As for your subject line, the answer is probably "You shouldn't, until other scientists have had a chance to examine it carefully." Scientists throw in this kind of idea all the time. Sometimes the ideas survive scrutiny; sometimes they don't.
> 1. There are a few techniques for measuring old dates (say, 4000 years and older, including upwards of millions of years).
> 2. These techniques are not accurate for young objects, such as dates taken from recent volcanic activity
A simple case of garbage-in, garbage-out. If a programmer writes a function and specifies what inputs it works on, you can't expect it to work properly on other inputs. Ditto with most technological procedures that scientists use. If you want to use the Hubble space telescope to measure the distance to a quasar and you point it at the quasar when the sun lies in between, the numbers you get are going to be useless - even if you apply the "correct" calculations to them.
> 3. Because these techniques are only recently employed, they have not been tested on anything we know is old to prove they work. > 4. They are untestable because we have no objects we are certain are, say, 60000 years old except by these techniques. Therefore we cannot test these techniques on anything within range.
However, they are based on well-established principles (e.g., we understand radioactive decay for reasons completely unrelated to the age of the earth), and they converge on a common answer. Browse the links above if you are curious about this kind of stuff.
Also notice that when a murder occurs with no witnesses, we can often identify the time and manner of the event anyway. People actually investigate this stuff in order to come up with a model of the universe that works. It's not just some mechanism that someone pulled out of their hat.
Finally, notice that geologists had figured out that the earth was far, far older than a literal reading of the bible implies, long before they had radioisotopic methods to work with. (And even before they had Darwin's theory of evolution, for that matter.)
> 5. These techniques are based on the assumption that breakdown, injection of elements, etc, continues at a constant rate.
The thing about science that most creationists don't understand is that scientific assumptions have consequences, and you can increase the confidence in your assumptions by seeing how the consequences pan out. For instance, if there had been any significant changes in the rate of radioactive decay over the past few thousand years then we could see that the stars a few thousand light-years away were "burning" differently than the ones nearby.
Now it may be possible to juggle the parameters and come up with a model of the universe with changing physical constants and make it match all current observations. However, you have to actually do that if you want to offer it as an alternative theory about nature. You can't invoke a non-existent theory to displace an existing theory that actually works.
Remember, the requirement of science is a coherent model of the universe, not a bag of independent and possibly self-contradictory claims.
> So my question is, if K-Ar fails when it can be tested, and produces an age of 0.27-3.5 million years old for something that is _known_ to be young, then why should I trust the dates given in contemporary science?
And now for the Red Herring. Creationists often bring up the example of the Hawaiian pillow basalts with anomalous K-Ar ages, but they neglect to mention that geologists already thought that rocks formed under THESE PARTICULAR conditions would give unreliable K-Ar ages because they would trap argon before it can escape. The studies in question were performed to confirm this under controlled conditions, and thus to confirm to the scientific community that THIS PARTICULAR type of rock is unsuitable for radiometric dating. The misuse of this work by Creationists is particularly despicable, IMHO.
So again, what's needed is that coherent model of the universe, not one datapoint in isolation from its context. (But please read the rest of the link; all I quoted was the punch line.)
> If I am to take evolution seriously, then this question must first be answered. Forget anything else, lets talk about this.
Good idea to focus on one thing at a time. If you still have questions after reading the links above carefully, post your question to the talk.origins and see what the experts bring out. I'll make it a point to lurk over that way in a day or two and see how it plays there.
> Couldn't a genetic mutation that spread more gradually (than the article claims) account for the facts as you provide them?
Good point, I would assume so. However, if you have time to read the whole t.o. thread you'll see that it generally undercuts the notion that there's anything that needs explaining at all. (At least that's how I interpreted it.)
> > > Let's hope the Bible is a joke or you aren't going to like the future.
> > What about the Koran? The Kama Sutra?
> What does the Koran teach Black Parrot? (without resorting to google). How much do you know?
Probably slightly more than you know about the Kama Sutra.
BTW, I have a copy of the Koran on my shelf, from long before 9/11 too. However, I never finished reading it cover-to-cover because it's just a compendum of the same kind of boring nonsense the bible is made of. Life's too precious, kind of thing.
