Well, if you're interested in a basic text on quantum mechanics (and its application to chemistry), you might check out Linus Pauling and E. Bright Wilson's _Introduction to Quantum Mechanics_. It's available from Dover Books which means it's about $10. Well worth it especially if you're also interested in how quantum theory came about and some of the older versions of the theory. My local Barnes and Noble had a copy.
Of course, I'm a chemist, so I'm more focused towards applying things to the real word than most Slashdotters...;)
> Here's one area where the sports coaches know > what they are doing better than the educators. > Walk out to a football practice sometime and tell > me if you really think those students are > enjoying what they are doing every minute.
The football coach, it should be said, has help. Professional football players (and to an extent, college players) are idolized by television and the media. Kids see this and WANT to play football - even if it's painful. Parents also get in on it. If daddy says you're not gonna ever be a man unless you play football, by golly you're gonna play football!
> if you cant tell the direction i would change it > from the content of my posting we're not going to > get anywhere.
So your answer to his question is "No, I don't have a proposal to change the education system".
If that's an error, outline your changes. Don't just say "It's obvious!" because it isn't.
EVERYONE has a quick fix that would supposedly turn all our young people into geniuses. Very few (if any) of these have been proven to work at the scale of, say, educating all the children in the USA. I'd like to hear *your* proposal.
> Until there are outside forces, like science > was to a church, probably commercial educational > enterprises to the current schools, fixing > education will be like fixing a car with > square wheels by putting in a better stereo.
The "external forces" I can see are these:
1) Parental involvement. Kids learn more when their parents are into it. It helps if the parents themselves are somewhat educated and do some "intellectual" things like (by golly) reading books. Parental involvement, by the way, means more than parents whining that their kid isn't doing good in school.
2) A social environment that places value on education. Think about this - how are people that do well on school portrayed on the nation's babysitter (the television)? Not too well, eh? Who's paid more, a professional baseball/basketball/football player or a rocket scientist? If we don't show kids that there's a value in learning in SOCIETY (not just in the classroom), then why do we whine so when these kids don't bother learning?
Change these and the educational system will evolve to accomodate these new students. Believe me, teachers *like* students that you don't have to spoon-feed everything to. Fix #1 and #2 above, and teachers will be glad to try something new!
> The reason I bring this up is because I'm hearing > multiple arguments on Slashdot today that say > something along the lines of, "Science is fact, > religion is heresay."
The devout might rephrase that as "Religion is fact, science is heresy.";)
A better argument for science (or to a degree, religion), might be based on what works. Science produces usable (though not always 100% accurate - darn those pesky fallible humans) predictions. I can generally rely on the noaa web site to give me a reasonable idea of tomorrow's weather and whether or not I have to worry about a tropical storm headed my way this week. These people are probably using scientific data rather than reading the last book of the Bible for the forecast.
Or at least I don't recall today's forecast being "Partly cloudy with a 75% chance of fire and brimstone late this evening.".;)
Of course, you can say religion "works" if you believe the findings of those studies that say that devout folks tend to survive long-term illnesses longer than the non-devout.
> Aye, but new, more advanced theories require > new, more advanced tools. Just because a CPU > is faster doesn't mean that the average speed > of computing goes up. Sorry if I'm putting > words in your mouth, I thought that was worth > pointing out.
I was merely pointing out that the basic notion of how to do science (reproducible observations, testing the predictionss of hypotheses, etc.) hasn't fundamentally changed - even though the actual hypotheses being tested have.
But then the old hypotheses aren't *that* bad - once you get past things like all matter being composed of earth, wind, fire, and water. Most of the stuff I teach in my chemistry classes is rather old knowledge - some of which I point out to my students isn't 100% accurate anymore - but it works in 95% of cases.
>>What, exactly, does the Bible prove? This is a >>pretty reasonable question to ask, I think. >Nothing. And that's my whole point. Neither side >can prove anything.
"Proofs", of course, are for the mathematician. Scientists have to be content merely with lots and lots of supporting evidence.:)
It's a conceit of mine that scientists don't have to prove or disprove whether god(s) exist. If the god(s) care, they'll make their presence known without our help.
> "Pot. Kettle. Black." refers to the folks here > on Slashdot who claim that science is vastly > superior to religion.
That would, again, depend on what people mean by "superior" and what questions they're trying to answer.
All I know is that if I develop, say, the symptoms of appendicitis, I'd prefer to go to a hospital than a faith healer.;)
> The scientists I know take a much more... > intelligent point of view, that is, "I > might be right, I might be wrong."
