At least in the movie, they were never actually ordered to fire. Here's the dialogue as the protesters approach the soldiers:
Enemy is approaching fast. Requesting orders. General, what should we do?
There's no response from Command, or from party leader Creedy, or from the High Chancellor.
Bloody hell, stand down! Stand down!
Perhaps if V hadn't taken out Creedy and the Chancellor things would have been different. Certainly the movie takes quite a few liberties with reality, but this one is somewhat believable. Without those people to order horrible things, we were left with average people firing or not. The decency of most average people was a theme in the film (Evey; the gay guy; the people who attacked the guy who killed the little girl; the lesbian; the inspector), so it's not terribly surprising that the general didn't order them to. If the general had in fact given the order, they probably would have fired, though, based on the rest of the movie.
This makes me want to read the graphic novel. I wonder if it's significantly different from the movie.
That would actually be nice. Flamebait, redundant, and slashvertising come to mind as useful story moderation categories. It might encourage higher quality submissions, or at least save readers time.
Yeah, I didn't even give a citation for the Wiki statistic I quoted since there was no citation in turn on that page, and it's hard to get good statistics from dating sites.
Since on average, men are more interested in sex, and women more interested in relationships, women have the advantage in scoring random hookups, and men have the advantage in relationships.
Interesting. Maybe so. I wonder if the long-term relationship dating sites (eg. eHarmony) have a male/female gender imbalance in the appropriate direction to support this. Numbers are a bit hard to find, but a Wikipedia page quotes a ratio of 42/58 males/females on eHarmony, though there are other significant factors that single statistic doesn't capture (eg. age distributions).
but what moron is trying to use Slashdot as a dating site?
Nobody? I don't see why you wrote these words; they're irrelevant. Oh--did you think I was asking for dating advice from a woman? Or that I was somehow trying to use/. as a dating site? Perhaps I wasn't clear; I meant to ask for a woman's perspective on online heterosexual dating (which the story was about), not dating in general--something like, "I ignore half the messages I get and just date the guys with nice pictures" or whatever happens to be true. I certainly didn't want a woman's advice for how men should date women; I'm gay (though of course most of your advice applies equally well in general).
dating is not harder as a man, it's just that men are in general really really stupid when it comes to interaction with the opposite sex
You gave a reason why dating is harder for men while simultaneously saying dating is not harder for men. Maybe you didn't say what you really meant--I don't know, something like "dating could be just as easy for men as women in a more ideal world where men are more intelligent socially"? Still, that point doesn't address the male/female ratio imbalance on dating sites and elsewhere brought up in a number of other comments.
If a person is dating they should be running through steps 1 and 2 with every single person they meet, and hitting step 3 when they find someone they like.
Seeing as step 1 was "find someone you like", this doesn't make a lot of sense. That is, how does one "find someone you like" with every person they meet? And if you're supposed to hit step 3 after step 1, what happened to step 2? I'm not an idiot; I know generally what you meant. I'm just giving an example showing how your post was a bit of a rambling mess.
Also remember, All Hot chicks are insane, but not all insane chicks are hot.
The sheer amount of (hetero) male dating advice in these comments is telling. I imagine it's caused by two things:
1. There aren't many women on/.
2. Dating is harder as a man seeking a woman than the other way around, so advice is more highly prized.
It would be interesting to hear a woman's perspective.
(I thought Carrie was somewhat plain, though being gay I have difficulty judging, which is why I'm curious. The animated women have obvious clues that they're supposed to be attractive: Wilma and Lois are both skinny and essentially have hourglass figures. Some of Lois' "hourglass pinch" is traded for larger breasts, probably because of the decades between them when society's standards evolved.)
Is it just me, or has the mod system been failing more than usual in the last few weeks? I've seen crap rise to +4 and +5 before sinking down to oblivion a couple times and wow I've seen a post with a valid point do essentially the same. And it seems like the ratio of +4/+5 posts to all posts is higher than it used to be. Perhaps the system got tweaked to give out mod points more often? If so it should be reverted.
