Had Microsoft not needed something to drive a stake through Netscape's heart, it wouldn't have needed to concoct it's own Frankenstein's monster of confused and misbegotten priorities.
If he'd deliberately participated in the Apple board meetings in a way that was not in the interests of Apple stockholders he could be in legal trouble. If he'd taken Apple's product plans and used that knowledge directly in Google's plans, for example. But you can't go after somebody for general expertise in the market or product development the've gained from working for a company or serving on the board, unless you have a contract that forbids them from doing so.
This is a situation that certainly skirts the edge of impropriety at the very least, but Apple is a big time player that ought to know how to protect itself. It's not like putting one over on some poor, information overloaded consumer.
Unless we are talking about Ray Harryhausen's stop motion animation. That could rescue an abortion of a film.
The thing about 3D animation is that even when it is very skillfully done, it's just not impressive. Yes, it may have been the product of blood, sweat and tears, but after a few more years of software development kids will be doing stuff almost as good as a hobby. So 3D only works if you are immersed in the story.
Stop motion animation, on the other hand, is a wonder even if you don't care to pay any attention at all to the story.
By your mode of argument, nobody every has to do anything, without positive justification that something bad is morally certain to happen.
For example, let's say I live in an apartment building and have a balcony ten stories over a busy street. I set a flower pot on the narrow wall of the balcony. I'm sitting on my balcony admiring my flower when my neighbor next door says, "Excuse me, but I couldn't help notice you put a flower pot on your wall without any kind of safety precautions. It could fall off and kill someone. I believe you should remove it."
What a busybody! Sure, if he'd pointed out the problem before I put the flower pot up I'd be obligated not to do so. But now I have done so and its none of his business telling me what to do. No, I'm only going to be satisfied when the person who is going to be hit by the flowerpot comes up to my apartment and demands I remove it.
Everyone else in the world? Everywhere? Citation please?
In any case I wouldn't take it for granted that any class of traffic "doesn't belong on the road," because what the heck does that mean? Does it mean that bicycles aren't legally allowed to use the road (untrue in most places)? Does it mean that rational transportation policy would not allow bicycles to use the road? Or does it mean that you don't like bikes and you get pissed when you see one?
There's no question that bicycles are a vehicle. The reason that it doesn't work to mix pedestrians and bicycles is that pedestrians aren't vehicles. They don't need defined lanes; they don't need to keep to the correct side of the roadway they travel on; they don't need to signal if they are going to stop, change direction, or do any other unpredictable thing; they don't need to use traffic lights and stop or yield signs unless they are mixing with other kinds of traffic; they don't need to carry lights and other markers to make themselves visible to each other.
Bicycles have to do all these things, and what is more they need all the other traffic using the same space as they do to do them too. So you can't reasonably mix bikes with pedestrians unless you are willing to impose vehicular style regulations on pedestrian traffic.
So, it all boils down to these options for any vehicle type:
(1) Put them on road, making any changes to the rules necessary to ensure reasonable safety for all users of the roads. (2) Mix them with pedestrians, but impose rules up on all users of pedestrian walkways -- including pedestrians. (3) Set aside spaces for the exclusive use of the vehicles and set and enforce rules for their use. (4) ban the class of vehicles altogether.
It sounds like the Helsinki solution you describe amounts to solution (3), that is to say bike lanes. They just happen to be contiguous with sidewalks rather than roadways. I happen to think it's a harebrained idea, because you can't regulate pedestrians without putting some kind of clear physical demarcation of where it is safe to be a highly unpredictable pedestrian, and where they have to be on their guard.
Of course it's useful -- as a starting point. My point is that you don't want to use one tiny sliver of a population to represent the whole just because it makes the problem description seem simpler. It's not a simple problem, and deserves a thoughtful characterization.
I actually believe that calling bullies "monsters" is almost useless, because it makes bullying an inexplicable phenomenon. There's no point in trying to study it -- they're just monsters. Well, so what? What then? There's really only one rational approach to a "monster" problem, which is extermination. This is obviously an absurd suggestion in all but the worst cases of bullying. And that's important too. You don't want to assume that the "worst case" scenarios are characteristic, not because the worst case isn't bad, but because mild cases are bad.
