It's worth noting that a recent study found that only 16% of female characters in movies and TV are shown to hold a job in any STEM field.
And what percentage of men in movies and TV are shown to hold a job of that kind? I'd be surprised if it was more than 20.
Not only that, but even the 16% TV does show is actually a vast overrepresentation of reality. Last year less than 10% of all college degrees conferred were for STEM disciplines. Since STEM jobs pretty much require a degree, and less than half the workforce has one, that means the long term trend here is probably for less than 5% of the general population to have such jobs. So gender aside, 16% is huge.
Now its not unreasonable either. There are certain dramatic narrative imperatives at work here preventing depiction of a lot of more boring jobs. But still its weird to be complaining about a big overrepresentation of reality for not overrepresenting it further..
They're homo neanderthalensis, while modern man is homo sapiens sapiens.
Umm...you do realize don't you that you can't prove anything just by spouting taxonomy at people? The people who consider them a separate species consider them "Homo neanderthalensis", while those who don't consider them "Homo sapiens neanderthalensis". Its right there in only the second paragraph of their wikipedia page.
In a large part this is an argument over those two sets of names, so you can't resolve anything by just stating one like its some kind of immutable fact of the universe.
Large mammals managed to survive for a long, long time before people came to Americas and then, shortly after people came, they were killed off by "climate and environmental changes"? Sounds a bit fishy to me!
This is exactly the problem, and I don't see anything in these "new findings" addressing it. What I'm seeing here is two-fold:
1) There were actually two megafauna die-offs, and the first happened before there were humans in the Americas. This is actually a reasonable argument, but it only addresses half the issue.
2)There's a part of the continent where we have found megafauna from before the second die-off, but we haven't yet found a lot of evidence in those specimens of human predation. This argument I find inherently specious, unless you for some weird reason really want to believe humans had nothing to do with it. It makes no attempt to explain why the timing is so coincidental with human occupation. It makes no attempt to explain why humans, known to be hunters and to have hunted megafauna in other parts of the contienent, decided to leave it alone in the NorthEast to prosper if not for (???). Wouldn't a much simpler explanation be that you just haven't happened to find the evidence yet?
In other words, a decisive amount of circumstantial evidence is already pointing us toward humans as at least a part of the cause of the second die-off. The burden of proof is on those who want to claim humans had nothing to do with it. But all they are claiming here is, "lack of evidence" (and only in a small area too, there's plenty of that evidence elsewhere), but that does not help them.
As near as I can tell, the only "perk" one gets for having a one-letter twitter ID is relentless attacks from criminals. Why on earth would I want that?
Well, no. Its actually a very good summary of a crappy article (or even more technically, a good summary of an article that is itself a good summary of a third very crappy article). Both the summary and TFA were OK, but the ultimate source was garbage so the result was simply well-communicated garbage.
I'd advise Slashdot readers to take their typical tack, and not read the linked articles. They are crap. However (again, much like Slashdot), the comments can be enlightening.
What I'm seeing there is:
a) This is not about the cold, or winter at all. Its been a problem since they started delivering vehicles in August.
b) Due to all the bad press (from poor journalists such as these) over fires from improperly overcharged batteries, Tesla charging cables now try to detect when a battery is fully-charged and stop the charging process.
c) They do this by looking for changes in the current flow through them.
d) Norway's power grid is so dirty that it is fooling the cables.
That's the issue, near as I can tell.
Take a look at Richard Feynman. Why was he considered one of the greatest educators of all time? Because of his Nobel price? Of course not. Because he was a bloody genius when it came to transferring knowledge.
Can't emphasize this enough. He got put on the commission investigating the Challenger explosion in part because it was hoped a Nobel Physicist make the cause of the disaster sound so dull confusing almost everyone would tune out. Huge mistake. Instead he showed up with an O-ring and a glass of ice water and showed everyone the problem on live TV.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming that just because someone isn't well paid, what they do is easy (or worse, they aren't that smart).
For teachers, this is really about being able to fire teachers with students who do poorly on standardized tests.
Hah, funny. No, its about Principals and parent groups being able to get teachers fired more easily, period. Sure some of those folks may be "bad teachers", but every single one of them is going to be a teacher a Principal, school board member, or random group of parents took a disliking to for some reason.
Think about this. Without any tenure, you are left with a profession that is supposed to judge (grade, control, etc) the progeny of folks who are capable of firing them on a whim. What exactly do you think is going to happen in that case? Do you think the kids of school board members will get a bad grade ever? How about a detention for misbehavior? Nope, they'll all be valedictorians.