Any scientist worth his sodium chloride, er, salt, will say something like that. All we can work to do is minimize errors, since we will make them at some point.
> Interestingly enough, some religious folks > I know say that, too.
Imagine someone like that as a TV preacher! I know I'd watch...
> As far as facts being manipulated - I see > where you are coming from, but I see it a > little differently.
I come from the deep southern part of the USA, where you can't travel half a mile down the road without driving past one or two cheurches. These areas tend to fall more on the "distort the facts, but don't reinterpret your religion" side of the fence. There's probably a little bit of geographical bias in my views showing through here.
> Religions try and take their scriptures > and apply it to the life they know in a > way that makes sense to them. That's > interpretation. They take what is given > them (or what they "find") and apply > it to what they know in ways they think > are correct. I see the same in science.
I think it's important to emphasize the difference in approaches, though. In science, it's perfectly okay to change your "scripture" - though you'd better have a pretty good set of experimental data to back you up.
In religion - or at least in the brand of christianity that is dominant around here, the "scripture" is supposed to be divinely inspired Truth. We're not allowed to change much.
Sure, both religion and science apply their ideas to facts to see what their ideas explain. I wouldn't dispute that. Religion and science both attempt to explain the world around us in terms we can understand. But they take different roads to get where they're going...
> At one time, every observation thought of proved > that the world was flat. To state that science > today is infallable is absolutely retarded.
This is a strawman argument.
Nobody - let me repeat, NOBODY - who knows anything about science will say that it is infallible. The whole POINT of the scientific method is that humands *do* make mistakes. If all our observations and conjectures were perfect, we wouldn't need the scentific method at all.
(Does it surprise anyone that *religions* have claimed "infallibility"?:) )
The difference between science now and science then is that we have a *lot* more observations under our belts and new tools for observations. The scientific method is the same.
> Saying that "scientific studies prove atoms > exist but the Bible doesn't prove squat" is a > fallacy, plain and simple.
What, exactly, does the Bible prove? This is a pretty reasonable question to ask, I think.
> Theologists study the Bible, trying to find > coheasion. When they find something that > doesn't make sense, they try and come up with > an explaination for it. Many "scientists" > call this proof that God does not exist.
That's a little strong, but it does tend to give fundamentalists the shivers. After all, the argument goes, why is an infallible, perfect, omniscient god's word so darned hard to read? For that matter, why are his products (us) so defective?
> The same goes for science. Theories arise to > explain things that we're not sure about. > They're not always right. > Pot. Kettle. Black.
Not quite. Scientists *know* that most new hypothesis are, if not flat-out wrong, in need of improvement. That's what the scientific method is all about.
Religion and science approach the problem from two different directions. The scientific approach is to observe, then try to come up with an explanation that fits the facts. If the facts go against the explanations, the facts must change.
The more "fundamentalist" religions work a different way: An explanation is presupposed. The "facts" are manipulated so they fit the explanation - or the explanation is so vague that any "fact" would fit. (Okay, that's a bit uncharitable - some religions DO change their dogma - but it's not far off from fundamentalist Christianity.)
Back to Larry Wall... his argument for his religion, quantum mechanics metaphors aside, basically boils down to "I believe because I believe". And that's perfectly all right. It's not *logical*, but then again that's the whole POINT of faith.:)
> Here's [google.com] an online auction for a bunch > of legos in 1994. It's just the first thing I > spotted on google groups.
Online auctions via USENET were going on all the time pre-1995. rec.games.video.classic was a common group (which I frequented) that had online auctions. I ran a few myself before Ebay started and took a little of the "database" work (which I had some custom programs I wrote on my Amiga 500 handling) off my hands. Google had a few of my r.g.v.c auctions from 1994 / 1995, and using advanced search, you can find a few even older. For example (not my auction), message ID 23APR199308590840@watson.bms.com...
Sometimes, making something everybody and his pet cat does already a little easier is worth patenting. But "a method of holding automated auctions using computers, databases and the Internet to register and link buyers and sellers, and facilitate transactions" sounds a little obvious to anyone who's run a USENET auction before. Hell, most of the USENET auctioneers were using some sort of database system at the time.
> News for you slashdotters... Teachers don't work > 8-9 hours a day. It's 10-14 hour days, each day, > often working weekends, YEAR ROUND. Sure, they > get _TWO_ months off in the summer, where they're > required, to keep thier job (not get more money > like our IT certs do for us), to take classes, > week long seminars, get thier 2nd or 3rd masters, > etc. etc. etc.