Also, I notice that in true creationist fashion you've completely given up on trying to defend your views, and started taking ad hominem pot shots at those who disagree with you instead. Lurkers will surely notice that creationists are the best argument against creationism.
> Much of Western civilization clearly followed from the teachings of Moses, following his encounter with a burning bush, supposedly an Acacia. It is known that many Acacias contain the potent hallucinogenic substance dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is active when smoked and inhaled.
FWIW, there's a hypothesis that the cornered and badly outnumbered Texicans won the battle of San Jacinto because the Mexican army had never operated in that area before and made their campfires by pulling up Acacia bushes. (I suppose this could be refuted by showing that the same species grows in Mexico. Does anyone know?)
> Could it be that this is how Moses "found God?"
> Sadly, those wishing to partake of similar transformational experiences today are prohibited by law from doing so. Both psilocybin and DMT are Schedule 1 drugs in the United States, and illegal in most other jurisdictions as well.
That's 'cause governments don't want their citizens finding any more gods.
> I didn't go to grad school, but I did get a bachelors degree in Anthropology - and I like to think that I am pretty well read in the field. I can guarantee that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence linking proto-humans, or physically modern humans, to any sort of psychedelic chemical that facilitated brain development.
Surely you're not saying you got a degree in the Liberal Arts without the help of a few magic mushrooms along the way? Whatever has this world come to! Next we'll be hearing that Drama students can be straight and Art majors wear clothes at parties.
> I thought that common scientific thought now says that we didn't evolve from the great apes, but there is a common ancester that both the great apes and humans evolved from that was neither a great ape or a human.
Phylogenetically speaking, humans are apes. Our neighborhood of the tree of life is thought to be something like this (based on the genetic evidence):
(((humans chimps) gorillas) other-apes)
I use bracketization rather than an ASCII drawing, but hopefully you can derive a tree from the indicated nesting. (Each matched pair of parentheses indicates a tree or sub-tree. Only the leaves are named, but there is a node in the tree for each pair of parentheses.)
Unfortunately the biological concept of "ape" clashes with the conventional meaning of "ape" (which excludes humans, and for lots of people may even be limited to "gorilla"), but then the word "ape" has been around a lot longer than our ability to parse a tree out of the genetic evidence. But notice that there's no way to name a sub-tree in the tree of life "apes" without either (a) including humans, or else (b) excluding some things we'd like to call "apes".
But back to the tree, there was a Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) of humans and chimps, which was itself neither human nor chimp, a MRCA of the humans-chimps and gorillas, etc. Those MRCAs are the nodes of the tree.
> I wonder if the discovery of this "random" mutation will help or hinder the creationists or the "by design" crew?
Creationists: assuredly not, since they think evidence is something to be ignored rather than something to be explained. Most deny that "good" mutations can happen at all.
Intelligent Design advocate: there is a big spread of beliefs in this group, ranging from outright creationists to people who accept evolution, the big bang, and all that, but only reserve a tiny claim that "God^W an intelligent designer helped things along somehow, somewhere along the way". Some in the latter group might actually appeal to this discovery, though for the most part they prefer to stay as vague about their claims as possible in order to avoid accidentally presenting a testable hypothesis. (If you're curious about the pseudo-science and politics of the Intelligent Design movement, go over to the talk.origins newsgroup and post a question about it. You'll get a real ear full, I guarantee you.)
>...it is still not proved that humans are descentants of apes... Furthermore, there is still no evidence between mutations from one species to another. I don't know much about biology
Obviously not, or you wouldn't be posting such nonsense.
> Granted, it's an interesting idea, but I'm wondering how sharp this supposed 'creativity boundary' really is. I find it unlikely that something so complex and essential to human society would be linked to only a handful of genes - that's ignoring a very large part of the evolution of the primate mind.
FWIW, there was a discussion of this (not the article, but the purported 50,000 YBP quantum leap) on talk.origins about a month ago, and lots of the better informed regular posters weighed in against the idea.
>
a) Was there a "quantum leap" in human technology around 50,000 years ago?