On the other hand, saying that "bullies are often relatively ordinary insecure people who act like monsters toward certain people in certain situations" may not sound as simple, but it gives you many places from which to attack the problem. For example situation: in what circumstances is bullying most likely to happen? That tells you were to look. How does bullying escape detection? That shows you were you need to improve your response.
Yes, but what you are talking about is a psychopath, not a bully. Psychopaths are, I suppose, a kind of bully, but they really ought to be treated as a special case. Thinking of all bullies as psychopaths is a bad idea, because it makes it harder to recognize and deal with garden variety bullying. Oh, my little Johnny can't be a bully, because he's not a monster. Well, the unfortunate and scary thing about human nature is that you don't have to be a monster to sometimes act like one.
Personally, and this is my own anecdotal observations, many bullies have a rather interesting common characteristic in common with their victims: vulnerability. Bullies pick on the vulnerable, which is not a behavior a secure person engages in. Bullies have a particular interest in marking somebody as being at the bottom of the social heap, because they know that's where they belong. They gain security and within limits, enhanced status by placing the weakest solidly at the bottom of the pecking order.
If you ever watch a clique, watch the dynamic between the top dog and the bottom-most one that is "in". The bottommost "in" person is nearly always the nastiest in the group toward outsiders, because he or she is hanging on by his teeth and can't afford to be displaced. The top dog can be more magnanimous, which reduces the security of the underlings and makes them more eager to please.
Seriously, though, how you act makes a huge difference to how likely you are to be mugged. It's actually quite useful knowledge: the places to avoid, how to act if you're in a strange place, how to react when potential muggers interact with you to gauge how safe a target you are, what to do if you are being mugged (e.g., never believe what a mugger says when he tries to get you to do something, especially if it involves going someplace where he'll find more private).
It's fine to say "muggers are bad people" -- we know they are. But that doesn't get you far in the area of self-protection. "Make all the people in the world good" is not a viable strategy.
Well, sure, but have you ever heard a Bayesian and Frequentist duke it out over what "significance" really means (as opposed to how to compute it)?
Five minutes and I guarantee you'll walk away doubting you understand anything at all.
Anyhow, I've known a lot of scientists in my day, and worked with quite a few. If you pressed them on an explanation of what significance means precisely, you'd probably get a rough and ready answer that would have statistics nazis of every stripe gritting their teeth in agony. I'd be willing to bet that for practical purposes most of 'em treat significance tests as mathematical black boxes into which they dump numbers and "significance" as green light that blinks when they've hit the statistical jackpot. It's not uncommon to see dubious kinds of reasoning about significance, e.g. conflating "very significant" with "highly correlated".
Moral of the story:in this world, there exists only varying degrees and topical distributions of "ignorance".
My response in general to most of your post is this: sometimes, but not necessarily.
There's lots of "depends", the biggest being how you define "stealing". Is it stealing to copy a copyrighted song? Depends on "fair use" -- unless the song is protected by DRM, in which case it breaks laws. As a legal technicality it might not be "stealing", but the effect of the laws is to create a de facto property right, so it is de facto stealing.
It would appear from your argument that stealing is by definition irrational -- either directly by definition (e.g. "stealing is the irrational misappropriation of somebody else's property" or "irrationality is defined as a set of acts of which stealing is one member") or indirectly (e.g. "stealing is misappropriating someone else's property in a way that harms oneself, and harming oneself is irrational).
Definitions of "stealing" that are tautologically irrational (as opposed to irrational in most commonly encountered circumstances) would seem to me to be contrived.
But carefully. Get to where you want to be overnight, and a lot of people are out of work and the panic starts all over again.
The best time to tighten your budgetary belt, unfortunately, is the time it is least likely to be done: when times are good. When times are good every dollar taxed is coming out of smoothly operating machine for turning dollars into wealth.
I don't think it was about oil. What were they going to do with it, other than sell it? Oil is more or less fungible, so it doesn't matter who they choose to sell it to. The best choice for them would have been to sell it on the market.