I teach at a tech school, and we teach over the summers - usually to folks who weren't quite able to cut it at large universities where the size of the chemistry class is 400 students instead of 36 students.
During summers, a lot of us work 10-14 hour days - every weekday - then get to spend part of some weekends grading tests / assignments / labs, etc.
I enjoy the work (which is why I do it), but I do get irritated at people who say it's "no work" or it's a "cushy" job. Teaching is anything but "cushy". Sure, since I'm college level, I have some amount of what they call academic freedom to organize the course as I see fit, etc. (I hear from friends that this is not true in the primary/secondary schools).
As for technology... At tech schools we're stuck in the divide between primary/secondary education (where most "public" education funding seems to go) and 4-year schools which also receive big dollars. We get... leftovers.
Most of our classrooms are traditional, as we only have limited funds to wire up rooms for Internet access and data projectors. We can trek across campus to borrow a data projector for class (if there's one available that day). Up until this year, I had a Pentium 200 on my desk that some poor IT droid had hobbled with Windows NT. You can check out a laptop for presentations (with the same issues as checking out a data projector). You are left on your own as far as hooking to the network and hooking up this equipment - which, for me, is not a big problem - availability is. We just don't have enough of the USEFUL equipment to go around.
Now as far as students "outpacing" teachers with online skills.... Hmm, where do I start?:) My students range in age from 17 to 75. In my experience, the younger ones *do* have more basic computer skills, but it's a rare student (young or old) who can figure out how to plot a graph of temperature vs. time in either Excel or OpenOffice Calc without help. Some of these same students at least *do* have basic browsing skills, but seem to mainly want to use AOL instant messenger or winamp.
I have a course web site on my personal (non-school) internet account - mainly because the school's "webmaster" left and apparently none of the IT staff can properly set up web and ftp services on a W2K box - uploading anything to the server has been broken for a month. (I'm almost at the point where I'm considering offering them an old Alphastation of mine preconfigured with Red Hat running apache.:) ).
Now it's true that all teachers aren't tech-savvy. Heck, probably half of my department isn't. But then again most students that we get aren't tech-savvy either. Using online chat services and playing Tetris on cell phones doesn't equate to knowing how to use computers as problem-solving tools.
Oh, and those fancy calculators they use for math classes? Don't get me started on the percentage of students that can't properly enter numbers on those things - mostly because they don't know anything about order of operations - and screw up nearly every calculation they're asked to do...:)
> I really beleive administrators should crack > down
Administrators are 3/4 of the problem. I recall an adminitrtator telling us that we had to increase enrollment in our college transfer programs. We were not allowed to advertise that we have college transfer courses because that wasn't conisitent with the college's business focus.
I guess that depends on what you used it for, and whether you have fast net access at work. I use the net basically for email and news/info, and occasional chat with some friends who don't live near me anymore. I don't tend to play games on my computer (that's what the Dreamcasts, Playstations, etc. are for).
I have a fast connection in my office should I need to download a large file - say the latest release of Open Office.
So why should I pay $50 a month *at home* for broadband?
I haven't been able to come up with a convincing reason yet.
> Most people that do not have indoor plubming > also claim that it is far too expensive.
Bad analogy. A more apt one would be, say, your house is equipped with a low-flow toilet. Is it worth the cost to buy an old-school flush toilet so you've only gotta flush once after a trip to the Chinese place?:)
> that's quite foolish. you're probably also > filtering a high percentage of the e-mail you > actually want to receive.
Quite right. I use e-mail for (among other things) communicating with my students. If I filtered out all those providers, 90 percent of my students' messages to me would get dropped. Looking over one of my classes, that guys filter would block 17 students out of a 19-student class! (Okay, so that's 89%:) )
Of course, my main spam problem (I'm not on hotmail) is still the Korean spammers, which *are* rather easy to filter out without alienating my students. Although it still is annoying when the Koreans send me 50+ spam messages overnight and I'm checking my mail with a dialup connection...
> Judging from my inbox it seems that 80% of > outgoing email at hotmail is spam.
If you read the message headers, you'll probably discover that most of this spam isn't actually *from* hotmail. It just shows a hotmail address in the "From:" line. The "From:" line is no more accurate than a return address written in the top left-hand corner of a letter you'd get in the mail. In other words, it can say whatever you want it to say.
And as someone who has more than one e-mail account, bring able to change "From:" without trouble is a *good* thing...
> I'm sure other schools/colleges/etc are in the > same position as mine (closed during July and > August).