No. It appeared as a quantum leap in a Europe-dominated archeological record. But as more and more sites in Africa from the right time frame are investigated, the "leap" becomes much more gradual. Here's a nice review:
McBrearty, S & Brooks, A (2000) 'The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior', J Hum Evo 39:453-563
>
New types of stone tools designed for specific tasks appear, and bone becomes a preferred material for manufacturing tools. Ivory beads, pendants, and other ornaments invested with social or symbolic meaning adorn the bodies of the living and the dead. And people begin to represent elements of their world in portable figurines, engravings on rocks, and paintings on the walls of limestone caves. While fossils indicate that humans looking just like us had already existed for the previous 60,000 years, only with the advent of Upper Paleolithic technology, it seems, did they start acting like us.
Outside of Europe the border of the Upper Paleolithic is gradual and indistinct, and substantially older than in Europe. As stated elsewhere, similar technologies are known from as long ago as 80,000 years ago in Africa.
There's lots of other interesting stuff in the thread too.
> 90% of French and British citizens were against standing up to Hitler when he waltzed into the Sudetenland. Look where that got us. No one wants war, but the realists in the world realize that inaction is actually worse in some cases.
The problem is that no one has a crystal ball that lets us examine the future the way we can examine the past. I for one am not eager to have tens or hundreds of thousands of people killed on the basis dubious claims that we can detect when history is repeating itself. Far better to reason things out on the basis of what we see now than to base our decision on a weak analogy with the past.
And remember, there have been times when we intervened and things still didn't work out exactly swell, and times when we sat back and weren't afflicted with another world war as a result. Appeals to history make great rhetoric, but so far as I can tell they are actually worthless.
> but the bottom ine is that the first to discover the thing was going to use it, and this world has been quite the scary & dangerous place ever since.
I agree, and it's unfortunate that that genie can't be put back in the bottle.
However, the curmudgeon in me can't help pointing out that the world was already a scary & dangerous place. Only the tiniest fraction of the ~50,000,000 people who died during WWII died as a result of atomic bombs.
And we've darn well kept our hand in at the killing since then, too.
> I think it's less about how much math you will use and more about how math changes the way you approach problems.
I agree (mostly), and would go further to say that it changes the way you approach problems because it changes the way you think about the world.
I added the "mostly" qualification because IMO we'll soon reach the point where society wants us to concentrate more on getting our products right than getting them out the door, and at that point "programming" will be forced to become a math-based engineering discipline, and we'll start using our maths very explicitly.
As for the "Ask Slashdot" question, the math needed for programmers to understand what they're doing is all the 'discrete' stuff people are mentioning: logic, sets, relations, functions, graphs, basic proofs, etc. You may never use these things explicitly during your programming career, but they will inform your intellectual life and have a big impact on the way you write programs. (Hopefully, in a way that causes you to produce fewer wrong algorithms.)
IMO the other good stuff so many people are mentioning, such as linear algebra, trigonometry, calculus, differential equations, numerical methods, statistics, etc., are not fundamental to computer science, but rather are important to specific types of application. Thus they should be moved out of the core CS curriculum in order to make room for as much of the discrete stuff as possible. (Or maybe leave in a "pick one" advanced math requirement.)
Still, I would encourage students to study these "non fundamental" mathematical topics if time allows, because some of them really will fundamentally change the way you look at the world. It would be nice for a CS degree to include them all, but the typical CS program is already so packed that most students can't finish in 4 years.
As an aside, IMO one of the most important courses a CS student should take is an algorithms course. (It's a killer hard course, so you may want to take it on a pass/fail basis.) The course will include a mathematical treatment, and you'll have to thoroughly master all the 'discrete' math stuff before you attempt it, but it will really open your eyes to the possibilities of what you can do algorithmically.
Clearly, they know that the world is going to end on next Tuesday, and they cynically promised us the next installment of the debate for Tuesday, knowing that they won't have to deliver.
> HAL: "I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal."
We've missed our window of opportunity for creating HAL. If we started today, once he obtained basic sentience he'd waste all his time trolling Slashdot instead of doing his homework, and never pass his qualifications for flying a spaceship.
Slashdot Mirror
So again, what's needed is that coherent model of the universe, not one datapoint in isolation from its context. (But please read the rest of the link; all I quoted was the punch line.)As for your subject line, the answer is probably "You shouldn't, until other scientists have had a chance to examine it carefully." Scientists throw in this kind of idea all the time. Sometimes the ideas survive scrutiny; sometimes they don't.
