Facebook (and most social networking, for that matter) is not about collecting random strangers as friends, and neither is it made for replacing face-to-face conversation. What it works well for is staying in touch with people that you value, but don't have time to keep up with all the time. It also works extremely well for sharing and finding news about upcoming stuff that your friends might be doing - concerts, parties, nerf battles all being recent examples of mine. These things would be clumsier to organize and advertise through email, text messaging, or personal calls, and Facebook works perfectly for this.
I have 200-300 friends, and I know each and every one of them either in real life or through a shared, non-facebook interest. Every sane person I know uses facebook in a fashion similar to the one I just described. It is nothing more or less than a convenient means for maintaining a better awareness of your social network in meatspace.
As a highschool physics and math teacher myself, I can see where she is coming from. However, I have a different perspective to offer. I would like to do all kinds of fun stuff with my kids, but there are two hold ups. The main one, is that kids just aren't that interested in science. They barely pay attention when we have to derive something, they do not know how to study anymore, and if anything resembles hard work to them, they turn away from it. I can remember when I was in high school, I liked physics and math just because of the mental exercise. A side part of this is their maturity. There is a reason people with kids can't have nice things, teenagers break shit. I mean, they have a total disregard for property that is not theirs. I don't know how many meter sticks have been snapped just to do it, and other basic tools that have been broken for the fun of it apparently. I can't trust the lot of them to step foot in a lab, they would end up hurting themselves, or even worse, someone else.
It is your job to make kids interested in science. Like it or not, most kids don't have intrinsic motivation or fear of parents or ambitious goals that will make them interested in the subject - we have to make them interested in a subject for its own sake. And, science is probably the easiest thing around to get kids interested in. Just blow some stuff up, do some demonstrations, show them neat and relevant applications, and I bet you students will start paying attention.
Also, the moment you make broad generalizations like that about your students, you have created a self fulfilling prophecy and they'll never do anything better than that. Students (and people in general) try to live up to your expectations. If you expect them to fail and break shit and be totally irresponsible, that is all they will ever do. Unfortunately parents and teachers and society in general seem to have decided that teenagers are helpless children with no capability for self-control, and then we're shocked when they act like it. People want to have high standards, they want to be pushed and challenged, and if you get them to buy in and then ask them to perform you might be surprised what happens.
I'm not saying that there aren't motivation problems and social problems that make teaching harder than it should be, but teachers don't have control over those things. They only have control over their classroom. So look at what you can change there to fix the problem, because bitching about everything else isn't ever going to accomplish anything.
Again, one could say the same for EVERY area of science. Would you require physicists to summarize all the evidence for theories of mechanics, optics, electromagnetism, etc. before they present it as well? What about this atom theory, with electrons buzzing around? "Where's the EVIDENCE?" you say. We should teach students to think critically, but we can't introduce every idea of elementary science like this. Why is evolution special, except for political reasons, rather than scientific ones?
Interesting that you bring up these points. There ARE some areas of physics that are considered more or less complete - electrodynamics being one of them. That isn't to say that there isn't more to learn, but the existing knowledge base works so well at predicting results and describing reality that the theory most likely won't see significant revision. Theories do have varying levels of stability and maturity.
The atomic theory you are talking about actually ISN'T as certain as you might think. Quantum mechanics leaves all sorts of huge (and so far unanswerable) questions for us to sort out about the interior of the atom, and the 'orbiting electrons' is a convenient but limited model that breaks down in all sorts of ways.
I think that all of science should be introduced as an attempt to conceptually approximate reality through observation. There is a lot of philosophy and fuzziness there, but too often science teachers want to make everything clean and predictable and knowable, when there are a lot of things that seem to be fundamentally unknowable.
All that said, I don't think Creationism or Intelligent Design should be put on any sort of equal footing with evolution, but presenting science as a developing process instead of a fixed structure is a good thing.
I don't buy your assertion that regulating offending behavior increases wealth and power - if anything, most corporations would argue the opposite, because they have to invest more in fuel efficiency and meeting standards that wouldn't exist otherwise.
On top of that, whatever you believe about global warming, the methods proposed to minimize it are almost always good things. Increased reliance on distributed, alternative energy increases security and develops technology that will almost certainly lead to cheaper, cleaner power all around. More efficient homes, vehicles and businesses allow us to do more with less and gives everybody more money in the long run (except maybe the power companies).
Overall, I might see a grand conspiracy in global warming, if it weren't for the fact that almost any imaginable outcome of this will be a good one. I don't see any of the crazy ideas ever getting leverage (putting chemicals in the ocean, trying to reflect light away from earth) and all of the practical, common-sense solutions address a number of other issues. Relying on finite resources from hostile countries is never a good thing, and wasting energy pointlessly is wasting money pointlessly. Really, I just don't see how a grand, evil scheme could result from this - I'd be happy to consider your arguments if you propose some believable scenarios.