The gravitational constant is a completely separate concept from gravity itself. It also plays no part in your definition of gravity; you are confusing the issue. You failed to answer my main point that your definition gives no predictions and so is essentially useless (implying that it should be avoided in favor of one based on a mathematical model). Instead, you resorted to an ad hominem attack against me based on a position I don't even hold. I assume you have no real counterargument and are just trying to save face by insulting me.
Your posts present an interesting study in bad argument technique. In addition to the above (ad hominem attacks; making a strawman of your opponent; confusing the issue), you have repeatedly implied everyone else is too stupid to understand your points while simultaneously ignoring or misunderstanding others' points. It's a clear case of the Dunning-Kruger effect where the incompetent fail to recognize their incompetence because of their incompetence. Please note that I waited to insult you until after you insulted me. I bring this all up in the hope that you'll improve your argument technique in the future. I understand you are probably too defensive to read this fairly as an honest critique, but I like to be optimistic.
Mods really need to exercise more care, especially with things they don't know much about. There was a recent article on Pac-Man being NP-Hard which included a discussion of the definition of NP-Hard. There were some early replies which got modded up only to crash down a little later because they had major errors anyone actually familiar with the material would have noticed immediately. Those replies apparently sounded good and authoritative. I guess the corrective replies sounded even better and more authoritative; some of them really were correct, even.
There really is a definition of NP-Hard, so there wasn't much debate, and after a little bit the good answers were modded up and the bad ones modded down. Here, it's much harder to determine who's right. In the "wrong" reply, NeutronCowboy is much more entertaining to read ("Where did you get your PhD - in a box of crackers?") than dorpus, so he has an advantage in getting careless mod points.
In another recent incident, I was modded down to 0 Troll for pointing out that I wasn't inclined to believe an international conspiracy theory presented without evidence by someone who made a major mistake in reading the article. The post I replied to was later modded up to +5 Funny, even though the bulk of it was serious. The joking part wasn't even that funny, though of course that's subjective.
In yet another recent incident, there was a post which somehow got +5 insightful/interesting without making an interesting or original point. It also used broken English. Half the replies were, "how did this get modded up?" It was modded down a while later, but a similar post from the same person was modded up later in the thread. Why anyone would think that person's garbage was insightful is a mystery to me.
There is a strong tendency for forcefully negative posts to get modded up. The "Randian" +5 insightful post above is a good example. The OP is entertainingly negative towards the article, yet it includes a ridiculous definition of gravity. Three people (including myself) have replied about that definition yet the OP just repeats it as if nobody understands; the only forcefully negative reply is very recent and unlikely to get modded up so late. The only moderation in the thread, excluding the OP, is NeutronCowboy (the same guy from the "wrong" post above) being entertainingly negative and another person doing the same thing though with less skill.
I know mentioning this will change nothing, but it's nice to vent sometimes. The moderation system has enough holes to drive a truck through. I'm not sure if it's worse recently or if I've just been noticing more flaws.
Gravity is a force that we have DEFINED as the attraction between two massive objects with no charge.
You keep saying this as if you weren't understood the first time. I understand your point. I believe it is incorrect. You are defining gravity in terms of the result of experiments. There is no predictive component to your definition, so it is essentially useless; for instance, that attraction could well be -10 in all cases as far as you've defined gravity. Adding a predictive component to the definition invokes a mathematical model like Newton's or Einstein's.
define what a meter is
A meter is a physical constant that is essentially defined as the result of an experiment for the purpose of comparing different experimental results. Gravity is not a physical constant and is instead a concept used to predict the results of experiments before performing them; the comparison is not apt.
or the concept of length
Length also does not have a predictive component; the comparison is not apt.
just because you don't understand why distance exists between objects.