> 1. There are a few techniques for measuring old dates (say, 4000 years and older, including upwards of millions of years).
There is an excellent summary of relevant dating methods and other matters pertaining to the age of the earth at the talk.origins Website.
> 2. These techniques are not accurate for young objects, such as dates taken from recent volcanic activity
A simple case of garbage-in, garbage-out. If a programmer writes a function and specifies what inputs it works on, you can't expect it to work properly on other inputs. Ditto with most technological procedures that scientists use. If you want to use the Hubble space telescope to measure the distance to a quasar and you point it at the quasar when the sun lies in between, the numbers you get are going to be useless - even if you apply the "correct" calculations to them.
> 3. Because these techniques are only recently employed, they have not been tested on anything we know is old to prove they work.
> 4. They are untestable because we have no objects we are certain are, say, 60000 years old except by these techniques. Therefore we cannot test these techniques on anything within range.
However, they are based on well-established principles (e.g., we understand radioactive decay for reasons completely unrelated to the age of the earth), and they converge on a common answer. Browse the links above if you are curious about this kind of stuff.
Also notice that when a murder occurs with no witnesses, we can often identify the time and manner of the event anyway. People actually investigate this stuff in order to come up with a model of the universe that works. It's not just some mechanism that someone pulled out of their hat.
Finally, notice that geologists had figured out that the earth was far, far older than a literal reading of the bible implies, long before they had radioisotopic methods to work with. (And even before they had Darwin's theory of evolution, for that matter.)
> 5. These techniques are based on the assumption that breakdown, injection of elements, etc, continues at a constant rate.
The thing about science that most creationists don't understand is that scientific assumptions have consequences, and you can increase the confidence in your assumptions by seeing how the consequences pan out. For instance, if there had been any significant changes in the rate of radioactive decay over the past few thousand years then we could see that the stars a few thousand light-years away were "burning" differently than the ones nearby.
Now it may be possible to juggle the parameters and come up with a model of the universe with changing physical constants and make it match all current observations. However, you have to actually do that if you want to offer it as an alternative theory about nature. You can't invoke a non-existent theory to displace an existing theory that actually works.
Remember, the requirement of science is a coherent model of the universe, not a bag of independent and possibly self-contradictory claims.
> So my question is, if K-Ar fails when it can be tested, and produces an age of 0.27-3.5 million years old for something that is _known_ to be young, then why should I trust the dates given in contemporary science?
That's a GIGO issue. See the talk.origins Website's comments on this, which summarizes with -
> If I am to take evolution seriously, then this question must first be answered. Forget anything else, lets talk about this.
Good idea to focus on one thing at a time. If you still have questions after reading the links above carefully, post your question to the talk.origins and see what the experts bring out. I'll make it a point to lurk over that way in a day or two and see how it plays there.
> And because of one time when I went in circles for ages trying to get you to see something that was so fundamentally simple but you just couldn't.
The problem wasn't with getting me to "see" it, but rather convincing me that it was right.
> I have never seen a person convinced through a forum
I see posts on talk.origins now and then where a lurker delurks and says it was the debate in the forum that convinced them.
> How can you impress women with your guitar playing skills if they have no appreciation of music?
They will thoroughly understand what it means when you grind your hips. Then you get a crop of baby Elvises who can play guitar too.
> Couldn't a genetic mutation that spread more gradually (than the article claims) account for the facts as you provide them?
Good point, I would assume so. However, if you have time to read the whole t.o. thread you'll see that it generally undercuts the notion that there's anything that needs explaining at all. (At least that's how I interpreted it.)
> > > Let's hope the Bible is a joke or you aren't going to like the future.
> > What about the Koran? The Kama Sutra?
> What does the Koran teach Black Parrot? (without resorting to google). How much do you know?
Probably slightly more than you know about the Kama Sutra.
BTW, I have a copy of the Koran on my shelf, from long before 9/11 too. However, I never finished reading it cover-to-cover because it's just a compendum of the same kind of boring nonsense the bible is made of. Life's too precious, kind of thing.
Also, I notice that in true creationist fashion you've completely given up on trying to defend your views, and started taking ad hominem pot shots at those who disagree with you instead. Lurkers will surely notice that creationists are the best argument against creationism.
