I can't agree more. Before turning 6, my daughter has done quote a few "disruptive" experiments (OMG WON'T THEY HURT THEMSELVES OR BURN DOWN THE SCHOOL THE LITTLE TERRORISTS):
- melting and boiling kitchen salt (800C and 1400C respectively), - burning wood with sunlight focused with a Fresnel lens (no, we didn't burn the freakin' bugs, she values life ya know), - melting concrete driveway with sunlight focused from a tad larger Fresnel lens, - testing a diode made out of a lightbulb immersed in heated up kitchen salt, - deforming cheap aluminum pans placed on a coil pulsed from a capacitor storage bank holding about 1kJ of energy, - learning about effects of unilateral restriction to the brain perfusion while monitoring daddy with a custom pletysmograph, - learning about effects of electrical nerve and muscle stimulation (using a battery powered stimulator/EMG recorder that would play back the slowed-down recorded EMG via a speaker after every stimulation pulse (or group in case averaging was used): you could "hear" the conduction speed by moving the stimulating electrode farther up and hearing the response "burp" getting more and more delayed), - blowing up soap bubbles filled with H2, O2, and the mixture of the two.
Those were perhaps the most "hair rising" ones. With each experiment we'd do some measurements to underscore physical reality (cooling law, existence of thermal mass, existence of polarized electric charge carriers, some hydraulic laws, finite speed of neural conduction, etc.). I'm not claiming she could recite all that in the middle of the night, but little-by-little she is getting the fundamentals needed not to take every piece of made up crap from talking heads at face value.
Are you in charge or not? Whatever the skippers expect you to do, is their problem, not yours. You don't have to "deal" with tardy or absent. Ignore the dimwits, grade appropriately, have them repeat the year if they so deserve.
You missed my point. I claim you can complete a year of high school while being 49% absent, without missing out on anything of importance. I claim I have learned no less than I'd have learned were I there for every class of every school day.
I can't see how some arbitrary number can be effective in and of itself. It's the effort that's effective, not a checkmark in the student register. You don't put the effort, and you become a stereotypical dropout. If you misdirect your effort (not having learned how to learn), you become a teacher's pet who has 99.9% attendance and can't get into college. Had both kinds for classmates throughout the grade school.
U.S. has a rather weird way of recording attendance. The school district we live in measures attendance in half-day increments. A half-day doesn't count if you are absent for more than 30 minutes. I kid you not. In Poland, in grades 4 and up, attendance was taken in the student register once per lesson. Perhaps it's a huge collective waste of time, but how else can one do it while staying fair?
One bit I left out: IIRC in Poland the attendance was counted per subject. Say if there was one history lesson (hour) per week in a 35 week school year, you had to attend at least 13 lessons. Otherwise you'd fail that single subject and that was enough to have to repeat the school year. I'm not sure if this lack of subject attendance implied that you got a compulsory failing grade in spite of positive test/homework grades, or if it merely caused you not to be promoted to the next grade in spite of having all passing individual grades. I believe the latter was the case.
Not having the pleasure of going through this ordeal, I'm not exactly sure how, when repeating a school year, did they count repeat grades for subjects you already got a passing grade for. I'm also unsure whether you had to retake all the other subjects you already passed in given grade. Maybe they expected you to audit them only. It was almost 2 decades ago...
I agree with you that not having basic knowledge in science makes it hard to even reasonably fulfill your civic duties: how can you vote if you can't filter out the substance (or lack thereof) of politics of the candidates you vote for? Heck, it's very hard to be a competent citizen or politician if you have no clue about the basic workings of modern communications and computer systems.
Alas, I disagree that there is a lot to be gained from the teachings of history. I find the most widely circulated arguments there be vacuous and unimpressive. You don't need to know there were a 100 dead tyrants before you to figure out you're seeing one. Experience in past events can only carry you so far.
