That's a bit of an oversimplification of relativity. Some simple, highly idealized calculations can be done by just replacing an input with a modified version of it, or modifying the result of a Newtonian calculation. But, calculations involving significant gravity are far more complex. I would agree with you if we were talking about special relativity instead of general, or if the calculations were kept simple.
There's a big difference between today's conception of Newtonian mechanics and (what I presume was) the original conception of it. Today, we call it an approximation; originally, it was perfectly precise. The original idea has been falsified, but the newer version with supplemental error bounds is alive and well. The add on analogy is a little bit of a stretch, but I don't think it's awful. Loading the GR module would be akin to adding routines that could predict the impact of a black hole meandering through our solar system, for instance, in addition to improving the accuracy of the Newton module's routines. It entirely replaces the Newton module, which is where the stretch comes in. Quantum fits pretty well in the analogy, though.
I very much agree about the usefulness of teaching a "logical fallacies" class. I'd love to hear about one aimed at standard high schoolers. Something in between a very basic first order logic course and dissecting politician's speeches could be extremely useful. Lewis Carroll wrote a book I've glanced through that's close to what I mean. (In addition to being an author, he was a logician.) It was basically formal logic aimed at young children, which is close to the same idea. I think it would be drastically more useful than studying conic sections (why they're so emphasized I'll never know; they really don't come up enough in later math to justify their placement in curricula, IMO. For the mathematically inclined, they're also easy to understand quickly).
I don't like calling calculus "advanced math" because nearly every technical discipline makes heavy use of its more basic features, so it's been dumbed down, a lot. It's more of a gateway to real advanced math that also happens to be incredibly useful, both to other areas of math and other disciplines. Certainly calculus can "become" advanced; for instance the differential form generalizations of Stokes' theorem are advanced. But that's not usually what people mean when they say "calculus". They mean the product, quotient, and power rules; derivatives and integrals of standard special functions; various integration tricks; a tiny bit of physics relating derivatives to velocity and acceleration; etc. They do not mean the playthings of mathematicians and a few poor souls like theoretical physicists who require advanced math to describe their theories.
Interesting. Poker has some seedier characteristics I don't think would fit well in schools--like how it encourages manipulation and gambling. It would improve probability skills, though. I'm sure if I had had to play poker regularly in school I would have computed various probabilities and maybe learned to count cards, since I'm both competitive and good at math. I can see myself learning/deriving basic combinatorics and probability in that case. I also might have learned to read people better, earlier.
There's no reason the person who excels in "chess lectures" can't play the game because they enjoy it as well. It's a happy coincidence for some people that their interests coincide with their studies. Having a strong international presence in high level chess would probably only take half a dozen or so really good players, so even if the overlap is rare that's fine.
I played chess with my dad when I was younger but my skills plateaued when I started to regularly beat him and he stopped wanting to play. I've played maybe a half dozen games in the last 8 years. I'm vaguely decent, but it might have been nice to have compulsory, regular games. I never got to the point of thinking more than a few moves ahead, or predicting my opponent more than a move or two ahead.
What would be some examples of directly teaching children to think "flexibly and wisely"? (Also, I don't think the mathematically disinclined are showered with advanced math; math, yes, advanced, no. To be clear, I hesitate to call Calculus advanced math.)
[Western news media] are good in telling stories, but they are bad in telling the truth (what ever that may be).
I've always figured they were worse at reporting scientific news than other news. I have no evidence, though, and in fact whenever I've been personally involved in a newspaper story, some of the details have been wrong--just like virtually every science-y story I've read where I'm familiar with the topic has large holes.
Maybe I missed it, but why do you say "This article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with America's science reporting"? The author of TFA, Gavin Atkins, appears to be Australian. The hosting site, Asian Correspondent, doesn't appear to be related to American news. I agree with the general statement that science reporting is more often than not just terrible, but I don't see how America's science reporting enters in here. In any case, thanks for the thoughtful post!
Sure, something like that will probably happen at least once (if it hasn't already), somewhere--it's a big world. The GP was implying that this situation was a reason not to trust the cloud to permanently store data, which I think is a little harsh considering no data has been lost. That is, I agree with their overall point--cloud data could be lost, and if you really care about data don't just trust the cloud--but disagree that this case exemplifies it.