In today's environment, where money=power, some rich folks feel like their money ought to be able to buy them complete control over their kids teachers. Tenure thwarts them (as designed), and they don't like it.
Not true. Life has been found at the bottom of our oceans where no light penetrates (or oxygen, for that matter). Some suggest it may even have started there. I don't know about that, but the current empherical facts are:
We aren't really sure what life's requirements actually are
Everywhere on earth there is water and we've looked, life exists
We haven't yet looked for life in any liquid water outside of earth
So any theories about whether alien water might or might not have life are at best unproven.
This is not at all true. OO stand's for "Object-Oriented". I was taught (and was doing) OO design back when the only "OO language" around was Smalltalk (and I wasn't using it).
The core of the concept is organizing behavior around your objects, rather that visa-versa. Once you have that, inheritance is really just a convenience feature. It saves you the drudgery of manually retyping the entire interface with calls down into the "base" object class for non-overridden methods. But you could do that scut-work manually, or with (shudder) macros, and it would have the same effect The reason you've come to expect it in an OO language is because it is a natural thing to want to add to such a language (and a silly thing to leave out). But if you are stuck with a language not designed around OO (and thus without inheritance), that doesn't mean you can't do OO design in it.
If you're a half competent C programmer you will be using OO techniques in any flavour of C.
Yup. If you've ever used/created an API that made use of a "cookie" (typically a pointer or an int indexing into an internal array of instances) to keep internal data for its client sessions straight, you're 2/3rds of the way to "OO" already. Inheritance and dynamic dispatch are really just convenience features tacked onto that.
Transforming calls from "operate_on(cookie,...)" to "cookie->operate_on(..)" is really just syntactic sugar. In fact, some OO language syntax uses the former rather than the latter anyway.
It is interesting how "piracy" originally indicated a company (group of private individuals acting cooperatively) taking property or resources a government felt belonged to it or its citizens. Now it has come to mean a government or its citizens taking what a company considers its property or resources.
Probably the best analogy is Architecture. There is a discipline that necessarily has a functional purpose, but still can (and often is) viewed and appreciated as art. A large part of the appreciation of architecture is appreciation of how it went about achieving its functional purpose, and there's a large body of theory build up around this. For example, its is a controversial but generally accepted architectural principle that form should follow function. An implication of this is that unnecessary architectural features are frowned upon. In SW Engineering we call non-functional code "dead code" if it flat out can't be used, and "inelegant" if it is simply more than necessary. Both are generally frowned on.
So if you want to spend time systematically analyzing software as art, perhaps the Right way to go about it would be the way architectural reviewers do, not the way literature or "high art" reviewers do it.
I'm a complete atheist but claiming that a ticket to heaven is reserved for a few chosen ones is just not true (well, at least not according to Jesus).
FYI: Where they get that alternate interpretation is from Revelation (the last book in the Christian Bible, in just about every way imaginable). Typically you hear this book called "Revelations" (by people who apparently can't even be bothered to read and comprehend the title of the frigging book correctly). The mainstream view is that it was a highly-allegorized story about how horrible the Emperor Nero was, purposely made oblique so people found with copies wouldn't be executed on the spot.
In that book there's an actual number for the amount of folks who will get sent to heaven. For those who that book literally, that small number of the heaven-bound is it. Everyone else living or dead is SOL.
Well, I think you probably realized there was an unfair generalization buried there, but stumbled over the specifics. I'll help you out and give it to you straight.
Creationism is not about Christianity at all. Its all about politics: particularly electing more Republicans and less Democrats.
This is done by making a big public stink about Republicans defending a weird literal interpretation of one tiny part of the Bible. By implication, anyone attacking this appears to be attacking The Bible.
However, the real division in USA politics these days is actually that of Rand's Objectivisim vs. Jesus' teachings. Nothing against Randites. Its a completely self-consistent philosophical system that can make a great deal of sense. However, it is inarguably incompatible with Christianity. Ayn herself argued this. Where a Christian has a moral obligation to help the poor, an objectivist in fact has a moral obligation not to help the poor (to an objectivist, that is just enabling the behavior that keeps them poor). Its an obvious consequence here that objectivism is going to be a more attractive philosophy for the wealthy, so it shouldn't shock anyone that the wealthy spend a great deal of effort in this country promoting it. If you look at Republican arguments against things like Welfare and Food Stamps, you'll find almost pure Objectivist philosophy.
However, if Christians aren't distracted by supposed attacks over things like Creationism and "The War on Christmas", they might start to notice the real philosophical fight they have on their hands. Can't have that.