So that's a simplification.
The earliest recognizable trial balloons about invading Iraq I remember were from June 2002 -- about eight months after 9/11. It was old Rummy, I believe, and as I recall it was couched in such vague terms it could only have been a trial balloon. That made my ears prick up. First, in the context of the Afghan war and the difficulty in getting anything done on the domestic security front, it was puzzling that the administration was dropping hints that it was going to do something in Iraq. Second floating vague political trial balloons is not how you respond to a serious security threat. You state it clearly and you take action.
Given that, I thought there was a political reason to be talking about Iraq. Subsequent behavior confirmed this in my mind. Whenever given a chance to address some concern raised in, say, an interview, it was never the case that that concern was *not* a reason for going to war, no matter what that concern might be. So the administration was building a political case for invading Iraq from the earliest moment possible.
As to why, that's a mystery to me. It certainly wasn't because we were afraid Sadaam wouldn't sell his oil. If I had to guess, and this is just a guess, it was more about contracts to rebuild and operate Iraq's oil infrastructure. Those contracts would have gone to Russia. That not only benefited competitors to companies with ties to the US, it extended Russian influence in the region.
Every other explanation I've heard only makes sense if you assume everybody in the Bush administration was a total moron. If you look at them as slick operators who were nonetheless out of their depth in international affairs (your basic CEO who knows how to game peopel but is weak on the details of his business), the contracting motive seems the most plausible. It's even almost a defensible motivation if you take a certain narrow view of American national interests.
I guess it depends on the language, but I just checked out their Chinese materials and would absolutely not recommend this - it's a bunch of cold-war era tapes and notes that teaches you to address people as "tongzhi" ("comrade"). That part's probably obvious enough to avoid, but there are other language changes that are more subtle.
Cool. Now I won't have to worry about whether I might be making some cultural gaffe that is subtly offensive, because those'll be masked by linguistic gaffes that are blatantly offensive.
So? You still can't argue that NASA is not an enormous contributor to planetary science and remote sensing.
Consider the Soviet Mars program. They sent three landers there over three years, and Russia is just getting around to following up on those. NASA has sent seven missions there over thirty years, very elaborate and sophisticated ones. The Viking lander was a scientific tour de force, and the US Mars Rover mission alone is a record breaker for sheer number of days in operation.
On the other hand, the Soviet space program practically owned Venus, spent decades in a serious, extended effort to gather data there. That's a huge contribution to science, because Venus is hard, but very, very interesting due to its similarities and differences with/to Earth.
As far as the Earth is concerned, I don't think there is any contest, science-wise. Not to denigrate Soviet contributions in engineering, but I don't think we can even begin to calculate the value of something like Landsat, or the other Earth Science oriented missions undertaken by NASA or with NASA playing a key part.
A "punch list of firsts" approach is not a very good way to gauge the importance of a nation's space exploration program.
Certainly. But whenever I've looked into the data used to support these assertions, they have't panned out. When I was in high school and in college back in the late 70s and early 80s, there was a lot of concern about declining SAT scores. And they were declining, there was no question about that. But this ignored two very important facts.
(1) The population taking the test was increasing (2) The test is not constant, it is continually recalibrated to achieve a certain score distribution.
In other words, the test authors deliberate changed the test in such a way that the *knew* it would make the averages drop. And they were 100% right to do that. Why? Because of fact #1: the change in the people who took the test. The purpose of the test is to yield admissions committees the maximum amount of useful information in the task of sorting a single year's cohort of applications into different categories. The test and the processes behind it was never designed or intended to give useful comparisons between generations. It *can't*.
But I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. Those of us who cared a great deal about education and looked into this didn't exactly going around beating the drum, shouting "the end is not nigh!" We had an education problem, but it wasn't declining standards. It was rising requirements. We foresaw that global competition was going to be a lot tougher than it was in the 1950s, and if we wanted to keep the benefits of being a primary driver of innovation, we had to do *better* than the good old days.