I find it strange that people think the scientific method is based on a philosophy or ideology. What scientists do is no different from what us common folk do when we debug a program or try to fix a mechanical system: you notice something funny (program gives wrong result, car won't start, water rising in basement) so you or the called-in expert speculates on the cause and then proceed on the basis of that speculation. If the facts don't bear it out, you pause, scratch your head and come up with a new speculation. Repeat as needed.
AFAICT even the most uneducated of us operate the same way in whatever we do. I suspect it's instinct, or at least such a basic result of the exercise of intelligence that no intelligent species could avoid operating that way.
Actually, the "scientific worldview" has appeared and been smashed throughout history. We think of it as obvious because it has infiltrated our society so thoroughly, but many of these concepts were pretty revolutionary in their day. Specifically, that we arrive at knowledge through observation.
Democritus and Aristarchus championed these points thousands of years ago (and arrived at suprisingly sophisticated models of the solar system and a rudimentary form of atomic theory), but their ideas were thrown out because Aristotle and crew preferred to arrive at knowledge "intrinsically". Specifically, they thought that it was inelegant at best to prove a point with physical evidence, instead one should be able to arrive at truth by just sitting and thinking.
Galileo usually gets credit for his contributions to basic astronomy or physics, but actually I think it was more significant that he tested things physically to try to deduce information about the nature of reality. That seems obvious to us now, but it really wasn't back then.
The main thing, though, is that I simply don't see the anti-abortion movement putting their money where their mouth is. Protesters are always in front of clinics saying "Don't get an abortion! Abortions are bad!" - but if they really cared about the potential baby's life, why aren't they saying "Don't get an abortion! We'll adopt the child!"?
5 minutes of googling returned this website - http://www.angeladoptioninc.com/ - a pro-life organization providing adoption assistance. I don't necessarily agree with pro-lifers, but it isn't honest to characterize them as unfeeling or claim that they don't actually want to prevent abortions. Most of them care very deeply about this issue, and if there is any failing on their parts it is a lack of a complete understanding of the biology of human birth. For a pro-lifer to be internally consistent, I believe they have to reject almost every form of birth control outside of condoms, because pills and the rhythm method both work by causing fertilized fetuses not to implant, so technically result in fetal abortion.
Actually, some of us get to a point of just being frank with one another. I've come to understand that my wife doesn't really care what we do, she just wants to be surprised. I can respect that. My wife has come to learn that I don't like being surprised, and would rather pick something that sounds fun for me. We've both learned that we would both rather have gifts that we like, rather than take random guesses and waste money on crap that we're going to get rid of.
All it takes is talking to one another. Although, maybe, I got lucky when I picked mine.
That's actually kind of offensive. The liberals in this country have done most of the freedom-damaging legislating in this country. Big government etc.
The conservative base is about all we have protecting our freedom at this point.
How exactly is liberal legislation "freedom damaging"? Allowing homosexuals to marry? Giving people the right to smoke what they want? Giving individuals choices over their own bodies rather than making governmental decisions for the moral good of all? Those all sound like they are really limiting freedom... oh, sorry, I forgot, they support "big government", which somehow ambiguously takes away freedoms just by virtue of being "big government", even though it is demonstrably smaller financially than a conservative's so-called small government.
No seriously, ever play that game? It's rage inducing. Did i think it was a good game? Fuck no, it was a piece of shit.
To summarize, difficulty != Fun
Wanna do something hard? Do something outside of video games.
I beg to differ. Battletoads kept me going back to the video store over and over to rent it as a kid. It was tough as hell, but it was interesting and the art was fun and the music was good, so I actually kept trying.
A good but difficult game will give you hours of playtime, a good but easy game will only give you a few, and a bad game won't keep you playing whether it's easy or not.
As our scientific knowledge increases, integer values seem to have more significance to the physical world, not less. This is the central claim of quantum mechanics. There is a point where energy, space, charge, and all sorts of other quantities move in whole integer chunks, rather than in a smooth analog form like we perceive on a human-sized level.
There still must be some detail missing from this picture.
They added the extra complexity of a power combining mechanism for extra efficiency and then only use at 70MPH and beyond.
That is outside EPA testing parameters, which means this extra complexity won't add anything to the all important for marketing EPA numbers.
So just how bad would the efficiency have to be through the ICE/Generator/Motor to add extra complexity to be used over 70MPH.
Something really doesn't add up.
Indeed. It almost looks as if, maybe, the car manufacturer is worrying about actual performance in the real world rather than just specs for a marketing handout. That can't be right...
Slashdot Mirror
As a really (really) rough idea: For any 3d objects of finite size, there exists a plane which could bisect all three of them.