K-12 schools, maybe. Most colleges and universities in my experience run all year with two weeks or so downtime in December near the Christmas holidays.
At least I'm fairly certain that I was teaching a freshman chemistry class this morning until about 11:20.:)
I've been using Linux since about Slackware 96 - so I know where the author of the article is coming from. Most of his points were quite dead-on accurate... as long as you're talking about Slackware 96. These days, I use Red Hat - up-to-date versions (7.2 and 7.3) on all my machines. My Linux experience now is quite different from my experiences with Slackware 96.
Slackware 96 *was* ugly. Heck, FVWM-95 was atrocious. It took me forever to get it to look and act the way I wanted.
With Redhat 7.2/7.3 and Gnome I didn't even have to edit anything.:)
Back in '96, there really wasn't much you could do for everyday "office" tasks. These days we have Star/Open Office and other rather good office tools. I find (I'm a teacher) that I simply don't need to use MS Office. Plus, I find that my laptop (an IBM thinkpad) is orders of magnitude more stable with Linux/SO/OO than Windows/MSOffice. I'm not talking about OS crashes here (W2K is fairly stable) - I'm talking about application crashes that cause me to lose data. I don't like losing data.:)
Internet tools? Give me Sylpheed any day over outlook. It loads in a second - even on a slow machine - and lets me *not* look at whatever silly fonts/colors someone has decided to inflict on the faculty today. (Where is the option to have HTML mail rendered as plain text by default in Outlook? Darned if I can find it). I also don't get the virus-of-the-week automatically executing on my machine. A little fringe benefit, I suppose...
I use Galeon, and I wouldn't trade it for the latest IE if you paid me. (Well, you could pay me, but it'd have to be a lot.;))
Hardware? All the hardware on my laptop was autodetected. I plugged in my PCMCIA network card. It Just Worked(tm). Same with my PCMCIA modem. And my JAMP3 player that I bought from Wal Mart for $20. (To be fair, this Just Works on W2K too, but I've yet to be able to make W2K see the multimedia card instead of just the internal memory. Linux sees it just fine.) My USB Zip drive works great too. I didn't even have to configure anything. I plugged it in, booted up, and RH just added it and added a mount point for me (This device actually DID work with Windows with equally little fuss).
I don't buy all the latest little doodads from CompUSA, true. (I don't need 'em.) But for the most part, Linuc Just Works(tm) for me. And keeping up to date is trivial with Red Carpet.
Of course, half the time I think I need something I realize that it's on a RH CD already.
I guess there's something just wrong with me. Linux does what I need it to do. And I'm a (chemistry) teacher, not a programmer.:)
But if Linux didn't do what I needed, I'd probably look elsewhere. Maybe that shiny new Mac OS...
The newer models (as far as I know, anything newer than the 760) have keyboards that don't completely suck. My 380XD (P233) has a pretty nice keyboard, and so did the 600E (PII/something) I used for a while. My 380XD has both the floppy and the CD-ROM built in, but I have no idea whether the newer models stick to this trend.
My old 760XD had both a lousy keyboard and only enough bays for a CD *or* floppy and not both. The swapping of drives I don't mind, but the sucky keyboard I *did*.:)
> I *JUST* bought an old thinkpad 760dx (used of > course). Now how am I supposed to get the > soundcard working?
If you mean the 760XD (XGA screen, built-in modem, P166MMX processor, max 104M ram), you've got one of the Thinkpads with a proprietary (mwave) sound / modem setup.
What that means is that you can't get the modem to work (IBM only provided drivers for *newer* mwave modems than yours). You *might* be able to get the sound recognized by Linux as a soundblaster if you load the DOS drivers (in DOS) then use linload to load Linux. I never actually got this to work, but I heard some people did.
Essentially, the modem and sound hardware on a 760XD is useless under Linux. Oops. (I've heard that some of the less fancy 760s have fairly normal ESS souns cards which *are* compatible with Linux... depending on what model Thinkpad you actually have, you might be able to get the sound working).
Anyone who thinks that this is a neat idea obviously hasn't seen the movie "Real Genius".
I can see it now - a call from your boss while you're at work:
Boss (in deep voice): "IT drone, this is god!" You (groggy from all night gaming session): "Huh?" Boss: "From now on, stop reading Slashdot instead of working!" You: "It *is* God!"
> IBM should hire 10 guys like me, pay them > $25 an hour, UPS them some equipment, and let them > hack ThinkPads all day from home.
According to a post (this morning!) on the Thinkpad mailing list, IBM's dropping their Thinkpad Linux support project and laying off those employees.