It also brings up social Darwinism as if it's an aspect of evolutionary theory
Actually, Social Darwinism is the one kind of Darwinism your typical Creationist is happy to believe whole-heartedly in. If you start believing the poor might not necessarily deserve to be poor, a whole lot of modern Republican politics suddenly starts to look very unchristian.
Not in any sense of the word "cost" I'm acquainted with. If I purchase an automobile in NYC, I'll pay an extra 5% just in sales tax (delta) alone. Car insurance rates are far higher in New York, there are all kinds of parking costs and "operating fees" that are a foreign concept here. Gasoline costs 20% more there (I filled up yesterday at a name-brand place for less than $3 a gallon). Frankly, I wonder why New Yorkers even bother with cars. My family here has three of them. May become four soon when my daughter turns 16.
More to the point, you'd need more in NYC to make up for the cost of living. According to the calculator I checked, the equivalent salary in NYC to $120K where I live would be about $215K.
It also says NYC employers only pay about 23% more than where I live, which means a $120K job here is likely to be about a $150K job there.
Not everyone had your parents. Mine are nice folks, but both had jobs, so almost no time at home to sit and watch me. They'd stick a thermometer in my mouth, leave me under orders to keep it under my tongue, and then wander off for 5-15 minutes. If you had some old style leave-it-to-Beaver parents with nothing better to do that dote on you personally, I'm happy for you. But don't think that was universal.
Particularly those families that have [small] children, since a broken CFL releases mercury, which is toxic
As a parent of three rambunctious children myself, I can confidently assert that I'm far more worried about the kiddos hurting themselves on the broken shards of glass than on the small amount of released mercury.
Time was we used to put very fragile tubes filled with mercury in our kids mouths whenever they got the sniffles. I think we can learn to deal with the hazard of having it in bulbs.
According to some recent studies there's something in the blood of younger people that makes their brains learn better. Enough so that giving an older person blood from a younger person actually has very noticeable affects on the brain.
So one possibility would be to get regular transfusions from a young person to keep your brain functioning at its best. Younger folks tend to be destitute so you might be able to pay for this. Otherwise I suppose you could use the techniques demonstrated in the documentary series Twilight to get yourself "volunteer" donors...
On the internet, being primarily a written media, it is kind of tough to tell a transposition error from an actual misunderstanding.
Note that the top answer there is actually mine. I'm rather well acquainted with this kind of error, as you have discovered. Not being able to edit Slashdot posts after submission doesn't help...
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth noting that a recent study found that only 16% of female characters in movies and TV are shown to hold a job in any STEM field.
And what percentage of men in movies and TV are shown to hold a job of that kind? I'd be surprised if it was more than 20.
Not only that, but even the 16% TV does show is actually a vast overrepresentation of reality. Last year less than 10% of all college degrees conferred were for STEM disciplines. Since STEM jobs pretty much require a degree, and less than half the workforce has one, that means the long term trend here is probably for less than 5% of the general population to have such jobs. So gender aside, 16% is huge.
Now its not unreasonable either. There are certain dramatic narrative imperatives at work here preventing depiction of a lot of more boring jobs. But still its weird to be complaining about a big overrepresentation of reality for not overrepresenting it further..
Neanderthals are barely a separate species.
They're homo neanderthalensis, while modern man is homo sapiens sapiens.
Umm...you do realize don't you that you can't prove anything just by spouting taxonomy at people? The people who consider them a separate species consider them "Homo neanderthalensis", while those who don't consider them "Homo sapiens neanderthalensis". Its right there in only the second paragraph of their wikipedia page.
In a large part this is an argument over those two sets of names, so you can't resolve anything by just stating one like its some kind of immutable fact of the universe.
Large mammals managed to survive for a long, long time before people came to Americas and then, shortly after people came, they were killed off by "climate and environmental changes"? Sounds a bit fishy to me!
This is exactly the problem, and I don't see anything in these "new findings" addressing it. What I'm seeing here is two-fold:
1) There were actually two megafauna die-offs, and the first happened before there were humans in the Americas. This is actually a reasonable argument, but it only addresses half the issue.
2)There's a part of the continent where we have found megafauna from before the second die-off, but we haven't yet found a lot of evidence in those specimens of human predation. This argument I find inherently specious, unless you for some weird reason really want to believe humans had nothing to do with it. It makes no attempt to explain why the timing is so coincidental with human occupation. It makes no attempt to explain why humans, known to be hunters and to have hunted megafauna in other parts of the contienent, decided to leave it alone in the NorthEast to prosper if not for (???). Wouldn't a much simpler explanation be that you just haven't happened to find the evidence yet?