So if one participates in a discussion, that's "doing nothing with one's life" according to you? And you see no problem in that line of reasoning? You win 5 failed internets.
As an educator, it's your right and responsibility to lobby to change fucked up laws. And truancy laws are truly overboard in the U.S. Change the laws and you won't have to bleed tax money on court proceedings, sending truancy officers, etc. It's really simple -- don't complain of it if you do nothing to change it.
I generally find the low unexcused absence threshold in the U.S. to be overboard, by an order of magnitude at least, or maybe two. When I was in 11th grade of high school in Poland, I had 51% attendance rate. You'd get to repeat the grade if it dropped to 50% or less. That was fair, IMHO. I don't think I turned out all that bad, nor do I think I missed out on much. U.S. schools seem to be designed like prisons with "voluntary" attendance.
Never mind that the U.S. school system on one hand tries to promote attendance, on another -- in spite of itself -- also promotes expulsion and suspension as disciplinary aids. Every time I hear that, it's a WTF?! moment to me. If a student messes up, make them work more, not less!
What's especially puzzling is that if, say, your parents decide not to let you go to school, they may lose custody of you. OTOH, when the school district decides they don't want you anymore, it's fine and dandy. Our former school district's superintendent saw no problem with that, citing that state law forces their hand, too. Then I asked her: what did she personally do to influence a change in state law, to get rid of expulsion/suspension as disciplinary measures, and to promote/reinforce attendance instead? She seemed puzzled that I'd expect her to do something about changing a law that she pretended to disagree with (the radio show she participated in was about promoting attendance). It was like Hypocrisy 101.
xkcd would disagree. It seems that getting to the LEO (Shuttle/ISS altitude) seems to get you about 1/6th of the way there, in terms of energy expenditure. Going back is much easier, of course -- about 20x so.
You mean you were on a ship and didn't have a way of restoring the system without contact with the world? And how's that HP's fault? I agree that 200MB drivers are egregious, but in this case the fault was all yours.
Yes, that's a problem when it comes to Qt. Because I don't particularly care to have to open-source my changes to Qt. I want to pay for the right not to have to do that, even.
Yeah, and when Nokia abandons Qt, who is going to develop it? It'll be impossible to re-create TrollTech as a business without having full rights to the codebase. You can't exactly live off LGPL'd Qt...
Qt is unlikely to get major development done by unpaid volunteers at a pace that Trolls/Nokia could pull off with paying experienced developers. Remember that Qt is chasing the competition and OS releases all the time. And they have to add new features/APIs, too. Just look how long it took wxWidgets to get 2.9.1 the release out that can be considered "good enough" for 64 bit OS X using Cocoa.
Into its own project? You mean as in an open source fork? You have a big inheritance I could dip into as well? Because you know, those developers have to be paid somehow. Qt's future is in a "small", focused business. TrollTech was exactly what Qt needed to thrive. Nokia was a pointless diversion. Sure the original owners/investors got more than their money's worth on the sale, but so far the technical and licensing direction where Nokia is taking Qt is a growing disaster.
Besides, there are benefits to commercial customers of not having to open-source their changes to Qt. Not having that option could be a big impediment to commercial adoption of a GPL/LGPL fork, even if the latter was technically superior.
If I'm a commercial vendor who depends on Qt, I want to be able to pay for the rights to use it in a closed-source fashion. If I change, say, Qt's event dispatcher so that it can coalesce arbitrary events, this may give me a competitive advantage and I may not want to distribute the changes. This is just an example.
And I'm depending on Qt being actively developed with new features to help me stay competitive. Just the fact that something is open source doesn't mean it's going to develop itself, right?
TrollTech methinks did a way better job managing Qt both technically and "politically" than Nokia. I think that LGPL-ing Qt was a mistake. Anyway, Nokia or a spinoff company may well stop offering new versions under that license. As far as I'm concerned, GPL and commercial are perfectly suitable. About the only good thing about LGPL was that we could stop paying Nokia. We had no problems paying TrollTech, but feeding the big corporate beast? No thanks. As soon as Qt is spun-off, I'll be more than happy to subscribe for a couple seats.