It looks like you'd be better off staying with those Dells if their Linux compatibility is good...
Here's an excerpt from the message to the Thinkpad mailing list about Linux support for Thinkpads:
>> But, after 3 years, IBM has decided to >> no longer fund that project, and as of Monday, >> June 24th, [the guy who sent the mail] will be >> layed-off from IBM as part >> of IBM's recent Server Group "resource action."
> Perhaps because you aren't supposed to move > accident victims, it could aggrivate their wounds. > Not sure how that applies to lightsaber cuts and > force burns(dark side lightening attack thingy > does burn right?)
Anakin's "wound" was already cauterized, and he's not likely to be hurt more by a movement a foot or two to the side. I don't recall everything wrong with Obi-Wan, but I distinctly don't remember crushed ribs, broken bones, or spinal column injuries.
You might say that, assuming Yoda were to win the fight with Dooku if he'd used a *quicker* means to rescue Anakin and Obi-Wan, he would have saved *millions* of lives by preventing many of the events in the later Star Wars episodes.
Of course, maybe this was part of Lucas's point - that the Jedi *are* blind and incredibly shortsighted and they *need* a good swift butt-kicking by the more cunning Dark Side to whip them back into shape.
Yoda in particular wouldn't recognize the Dark Side until it swam up and bit him in the ass...:)
> Am I the only one not blinding by the horrible > quality of the Playstation?
Apparently, you're blinded by *something*...:)
> The only benefit the thing had in it's time was > the storage medium allowing tons of crap to be > stuck on a CD.
You're surely thinking of the SegaCD, which was probably the pioneer of "stick a bunch of junk on a CD-ROM and sell it". Granted, the SegaCD had a few good games (Lunar, Lunar:EB, Snatcher, etc.), but much of what was released for that system was FMV garbage.
The nice thing about the Playstation was that it had a whole lot of games that *weren't* just "shovel junk onto a CD". Ridge Racer, Tekken, Raiden Project, Namco Museum, etc. (to name a few of the earlier titles).
> If Nintendo wasn't so strict with its > blood/gore/mature rating crap...
Ahh yes, Nintendo. Nintendo wasn't *any* competition to the Playstation {Remember - Nintendo's then-current console was the SNES) until the N64 came out - which was long after the Playstation hit critical mass. And then the N64 came, with its very limited group of expensive (compared to Playstaiton) first-run titles - of which about the only hit was Mario 64. No wonder the Playstation dominated!
> Now, I'm not sure how long Yoda could keep up > fighting like that, but the way it looked to me, > he would have won if he hadn't had to save Obi Wan > and Anakin.
Speaking of, why didn't Yoda simply move Anakin and Obi-Wan out of the way rather than trying to hold up the big whatever-it-was-that-was-going-to-crush-them? It's already been established that it's easier to "force" smaller objects to move.
"So you see, Lone Starr, why evil always triumphs. Because good is dumb..." (Dark Helmet - Spaceballs)
> That's low enough for me! I'm off to get my > GameCube. Really, that's about as much as I'm > willing to pay for a non-upgradable piece of > hardware that will be obsolete in a year...
You mean something that's usually non-upgradable and obsolete in a year like, ohh, a video card for a PC? Some of the fancier graphics cards cost more than a console!
Unless things get *really* lousy in the console market, video game consoles have a staying power greater than a year. Even the *Dreamcast* was around longer than a year!
Consider the Playstation. There are still games being released for that old beast.
> Why are browsers so bloated, anyway? My poor > 133 MHz Pentium with 64 Mb RAM [...] is barely > able to cope with Netscape 6.
You might want to try a more lightweight browser with the same rendering engine - say, Galeon.
My main workstation is an IBM Thinkpad model 760XD. That's a P166MMX / 80M RAM / 3G HD. Right now I'm running Gnome (minus nautilus), Galeon (to respond to this post), Star Office (to do my actual work), and several smaller apps. I may update to 104M, but my system's quite usable now.
One thing I do is to use Dillo (http://dillo.cipsga.org.br/) for quick browsing. It's very light, depends only on GTK, and loads in a second or so - even with the apps I'm already running.
> School districts need to learn to let competent > people do their jobs. They hire them, underpay > them, then micromanage them until they get > burned out or quit.
So are you talking about the sysadmins getting burned out or the teachers?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you're interested in a basic text on quantum mechanics (and its application to chemistry), you might check out Linus Pauling and E. Bright Wilson's _Introduction to Quantum Mechanics_. It's available from Dover Books which means it's about $10. Well worth it especially if you're also interested in how quantum theory came about and some of the older versions of the theory. My local Barnes and Noble had a copy.