Google is giving people time to save their content. There's a difference between data in the cloud suddenly and permanently becoming inaccessible and this.
Well, it's really a paper folding record that happened to use toilet paper. These people have a weird hobby, but I have difficulty faulting them when MMOs eat up billions of person-hours yearly (my own estimate). Calling them "obsessive compulsive retards" is ignorant and needlessly insulting.
Most of my college tests were take-home. There was a strong "do the right thing" culture there, and nobody I knew cheated, to my knowledge. For some of my CS tests, we weren't allowed to have a computer on while taking the test. People grumbled about it, since then they couldn't listen to music (depending on their setup)--if the test required the computer to be off, it would be off. I'm pretty sure my college was strange in this regard. It was both prestigious and "nice", which was a big reason why I picked it.
Certainly some people did cheat. Every semester or two a few people would get disciplined for it. None of those cases were like the one you describe, using some online answer service or forums. They were often technicalities, or relatively minor things like taking more time than allotted. They were often also self-reported, though not always. Overall the convenience and respect of take-home tests was worth it there. A similar setup at my high school would have been nuts, though, since cheating would have been incredibly rampant.
Well, he did say "the proof of the quadratic formula". I guess the proof could be entered in a text note of some kind. The proof is really quite brief, though: complete the square. I could understand not remembering how to solve a cubic or quartic. They typically use substitutions pulled out of the aether. I have a book that derives a key chunk of the usual method for solving quartics geometrically, but it runs through some basic projective and algebraic geometry and linear algebra--it's definitely not shorter than writing a sequence of magical substitutions, even if it's (arguably...) more intuitive.
I'm fine with the majority of people getting focused trade-oriented higher education. I also have a liberal arts education and am on the path of a future professor/researcher. To most people, I don't think a "well rounded" education is helpful enough to justify the cost in time and money. For instance, I'm thrilled whenever someone wants to learn calculus, but it's just not useful to most people in most areas of society. In a more ideal world, perhaps everyone could recite Dante in the original Italian and solve differential equations, but realistically society is better off *not* wasting productive years forcing everyone to slog through coursework they get little out of.
I think a broad education has its merits, and that some sizable-but-sub-majority fraction of society should get one. I also think a core of hard science (physics, chemistry, math, etc.) should be the basis of a well-rounded education instead of the current art/music/literature/etc. core.
I had watched TAS a year or so ago. There were two episodes I liked, but most of them I had a hard time sitting through. I remember being repeatedly glad that they were only ~22 minutes, and that there were only a couple dozen or so of them. The Wikipedia article is much kinder than I expected. It was also a children's show, so watching it as an adult is kind of unfair. Maybe if I had watched it years ago I wouldn't have disliked it so much. The animation was often cheap, the plots didn't fit very well into the short running time, and they were often silly (even for Star Trek). The child me wouldn't have noticed any of this, though.
For the record, I like TOS, and every other Star Trek series besides TAS. I really only watched TAS for completion, seeing as I had seen every other episode of every other series.
Starting in July, every episode from every Star Trek series will be available for Instant Watch over Netflix [...] the original Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise
*Ahem*, what happened to The Animated Series? It's almost entirely awful and is more or less non-canon, but it's still a Star Trek series.
(The article does go on to say "all five live-action Star Trek series", but the bit I quoted and the title are not technically accurate. Of course I have to point out such an inaccuracy, given the topic.)
I mean that it's not clear to me that a Bernoulli RV saying "weird" or "not weird" was used, as opposed to some continuous measure of "weirdness". For instance, if 249 cases were only slightly "weird", it might be completely unremarkable. Your quote didn't support the expectation of 1 weird result in 10,000, though perhaps the paper does support your 0.6 number. My second sentence wasn't sarcastic, it's just missing an "n't". Basically I would look at the paper, but it doesn't matter enough.
You're pulling probability distributions from nowhere now.... Whatever, the point is moot--I'm certain a random/.'er who admits his lack of understanding of statistics could poke a hole in these researcher's analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a bit of an oversimplification of relativity. Some simple, highly idealized calculations can be done by just replacing an input with a modified version of it, or modifying the result of a Newtonian calculation. But, calculations involving significant gravity are far more complex. I would agree with you if we were talking about special relativity instead of general, or if the calculations were kept simple.