I don't personally care much for a Qt fork, because it can only be an open-source fork and no one will pay enough money for it to run a company to do the development.
There needs to be a spin-off company, say TrollRoll or somesuch that will acquire the full commercial rights and will be able to offer commercial licenses.
Qt desperately needs to be spun off into its own company. It's a great cross-platform framework without any clear contender. I develop several applications at work using Qt and there is no alternative. I need my stuff to run on OS X and Windows, and I'm using pretty much all that Qt gives, at least when it comes to the graphics scene framework and model/view system. The oft-repeated alternatives of GTK and wxWindows just aren't anywhere near where I'd need them to be.
We used to pay for Qt, but once Nokia took over we figured: why feed the beast? As soon as Qt would be spun-off, we'd begin paying again for two commercial licenses...
Either way, you are crazy for using both feet because you really are likely to hit both pedals in the case of a panicked stop
Never happened to me and I had a few involuntary close calls. I don't buy the possibility, sorry. Could happen if I was getting a seizure of some sort. Normally -- no way. As I've said in the post you replied to: with two feet on two pedals, I use the left foot to monitor that the right one doesn't press on brake when it shouldn't, and vice versa: right foot makes sure that when the brake goes down, accelerator doesn't follow. It's very, very obvious when cross-actuation happens. You just have to get used to it and you then pick it up by reflex action.
if you used cruise control on the highway
LOL, good luck driving in downtown Chicago during normal commute rush hour with cruise control.
Much good will that do to you in a hybrid vehicle -- cutting fuel pump power, that is. You need to have safe stop functionality in the motor controller, too. I do agree that the ignition switch/button and the elements it controls (safe stop circuitry in the controller, fuel pump solenoid) should be monitored and all rated to SIL-3. The communications path between the elements can well be digital.
To give you an idea of how much the components would cost if you wanted to implement it all by yourself as a safety mod to an existing car: on the order of $2000, give or take for brand new components. With luck on eBay you could get it for 30% of the price. That's for the following (all safety rated, mind you):
- (1) safety PLC with at least 3xDI and 5xDO (DO must be via monitored contacts of course) - (1) 2xNC ignition switch with extra contacts to stand-in for existing switch - (1) SPST monitored contactor for fuel pump - (1) SPST monitored contactor that can interrupt DC going to motor controller (you need rating on the order of 200ADC, that's no small feat) - crimp terminals to attach battery wires to the contactor
Making it in larger volume would of course shave on the cost, but we're still talking industrial components that would have to be redesigned for automotive use. They would still cost around $500 per vehicle I bet.
To avoid gaining unwanted speed in poor weather you simply trade a bit of fuel efficiency for safety. You upshift. Sane automatic transmissions offer wet/winter modes. You push a button and you're done. This also prevents you from engine braking too hard as to lose traction.
I'd think that the senior faculty member could be potentially to blame for that? If my wife cheated on me, I'd first have a hard look in the mirror. Humility and all that.
Those E-stop systems are rated by the same agencies that rate your electromechanical E-Stop switches. Those are not overnight hacks, the code running on those devices is often formally proven to be correct.
Besides, there is plenty of machinery where an electromechanical E-Stop that removes power would result in sure destruction. There are machines that you can't just safely stop by removing power. To a point where there are redundant, diverse drive/actuator systems that get activated to safely stop the machine. Some of those are designed to actively harvest the power from the spinning-down system (using regenerative drives) to keep the shut-down function running when power feeds and UPSes are down.