Our "understanding" of reality or lack thereof has little to do with what I wrote. Our ability to create some sort of perfect mathematical model to predict the results of experiments is relevant only inasmuch as we have no such model currently. If we had a perfect model, we may as well define reality by it, but we don't, so reality and mathematical models must remain separate concepts.
You seem to be conflating mathematical models and reality. Newtonian gravity is a mathematical model. The results of actual experiments are irrelevant when defining that model. In fact, when measured very carefully, the force between "objects with mass" disagrees with the Newtonian model and agrees more fully with the General Relativity model. At some point there are quantum level fluctuations in the position of objects which requires more tweaks to the GR model--and science marches on.
Newtonian gravity is not defined as the force between two real objects with mass (which is what I believe you meant). It is defined as a particular integral over certain subsets of Euclidean 3-space.
But making the opposite assumption never seems to lead anywhere interesting.
The opposite assumption is so very uninteresting that I don't see why the issue needs to be brought up at all. I do agree with what you've written, though.
Actually a few particularly underdeveloped countries are below the data center in electricity consumption (eg. Rwanda; Bhutan). I put the details in a comment above under the "Entire county" thread.
That's what I thought initially. The CIA World Factbook includes electricity consumption statistics for many countries and regions. Note that they're listed in kWh per year; 28 MW translates to about 245,000,000 kWh per year. This puts the data center at around #174 on that list, ahead of Rwanda, Eritrea, Belize, Bhutan, Chad, and Tonga, to pick a few (though note that the data for many of those countries is a few years old, so they may have moved up). For comparison, the entire US is listed at 3,741,000,000,000 kWh per year. This data center is then around 0.007% of the US's power usage.
Since there are something like 3000 counties in the US, assuming uniform distribution, an average sized county would have 1/3000 = ~0.033% of the country's electricity consumption. This county then has around 7/33 ~= 21% of the average population. That average would be ~300 million / 3000 = 100,000 people per county: and indeed, Crook County, Oregon has approximately 21,000 = 100,000 * 21% people. So actually the electricity consumption of the county appears to be quite average, even though it sounds rural from the Wikipedia page.
Considering your original mistake, call me crazy, but I'm not favorably disposed towards believing your international conspiracy theory, which you presented without providing any evidence no less. I'm another person who is not sure how you got modded insightful.
I don't quite know why you think mathematics includes "things like protractors," or why you think I think I have an encyclopedic knowledge of my field. I only meant to imply that if I haven't heard the phrase even though I've worked with protractors and am a mathematician, it's probably uncommon amongst mathematicians, so it probably doesn't belong to mathematics. This is merely suggestive, not conclusive. I never pretended otherwise.
I glanced through some online definitions. Most are along the lines of, "The abstract science of number, quantity, and space," while a few are like "The science of structure, order, and relation that has evolved from elemental practices of counting, measuring, and describing the shapes of objects." I imagine most mathematicians would define math as something entirely abstract, as in the first definition, without any necessary connection to reality, which the second definition seems to entail.
In any case, metrology is the science of measuring things. It seems more appropriate to use that heading even if it makes sense to put that definition under the "mathematics" heading.
I don't really think that's true. People who might go for a purely technical education usually have a strong command of the technical aspects of writing. Whether or not that includes the ability to actually communicate is another issue, but the original post has a huge number of technical mistakes. I don't really know why it's so highly modded right now; it doesn't seem particularly original or insightful, and it's really hard to read.
(For the TLDR crowd, I've made the last paragraph stand-alone.)
Everything boils down to belief eventually. For instance, I believe in the existence of counting numbers. I'm not really able to justify this belief, and even if I were, I would just be pushing the problem further back to more basic beliefs. Indeed, you seem to believe that people should "not BELIEVE in anything", which is rather contradictory.