In other words, a decisive amount of circumstantial evidence is already pointing us toward humans as at least a part of the cause of the second die-off. The burden of proof is on those who want to claim humans had nothing to do with it. But all they are claiming here is, "lack of evidence" (and only in a small area too, there's plenty of that evidence elsewhere), but that does not help them.
As near as I can tell, the only "perk" one gets for having a one-letter twitter ID is relentless attacks from criminals. Why on earth would I want that?
Well, no. Its actually a very good summary of a crappy article (or even more technically, a good summary of an article that is itself a good summary of a third very crappy article). Both the summary and TFA were OK, but the ultimate source was garbage so the result was simply well-communicated garbage.
I'd advise Slashdot readers to take their typical tack, and not read the linked articles. They are crap. However (again, much like Slashdot), the comments can be enlightening.
What I'm seeing there is:
a) This is not about the cold, or winter at all. Its been a problem since they started delivering vehicles in August.
b) Due to all the bad press (from poor journalists such as these) over fires from improperly overcharged batteries, Tesla charging cables now try to detect when a battery is fully-charged and stop the charging process.
c) They do this by looking for changes in the current flow through them.
d) Norway's power grid is so dirty that it is fooling the cables. That's the issue, near as I can tell.
Take a look at Richard Feynman. Why was he considered one of the greatest educators of all time? Because of his Nobel price? Of course not. Because he was a bloody genius when it came to transferring knowledge.
Can't emphasize this enough. He got put on the commission investigating the Challenger explosion in part because it was hoped a Nobel Physicist make the cause of the disaster sound so dull confusing almost everyone would tune out. Huge mistake. Instead he showed up with an O-ring and a glass of ice water and showed everyone the problem on live TV.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming that just because someone isn't well paid, what they do is easy (or worse, they aren't that smart).
For teachers, this is really about being able to fire teachers with students who do poorly on standardized tests.
Hah, funny. No, its about Principals and parent groups being able to get teachers fired more easily, period. Sure some of those folks may be "bad teachers", but every single one of them is going to be a teacher a Principal, school board member, or random group of parents took a disliking to for some reason.
Think about this. Without any tenure, you are left with a profession that is supposed to judge (grade, control, etc) the progeny of folks who are capable of firing them on a whim. What exactly do you think is going to happen in that case? Do you think the kids of school board members will get a bad grade ever? How about a detention for misbehavior? Nope, they'll all be valedictorians.
In today's environment, where money=power, some rich folks feel like their money ought to be able to buy them complete control over their kids teachers. Tenure thwarts them (as designed), and they don't like it.
So any theories about whether alien water might or might not have life are at best unproven.
WTF? Without inheritance, you don't have OO.
This is not at all true. OO stand's for "Object-Oriented". I was taught (and was doing) OO design back when the only "OO language" around was Smalltalk (and I wasn't using it).
The core of the concept is organizing behavior around your objects, rather that visa-versa. Once you have that, inheritance is really just a convenience feature. It saves you the drudgery of manually retyping the entire interface with calls down into the "base" object class for non-overridden methods. But you could do that scut-work manually, or with (shudder) macros, and it would have the same effect The reason you've come to expect it in an OO language is because it is a natural thing to want to add to such a language (and a silly thing to leave out). But if you are stuck with a language not designed around OO (and thus without inheritance), that doesn't mean you can't do OO design in it.
If you're a half competent C programmer you will be using OO techniques in any flavour of C.
Yup. If you've ever used/created an API that made use of a "cookie" (typically a pointer or an int indexing into an internal array of instances) to keep internal data for its client sessions straight, you're 2/3rds of the way to "OO" already. Inheritance and dynamic dispatch are really just convenience features tacked onto that.
Transforming calls from "operate_on(cookie,...)" to "cookie->operate_on(..)" is really just syntactic sugar. In fact, some OO language syntax uses the former rather than the latter anyway.
On this planet, wherever liquid water is found, there is life. Even in some exceedingly extreme circumstances.
Admittedly, that phenomenon has yet to be observed off of this planet. But neither has the phenomenon of lifeless water either...
It is interesting how "piracy" originally indicated a company (group of private individuals acting cooperatively) taking property or resources a government felt belonged to it or its citizens. Now it has come to mean a government or its citizens taking what a company considers its property or resources.
Probably the best analogy is Architecture. There is a discipline that necessarily has a functional purpose, but still can (and often is) viewed and appreciated as art. A large part of the appreciation of architecture is appreciation of how it went about achieving its functional purpose, and there's a large body of theory build up around this. For example, its is a controversial but generally accepted architectural principle that form should follow function. An implication of this is that unnecessary architectural features are frowned upon. In SW Engineering we call non-functional code "dead code" if it flat out can't be used, and "inelegant" if it is simply more than necessary. Both are generally frowned on.