... ;)
Of course, I'm a chemist, so I'm more focused towards applying things to the real word than most Slashdotters
> Here's one area where the sports coaches know
> what they are doing better than the educators.
> Walk out to a football practice sometime and tell
> me if you really think those students are
> enjoying what they are doing every minute.
The football coach, it should be said, has help. Professional football players (and to an extent, college players) are idolized by television and the media. Kids see this and WANT to play football - even if it's painful. Parents also get in on it. If daddy says you're not gonna ever be a man unless you play football, by golly you're gonna play football!
> if you cant tell the direction i would change it
> from the content of my posting we're not going to
> get anywhere.
So your answer to his question is "No, I don't have a proposal to change the education system".
If that's an error, outline your changes. Don't just say "It's obvious!" because it isn't.
EVERYONE has a quick fix that would supposedly turn all our young people into geniuses. Very few (if any) of these have been proven to work at the scale of, say, educating all the children in the USA. I'd like to hear *your* proposal.
> Until there are outside forces, like science
> was to a church, probably commercial educational
> enterprises to the current schools, fixing
> education will be like fixing a car with
> square wheels by putting in a better stereo.
The "external forces" I can see are these:
1) Parental involvement. Kids learn more when their parents are into it. It helps if the parents themselves are somewhat educated and do some "intellectual" things like (by golly) reading books. Parental involvement, by the way, means more than parents whining that their kid isn't doing good in school.
2) A social environment that places value on education. Think about this - how are people that do well on school portrayed on the nation's babysitter (the television)? Not too well, eh? Who's paid more, a professional baseball/basketball/football player or a rocket scientist? If we don't show kids that there's a value in learning in SOCIETY (not just in the classroom), then why do we whine so when these kids don't bother learning?
Change these and the educational system will evolve to accomodate these new students. Believe me, teachers *like* students that you don't have to spoon-feed everything to. Fix #1 and #2 above, and teachers will be glad to try something new!
> The reason I bring this up is because I'm hearing
;)
;)
:)
;)
...
> multiple arguments on Slashdot today that say
> something along the lines of, "Science is fact,
> religion is heresay."
The devout might rephrase that as "Religion is fact, science is heresy."
A better argument for science (or to a degree, religion), might be based on what works. Science produces usable (though not always 100% accurate - darn those pesky fallible humans) predictions. I can generally rely on the noaa web site to give me a reasonable idea of tomorrow's weather and whether or not I have to worry about a tropical storm headed my way this week. These people are probably using scientific data rather than reading the last book of the Bible for the forecast.
Or at least I don't recall today's forecast being "Partly cloudy with a 75% chance of fire and brimstone late this evening.".
Of course, you can say religion "works" if you believe the findings of those studies that say that devout folks tend to survive long-term illnesses longer than the non-devout.
> Aye, but new, more advanced theories require
> new, more advanced tools. Just because a CPU
> is faster doesn't mean that the average speed
> of computing goes up. Sorry if I'm putting
> words in your mouth, I thought that was worth
> pointing out.
I was merely pointing out that the basic notion of how to do science (reproducible observations, testing the predictionss of hypotheses, etc.) hasn't fundamentally changed - even though the actual hypotheses being tested have.
But then the old hypotheses aren't *that* bad - once you get past things like all matter being composed of earth, wind, fire, and water. Most of the stuff I teach in my chemistry classes is rather old knowledge - some of which I point out to my students isn't 100% accurate anymore - but it works in 95% of cases.
>>What, exactly, does the Bible prove? This is a
>>pretty reasonable question to ask, I think.
>Nothing. And that's my whole point. Neither side
>can prove anything.
"Proofs", of course, are for the mathematician. Scientists have to be content merely with lots and lots of supporting evidence.
It's a conceit of mine that scientists don't have to prove or disprove whether god(s) exist. If the god(s) care, they'll make their presence known without our help.
> "Pot. Kettle. Black." refers to the folks here
> on Slashdot who claim that science is vastly
> superior to religion.
That would, again, depend on what people mean by "superior" and what questions they're trying to answer.
All I know is that if I develop, say, the symptoms of appendicitis, I'd prefer to go to a hospital than a faith healer.
> The scientists I know take a much more...
> intelligent point of view, that is, "I
> might be right, I might be wrong."
Any scientist worth his sodium chloride, er, salt, will say something like that. All we can work to do is minimize errors, since we will make them at some point.