But of course your point is that people in general need to have better quality control about what they believe (and you used overstatement as a rhetorical device). Being willing to question one's own beliefs and either toss them out due to a lack of evidence or embrace them due to a preponderance of evidence is a great heuristic that far too few people use. Science is full of great heuristics, but that's all science is: a bunch of heuristics that get at the truth better than anything else humans have ever come up with.
Still, at the end of the day, you only believe in science (or anything, for that matter) because those beliefs give good results. Can you blame people for believing in an omnipotent creator that gives them comfort and disbelieving in a host of things which scare them? What results in an average person's life will come up wrong because they don't believe in evolution, or climate change, or the existence of non-Lebesgue measurable sets? If believing one way gives a better result for one individual, why should that person care about the truth? Remember, most people apply greedy algorithms. "But think of future generations!" is not terribly effective.
You should argue for an overpowering respect for and belief in the truth, rather than the adoption of a particular set of heuristics. Such respect prevents numerous common mistakes: letting emotion dictate one's beliefs; passing judgement too early only because it's convenient; letting shoddy reasoning convince you of things; accepting poor evidence because of a variety of cognitive biases;.... Most people with a great respect for truth think everyone shares their respect, and that the problem with society is merely one of stupidity. This is only partly correct. The truth is that most humans don't have a strong enough reason to care about the truth to override their emotions. If they did, questioning beliefs--any beliefs--would be a matter of course. The question becomes, how does one instill an overpowering respect for the truth in someone else? The answer is indoctrination. While growing up, a friend of mine's physicist-of-a-mother told him not to fake his data, ever. Now, faking data is as close to a sin as he believes in. Start young, repeat the message often--just like with any indoctrination. Make truth society's most valued possession and a host of problems will go away.
the years it was 'normal' were much fewer than the years that were 'strange.'
Clearly the 'normal' range needed extending. What else could 'normal' be in this context but, to pick some numbers, the range which contains 75% of data points with the remaining ones split above and below it? (There are a variety of similar techniques if one needs to weight outliers less, but the point is normal should be a range containing most of the data.)
What's wrong with Fahrenheit? The human-scale temperatures are more or less 0 to 100 F, which is nicer than -20 to 40 C in that it gives higher resolution when you restrict yourself to two digits, and you have to write a negative sign less often. It's not like Celcius is an absolute scale anyway, so which one is "better" may as well be the most useful one in everyday usage. As for miles vs. meters and friends, meters and friends are obviously better because of their simpler conversions.
That said, having two competing systems is stupid. Most of the world uses Celcius, scientists and healthcare professionals even in the US use Celcius; we really should start the switch.
After some searching, the article appears to be this one, "Media use, face-to-face communication, media multitasking, and social well-being among 8- to 12-year-old girls." Abstract:
An online survey of 3,461 North American girls ages 8-12 conducted in the summer of 2010 through Discovery Girls magazine examined the relationships between social well-being and young girls' media use-including video, video games, music listening, reading/homework, e-mailing/posting on social media sites, texting/instant messaging, and talking on phones/video chatting-and face-to-face communication. This study introduced both a more granular measure of media multitasking and a new comparative measure of media use versus time spent in face-to-face communication. Regression analyses indicated that negative social well-being was positively associated with levels of uses of media that are centrally about interpersonal interaction (e.g., phone, online communication) as well as uses of media that are not (e.g., video, music, and reading). Video use was particularly strongly associated with negative social well-being indicators. Media multitasking was also associated with negative social indicators. Conversely, face-to-face communication was strongly associated with positive social well-being. Cell phone ownership and having a television or computer in one's room had little direct association with children's socioemotional well-being. We hypothesize possible causes for these relationships, call for research designs to address causality, and outline possible implications of such findings for the social well-being of younger adolescents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
I don't have access to the study itself. I hope that any peer-reviewed study would address the concerns you voiced (and many more). Obviously the CNN article is crap; in the absence of more information, I'll at least give the article the benefit of the doubt and suspend judgement.
Slashdot Mirror
Enemy is approaching fast. Requesting orders. General, what should we do?