So if you want to spend time systematically analyzing software as art, perhaps the Right way to go about it would be the way architectural reviewers do, not the way literature or "high art" reviewers do it.
I'm a complete atheist but claiming that a ticket to heaven is reserved for a few chosen ones is just not true (well, at least not according to Jesus).
FYI: Where they get that alternate interpretation is from Revelation (the last book in the Christian Bible, in just about every way imaginable). Typically you hear this book called "Revelations" (by people who apparently can't even be bothered to read and comprehend the title of the frigging book correctly). The mainstream view is that it was a highly-allegorized story about how horrible the Emperor Nero was, purposely made oblique so people found with copies wouldn't be executed on the spot.
In that book there's an actual number for the amount of folks who will get sent to heaven. For those who that book literally, that small number of the heaven-bound is it. Everyone else living or dead is SOL.
Creationism is not about Christianity at all. Its all about politics: particularly electing more Republicans and less Democrats.
This is done by making a big public stink about Republicans defending a weird literal interpretation of one tiny part of the Bible. By implication, anyone attacking this appears to be attacking The Bible.
However, the real division in USA politics these days is actually that of Rand's Objectivisim vs. Jesus' teachings. Nothing against Randites. Its a completely self-consistent philosophical system that can make a great deal of sense. However, it is inarguably incompatible with Christianity. Ayn herself argued this. Where a Christian has a moral obligation to help the poor, an objectivist in fact has a moral obligation not to help the poor (to an objectivist, that is just enabling the behavior that keeps them poor). Its an obvious consequence here that objectivism is going to be a more attractive philosophy for the wealthy, so it shouldn't shock anyone that the wealthy spend a great deal of effort in this country promoting it. If you look at Republican arguments against things like Welfare and Food Stamps, you'll find almost pure Objectivist philosophy.
However, if Christians aren't distracted by supposed attacks over things like Creationism and "The War on Christmas", they might start to notice the real philosophical fight they have on their hands. Can't have that.
...nor do they get modded up, apparently. :-)
It also brings up social Darwinism as if it's an aspect of evolutionary theory
Actually, Social Darwinism is the one kind of Darwinism your typical Creationist is happy to believe whole-heartedly in. If you start believing the poor might not necessarily deserve to be poor, a whole lot of modern Republican politics suddenly starts to look very unchristian.
Clearly they should have never agreed to build Congress its own subway.
Cars cost about the same
Not in any sense of the word "cost" I'm acquainted with. If I purchase an automobile in NYC, I'll pay an extra 5% just in sales tax (delta) alone. Car insurance rates are far higher in New York, there are all kinds of parking costs and "operating fees" that are a foreign concept here. Gasoline costs 20% more there (I filled up yesterday at a name-brand place for less than $3 a gallon). Frankly, I wonder why New Yorkers even bother with cars. My family here has three of them. May become four soon when my daughter turns 16.
More to the point, you'd need more in NYC to make up for the cost of living. According to the calculator I checked, the equivalent salary in NYC to $120K where I live would be about $215K.
It also says NYC employers only pay about 23% more than where I live, which means a $120K job here is likely to be about a $150K job there.
Not everyone had your parents. Mine are nice folks, but both had jobs, so almost no time at home to sit and watch me. They'd stick a thermometer in my mouth, leave me under orders to keep it under my tongue, and then wander off for 5-15 minutes. If you had some old style leave-it-to-Beaver parents with nothing better to do that dote on you personally, I'm happy for you. But don't think that was universal.
Particularly those families that have [small] children, since a broken CFL releases mercury, which is toxic
As a parent of three rambunctious children myself, I can confidently assert that I'm far more worried about the kiddos hurting themselves on the broken shards of glass than on the small amount of released mercury.
Time was we used to put very fragile tubes filled with mercury in our kids mouths whenever they got the sniffles. I think we can learn to deal with the hazard of having it in bulbs.
According to some recent studies there's something in the blood of younger people that makes their brains learn better. Enough so that giving an older person blood from a younger person actually has very noticeable affects on the brain.
So one possibility would be to get regular transfusions from a young person to keep your brain functioning at its best. Younger folks tend to be destitute so you might be able to pay for this. Otherwise I suppose you could use the techniques demonstrated in the documentary series Twilight to get yourself "volunteer" donors...
On the internet, being primarily a written media, it is kind of tough to tell a transposition error from an actual misunderstanding.
Note that the top answer there is actually mine. I'm rather well acquainted with this kind of error, as you have discovered. Not being able to edit Slashdot posts after submission doesn't help...