the word economics to econ all the flipping time. Wander into any business school for about 20 seconds if you don't believe me. I used the shortened version of physics as an extreme example of why maths is not a contraction.
Mathematics is both singular and plural. Math is also singular and plural AND it is a short version of both mathematics and mathematical. Maths is not a contraction as some here are claiming though it is a form of abbreviation. And frankly it just sounds silly like the speaker has a lisp.
Maths is the correct abbreviation
You are claiming it is a contraction, not merely an abbreviation. Typically when you do a contraction you put in an apostrophe to indicate the missing letters. So the proper contraction would be "math's" not "maths" if you want to get pedantic about it. Of course common usage in the UK allows for dropping the apostrophe but that doesn't make it technically correct if you give half a shit about consistent grammar. Mathematics is both singular and plural as it refers to both the subject as a whole (singular) and the components of that subject (plural). Likewise "math" is both singular and plural in the same way. Adding the s on the end does not add any value to the contraction because unlike other contractions (it is = it's != its) it doesn't change the meaning. So why add an unnecessary s?
What really blows your argument out of the water is that it is NOT a contraction. People use maths as a short version of both mathematics and mathematical. So it cannot be a contraction, it has to be something else. To my mind it's just unnecessary complication.
"Mathematics" both singular plural and "mathematic" is not a word, you would shorten it to be conjugated with an s as there is no singular form without one.
Mathematic is not a word but math is the most sensible shortening of the word mathematics. Math also is a proper shortening of the word mathematical. Do you shorten mathematical to mathl? Math is a sensible shortening of both mathematics and mathematical. Maths is not. If you want a contraction then you need to throw an apostrophe in there to indicate letters are missing. (yes we all understand what you mean but english is inconsistent enough without you aiding the process)
Economic is the singular, economics is a plural
Economics is both singular and plural depending on usage Anyway missing the point. You don't shorten Economics to Econs. You don't shorten Physics to Physs. QED it is illogical to shorten Mathematics to Maths.
Finally, yes "I attended a Maths class today" is correct and proper English.
In England maybe. Definitely not in the US. If you say I went to maths class in the US people are going ask you when you developed a lisp.
In high-school tier, math equations are easy to type.
You type derivatives and integrals? Not to mention geometry and trig. What kind of weak math were you taking in high school? And even the equations that are easy to type are generally still easier to write with a pen/stylus.
In college tier, you probably should have a copy of Matlab, Mathematica or some other similar program that makes it easier to type those equations. If not, that's a case to have subsidized software infrastructure.
Why would I buy a heavy duty program like that to take notes? It's faster and more helpful to do it on paper. There isn't a program I've ever seen that is as fast to write equations as a pen and paper. I'd love it if there were one but nobody has made it yet. Not even the current generation tablet computers have nailed that particular problem adequately.
In case of a diagram, there's MsPaint. Or if necessary, you can take said diagram from the textbook instead.
Great, now you want people to take notes in two applications at the same time? No thanks.
Maths is the correct short form of mathematics (notice the "s" on the end of both words) in the English language. Only ignorant Americans say "math", as though it were the only one.
Do you study econs and physs too? Why leave the s on mathematics but not economics or physics or any other word in the language for that matter. The word math is plural and understood to be. Nobody say "I did a math today" because it refers to the subject, not an instance of it.
I believe that note taking is generally a bad thing. At least some brain power has to be diverted from paying attention into taking notes.
Note taking CAN be useful. It just usually isn't and most people do it very poorly. If the material in question is in your book, it's probably a waste of time. Annotate the book or handouts instead of transcribing.
In my grad school they usually just handed out some notes before class which you could then annotate as needed. WAY more helpful than trying to transcribe the discussion. In medical schools they usually assign one person to take notes for the whole class and that person rotates so nobody has to do it more than once or twice. They then work really hard to make a very detailed set of notes which everyone can benefit from and everybody else just spends their effort paying attention.
If that's the case why are you turning up?
Exactly my point.
I would have liked one to take notes with...as that I type WAAAY faster than I can hand write....not to mention even I cannot read my own handwriting 30 minutes later, it's that bad.
Pretty hard to type a diagram or a math equation.
Can they not block internet connectivity in the classrooms?
Nope. Even if they turn off wifi (which they wont) the students still can connect through a cell phone or cellular connection.
You could argue it prepares them for the modern workplace, where people have to learn to concentrate in the face of such distractions.
That only matters if you already know what you are doing and the goal isn't to master the subject material. Distracting students just results in poor quality learning.
If a student is going to bring a computing device into a lecture maybe it should tell them, in real time, how much of their education loan each minute of messing around on facebook etc is costing them.
Why would they give a shit? Especially children who aren't the ones paying anyway?
Other than businesses wanting to sell more laptop computers or students wanting to surf the web during class, who ever claimed computer use during a lecture or seminar would enhance engagement with course content?
FAR too many people think it will help. In some cases it can but the problem is that people think these cases generalize more than they actually do. It's just a modern day version of letting students use a fancy calculator as a crutch to get answers rather than having to do the heavy lifting to actually learn from first principles and gain the intuition that results.
Plus for too many students the computer is just a HUGE distraction. Why would a kid pay attention to a boring history or math class when they could be doing something fun on social media?
Boy are people going to lack back and laugh at these kinds of Luddite posts in ten years.
Luddite? Dude, I was working with this stuff as far back as 20 years ago and think it's so awesome I worked on it full time for nearly 5 years. I just also have actual experience with it so my perspective is tempered by reality. I know what it can do and what it can't and where it is useful. It's not going away but the big money in VR is actually in its application to AR. The direct applications of VR are considerably more limited.