I went to school in the post-sputnik era. Lots of improvements were made in the curriculum, particularly science, in response to the Red Menace. But let me tell you about most of the schools in the 60s: by modern standards they sucked. And schools back in the 1920s sucked by 1960s standards.
In the thirty years I've been following this kind of story, I've never seen a "declining standards" figure that held up to scrutiny. But that doesn't mean we can stop innovating.
Grammatical ability is a good proxy for emphasis on education in general.
I can also guarantee that if the last giant sequoia were cut down for firewood, some people would say "so what?"
So what?
Look around you. The world is full of blockheads, and I can guarantee that no matter what side of any issue you are on, plenty of them will agree with you.
But the F150 is not a good comparison. It's just another nickles to kilometers comparison.
A better comparison is the number of people living in the US. 14.2 Trillion divied across 304 million people amounts to 46,710 per person.
But wait, is that a valid comparison? Shouldn't you just count US citizens? Or people who are working? It depends on what you want to conclude. You choose the right number for the right conclusion.
I've been trying to write a poem about the authors of this paper, but I'm having trouble with the scansion.
"GRAPHene on SILicon SUBstrate" is trochaic triameter, and lends itself to the ballad quatrain, e.g.
Has ever there been a more wonderful thing, than graphene on silicon substrate? I'll bet Hyun-Chul Kang doesn't mind it a bit, that in college he wasn't a "fun date".
I've had to drop several of the original 11 authors (HIroKAzu FUkiDOme, RYOta TAkaHASHi, and AKiTASHi YUshiGOe) whose names take up an entire quadrameter line and are hard to rhyme.
I don't think that large numbers are incomprehensible at all. A billion is not any less comprehensible than a million or even a number like a thousand.
You gain useful insight from numbers by comparing them to suitably selected other numbers, like this: 1 billion dollars of current expenses against nine hundred million dollars in short term assets and revenue plus a one hundred million dollar line of credit. That says you can just barely keep running your very large enterprise without going bankrupt, provided that the banks don't change their mind about your line of credit, your revenue his projections, and you can liquidate all your current assets at the expected price. It doesn't matter that you can't imagine what that much currency looks like. Unless you are a retail bank or drug dealer, chances are you don't ever deal with quantities of cash over a thousand dollars.
Nor is that really much more difficult to understand than this: just three potatoes to feed a family of five for seven days. You only need to inform yourself a little bit about the magnitudes involved in the problem domain (e.g. that one potato isn't enough to feed a single person for a single day, that a hundred million dollars is a lot of cash for even a huge business to come up with in a year).
Now you can visualize a billion dollars as a stack of nickels 39 km high, and that is a comparison you can make. It just doesn't give you any useful insights. You can understand a number like ten thousand, because you automatically know the kinds of things you'd want to compare it to: the price of a car, the price of a house, the price of a pizza. Unless you have a money fetish, you probably never bothered to figure out what ten thousand dollars in twenty dollar bills looks like, much less what a stack of two hundred thousand nickels would look like.
Choosing figures that cut against each other to produce insight is the very heart of numerical "literacy". All that other stuff are tools to get there, or to get from there to something else you need to know.
"Breakthrough Grows Graphene On Silicon Substrate"? I'm calling everyone I know with the news. In fact, I'm writing my congressman to demand a new three day holiday: "National Graphene On Silicon Substrate Day".
That's an excellent point. We don't know that peak oil is necessarily a huge problem. What matters is how quickly declining oil production is factored into our economic decisions (which car to buy, which technology to back). If demand grows relatively slowly and supply falls relatively slowly, then a Mad Max style dystopia is a long way off, it is coming at all.
The nice thing about the "soft landing" scenario is that we don't have to plan anything. We just do what comes naturally and everything sorts itself out. Such a scenario does not seem improbable to me. However it's not the only plausible scenario, so some kind of concerted plan to get ahead of the supply curve seems reasonable to me.
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Had Microsoft not needed something to drive a stake through Netscape's heart, it wouldn't have needed to concoct it's own Frankenstein's monster of confused and misbegotten priorities.