> that was only posted two days ago....
I wonder how many people are deliberately submitting stories that have already been posted, to see if they can get a dupe.
I also wonder whether the editors are doing it deliberately, as some kind of joke (or attempt thereat).
> Much of Western civilization clearly followed from the teachings of Moses, following his encounter with a burning bush, supposedly an Acacia. It is known that many Acacias contain the potent hallucinogenic substance dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is active when smoked and inhaled.
FWIW, there's a hypothesis that the cornered and badly outnumbered Texicans won the battle of San Jacinto because the Mexican army had never operated in that area before and made their campfires by pulling up Acacia bushes. (I suppose this could be refuted by showing that the same species grows in Mexico. Does anyone know?)
> Could it be that this is how Moses "found God?"
> Sadly, those wishing to partake of similar transformational experiences today are prohibited by law from doing so. Both psilocybin and DMT are Schedule 1 drugs in the United States, and illegal in most other jurisdictions as well.
That's 'cause governments don't want their citizens finding any more gods.
> I didn't go to grad school, but I did get a bachelors degree in Anthropology - and I like to think that I am pretty well read in the field. I can guarantee that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence linking proto-humans, or physically modern humans, to any sort of psychedelic chemical that facilitated brain development.
Surely you're not saying you got a degree in the Liberal Arts without the help of a few magic mushrooms along the way? Whatever has this world come to! Next we'll be hearing that Drama students can be straight and Art majors wear clothes at parties.
> You might want to try reading the articles before ranting against the "entire genetic engineering field" if you want to talk about folly.
Those of us with the creative gene prefer to post without reading the stories, since that tends to stifle our inherited creativity.
I use bracketization rather than an ASCII drawing, but hopefully you can derive a tree from the indicated nesting. (Each matched pair of parentheses indicates a tree or sub-tree. Only the leaves are named, but there is a node in the tree for each pair of parentheses.)> I thought that common scientific thought now says that we didn't evolve from the great apes, but there is a common ancester that both the great apes and humans evolved from that was neither a great ape or a human.
Phylogenetically speaking, humans are apes. Our neighborhood of the tree of life is thought to be something like this (based on the genetic evidence):
Unfortunately the biological concept of "ape" clashes with the conventional meaning of "ape" (which excludes humans, and for lots of people may even be limited to "gorilla"), but then the word "ape" has been around a lot longer than our ability to parse a tree out of the genetic evidence. But notice that there's no way to name a sub-tree in the tree of life "apes" without either (a) including humans, or else (b) excluding some things we'd like to call "apes".
But back to the tree, there was a Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) of humans and chimps, which was itself neither human nor chimp, a MRCA of the humans-chimps and gorillas, etc. Those MRCAs are the nodes of the tree.
> I wonder if the discovery of this "random" mutation will help or hinder the creationists or the "by design" crew?
Creationists: assuredly not, since they think evidence is something to be ignored rather than something to be explained. Most deny that "good" mutations can happen at all.
Intelligent Design advocate: there is a big spread of beliefs in this group, ranging from outright creationists to people who accept evolution, the big bang, and all that, but only reserve a tiny claim that "God^W an intelligent designer helped things along somehow, somewhere along the way". Some in the latter group might actually appeal to this discovery, though for the most part they prefer to stay as vague about their claims as possible in order to avoid accidentally presenting a testable hypothesis. (If you're curious about the pseudo-science and politics of the Intelligent Design movement, go over to the talk.origins newsgroup and post a question about it. You'll get a real ear full, I guarantee you.)
> But then again, Jimmy Hendrix said that life is but a joke.
Hopefully he was joking when he said "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy!"
> Do you BELIEVE that the matter and energy consisting of the big bang always existed?
Do you believe that has any bearing on the question of evolution?
> If you trust in evolution, then the future is uncertain.
The future is uncertain regardless of what you believe or trust in.
However, the theory of evolution doesn't claim to save souls; it just explains the mechanism of biological change.
> Let's hope the Bible is a joke or you aren't going to like the future.
What about the Koran? The Kama Sutra?