There's no response from Command, or from party leader Creedy, or from the High Chancellor.
Bloody hell, stand down! Stand down!
Perhaps if V hadn't taken out Creedy and the Chancellor things would have been different. Certainly the movie takes quite a few liberties with reality, but this one is somewhat believable. Without those people to order horrible things, we were left with average people firing or not. The decency of most average people was a theme in the film (Evey; the gay guy; the people who attacked the guy who killed the little girl; the lesbian; the inspector), so it's not terribly surprising that the general didn't order them to. If the general had in fact given the order, they probably would have fired, though, based on the rest of the movie.
This makes me want to read the graphic novel. I wonder if it's significantly different from the movie.
Can we tag titles "-1 Flamebait"?
That would actually be nice. Flamebait, redundant, and slashvertising come to mind as useful story moderation categories. It might encourage higher quality submissions, or at least save readers time.
FWIW I don't think you were that unclear. I read it correctly the first time.
Yeah, I didn't even give a citation for the Wiki statistic I quoted since there was no citation in turn on that page, and it's hard to get good statistics from dating sites.
Since on average, men are more interested in sex, and women more interested in relationships, women have the advantage in scoring random hookups, and men have the advantage in relationships.
Interesting. Maybe so. I wonder if the long-term relationship dating sites (eg. eHarmony) have a male/female gender imbalance in the appropriate direction to support this. Numbers are a bit hard to find, but a Wikipedia page quotes a ratio of 42/58 males/females on eHarmony, though there are other significant factors that single statistic doesn't capture (eg. age distributions).
but what moron is trying to use Slashdot as a dating site?
Nobody? I don't see why you wrote these words; they're irrelevant. Oh--did you think I was asking for dating advice from a woman? Or that I was somehow trying to use /. as a dating site? Perhaps I wasn't clear; I meant to ask for a woman's perspective on online heterosexual dating (which the story was about), not dating in general--something like, "I ignore half the messages I get and just date the guys with nice pictures" or whatever happens to be true. I certainly didn't want a woman's advice for how men should date women; I'm gay (though of course most of your advice applies equally well in general).
dating is not harder as a man, it's just that men are in general really really stupid when it comes to interaction with the opposite sex
You gave a reason why dating is harder for men while simultaneously saying dating is not harder for men. Maybe you didn't say what you really meant--I don't know, something like "dating could be just as easy for men as women in a more ideal world where men are more intelligent socially"? Still, that point doesn't address the male/female ratio imbalance on dating sites and elsewhere brought up in a number of other comments.
If a person is dating they should be running through steps 1 and 2 with every single person they meet, and hitting step 3 when they find someone they like.
Seeing as step 1 was "find someone you like", this doesn't make a lot of sense. That is, how does one "find someone you like" with every person they meet? And if you're supposed to hit step 3 after step 1, what happened to step 2? I'm not an idiot; I know generally what you meant. I'm just giving an example showing how your post was a bit of a rambling mess.
Also remember, All Hot chicks are insane, but not all insane chicks are hot.
The sheer amount of (hetero) male dating advice in these comments is telling. I imagine it's caused by two things: /.
1. There aren't many women on
2. Dating is harder as a man seeking a woman than the other way around, so advice is more highly prized.
It would be interesting to hear a woman's perspective.
The woman from King of Queens is hot? If so, why?
(I thought Carrie was somewhat plain, though being gay I have difficulty judging, which is why I'm curious. The animated women have obvious clues that they're supposed to be attractive: Wilma and Lois are both skinny and essentially have hourglass figures. Some of Lois' "hourglass pinch" is traded for larger breasts, probably because of the decades between them when society's standards evolved.)
Is it just me, or has the mod system been failing more than usual in the last few weeks? I've seen crap rise to +4 and +5 before sinking down to oblivion a couple times and wow I've seen a post with a valid point do essentially the same. And it seems like the ratio of +4/+5 posts to all posts is higher than it used to be. Perhaps the system got tweaked to give out mod points more often? If so it should be reverted.
