Of course, some communities in the USA consider discussion of the light cone obscene, since it can be used to determine that the age of the universe is more than 6000 yr...
This assumes that there's some mechanism in the brain that is very, very tightly tuned to respond to particular frequencies -- that's how a radio works, after all. You can set it to be sensitive to a particular frequency, and it will amplify whatever signal (assume it's amplitude-modulated for the sake of simplicity) it receives on that frequency. If it's modulated with no particular pattern, you'll get static; if it's Buddy Holly, you'll just get... noise.
The key is that the radio is very, very tightly tuned. Even if the energy content of the desired signal is tiny, it's at a very particular frequency, and the radio is designed to discard nearby frequencies and grab just the one it wants. In order to argue that "the brain responds in some very weird ways to a range of modulated signals delivered by microwave carrier", you need a similar very fine tuning.
Do these studies propose a mechanism for this? I'd like to see their results for this blood-brain-barrier permeability work; it sort of smells like nonsense. If it's *not* nonsense, though, it could have some promising applications in pharmacology.
But I doubt it will hold up to review -- this smells sort of like the "MMR causes autism!" thing.
Believe it or not, your brain is immersed in a bath of photons with equal and higher energies to the ones in cellphone radiation. They come from the blackbody radiation that everything with a temperature emits. Equivalently, any oscillatory mode with energy comparable to kT among the atoms in your brain is already getting randomly banged around by thermal fluctuations.
Your brain's awash in radiation all the time, with a higher energy per photon than what you get from a cell phone, and with much more of it.
She worked to make sure McCain didn't get elected; she showed her devotion to pacifism by her nonconfrontational debating tactics (not answering the questions); she showed her extraordinary political vision by being able to see Russia from her house.
... can't we find somebody else who deserves the thing? Obama's done no more for world peace than any other sane person in the US: he's not a radical warmonger, but that in itself shouldn't get you an award. Rather than giving it to him, give it to someone who worked to make sure McCain didn't get elected, if you want to tie it to the US.
Morgan Tsangvirai, maybe. Or the pro-democracy campaigners in Iran.
Are there really that few good people in the world these days?
This is because statistical error -- the error you make because of the limits of your sample size -- goes down as 1/sqrt(N), but systematic error -- the error you make because of imperfect knowledge of your model, biases you can't estimate and control for, and so on -- does not.
A large and difficult part of the field of computational physics I do, at least, is accurately estimating systematic errors. Statistical errors are easy, you just do the probability shit. But honestly estimating systematic errors is hard.
If you have a large sample size, of course, you should be trying to bring that huge sample to bear to reduce systematic error, which can usually be done. An example of trying to correct for systematic error is the corrections made to polling data to account for cell-phone-only voters. It can be done, and as long as it is done honestly, you will get a reliable estimate of significance levels at the end.
The Big Deal about the LHC isn't just the energy. It's also that it allows for a much higher collision rate than the Tevatron. Even if you only run the thing at Tevatron energies, it's possible that it can collect as much data in a week as the Tevatron could in years.
When the LHC guys down the hall show up tomorrow I'll have to ask them about the planned luminosity in the first year of running.
It can be guaranteed that Shelby's not doing anything for honest "this-is-what-I-really-think-is-best" reasons. There may be arguments for and against Constellation, but Shelby did that just because the work was being done in his district.
We don't have a one-size-fits-all system, though. There's a thing called an IEP -- Individual Education Plan -- whereby the parents of a child can demand modifications to the child's education if it'd be good for the child. IEP's are legally binding, and I benefited from them when I was in school.
Because those random strangers influence the world I live in. In particular, they get to vote, and I don't want people voting based on false information.
If people are going to be voting on (say) whether or not nuclear power is a good idea, or whether homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals, then I want them to actually understand what nuclear power is, or what homosexuality is.
And these "fundamentals" aren't things that one either believes or not, as though it's a choice. There's simply the way the world is, and society has a duty to make sure that children understand some of it.
This is because the public schools don't serve children who are exceptional well. My mom studies the education of the highly intelligent (it's her job), and while many schools have decent programs for dealing with students like that, many don't.
Your anecdote of doing better than the public schools doesn't mean that everyone who homeschools does. There are two distinct populations: religious homeschoolers and people who homeschool because they can do better than public school. You're in the latter, and you're a minority.
Did your learn fundamental biology, cosmology, and the fundamentals of human anatomy and sexuality during your schooling?
Turns out you can still be uneducated and get an electrical engineering degree. Not saying that you are (you probably aren't, but I know people who are), but getting a BS in a technical field isn't evidence of a well-rounded background. Hell, I'm about to get a PhD, and there are still some fundamental things I should have learned in school that I don't know.
This is certainly true. My mother is a middle school teacher, and I've volunteered at her (inner-city) school in Alabama. The quality of education fluctuates between average and crappy, and I have no doubt that a reasonably educated, intelligent person (as you probably are, being a Slashdot reader and someone capable of writing coherently, which is all I know about you) can do a better job than the lowest-common-denominator teachers in many schools. Public schooling in the US has a lot of problems, and the foremost of them is that in many cases the children are more intelligent than their teachers and the teachers, having no idea how to handle students who are above average, just do nothing. After all, if you do nothing to help the student above the curve, she'll just get an A and nobody cares that she's not living up to her potential.