If he'd deliberately participated in the Apple board meetings in a way that was not in the interests of Apple stockholders he could be in legal trouble. If he'd taken Apple's product plans and used that knowledge directly in Google's plans, for example. But you can't go after somebody for general expertise in the market or product development the've gained from working for a company or serving on the board, unless you have a contract that forbids them from doing so.
This is a situation that certainly skirts the edge of impropriety at the very least, but Apple is a big time player that ought to know how to protect itself. It's not like putting one over on some poor, information overloaded consumer.
Unless we are talking about Ray Harryhausen's stop motion animation. That could rescue an abortion of a film.
The thing about 3D animation is that even when it is very skillfully done, it's just not impressive. Yes, it may have been the product of blood, sweat and tears, but after a few more years of software development kids will be doing stuff almost as good as a hobby. So 3D only works if you are immersed in the story.
Stop motion animation, on the other hand, is a wonder even if you don't care to pay any attention at all to the story.
By your mode of argument, nobody every has to do anything, without positive justification that something bad is morally certain to happen.
For example, let's say I live in an apartment building and have a balcony ten stories over a busy street. I set a flower pot on the narrow wall of the balcony. I'm sitting on my balcony admiring my flower when my neighbor next door says, "Excuse me, but I couldn't help notice you put a flower pot on your wall without any kind of safety precautions. It could fall off and kill someone. I believe you should remove it."
What a busybody! Sure, if he'd pointed out the problem before I put the flower pot up I'd be obligated not to do so. But now I have done so and its none of his business telling me what to do. No, I'm only going to be satisfied when the person who is going to be hit by the flowerpot comes up to my apartment and demands I remove it.
Everyone else in the world? Everywhere? Citation please?
In any case I wouldn't take it for granted that any class of traffic "doesn't belong on the road," because what the heck does that mean? Does it mean that bicycles aren't legally allowed to use the road (untrue in most places)? Does it mean that rational transportation policy would not allow bicycles to use the road? Or does it mean that you don't like bikes and you get pissed when you see one?
There's no question that bicycles are a vehicle. The reason that it doesn't work to mix pedestrians and bicycles is that pedestrians aren't vehicles. They don't need defined lanes; they don't need to keep to the correct side of the roadway they travel on; they don't need to signal if they are going to stop, change direction, or do any other unpredictable thing; they don't need to use traffic lights and stop or yield signs unless they are mixing with other kinds of traffic; they don't need to carry lights and other markers to make themselves visible to each other.
Bicycles have to do all these things, and what is more they need all the other traffic using the same space as they do to do them too. So you can't reasonably mix bikes with pedestrians unless you are willing to impose vehicular style regulations on pedestrian traffic.
So, it all boils down to these options for any vehicle type:
(1) Put them on road, making any changes to the rules necessary to ensure reasonable safety for all users of the roads.
(2) Mix them with pedestrians, but impose rules up on all users of pedestrian walkways -- including pedestrians.
(3) Set aside spaces for the exclusive use of the vehicles and set and enforce rules for their use.
(4) ban the class of vehicles altogether.
It sounds like the Helsinki solution you describe amounts to solution (3), that is to say bike lanes. They just happen to be contiguous with sidewalks rather than roadways. I happen to think it's a harebrained idea, because you can't regulate pedestrians without putting some kind of clear physical demarcation of where it is safe to be a highly unpredictable pedestrian, and where they have to be on their guard.
Of course it's useful -- as a starting point. My point is that you don't want to use one tiny sliver of a population to represent the whole just because it makes the problem description seem simpler. It's not a simple problem, and deserves a thoughtful characterization.
I actually believe that calling bullies "monsters" is almost useless, because it makes bullying an inexplicable phenomenon. There's no point in trying to study it -- they're just monsters. Well, so what? What then? There's really only one rational approach to a "monster" problem, which is extermination. This is obviously an absurd suggestion in all but the worst cases of bullying. And that's important too. You don't want to assume that the "worst case" scenarios are characteristic, not because the worst case isn't bad, but because mild cases are bad.