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I can't agree more. Before turning 6, my daughter has done quote a few "disruptive" experiments (OMG WON'T THEY HURT THEMSELVES OR BURN DOWN THE SCHOOL THE LITTLE TERRORISTS):
- melting and boiling kitchen salt (800C and 1400C respectively),
- burning wood with sunlight focused with a Fresnel lens (no, we didn't burn the freakin' bugs, she values life ya know),
- melting concrete driveway with sunlight focused from a tad larger Fresnel lens,
- testing a diode made out of a lightbulb immersed in heated up kitchen salt,
- deforming cheap aluminum pans placed on a coil pulsed from a capacitor storage bank holding about 1kJ of energy,
- learning about effects of unilateral restriction to the brain perfusion while monitoring daddy with a custom pletysmograph,
- learning about effects of electrical nerve and muscle stimulation (using a battery powered stimulator/EMG recorder that would play back the slowed-down recorded EMG via a speaker after every stimulation pulse (or group in case averaging was used): you could "hear" the conduction speed by moving the stimulating electrode farther up and hearing the response "burp" getting more and more delayed),
- blowing up soap bubbles filled with H2, O2, and the mixture of the two.
Those were perhaps the most "hair rising" ones. With each experiment we'd do some measurements to underscore physical reality (cooling law, existence of thermal mass, existence of polarized electric charge carriers, some hydraulic laws, finite speed of neural conduction, etc.). I'm not claiming she could recite all that in the middle of the night, but little-by-little she is getting the fundamentals needed not to take every piece of made up crap from talking heads at face value.
Are you in charge or not? Whatever the skippers expect you to do, is their problem, not yours. You don't have to "deal" with tardy or absent. Ignore the dimwits, grade appropriately, have them repeat the year if they so deserve.
You missed my point. I claim you can complete a year of high school while being 49% absent, without missing out on anything of importance. I claim I have learned no less than I'd have learned were I there for every class of every school day.
I can't see how some arbitrary number can be effective in and of itself. It's the effort that's effective, not a checkmark in the student register. You don't put the effort, and you become a stereotypical dropout. If you misdirect your effort (not having learned how to learn), you become a teacher's pet who has 99.9% attendance and can't get into college. Had both kinds for classmates throughout the grade school.
U.S. has a rather weird way of recording attendance. The school district we live in measures attendance in half-day increments. A half-day doesn't count if you are absent for more than 30 minutes. I kid you not. In Poland, in grades 4 and up, attendance was taken in the student register once per lesson. Perhaps it's a huge collective waste of time, but how else can one do it while staying fair?
One bit I left out: IIRC in Poland the attendance was counted per subject. Say if there was one history lesson (hour) per week in a 35 week school year, you had to attend at least 13 lessons. Otherwise you'd fail that single subject and that was enough to have to repeat the school year. I'm not sure if this lack of subject attendance implied that you got a compulsory failing grade in spite of positive test/homework grades, or if it merely caused you not to be promoted to the next grade in spite of having all passing individual grades. I believe the latter was the case.
Not having the pleasure of going through this ordeal, I'm not exactly sure how, when repeating a school year, did they count repeat grades for subjects you already got a passing grade for. I'm also unsure whether you had to retake all the other subjects you already passed in given grade. Maybe they expected you to audit them only. It was almost 2 decades ago...
I agree with you that not having basic knowledge in science makes it hard to even reasonably fulfill your civic duties: how can you vote if you can't filter out the substance (or lack thereof) of politics of the candidates you vote for? Heck, it's very hard to be a competent citizen or politician if you have no clue about the basic workings of modern communications and computer systems.
Alas, I disagree that there is a lot to be gained from the teachings of history. I find the most widely circulated arguments there be vacuous and unimpressive. You don't need to know there were a 100 dead tyrants before you to figure out you're seeing one. Experience in past events can only carry you so far.
Couldn't agree more. You can be late and still be civilized about it. Teachers can, too. If they don't -- WTF blame it on the student?
So if one participates in a discussion, that's "doing nothing with one's life" according to you? And you see no problem in that line of reasoning? You win 5 failed internets.