There's a big difference between today's conception of Newtonian mechanics and (what I presume was) the original conception of it. Today, we call it an approximation; originally, it was perfectly precise. The original idea has been falsified, but the newer version with supplemental error bounds is alive and well. The add on analogy is a little bit of a stretch, but I don't think it's awful. Loading the GR module would be akin to adding routines that could predict the impact of a black hole meandering through our solar system, for instance, in addition to improving the accuracy of the Newton module's routines. It entirely replaces the Newton module, which is where the stretch comes in. Quantum fits pretty well in the analogy, though.
I very much agree about the usefulness of teaching a "logical fallacies" class. I'd love to hear about one aimed at standard high schoolers. Something in between a very basic first order logic course and dissecting politician's speeches could be extremely useful. Lewis Carroll wrote a book I've glanced through that's close to what I mean. (In addition to being an author, he was a logician.) It was basically formal logic aimed at young children, which is close to the same idea. I think it would be drastically more useful than studying conic sections (why they're so emphasized I'll never know; they really don't come up enough in later math to justify their placement in curricula, IMO. For the mathematically inclined, they're also easy to understand quickly).
I don't like calling calculus "advanced math" because nearly every technical discipline makes heavy use of its more basic features, so it's been dumbed down, a lot. It's more of a gateway to real advanced math that also happens to be incredibly useful, both to other areas of math and other disciplines. Certainly calculus can "become" advanced; for instance the differential form generalizations of Stokes' theorem are advanced. But that's not usually what people mean when they say "calculus". They mean the product, quotient, and power rules; derivatives and integrals of standard special functions; various integration tricks; a tiny bit of physics relating derivatives to velocity and acceleration; etc. They do not mean the playthings of mathematicians and a few poor souls like theoretical physicists who require advanced math to describe their theories.
I can just imagine a choice between gym class and Go class. I know which I would have picked!
Interesting. Poker has some seedier characteristics I don't think would fit well in schools--like how it encourages manipulation and gambling. It would improve probability skills, though. I'm sure if I had had to play poker regularly in school I would have computed various probabilities and maybe learned to count cards, since I'm both competitive and good at math. I can see myself learning/deriving basic combinatorics and probability in that case. I also might have learned to read people better, earlier.
"we don't know for sure" is true about practically everything we need to learn.
Except math!
There's no reason the person who excels in "chess lectures" can't play the game because they enjoy it as well. It's a happy coincidence for some people that their interests coincide with their studies. Having a strong international presence in high level chess would probably only take half a dozen or so really good players, so even if the overlap is rare that's fine.
I played chess with my dad when I was younger but my skills plateaued when I started to regularly beat him and he stopped wanting to play. I've played maybe a half dozen games in the last 8 years. I'm vaguely decent, but it might have been nice to have compulsory, regular games. I never got to the point of thinking more than a few moves ahead, or predicting my opponent more than a move or two ahead.
What would be some examples of directly teaching children to think "flexibly and wisely"? (Also, I don't think the mathematically disinclined are showered with advanced math; math, yes, advanced, no. To be clear, I hesitate to call Calculus advanced math.)
That quote sounds directed at aristocratic adults and not modern-day Armenian children. Is there context?
[Western news media] are good in telling stories, but they are bad in telling the truth (what ever that may be).
I've always figured they were worse at reporting scientific news than other news. I have no evidence, though, and in fact whenever I've been personally involved in a newspaper story, some of the details have been wrong--just like virtually every science-y story I've read where I'm familiar with the topic has large holes.
Maybe I missed it, but why do you say "This article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with America's science reporting"? The author of TFA, Gavin Atkins, appears to be Australian. The hosting site, Asian Correspondent, doesn't appear to be related to American news. I agree with the general statement that science reporting is more often than not just terrible, but I don't see how America's science reporting enters in here. In any case, thanks for the thoughtful post!
Thank you. That would have bothered me all day otherwise.
Hah, now I have a picture of a courtroom where lawyers in magic capes dramatically reveal evidence while the jury claps appreciatively.