On the other hand, saying that "bullies are often relatively ordinary insecure people who act like monsters toward certain people in certain situations" may not sound as simple, but it gives you many places from which to attack the problem. For example situation: in what circumstances is bullying most likely to happen? That tells you were to look. How does bullying escape detection? That shows you were you need to improve your response.
Yes, but what you are talking about is a psychopath, not a bully. Psychopaths are, I suppose, a kind of bully, but they really ought to be treated as a special case. Thinking of all bullies as psychopaths is a bad idea, because it makes it harder to recognize and deal with garden variety bullying. Oh, my little Johnny can't be a bully, because he's not a monster. Well, the unfortunate and scary thing about human nature is that you don't have to be a monster to sometimes act like one.
Personally, and this is my own anecdotal observations, many bullies have a rather interesting common characteristic in common with their victims: vulnerability. Bullies pick on the vulnerable, which is not a behavior a secure person engages in. Bullies have a particular interest in marking somebody as being at the bottom of the social heap, because they know that's where they belong. They gain security and within limits, enhanced status by placing the weakest solidly at the bottom of the pecking order.
If you ever watch a clique, watch the dynamic between the top dog and the bottom-most one that is "in". The bottommost "in" person is nearly always the nastiest in the group toward outsiders, because he or she is hanging on by his teeth and can't afford to be displaced. The top dog can be more magnanimous, which reduces the security of the underlings and makes them more eager to please.
Seriously, though, how you act makes a huge difference to how likely you are to be mugged. It's actually quite useful knowledge: the places to avoid, how to act if you're in a strange place, how to react when potential muggers interact with you to gauge how safe a target you are, what to do if you are being mugged (e.g., never believe what a mugger says when he tries to get you to do something, especially if it involves going someplace where he'll find more private).
It's fine to say "muggers are bad people" -- we know they are. But that doesn't get you far in the area of self-protection. "Make all the people in the world good" is not a viable strategy.
Aww, hell, join Slashdot and you can have friends just like you!!
Somebody apparently has never heard of self-loathing.
social cues.
If I wanted to know what other kids thought of me, I told them and they toed the line if they didn't want the snot beat out of them.
I'm sorry, did your post have a point? Well, tell it to somebody who cares.
Well, sure, but have you ever heard a Bayesian and Frequentist duke it out over what "significance" really means (as opposed to how to compute it)?
Five minutes and I guarantee you'll walk away doubting you understand anything at all.
Anyhow, I've known a lot of scientists in my day, and worked with quite a few. If you pressed them on an explanation of what significance means precisely, you'd probably get a rough and ready answer that would have statistics nazis of every stripe gritting their teeth in agony. I'd be willing to bet that for practical purposes most of 'em treat significance tests as mathematical black boxes into which they dump numbers and "significance" as green light that blinks when they've hit the statistical jackpot. It's not uncommon to see dubious kinds of reasoning about significance, e.g. conflating "very significant" with "highly correlated".
Moral of the story:in this world, there exists only varying degrees and topical distributions of "ignorance".
My response in general to most of your post is this: sometimes, but not necessarily.
There's lots of "depends", the biggest being how you define "stealing". Is it stealing to copy a copyrighted song? Depends on "fair use" -- unless the song is protected by DRM, in which case it breaks laws. As a legal technicality it might not be "stealing", but the effect of the laws is to create a de facto property right, so it is de facto stealing.
It would appear from your argument that stealing is by definition irrational -- either directly by definition (e.g. "stealing is the irrational misappropriation of somebody else's property" or "irrationality is defined as a set of acts of which stealing is one member") or indirectly (e.g. "stealing is misappropriating someone else's property in a way that harms oneself, and harming oneself is irrational).
Definitions of "stealing" that are tautologically irrational (as opposed to irrational in most commonly encountered circumstances) would seem to me to be contrived.
But carefully. Get to where you want to be overnight, and a lot of people are out of work and the panic starts all over again.
The best time to tighten your budgetary belt, unfortunately, is the time it is least likely to be done: when times are good. When times are good every dollar taxed is coming out of smoothly operating machine for turning dollars into wealth.
Correction: you don't get more than you pay for. At least very often.
It is very common to get less than you pay for.