The gravitational constant is a completely separate concept from gravity itself. It also plays no part in your definition of gravity; you are confusing the issue. You failed to answer my main point that your definition gives no predictions and so is essentially useless (implying that it should be avoided in favor of one based on a mathematical model). Instead, you resorted to an ad hominem attack against me based on a position I don't even hold. I assume you have no real counterargument and are just trying to save face by insulting me.
Your posts present an interesting study in bad argument technique. In addition to the above (ad hominem attacks; making a strawman of your opponent; confusing the issue), you have repeatedly implied everyone else is too stupid to understand your points while simultaneously ignoring or misunderstanding others' points. It's a clear case of the Dunning-Kruger effect where the incompetent fail to recognize their incompetence because of their incompetence. Please note that I waited to insult you until after you insulted me. I bring this all up in the hope that you'll improve your argument technique in the future. I understand you are probably too defensive to read this fairly as an honest critique, but I like to be optimistic.
Have a nice life.
Mods really need to exercise more care, especially with things they don't know much about. There was a recent article on Pac-Man being NP-Hard which included a discussion of the definition of NP-Hard. There were some early replies which got modded up only to crash down a little later because they had major errors anyone actually familiar with the material would have noticed immediately. Those replies apparently sounded good and authoritative. I guess the corrective replies sounded even better and more authoritative; some of them really were correct, even.
There really is a definition of NP-Hard, so there wasn't much debate, and after a little bit the good answers were modded up and the bad ones modded down. Here, it's much harder to determine who's right. In the "wrong" reply, NeutronCowboy is much more entertaining to read ("Where did you get your PhD - in a box of crackers?") than dorpus, so he has an advantage in getting careless mod points.
In another recent incident, I was modded down to 0 Troll for pointing out that I wasn't inclined to believe an international conspiracy theory presented without evidence by someone who made a major mistake in reading the article. The post I replied to was later modded up to +5 Funny, even though the bulk of it was serious. The joking part wasn't even that funny, though of course that's subjective.
In yet another recent incident, there was a post which somehow got +5 insightful/interesting without making an interesting or original point. It also used broken English. Half the replies were, "how did this get modded up?" It was modded down a while later, but a similar post from the same person was modded up later in the thread. Why anyone would think that person's garbage was insightful is a mystery to me.
There is a strong tendency for forcefully negative posts to get modded up. The "Randian" +5 insightful post above is a good example. The OP is entertainingly negative towards the article, yet it includes a ridiculous definition of gravity. Three people (including myself) have replied about that definition yet the OP just repeats it as if nobody understands; the only forcefully negative reply is very recent and unlikely to get modded up so late. The only moderation in the thread, excluding the OP, is NeutronCowboy (the same guy from the "wrong" post above) being entertainingly negative and another person doing the same thing though with less skill.
I know mentioning this will change nothing, but it's nice to vent sometimes. The moderation system has enough holes to drive a truck through. I'm not sure if it's worse recently or if I've just been noticing more flaws.
Gravity is a force that we have DEFINED as the attraction between two massive objects with no charge.
You keep saying this as if you weren't understood the first time. I understand your point. I believe it is incorrect. You are defining gravity in terms of the result of experiments. There is no predictive component to your definition, so it is essentially useless; for instance, that attraction could well be -10 in all cases as far as you've defined gravity. Adding a predictive component to the definition invokes a mathematical model like Newton's or Einstein's.
define what a meter is
A meter is a physical constant that is essentially defined as the result of an experiment for the purpose of comparing different experimental results. Gravity is not a physical constant and is instead a concept used to predict the results of experiments before performing them; the comparison is not apt.
or the concept of length
Length also does not have a predictive component; the comparison is not apt.
just because you don't understand why distance exists between objects.