The solution here, of course, is to fix the public schools. Universal access to education is too important a social benefit to let it fall by the wayside simply because the schools need work.
It *is* true, though, that a large chunk (probably a majority) of homeschoolers do it for religious reasons, reasons which are detrimental to their children's education. I'm from Alabama. The homeschool movement is very strong in the Deep South, and it's almost all for fundamentalist reasons.
Who else is going to do the approving? Y'know, it's possible for the State to not be corrupt. If it's corrupt, rather than changing the policy that doesn't work because of corruption, you should do something about the corruption in the first place.
Homeschooling in your situation, in isolation, made some sense. But, looking at the system as a whole, if public schools are broken the solution is to fix them, rather than just homeschool everybody.
The question is whether or not you have the right to not raise your children, which is what happens in religious homeschooling: teaching children the fundamentals of the world around them is part of "raising" them, and whether parents have the right to demand that that not happen is the question...
The fact remains that your rationale for homeschooling is the minority in the USA. Most people who do it do it for reasons that are detrimental to society.
What you are doing for your children is commendable and should be permitted in a rational society, but religious homeschooling (where children are sheltered from the sorts of basic fundamental facts about our world that form the rationale for universal education in the first place) should not be. As someone else pointed out, anybody in Germany can take the test to be qualified as a teacher; if you're competent, just get certified to homeschool your own kids.
I know that the law in the US governing photography is that, by default, if I can see it and I am standing either on my own property or on public property, I can shoot it. There are a few exceptions (peeping tom laws and so on), but for the most part, I've got the right to record anything I can see.
I teach a computational physics class for freshmen.
When I was going over our syllabus, I said: "Email your homework here. Don't send us Microsoft Word documents. My TA and I don't have Word, we're probably not on a computer that does when we grade your homework, and we can't be arsed to go find a decoder for whatever the newest obscure Microsoft format is."
The students were shocked -- you don't have Word? Really? How is this possible? (Answer: LaTeX.)
(Except for the one guy with the Ubuntu laptop, in the back, who chuckled...)
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, some communities in the USA consider discussion of the light cone obscene, since it can be used to determine that the age of the universe is more than 6000 yr...
This assumes that there's some mechanism in the brain that is very, very tightly tuned to respond to particular frequencies -- that's how a radio works, after all. You can set it to be sensitive to a particular frequency, and it will amplify whatever signal (assume it's amplitude-modulated for the sake of simplicity) it receives on that frequency. If it's modulated with no particular pattern, you'll get static; if it's Buddy Holly, you'll just get ... noise.
The key is that the radio is very, very tightly tuned. Even if the energy content of the desired signal is tiny, it's at a very particular frequency, and the radio is designed to discard nearby frequencies and grab just the one it wants. In order to argue that "the brain responds in some very weird ways to a range of modulated signals delivered by microwave carrier", you need a similar very fine tuning.
Do these studies propose a mechanism for this? I'd like to see their results for this blood-brain-barrier permeability work; it sort of smells like nonsense. If it's *not* nonsense, though, it could have some promising applications in pharmacology.
But I doubt it will hold up to review -- this smells sort of like the "MMR causes autism!" thing.
Believe it or not, your brain is immersed in a bath of photons with equal and higher energies to the ones in cellphone radiation. They come from the blackbody radiation that everything with a temperature emits. Equivalently, any oscillatory mode with energy comparable to kT among the atoms in your brain is already getting randomly banged around by thermal fluctuations.
Your brain's awash in radiation all the time, with a higher energy per photon than what you get from a cell phone, and with much more of it.
That was my suggestion.
She worked to make sure McCain didn't get elected; she showed her devotion to pacifism by her nonconfrontational debating tactics (not answering the questions); she showed her extraordinary political vision by being able to see Russia from her house.
... can't we find somebody else who deserves the thing? Obama's done no more for world peace than any other sane person in the US: he's not a radical warmonger, but that in itself shouldn't get you an award. Rather than giving it to him, give it to someone who worked to make sure McCain didn't get elected, if you want to tie it to the US.
Morgan Tsangvirai, maybe. Or the pro-democracy campaigners in Iran.
Are there really that few good people in the world these days?
This is because statistical error -- the error you make because of the limits of your sample size -- goes down as 1/sqrt(N), but systematic error -- the error you make because of imperfect knowledge of your model, biases you can't estimate and control for, and so on -- does not.
A large and difficult part of the field of computational physics I do, at least, is accurately estimating systematic errors. Statistical errors are easy, you just do the probability shit. But honestly estimating systematic errors is hard.
If you have a large sample size, of course, you should be trying to bring that huge sample to bear to reduce systematic error, which can usually be done. An example of trying to correct for systematic error is the corrections made to polling data to account for cell-phone-only voters. It can be done, and as long as it is done honestly, you will get a reliable estimate of significance levels at the end.