As an educator, it's your right and responsibility to lobby to change fucked up laws. And truancy laws are truly overboard in the U.S. Change the laws and you won't have to bleed tax money on court proceedings, sending truancy officers, etc. It's really simple -- don't complain of it if you do nothing to change it.
I generally find the low unexcused absence threshold in the U.S. to be overboard, by an order of magnitude at least, or maybe two. When I was in 11th grade of high school in Poland, I had 51% attendance rate. You'd get to repeat the grade if it dropped to 50% or less. That was fair, IMHO. I don't think I turned out all that bad, nor do I think I missed out on much. U.S. schools seem to be designed like prisons with "voluntary" attendance.
Never mind that the U.S. school system on one hand tries to promote attendance, on another -- in spite of itself -- also promotes expulsion and suspension as disciplinary aids. Every time I hear that, it's a WTF?! moment to me. If a student messes up, make them work more, not less!
What's especially puzzling is that if, say, your parents decide not to let you go to school, they may lose custody of you. OTOH, when the school district decides they don't want you anymore, it's fine and dandy. Our former school district's superintendent saw no problem with that, citing that state law forces their hand, too. Then I asked her: what did she personally do to influence a change in state law, to get rid of expulsion/suspension as disciplinary measures, and to promote/reinforce attendance instead? She seemed puzzled that I'd expect her to do something about changing a law that she pretended to disagree with (the radio show she participated in was about promoting attendance). It was like Hypocrisy 101.
He does a good job of explaining scales of things. Would make Feynman's dad proud.
True.
xkcd would disagree. It seems that getting to the LEO (Shuttle/ISS altitude) seems to get you about 1/6th of the way there, in terms of energy expenditure. Going back is much easier, of course -- about 20x so.
Yeah. The time context of those images is especially mind-blowing. The whole sequence lasts a couple minutes.
You mean you were on a ship and didn't have a way of restoring the system without contact with the world? And how's that HP's fault? I agree that 200MB drivers are egregious, but in this case the fault was all yours.
Yes, that's a problem when it comes to Qt. Because I don't particularly care to have to open-source my changes to Qt. I want to pay for the right not to have to do that, even.
Yeah, and when Nokia abandons Qt, who is going to develop it? It'll be impossible to re-create TrollTech as a business without having full rights to the codebase. You can't exactly live off LGPL'd Qt...
Qt is unlikely to get major development done by unpaid volunteers at a pace that Trolls/Nokia could pull off with paying experienced developers. Remember that Qt is chasing the competition and OS releases all the time. And they have to add new features/APIs, too. Just look how long it took wxWidgets to get 2.9.1 the release out that can be considered "good enough" for 64 bit OS X using Cocoa.
Into its own project? You mean as in an open source fork? You have a big inheritance I could dip into as well? Because you know, those developers have to be paid somehow. Qt's future is in a "small", focused business. TrollTech was exactly what Qt needed to thrive. Nokia was a pointless diversion. Sure the original owners/investors got more than their money's worth on the sale, but so far the technical and licensing direction where Nokia is taking Qt is a growing disaster.
Besides, there are benefits to commercial customers of not having to open-source their changes to Qt. Not having that option could be a big impediment to commercial adoption of a GPL/LGPL fork, even if the latter was technically superior.
If I'm a commercial vendor who depends on Qt, I want to be able to pay for the rights to use it in a closed-source fashion. If I change, say, Qt's event dispatcher so that it can coalesce arbitrary events, this may give me a competitive advantage and I may not want to distribute the changes. This is just an example.
And I'm depending on Qt being actively developed with new features to help me stay competitive. Just the fact that something is open source doesn't mean it's going to develop itself, right?