Our "understanding" of reality or lack thereof has little to do with what I wrote. Our ability to create some sort of perfect mathematical model to predict the results of experiments is relevant only inasmuch as we have no such model currently. If we had a perfect model, we may as well define reality by it, but we don't, so reality and mathematical models must remain separate concepts.
You seem to be conflating mathematical models and reality. Newtonian gravity is a mathematical model. The results of actual experiments are irrelevant when defining that model. In fact, when measured very carefully, the force between "objects with mass" disagrees with the Newtonian model and agrees more fully with the General Relativity model. At some point there are quantum level fluctuations in the position of objects which requires more tweaks to the GR model--and science marches on.
Newtonian gravity is not defined as the force between two real objects with mass (which is what I believe you meant). It is defined as a particular integral over certain subsets of Euclidean 3-space.
But making the opposite assumption never seems to lead anywhere interesting.
The opposite assumption is so very uninteresting that I don't see why the issue needs to be brought up at all. I do agree with what you've written, though.
Actually a few particularly underdeveloped countries are below the data center in electricity consumption (eg. Rwanda; Bhutan). I put the details in a comment above under the "Entire county" thread.
That's what I thought initially. The CIA World Factbook includes electricity consumption statistics for many countries and regions. Note that they're listed in kWh per year; 28 MW translates to about 245,000,000 kWh per year. This puts the data center at around #174 on that list, ahead of Rwanda, Eritrea, Belize, Bhutan, Chad, and Tonga, to pick a few (though note that the data for many of those countries is a few years old, so they may have moved up). For comparison, the entire US is listed at 3,741,000,000,000 kWh per year. This data center is then around 0.007% of the US's power usage.
Since there are something like 3000 counties in the US, assuming uniform distribution, an average sized county would have 1/3000 = ~0.033% of the country's electricity consumption. This county then has around 7/33 ~= 21% of the average population. That average would be ~300 million / 3000 = 100,000 people per county: and indeed, Crook County, Oregon has approximately 21,000 = 100,000 * 21% people. So actually the electricity consumption of the county appears to be quite average, even though it sounds rural from the Wikipedia page.
Considering your original mistake, call me crazy, but I'm not favorably disposed towards believing your international conspiracy theory, which you presented without providing any evidence no less. I'm another person who is not sure how you got modded insightful.
I don't quite know why you think mathematics includes "things like protractors," or why you think I think I have an encyclopedic knowledge of my field. I only meant to imply that if I haven't heard the phrase even though I've worked with protractors and am a mathematician, it's probably uncommon amongst mathematicians, so it probably doesn't belong to mathematics. This is merely suggestive, not conclusive. I never pretended otherwise.
I glanced through some online definitions. Most are along the lines of, "The abstract science of number, quantity, and space," while a few are like "The science of structure, order, and relation that has evolved from elemental practices of counting, measuring, and describing the shapes of objects." I imagine most mathematicians would define math as something entirely abstract, as in the first definition, without any necessary connection to reality, which the second definition seems to entail.
In any case, metrology is the science of measuring things. It seems more appropriate to use that heading even if it makes sense to put that definition under the "mathematics" heading.
I'm sorry, I'm just too curious not to ask. Is English your first language? If so, is there a reason for your... creative... dialect?
I don't really think that's true. People who might go for a purely technical education usually have a strong command of the technical aspects of writing. Whether or not that includes the ability to actually communicate is another issue, but the original post has a huge number of technical mistakes. I don't really know why it's so highly modded right now; it doesn't seem particularly original or insightful, and it's really hard to read.
(For the TLDR crowd, I've made the last paragraph stand-alone.)
Everything boils down to belief eventually. For instance, I believe in the existence of counting numbers. I'm not really able to justify this belief, and even if I were, I would just be pushing the problem further back to more basic beliefs. Indeed, you seem to believe that people should "not BELIEVE in anything", which is rather contradictory.