Disclaimer:
IANAMBITCO (I am not a mathemetician, but I took calculus once)
Facebook (and most social networking, for that matter) is not about collecting random strangers as friends, and neither is it made for replacing face-to-face conversation. What it works well for is staying in touch with people that you value, but don't have time to keep up with all the time. It also works extremely well for sharing and finding news about upcoming stuff that your friends might be doing - concerts, parties, nerf battles all being recent examples of mine. These things would be clumsier to organize and advertise through email, text messaging, or personal calls, and Facebook works perfectly for this.
I have 200-300 friends, and I know each and every one of them either in real life or through a shared, non-facebook interest. Every sane person I know uses facebook in a fashion similar to the one I just described. It is nothing more or less than a convenient means for maintaining a better awareness of your social network in meatspace.
As a highschool physics and math teacher myself, I can see where she is coming from. However, I have a different perspective to offer. I would like to do all kinds of fun stuff with my kids, but there are two hold ups. The main one, is that kids just aren't that interested in science. They barely pay attention when we have to derive something, they do not know how to study anymore, and if anything resembles hard work to them, they turn away from it. I can remember when I was in high school, I liked physics and math just because of the mental exercise. A side part of this is their maturity. There is a reason people with kids can't have nice things, teenagers break shit. I mean, they have a total disregard for property that is not theirs. I don't know how many meter sticks have been snapped just to do it, and other basic tools that have been broken for the fun of it apparently. I can't trust the lot of them to step foot in a lab, they would end up hurting themselves, or even worse, someone else.
It is your job to make kids interested in science. Like it or not, most kids don't have intrinsic motivation or fear of parents or ambitious goals that will make them interested in the subject - we have to make them interested in a subject for its own sake. And, science is probably the easiest thing around to get kids interested in. Just blow some stuff up, do some demonstrations, show them neat and relevant applications, and I bet you students will start paying attention.
Also, the moment you make broad generalizations like that about your students, you have created a self fulfilling prophecy and they'll never do anything better than that. Students (and people in general) try to live up to your expectations. If you expect them to fail and break shit and be totally irresponsible, that is all they will ever do. Unfortunately parents and teachers and society in general seem to have decided that teenagers are helpless children with no capability for self-control, and then we're shocked when they act like it. People want to have high standards, they want to be pushed and challenged, and if you get them to buy in and then ask them to perform you might be surprised what happens.
I'm not saying that there aren't motivation problems and social problems that make teaching harder than it should be, but teachers don't have control over those things. They only have control over their classroom. So look at what you can change there to fix the problem, because bitching about everything else isn't ever going to accomplish anything.
Again, one could say the same for EVERY area of science. Would you require physicists to summarize all the evidence for theories of mechanics, optics, electromagnetism, etc. before they present it as well? What about this atom theory, with electrons buzzing around? "Where's the EVIDENCE?" you say. We should teach students to think critically, but we can't introduce every idea of elementary science like this. Why is evolution special, except for political reasons, rather than scientific ones?
Interesting that you bring up these points. There ARE some areas of physics that are considered more or less complete - electrodynamics being one of them. That isn't to say that there isn't more to learn, but the existing knowledge base works so well at predicting results and describing reality that the theory most likely won't see significant revision. Theories do have varying levels of stability and maturity. The atomic theory you are talking about actually ISN'T as certain as you might think. Quantum mechanics leaves all sorts of huge (and so far unanswerable) questions for us to sort out about the interior of the atom, and the 'orbiting electrons' is a convenient but limited model that breaks down in all sorts of ways.
I think that all of science should be introduced as an attempt to conceptually approximate reality through observation. There is a lot of philosophy and fuzziness there, but too often science teachers want to make everything clean and predictable and knowable, when there are a lot of things that seem to be fundamentally unknowable. All that said, I don't think Creationism or Intelligent Design should be put on any sort of equal footing with evolution, but presenting science as a developing process instead of a fixed structure is a good thing.
"Big Science", really?
I don't buy your assertion that regulating offending behavior increases wealth and power - if anything, most corporations would argue the opposite, because they have to invest more in fuel efficiency and meeting standards that wouldn't exist otherwise. On top of that, whatever you believe about global warming, the methods proposed to minimize it are almost always good things. Increased reliance on distributed, alternative energy increases security and develops technology that will almost certainly lead to cheaper, cleaner power all around. More efficient homes, vehicles and businesses allow us to do more with less and gives everybody more money in the long run (except maybe the power companies).
Overall, I might see a grand conspiracy in global warming, if it weren't for the fact that almost any imaginable outcome of this will be a good one. I don't see any of the crazy ideas ever getting leverage (putting chemicals in the ocean, trying to reflect light away from earth) and all of the practical, common-sense solutions address a number of other issues. Relying on finite resources from hostile countries is never a good thing, and wasting energy pointlessly is wasting money pointlessly. Really, I just don't see how a grand, evil scheme could result from this - I'd be happy to consider your arguments if you propose some believable scenarios.