Sure, something like that will probably happen at least once (if it hasn't already), somewhere--it's a big world. The GP was implying that this situation was a reason not to trust the cloud to permanently store data, which I think is a little harsh considering no data has been lost. That is, I agree with their overall point--cloud data could be lost, and if you really care about data don't just trust the cloud--but disagree that this case exemplifies it.
Google is giving people time to save their content. There's a difference between data in the cloud suddenly and permanently becoming inaccessible and this.
Thank you for eliding their elusive allusion.
Well, it's really a paper folding record that happened to use toilet paper. These people have a weird hobby, but I have difficulty faulting them when MMOs eat up billions of person-hours yearly (my own estimate). Calling them "obsessive compulsive retards" is ignorant and needlessly insulting.
Most of my college tests were take-home. There was a strong "do the right thing" culture there, and nobody I knew cheated, to my knowledge. For some of my CS tests, we weren't allowed to have a computer on while taking the test. People grumbled about it, since then they couldn't listen to music (depending on their setup)--if the test required the computer to be off, it would be off. I'm pretty sure my college was strange in this regard. It was both prestigious and "nice", which was a big reason why I picked it.
Certainly some people did cheat. Every semester or two a few people would get disciplined for it. None of those cases were like the one you describe, using some online answer service or forums. They were often technicalities, or relatively minor things like taking more time than allotted. They were often also self-reported, though not always. Overall the convenience and respect of take-home tests was worth it there. A similar setup at my high school would have been nuts, though, since cheating would have been incredibly rampant.
Well, he did say "the proof of the quadratic formula". I guess the proof could be entered in a text note of some kind. The proof is really quite brief, though: complete the square. I could understand not remembering how to solve a cubic or quartic. They typically use substitutions pulled out of the aether. I have a book that derives a key chunk of the usual method for solving quartics geometrically, but it runs through some basic projective and algebraic geometry and linear algebra--it's definitely not shorter than writing a sequence of magical substitutions, even if it's (arguably...) more intuitive.
I'm fine with the majority of people getting focused trade-oriented higher education. I also have a liberal arts education and am on the path of a future professor/researcher. To most people, I don't think a "well rounded" education is helpful enough to justify the cost in time and money. For instance, I'm thrilled whenever someone wants to learn calculus, but it's just not useful to most people in most areas of society. In a more ideal world, perhaps everyone could recite Dante in the original Italian and solve differential equations, but realistically society is better off *not* wasting productive years forcing everyone to slog through coursework they get little out of.
I think a broad education has its merits, and that some sizable-but-sub-majority fraction of society should get one. I also think a core of hard science (physics, chemistry, math, etc.) should be the basis of a well-rounded education instead of the current art/music/literature/etc. core.
I had watched TAS a year or so ago. There were two episodes I liked, but most of them I had a hard time sitting through. I remember being repeatedly glad that they were only ~22 minutes, and that there were only a couple dozen or so of them. The Wikipedia article is much kinder than I expected. It was also a children's show, so watching it as an adult is kind of unfair. Maybe if I had watched it years ago I wouldn't have disliked it so much. The animation was often cheap, the plots didn't fit very well into the short running time, and they were often silly (even for Star Trek). The child me wouldn't have noticed any of this, though.
For the record, I like TOS, and every other Star Trek series besides TAS. I really only watched TAS for completion, seeing as I had seen every other episode of every other series.
Starting in July, every episode from every Star Trek series will be available for Instant Watch over Netflix [...] the original Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise
*Ahem*, what happened to The Animated Series? It's almost entirely awful and is more or less non-canon, but it's still a Star Trek series.
(The article does go on to say "all five live-action Star Trek series", but the bit I quoted and the title are not technically accurate. Of course I have to point out such an inaccuracy, given the topic.)
I mean that it's not clear to me that a Bernoulli RV saying "weird" or "not weird" was used, as opposed to some continuous measure of "weirdness". For instance, if 249 cases were only slightly "weird", it might be completely unremarkable. Your quote didn't support the expectation of 1 weird result in 10,000, though perhaps the paper does support your 0.6 number. My second sentence wasn't sarcastic, it's just missing an "n't". Basically I would look at the paper, but it doesn't matter enough.
You're pulling probability distributions from nowhere now.... Whatever, the point is moot--I'm certain a random /.'er who admits his lack of understanding of statistics could poke a hole in these researcher's analysis.