> Interestingly enough, some religious folks
> I know say that, too.
Imagine someone like that as a TV preacher! I know I'd watch
> As far as facts being manipulated - I see
> where you are coming from, but I see it a
> little differently.
I come from the deep southern part of the USA, where you can't travel half a mile down the road without driving past one or two cheurches. These areas tend to fall more on the "distort the facts, but don't reinterpret your religion" side of the fence. There's probably a little bit of geographical bias in my views showing through here.
> Religions try and take their scriptures
> and apply it to the life they know in a
> way that makes sense to them. That's
> interpretation. They take what is given
> them (or what they "find") and apply
> it to what they know in ways they think
> are correct. I see the same in science.
I think it's important to emphasize the difference in approaches, though. In science, it's perfectly okay to change your "scripture" - though you'd better have a pretty good set of experimental data to back you up.
In religion - or at least in the brand of christianity that is dominant around here, the "scripture" is supposed to be divinely inspired Truth. We're not allowed to change much.
Sure, both religion and science apply their ideas to facts to see what their ideas explain. I wouldn't dispute that. Religion and science both attempt to explain the world around us in terms we can understand. But they take different roads to get where they're going...
> At one time, every observation thought of proved
:) )
... his argument for his religion, quantum mechanics metaphors aside, basically boils down to "I believe because I believe". And that's perfectly all right. It's not *logical*, but then again that's the whole POINT of faith. :)
> that the world was flat. To state that science
> today is infallable is absolutely retarded.
This is a strawman argument.
Nobody - let me repeat, NOBODY - who knows anything about science will say that it is infallible. The whole POINT of the scientific method is that humands *do* make mistakes. If all our observations and conjectures were perfect, we wouldn't need the scentific method at all.
(Does it surprise anyone that *religions* have claimed "infallibility"?
The difference between science now and science then is that we have a *lot* more observations under our belts and new tools for observations. The scientific method is the same.
> Saying that "scientific studies prove atoms
> exist but the Bible doesn't prove squat" is a
> fallacy, plain and simple.
What, exactly, does the Bible prove? This is a pretty reasonable question to ask, I think.
> Theologists study the Bible, trying to find
> coheasion. When they find something that
> doesn't make sense, they try and come up with
> an explaination for it. Many "scientists"
> call this proof that God does not exist.
That's a little strong, but it does tend to give fundamentalists the shivers. After all, the argument goes, why is an infallible, perfect, omniscient god's word so darned hard to read? For that matter, why are his products (us) so defective?
> The same goes for science. Theories arise to
> explain things that we're not sure about.
> They're not always right.
> Pot. Kettle. Black.
Not quite. Scientists *know* that most new hypothesis are, if not flat-out wrong, in need of improvement. That's what the scientific method is all about.
Religion and science approach the problem from two different directions. The scientific approach is to observe, then try to come up with an explanation that fits the facts. If the facts go against the explanations, the facts must change.
The more "fundamentalist" religions work a different way: An explanation is presupposed. The "facts" are manipulated so they fit the explanation - or the explanation is so vague that any "fact" would fit. (Okay, that's a bit uncharitable - some religions DO change their dogma - but it's not far off from fundamentalist Christianity.)
Back to Larry Wall
> Here's [google.com] an online auction for a bunch
...
> of legos in 1994. It's just the first thing I
> spotted on google groups.
Online auctions via USENET were going on all the time pre-1995. rec.games.video.classic was a common group (which I frequented) that had online auctions. I ran a few myself before Ebay started and took a little of the "database" work (which I had some custom programs I wrote on my Amiga 500 handling) off my hands. Google had a few of my r.g.v.c auctions from 1994 / 1995, and using advanced search, you can find a few even older. For example (not my auction), message ID 23APR199308590840@watson.bms.com
Sometimes, making something everybody and his pet cat does already a little easier is worth patenting. But "a method of holding automated auctions using computers, databases and the Internet to register and link buyers and sellers, and facilitate transactions" sounds a little obvious to anyone who's run a USENET auction before. Hell, most of the USENET auctioneers were using some sort of database system at the time.
> News for you slashdotters... Teachers don't work
... leftovers.
.... Hmm, where do I start? :) My students range in age from 17 to 75. In my experience, the younger ones *do* have more basic computer skills, but it's a rare student (young or old) who can figure out how to plot a graph of temperature vs. time in either Excel or OpenOffice Calc without help. Some of these same students at least *do* have basic browsing skills, but seem to mainly want to use AOL instant messenger or winamp.