What we're seeing right now is 2D platform gamers telling everyone that 3D graphics is just a fad that will never take off.
No what you are seeing is someone who actually worked with the technology telling you that the use cases and financial payoff for it aren't where you think they are.
Now I get interrogated about what is so damn endearing about strapping this blindbox on my head, and all I can really say is ... it's the future whether you want it or not.
Ahh so just because you do it means that everyone else will? Sorry my friend but it doesn't work like that. What will happen is that the technology in that "blindbox" will be used to make some really cool AR applications. Unless someone comes up with some amazing use case that no one has thought of yet, you simply aren't going to see widespread adoption of VR. A few hard core gamers will enjoy it and you'll see some marketing uses but that's probably about it. I think the technology has a bright future but not in the way many VR fanbois imagine.
And your example that people are using smartphones like you used a PC 20 years ago is clearly absurd. They aren't used in the same way or for the same purposes unless you take such a generic perspective as to render the comparison meaningless.
Despite Mark Zuckerberg's early enthusiasm for virtual reality, the technology has stubbornly remained a hard sell for Facebook. Now, in yet another sign that VR is failing to capture the imagination of the public,
I've been saying this for well over a decade and I speak from first hand professional experience in the industry. There is no killer use case for VR among the general public. I spent the better part of 5 years of my career immersed (no pun intended) in VR technology as my day job and it was as obvious then as it is now that there is no big market for it no matter how cheap they make the headsets. Yes it's fun and cool as a demo but it's impractical, expensive, and has no obvious utility in every day life that cannot be served by alternative (albeit not identical) means. A TV with good sound is a good enough substitute for actually being at a sports game or concert for most people most of the time. Few people actually gain much from the added immersion of VR over playing a game through a monitor. Aside from a few tiny niches like flight simulators and some other training and demo applications there simply isn't much utility in VR to most people in every day life. Certainly not enough to invest even a modest sum of money in a VR headset that they will seldom if ever use.
Some of what they are doing with VR will be applicable to AR and AR has HUGE and obvious applications among the general public. So if you think of VR as a research project with AR as the ultimate goal then it's a worthwhile endeavor. If you think of VR as an end unto itself then you have drunk the kool-aid too deeply and need to go to rehab. Never say never but VR is very unlikely to ever gain widespread popularity among the general public.
I was about to disagree with you based on the depth of the gravity well on earth vs. the moon but in reality it would probably be more efficient (in a large scale) to go to the moon, build projectiles, then move them to earth orbit since that transfer requires much less energy.
We don't have to involve the moon at all to have more than enough firepower to destroy earth. I fail to see how the efficiency the orbital mechanics would be significant in a shooting war when the warheads coming from Earth are more than adequate to wipe out civilization already without any of the bother of building a moon base. While the same missile shot from the moon could reach earth a bit faster and require less energy, it wouldn't get to earth quick enough to prevent a retaliatory launch so no tactical advantage is gained that I can see.
But for smaller scales, it's far more efficient to just go to earth orbit and drop things back down. Not that it's especially efficient anyway of course. It just doesn't involve nuclear fallout if you use the weapons.
Pretty much exactly my point. Even if we had an extensive infrastructure on the moon it would still remain true I think.
Any Chinese person I know would scoff at that threat, only Americans are so dedicated to law and order.
Americans aren't the ones with the giant firewall. (Our government is more subtly evil in how it spys on us) You seem to have missed the point. The point isn't that the Chinese government will catch everyone, merely that they will deter VPNs through threats of jail and/or other punishment. I'm sure lots of people will ignore the laws but the stakes just got higher.
Breaking the law is a way of life in many places (and in some places in the US, ask any NYer).
Every citizen breaks the law dozens of times a day. Nevertheless the punishments for some "crimes" are much harsher depending on the locale. China punishes some stuff harshly that wouldn't even be a crime in the US, particularly political dissension.
Also, if they block VPNs, then the people will just start tunnelling over SSH. Can they block all VPN an SSH connections? That would basically disable a huge portion of the internet.
They don't have to. They just put you in jail or worse you if they catch you using a VPN.
Our GDP is almost 18 trillion dollars.
And our debt is nearly equal to that. And we are adding to that debt at a rate of approximately the entire budget of the US military EVERY YEAR. Basically we are borrowing the entire cost of the US military every single year which we then have to repay with interest. You think there isn't an opportunity cost that arises from that? Just because the US has a large GDP doesn't mean it is infinite or that we can't outspend our means.
One. Literally one million. A quick search shows that adding up the top 9 contracters is under 900,000 people, and a large portion of each of those companies actually sits outside the defense industry.
You have to add in the supply chain for those contractors which I assure you is considerably larger than 1 million people. The actual size of the impact of defense spending is a substantially larger percent of our economy than the 4% of GDP we spend on the federal military budget. Some military spending is necessary and proper. When that spending exceeds the military spending of the next 8 largest countries combined it's pretty hard to argue that we are being responsible with taxpayer money.
Again, our GDP is almost 18 trillion dollars. That's a lot of "nothing" we make. Our defense budget is only about 3.3% of that. For supporting 1% of the population, it's a little disproportionate, but not unreasonable.
It's absolutely unreasonable when we have congress running a $600 Billion deficit every year and they are talking about taking away health care from millions of people including the poor and elderly. Much of the money we spend on the military does not improve our society. It's just money wasted on weapons and combat resources we don't need and won't use.