TrollTech methinks did a way better job managing Qt both technically and "politically" than Nokia. I think that LGPL-ing Qt was a mistake. Anyway, Nokia or a spinoff company may well stop offering new versions under that license. As far as I'm concerned, GPL and commercial are perfectly suitable. About the only good thing about LGPL was that we could stop paying Nokia. We had no problems paying TrollTech, but feeding the big corporate beast? No thanks. As soon as Qt is spun-off, I'll be more than happy to subscribe for a couple seats.
I don't personally care much for a Qt fork, because it can only be an open-source fork and no one will pay enough money for it to run a company to do the development.
There needs to be a spin-off company, say TrollRoll or somesuch that will acquire the full commercial rights and will be able to offer commercial licenses.
Shit no. Novell is but a name right now. They shouldn't really exist. Novell buying Qt would be as good as SCO buying Qt.
Qt desperately needs to be spun off into its own company. It's a great cross-platform framework without any clear contender. I develop several applications at work using Qt and there is no alternative. I need my stuff to run on OS X and Windows, and I'm using pretty much all that Qt gives, at least when it comes to the graphics scene framework and model/view system. The oft-repeated alternatives of GTK and wxWindows just aren't anywhere near where I'd need them to be.
We used to pay for Qt, but once Nokia took over we figured: why feed the beast? As soon as Qt would be spun-off, we'd begin paying again for two commercial licenses...
Either way, you are crazy for using both feet because you really are likely to hit both pedals in the case of a panicked stop
Never happened to me and I had a few involuntary close calls. I don't buy the possibility, sorry. Could happen if I was getting a seizure of some sort. Normally -- no way. As I've said in the post you replied to: with two feet on two pedals, I use the left foot to monitor that the right one doesn't press on brake when it shouldn't, and vice versa: right foot makes sure that when the brake goes down, accelerator doesn't follow. It's very, very obvious when cross-actuation happens. You just have to get used to it and you then pick it up by reflex action.
if you used cruise control on the highway
LOL, good luck driving in downtown Chicago during normal commute rush hour with cruise control.
Much good will that do to you in a hybrid vehicle -- cutting fuel pump power, that is. You need to have safe stop functionality in the motor controller, too. I do agree that the ignition switch/button and the elements it controls (safe stop circuitry in the controller, fuel pump solenoid) should be monitored and all rated to SIL-3. The communications path between the elements can well be digital.
To give you an idea of how much the components would cost if you wanted to implement it all by yourself as a safety mod to an existing car: on the order of $2000, give or take for brand new components. With luck on eBay you could get it for 30% of the price. That's for the following (all safety rated, mind you):
- (1) safety PLC with at least 3xDI and 5xDO (DO must be via monitored contacts of course)
- (1) 2xNC ignition switch with extra contacts to stand-in for existing switch
- (1) SPST monitored contactor for fuel pump
- (1) SPST monitored contactor that can interrupt DC going to motor controller (you need rating on the order of 200ADC, that's no small feat)
- crimp terminals to attach battery wires to the contactor
Making it in larger volume would of course shave on the cost, but we're still talking industrial components that would have to be redesigned for automotive use. They would still cost around $500 per vehicle I bet.
To avoid gaining unwanted speed in poor weather you simply trade a bit of fuel efficiency for safety. You upshift. Sane automatic transmissions offer wet/winter modes. You push a button and you're done. This also prevents you from engine braking too hard as to lose traction.
I'd think that the senior faculty member could be potentially to blame for that? If my wife cheated on me, I'd first have a hard look in the mirror. Humility and all that.
Those E-stop systems are rated by the same agencies that rate your electromechanical E-Stop switches. Those are not overnight hacks, the code running on those devices is often formally proven to be correct.
Besides, there is plenty of machinery where an electromechanical E-Stop that removes power would result in sure destruction. There are machines that you can't just safely stop by removing power. To a point where there are redundant, diverse drive/actuator systems that get activated to safely stop the machine. Some of those are designed to actively harvest the power from the spinning-down system (using regenerative drives) to keep the shut-down function running when power feeds and UPSes are down.