I don't think it was about oil. What were they going to do with it, other than sell it? Oil is more or less fungible, so it doesn't matter who they choose to sell it to. The best choice for them would have been to sell it on the market.
So that's a simplification.
The earliest recognizable trial balloons about invading Iraq I remember were from June 2002 -- about eight months after 9/11. It was old Rummy, I believe, and as I recall it was couched in such vague terms it could only have been a trial balloon. That made my ears prick up. First, in the context of the Afghan war and the difficulty in getting anything done on the domestic security front, it was puzzling that the administration was dropping hints that it was going to do something in Iraq. Second floating vague political trial balloons is not how you respond to a serious security threat. You state it clearly and you take action.
Given that, I thought there was a political reason to be talking about Iraq. Subsequent behavior confirmed this in my mind. Whenever given a chance to address some concern raised in, say, an interview, it was never the case that that concern was *not* a reason for going to war, no matter what that concern might be. So the administration was building a political case for invading Iraq from the earliest moment possible.
As to why, that's a mystery to me. It certainly wasn't because we were afraid Sadaam wouldn't sell his oil. If I had to guess, and this is just a guess, it was more about contracts to rebuild and operate Iraq's oil infrastructure. Those contracts would have gone to Russia. That not only benefited competitors to companies with ties to the US, it extended Russian influence in the region.
Every other explanation I've heard only makes sense if you assume everybody in the Bush administration was a total moron. If you look at them as slick operators who were nonetheless out of their depth in international affairs (your basic CEO who knows how to game peopel but is weak on the details of his business), the contracting motive seems the most plausible. It's even almost a defensible motivation if you take a certain narrow view of American national interests.
I guess it depends on the language, but I just checked out their Chinese materials and would absolutely not recommend this - it's a bunch of cold-war era tapes and notes that teaches you to address people as "tongzhi" ("comrade"). That part's probably obvious enough to avoid, but there are other language changes that are more subtle.
Cool. Now I won't have to worry about whether I might be making some cultural gaffe that is subtly offensive, because those'll be masked by linguistic gaffes that are blatantly offensive.
So? You still can't argue that NASA is not an enormous contributor to planetary science and remote sensing.
Consider the Soviet Mars program. They sent three landers there over three years, and Russia is just getting around to following up on those. NASA has sent seven missions there over thirty years, very elaborate and sophisticated ones. The Viking lander was a scientific tour de force, and the US Mars Rover mission alone is a record breaker for sheer number of days in operation.
On the other hand, the Soviet space program practically owned Venus, spent decades in a serious, extended effort to gather data there. That's a huge contribution to science, because Venus is hard, but very, very interesting due to its similarities and differences with/to Earth.
As far as the Earth is concerned, I don't think there is any contest, science-wise. Not to denigrate Soviet contributions in engineering, but I don't think we can even begin to calculate the value of something like Landsat, or the other Earth Science oriented missions undertaken by NASA or with NASA playing a key part.
A "punch list of firsts" approach is not a very good way to gauge the importance of a nation's space exploration program.
But this story isn't an isolated anecdote
Certainly. But whenever I've looked into the data used to support these assertions, they have't panned out. When I was in high school and in college back in the late 70s and early 80s, there was a lot of concern about declining SAT scores. And they were declining, there was no question about that. But this ignored two very important facts.
(1) The population taking the test was increasing
(2) The test is not constant, it is continually recalibrated to achieve a certain score distribution.
In other words, the test authors deliberate changed the test in such a way that the *knew* it would make the averages drop. And they were 100% right to do that. Why? Because of fact #1: the change in the people who took the test. The purpose of the test is to yield admissions committees the maximum amount of useful information in the task of sorting a single year's cohort of applications into different categories. The test and the processes behind it was never designed or intended to give useful comparisons between generations. It *can't*.
But I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. Those of us who cared a great deal about education and looked into this didn't exactly going around beating the drum, shouting "the end is not nigh!" We had an education problem, but it wasn't declining standards. It was rising requirements. We foresaw that global competition was going to be a lot tougher than it was in the 1950s, and if we wanted to keep the benefits of being a primary driver of innovation, we had to do *better* than the good old days.