But of course your point is that people in general need to have better quality control about what they believe (and you used overstatement as a rhetorical device). Being willing to question one's own beliefs and either toss them out due to a lack of evidence or embrace them due to a preponderance of evidence is a great heuristic that far too few people use. Science is full of great heuristics, but that's all science is: a bunch of heuristics that get at the truth better than anything else humans have ever come up with.
Still, at the end of the day, you only believe in science (or anything, for that matter) because those beliefs give good results. Can you blame people for believing in an omnipotent creator that gives them comfort and disbelieving in a host of things which scare them? What results in an average person's life will come up wrong because they don't believe in evolution, or climate change, or the existence of non-Lebesgue measurable sets? If believing one way gives a better result for one individual, why should that person care about the truth? Remember, most people apply greedy algorithms. "But think of future generations!" is not terribly effective.
You should argue for an overpowering respect for and belief in the truth, rather than the adoption of a particular set of heuristics. Such respect prevents numerous common mistakes: letting emotion dictate one's beliefs; passing judgement too early only because it's convenient; letting shoddy reasoning convince you of things; accepting poor evidence because of a variety of cognitive biases; .... Most people with a great respect for truth think everyone shares their respect, and that the problem with society is merely one of stupidity. This is only partly correct. The truth is that most humans don't have a strong enough reason to care about the truth to override their emotions. If they did, questioning beliefs--any beliefs--would be a matter of course. The question becomes, how does one instill an overpowering respect for the truth in someone else? The answer is indoctrination. While growing up, a friend of mine's physicist-of-a-mother told him not to fake his data, ever. Now, faking data is as close to a sin as he believes in. Start young, repeat the message often--just like with any indoctrination. Make truth society's most valued possession and a host of problems will go away.
the years it was 'normal' were much fewer than the years that were 'strange.'
Clearly the 'normal' range needed extending. What else could 'normal' be in this context but, to pick some numbers, the range which contains 75% of data points with the remaining ones split above and below it? (There are a variety of similar techniques if one needs to weight outliers less, but the point is normal should be a range containing most of the data.)
What's wrong with Fahrenheit? The human-scale temperatures are more or less 0 to 100 F, which is nicer than -20 to 40 C in that it gives higher resolution when you restrict yourself to two digits, and you have to write a negative sign less often. It's not like Celcius is an absolute scale anyway, so which one is "better" may as well be the most useful one in everyday usage. As for miles vs. meters and friends, meters and friends are obviously better because of their simpler conversions.
That said, having two competing systems is stupid. Most of the world uses Celcius, scientists and healthcare professionals even in the US use Celcius; we really should start the switch.
An online survey of 3,461 North American girls ages 8-12 conducted in the summer of 2010 through Discovery Girls magazine examined the relationships between social well-being and young girls' media use-including video, video games, music listening, reading/homework, e-mailing/posting on social media sites, texting/instant messaging, and talking on phones/video chatting-and face-to-face communication. This study introduced both a more granular measure of media multitasking and a new comparative measure of media use versus time spent in face-to-face communication. Regression analyses indicated that negative social well-being was positively associated with levels of uses of media that are centrally about interpersonal interaction (e.g., phone, online communication) as well as uses of media that are not (e.g., video, music, and reading). Video use was particularly strongly associated with negative social well-being indicators. Media multitasking was also associated with negative social indicators. Conversely, face-to-face communication was strongly associated with positive social well-being. Cell phone ownership and having a television or computer in one's room had little direct association with children's socioemotional well-being. We hypothesize possible causes for these relationships, call for research designs to address causality, and outline possible implications of such findings for the social well-being of younger adolescents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
I don't have access to the study itself. I hope that any peer-reviewed study would address the concerns you voiced (and many more). Obviously the CNN article is crap; in the absence of more information, I'll at least give the article the benefit of the doubt and suspend judgement.
As a mathematician, I've never heard the graduated arc or circle definition. I would swap "mathematics" for "metrology".