>
Obviously not, or you wouldn't be posting such nonsense.
and this one There's lots of other interesting stuff in the thread too.> Granted, it's an interesting idea, but I'm wondering how sharp this supposed 'creativity boundary' really is. I find it unlikely that something so complex and essential to human society would be linked to only a handful of genes - that's ignoring a very large part of the evolution of the primate mind.
FWIW, there was a discussion of this (not the article, but the purported 50,000 YBP quantum leap) on talk.origins about a month ago, and lots of the better informed regular posters weighed in against the idea.
E.g., this one:
> For broccoli, a food I normally can't stand, a ranch dip actually livens up the taste while masking most of the bitter flavor.
Having someone hold a gun to your head makes it positively delicious!
> Is there anything that DOESN'T cause it?
Someday they'll figure out that testing to see whether something causes cancer causes cancer.
I deleted all my porn, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get it again when I need it.
> Heavy water is D2O, D being deuterium, or an isotope of hydrogen that has 1 extra neutron.
And the related peroxide is called DO-DO.
> 90% of French and British citizens were against standing up to Hitler when he waltzed into the Sudetenland. Look where that got us. No one wants war, but the realists in the world realize that inaction is actually worse in some cases.
The problem is that no one has a crystal ball that lets us examine the future the way we can examine the past. I for one am not eager to have tens or hundreds of thousands of people killed on the basis dubious claims that we can detect when history is repeating itself. Far better to reason things out on the basis of what we see now than to base our decision on a weak analogy with the past.
And remember, there have been times when we intervened and things still didn't work out exactly swell, and times when we sat back and weren't afflicted with another world war as a result. Appeals to history make great rhetoric, but so far as I can tell they are actually worthless.
What a let down. Your subject line made me think your post was going to be some hot gossip about Eva Braun.
> but the bottom ine is that the first to discover the thing was going to use it, and this world has been quite the scary & dangerous place ever since.
I agree, and it's unfortunate that that genie can't be put back in the bottle.
However, the curmudgeon in me can't help pointing out that the world was already a scary & dangerous place. Only the tiniest fraction of the ~50,000,000 people who died during WWII died as a result of atomic bombs.
And we've darn well kept our hand in at the killing since then, too.
> I think it's less about how much math you will use and more about how math changes the way you approach problems.
I agree (mostly), and would go further to say that it changes the way you approach problems because it changes the way you think about the world.
I added the "mostly" qualification because IMO we'll soon reach the point where society wants us to concentrate more on getting our products right than getting them out the door, and at that point "programming" will be forced to become a math-based engineering discipline, and we'll start using our maths very explicitly.
As for the "Ask Slashdot" question, the math needed for programmers to understand what they're doing is all the 'discrete' stuff people are mentioning: logic, sets, relations, functions, graphs, basic proofs, etc. You may never use these things explicitly during your programming career, but they will inform your intellectual life and have a big impact on the way you write programs. (Hopefully, in a way that causes you to produce fewer wrong algorithms.)
IMO the other good stuff so many people are mentioning, such as linear algebra, trigonometry, calculus, differential equations, numerical methods, statistics, etc., are not fundamental to computer science, but rather are important to specific types of application. Thus they should be moved out of the core CS curriculum in order to make room for as much of the discrete stuff as possible. (Or maybe leave in a "pick one" advanced math requirement.)
Still, I would encourage students to study these "non fundamental" mathematical topics if time allows, because some of them really will fundamentally change the way you look at the world. It would be nice for a CS degree to include them all, but the typical CS program is already so packed that most students can't finish in 4 years.
As an aside, IMO one of the most important courses a CS student should take is an algorithms course. (It's a killer hard course, so you may want to take it on a pass/fail basis.) The course will include a mathematical treatment, and you'll have to thoroughly master all the 'discrete' math stuff before you attempt it, but it will really open your eyes to the possibilities of what you can do algorithmically.
> Bah, duck tape won't do anything! Too fragile, too many cracks.
d00d! The duct tape is for restraining your mother while you party what's left of your life away.
Clearly, they know that the world is going to end on next Tuesday, and they cynically promised us the next installment of the debate for Tuesday, knowing that they won't have to deliver.
> HAL: "I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal."
We've missed our window of opportunity for creating HAL. If we started today, once he obtained basic sentience he'd waste all his time trolling Slashdot instead of doing his homework, and never pass his qualifications for flying a spaceship.