I find it strange that people think the scientific method is based on a philosophy or ideology. What scientists do is no different from what us common folk do when we debug a program or try to fix a mechanical system: you notice something funny (program gives wrong result, car won't start, water rising in basement) so you or the called-in expert speculates on the cause and then proceed on the basis of that speculation. If the facts don't bear it out, you pause, scratch your head and come up with a new speculation. Repeat as needed.
AFAICT even the most uneducated of us operate the same way in whatever we do. I suspect it's instinct, or at least such a basic result of the exercise of intelligence that no intelligent species could avoid operating that way.
Actually, the "scientific worldview" has appeared and been smashed throughout history. We think of it as obvious because it has infiltrated our society so thoroughly, but many of these concepts were pretty revolutionary in their day. Specifically, that we arrive at knowledge through observation. Democritus and Aristarchus championed these points thousands of years ago (and arrived at suprisingly sophisticated models of the solar system and a rudimentary form of atomic theory), but their ideas were thrown out because Aristotle and crew preferred to arrive at knowledge "intrinsically". Specifically, they thought that it was inelegant at best to prove a point with physical evidence, instead one should be able to arrive at truth by just sitting and thinking. Galileo usually gets credit for his contributions to basic astronomy or physics, but actually I think it was more significant that he tested things physically to try to deduce information about the nature of reality. That seems obvious to us now, but it really wasn't back then.
The main thing, though, is that I simply don't see the anti-abortion movement putting their money where their mouth is. Protesters are always in front of clinics saying "Don't get an abortion! Abortions are bad!" - but if they really cared about the potential baby's life, why aren't they saying "Don't get an abortion! We'll adopt the child!"?
5 minutes of googling returned this website - http://www.angeladoptioninc.com/ - a pro-life organization providing adoption assistance. I don't necessarily agree with pro-lifers, but it isn't honest to characterize them as unfeeling or claim that they don't actually want to prevent abortions. Most of them care very deeply about this issue, and if there is any failing on their parts it is a lack of a complete understanding of the biology of human birth. For a pro-lifer to be internally consistent, I believe they have to reject almost every form of birth control outside of condoms, because pills and the rhythm method both work by causing fertilized fetuses not to implant, so technically result in fetal abortion.
towards a sexy future!
Actually, some of us get to a point of just being frank with one another. I've come to understand that my wife doesn't really care what we do, she just wants to be surprised. I can respect that. My wife has come to learn that I don't like being surprised, and would rather pick something that sounds fun for me. We've both learned that we would both rather have gifts that we like, rather than take random guesses and waste money on crap that we're going to get rid of. All it takes is talking to one another. Although, maybe, I got lucky when I picked mine.
That's actually kind of offensive. The liberals in this country have done most of the freedom-damaging legislating in this country. Big government etc.
The conservative base is about all we have protecting our freedom at this point.
How exactly is liberal legislation "freedom damaging"? Allowing homosexuals to marry? Giving people the right to smoke what they want? Giving individuals choices over their own bodies rather than making governmental decisions for the moral good of all? Those all sound like they are really limiting freedom... oh, sorry, I forgot, they support "big government", which somehow ambiguously takes away freedoms just by virtue of being "big government", even though it is demonstrably smaller financially than a conservative's so-called small government.
But do they have battletoads?
No seriously, ever play that game? It's rage inducing. Did i think it was a good game? Fuck no, it was a piece of shit.
To summarize, difficulty != Fun
Wanna do something hard? Do something outside of video games.
I beg to differ. Battletoads kept me going back to the video store over and over to rent it as a kid. It was tough as hell, but it was interesting and the art was fun and the music was good, so I actually kept trying. A good but difficult game will give you hours of playtime, a good but easy game will only give you a few, and a bad game won't keep you playing whether it's easy or not.
As our scientific knowledge increases, integer values seem to have more significance to the physical world, not less. This is the central claim of quantum mechanics. There is a point where energy, space, charge, and all sorts of other quantities move in whole integer chunks, rather than in a smooth analog form like we perceive on a human-sized level.
There still must be some detail missing from this picture.
They added the extra complexity of a power combining mechanism for extra efficiency and then only use at 70MPH and beyond.
That is outside EPA testing parameters, which means this extra complexity won't add anything to the all important for marketing EPA numbers.
So just how bad would the efficiency have to be through the ICE/Generator/Motor to add extra complexity to be used over 70MPH.
Something really doesn't add up.
Indeed. It almost looks as if, maybe, the car manufacturer is worrying about actual performance in the real world rather than just specs for a marketing handout. That can't be right...