Yup. :) And the luminosity of the LHC is 0.8 fucktons (metric) of particles per second.
That's about a microjoule.
The Big Deal about the LHC isn't just the energy. It's also that it allows for a much higher collision rate than the Tevatron. Even if you only run the thing at Tevatron energies, it's possible that it can collect as much data in a week as the Tevatron could in years.
When the LHC guys down the hall show up tomorrow I'll have to ask them about the planned luminosity in the first year of running.
It can be guaranteed that Shelby's not doing anything for honest "this-is-what-I-really-think-is-best" reasons. There may be arguments for and against Constellation, but Shelby did that just because the work was being done in his district.
That guy's a crook.
The only reply I have is this:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/science.jpg
We don't have a one-size-fits-all system, though. There's a thing called an IEP -- Individual Education Plan -- whereby the parents of a child can demand modifications to the child's education if it'd be good for the child. IEP's are legally binding, and I benefited from them when I was in school.
Because those random strangers influence the world I live in. In particular, they get to vote, and I don't want people voting based on false information.
If people are going to be voting on (say) whether or not nuclear power is a good idea, or whether homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals, then I want them to actually understand what nuclear power is, or what homosexuality is.
And these "fundamentals" aren't things that one either believes or not, as though it's a choice. There's simply the way the world is, and society has a duty to make sure that children understand some of it.
The trouble is that the standard tests don't actually test whether or not someone has gotten a good education.
This is because the public schools don't serve children who are exceptional well. My mom studies the education of the highly intelligent (it's her job), and while many schools have decent programs for dealing with students like that, many don't.
Your anecdote of doing better than the public schools doesn't mean that everyone who homeschools does. There are two distinct populations: religious homeschoolers and people who homeschool because they can do better than public school. You're in the latter, and you're a minority.
Did your learn fundamental biology, cosmology, and the fundamentals of human anatomy and sexuality during your schooling?
Turns out you can still be uneducated and get an electrical engineering degree. Not saying that you are (you probably aren't, but I know people who are), but getting a BS in a technical field isn't evidence of a well-rounded background. Hell, I'm about to get a PhD, and there are still some fundamental things I should have learned in school that I don't know.
This is certainly true. My mother is a middle school teacher, and I've volunteered at her (inner-city) school in Alabama. The quality of education fluctuates between average and crappy, and I have no doubt that a reasonably educated, intelligent person (as you probably are, being a Slashdot reader and someone capable of writing coherently, which is all I know about you) can do a better job than the lowest-common-denominator teachers in many schools. Public schooling in the US has a lot of problems, and the foremost of them is that in many cases the children are more intelligent than their teachers and the teachers, having no idea how to handle students who are above average, just do nothing. After all, if you do nothing to help the student above the curve, she'll just get an A and nobody cares that she's not living up to her potential.
The solution here, of course, is to fix the public schools. Universal access to education is too important a social benefit to let it fall by the wayside simply because the schools need work.
It *is* true, though, that a large chunk (probably a majority) of homeschoolers do it for religious reasons, reasons which are detrimental to their children's education. I'm from Alabama. The homeschool movement is very strong in the Deep South, and it's almost all for fundamentalist reasons.
Who else is going to do the approving? Y'know, it's possible for the State to not be corrupt. If it's corrupt, rather than changing the policy that doesn't work because of corruption, you should do something about the corruption in the first place.
Homeschooling in your situation, in isolation, made some sense. But, looking at the system as a whole, if public schools are broken the solution is to fix them, rather than just homeschool everybody.
The question is whether or not you have the right to not raise your children, which is what happens in religious homeschooling: teaching children the fundamentals of the world around them is part of "raising" them, and whether parents have the right to demand that that not happen is the question...
The fact remains that your rationale for homeschooling is the minority in the USA. Most people who do it do it for reasons that are detrimental to society.
What you are doing for your children is commendable and should be permitted in a rational society, but religious homeschooling (where children are sheltered from the sorts of basic fundamental facts about our world that form the rationale for universal education in the first place) should not be. As someone else pointed out, anybody in Germany can take the test to be qualified as a teacher; if you're competent, just get certified to homeschool your own kids.
During the protests, I knew an Anon who went by "Faggyfag" -- 'cause he was gay.
Really?
I know that the law in the US governing photography is that, by default, if I can see it and I am standing either on my own property or on public property, I can shoot it. There are a few exceptions (peeping tom laws and so on), but for the most part, I've got the right to record anything I can see.
I teach a computational physics class for freshmen.
When I was going over our syllabus, I said: "Email your homework here. Don't send us Microsoft Word documents. My TA and I don't have Word, we're probably not on a computer that does when we grade your homework, and we can't be arsed to go find a decoder for whatever the newest obscure Microsoft format is."
The students were shocked -- you don't have Word? Really? How is this possible? (Answer: LaTeX.)
(Except for the one guy with the Ubuntu laptop, in the back, who chuckled...)
You can turn that off...