I went to school in the post-sputnik era. Lots of improvements were made in the curriculum, particularly science, in response to the Red Menace. But let me tell you about most of the schools in the 60s: by modern standards they sucked. And schools back in the 1920s sucked by 1960s standards.
In the thirty years I've been following this kind of story, I've never seen a "declining standards" figure that held up to scrutiny. But that doesn't mean we can stop innovating.
Grammatical ability is a good proxy for emphasis on education in general.
Only within a given cohort.
I can also guarantee that if the last giant sequoia were cut down for firewood, some people would say "so what?"
So what?
Look around you. The world is full of blockheads, and I can guarantee that no matter what side of any issue you are on, plenty of them will agree with you.
Well, that is a problem. I started to call all my friends, then I realized I don't have any.
But the F150 is not a good comparison. It's just another nickles to kilometers comparison.
A better comparison is the number of people living in the US. 14.2 Trillion divied across 304 million people amounts to 46,710 per person.
But wait, is that a valid comparison? Shouldn't you just count US citizens? Or people who are working? It depends on what you want to conclude. You choose the right number for the right conclusion.
I've been trying to write a poem about the authors of this paper, but I'm having trouble with the scansion.
"GRAPHene on SILicon SUBstrate" is trochaic triameter, and lends itself to the ballad quatrain, e.g.
Has ever there been a more wonderful thing,
than graphene on silicon substrate?
I'll bet Hyun-Chul Kang doesn't mind it a bit,
that in college he wasn't a "fun date".
I've had to drop several of the original 11 authors (HIroKAzu FUkiDOme, RYOta TAkaHASHi, and AKiTASHi YUshiGOe) whose names take up an entire quadrameter line and are hard to rhyme.
I don't think that large numbers are incomprehensible at all. A billion is not any less comprehensible than a million or even a number like a thousand.
You gain useful insight from numbers by comparing them to suitably selected other numbers, like this: 1 billion dollars of current expenses against nine hundred million dollars in short term assets and revenue plus a one hundred million dollar line of credit. That says you can just barely keep running your very large enterprise without going bankrupt, provided that the banks don't change their mind about your line of credit, your revenue his projections, and you can liquidate all your current assets at the expected price. It doesn't matter that you can't imagine what that much currency looks like. Unless you are a retail bank or drug dealer, chances are you don't ever deal with quantities of cash over a thousand dollars.
Nor is that really much more difficult to understand than this: just three potatoes to feed a family of five for seven days. You only need to inform yourself a little bit about the magnitudes involved in the problem domain (e.g. that one potato isn't enough to feed a single person for a single day, that a hundred million dollars is a lot of cash for even a huge business to come up with in a year).
Now you can visualize a billion dollars as a stack of nickels 39 km high, and that is a comparison you can make. It just doesn't give you any useful insights. You can understand a number like ten thousand, because you automatically know the kinds of things you'd want to compare it to: the price of a car, the price of a house, the price of a pizza. Unless you have a money fetish, you probably never bothered to figure out what ten thousand dollars in twenty dollar bills looks like, much less what a stack of two hundred thousand nickels would look like.
Choosing figures that cut against each other to produce insight is the very heart of numerical "literacy". All that other stuff are tools to get there, or to get from there to something else you need to know.
"Breakthrough Grows Graphene On Silicon Substrate"? I'm calling everyone I know with the news. In fact, I'm writing my congressman to demand a new three day holiday: "National Graphene On Silicon Substrate Day".
That's an excellent point. We don't know that peak oil is necessarily a huge problem. What matters is how quickly declining oil production is factored into our economic decisions (which car to buy, which technology to back). If demand grows relatively slowly and supply falls relatively slowly, then a Mad Max style dystopia is a long way off, it is coming at all.
The nice thing about the "soft landing" scenario is that we don't have to plan anything. We just do what comes naturally and everything sorts itself out. Such a scenario does not seem improbable to me. However it's not the only plausible scenario, so some kind of concerted plan to get ahead of the supply curve seems reasonable to me.