:) ).
:)
> 8-9 hours a day. It's 10-14 hour days, each day,
> often working weekends, YEAR ROUND. Sure, they
> get _TWO_ months off in the summer, where they're
> required, to keep thier job (not get more money
> like our IT certs do for us), to take classes,
> week long seminars, get thier 2nd or 3rd masters,
> etc. etc. etc.
I teach at a tech school, and we teach over the summers - usually to folks who weren't quite able to cut it at large universities where the size of the chemistry class is 400 students instead of 36 students.
During summers, a lot of us work 10-14 hour days - every weekday - then get to spend part of some weekends grading tests / assignments / labs, etc.
I enjoy the work (which is why I do it), but I do get irritated at people who say it's "no work" or it's a "cushy" job. Teaching is anything but "cushy". Sure, since I'm college level, I have some amount of what they call academic freedom to organize the course as I see fit, etc. (I hear from friends that this is not true in the primary/secondary schools).
As for technology... At tech schools we're stuck in the divide between primary/secondary education (where most "public" education funding seems to go) and 4-year schools which also receive big dollars. We get
Most of our classrooms are traditional, as we only have limited funds to wire up rooms for Internet access and data projectors. We can trek across campus to borrow a data projector for class (if there's one available that day). Up until this year, I had a Pentium 200 on my desk that some poor IT droid had hobbled with Windows NT. You can check out a laptop for presentations (with the same issues as checking out a data projector). You are left on your own as far as hooking to the network and hooking up this equipment - which, for me, is not a big problem - availability is. We just don't have enough of the USEFUL equipment to go around.
Now as far as students "outpacing" teachers with online skills
I have a course web site on my personal (non-school) internet account - mainly because the school's "webmaster" left and apparently none of the IT staff can properly set up web and ftp services on a W2K box - uploading anything to the server has been broken for a month. (I'm almost at the point where I'm considering offering them an old Alphastation of mine preconfigured with Red Hat running apache.
Now it's true that all teachers aren't tech-savvy. Heck, probably half of my department isn't. But then again most students that we get aren't tech-savvy either. Using online chat services and playing Tetris on cell phones doesn't equate to knowing how to use computers as problem-solving tools.
Oh, and those fancy calculators they use for math classes? Don't get me started on the percentage of students that can't properly enter numbers on those things - mostly because they don't know anything about order of operations - and screw up nearly every calculation they're asked to do...
> I really beleive administrators should crack
> down
Administrators are 3/4 of the problem. I recall an adminitrtator telling us that we had to increase enrollment in our college transfer programs. We were not allowed to advertise that we have college transfer courses because that wasn't conisitent with the college's business focus.
Que?
> Once you have it you can never go back. Never.
:)
I guess that depends on what you used it for, and whether you have fast net access at work. I use the net basically for email and news/info, and occasional chat with some friends who don't live near me anymore. I don't tend to play games on my computer (that's what the Dreamcasts, Playstations, etc. are for).
I have a fast connection in my office should I need to download a large file - say the latest release of Open Office.
So why should I pay $50 a month *at home* for broadband?
I haven't been able to come up with a convincing reason yet.
> Most people that do not have indoor plubming
> also claim that it is far too expensive.
Bad analogy. A more apt one would be, say, your house is equipped with a low-flow toilet. Is it worth the cost to buy an old-school flush toilet so you've only gotta flush once after a trip to the Chinese place?
> that's quite foolish. you're probably also
:) )
> filtering a high percentage of the e-mail you
> actually want to receive.
Quite right. I use e-mail for (among other things) communicating with my students. If I filtered out all those providers, 90 percent of my students' messages to me would get dropped. Looking over one of my classes, that guys filter would block 17 students out of a 19-student class! (Okay, so that's 89%
Of course, my main spam problem (I'm not on hotmail) is still the Korean spammers, which *are* rather easy to filter out without alienating my students. Although it still is annoying when the Koreans send me 50+ spam messages overnight and I'm checking my mail with a dialup connection...
> Judging from my inbox it seems that 80% of
...
> outgoing email at hotmail is spam.
If you read the message headers, you'll probably discover that most of this spam isn't actually *from* hotmail. It just shows a hotmail address in the "From:" line. The "From:" line is no more accurate than a return address written in the top left-hand corner of a letter you'd get in the mail. In other words, it can say whatever you want it to say.
And as someone who has more than one e-mail account, bring able to change "From:" without trouble is a *good* thing
> I'm sure other schools/colleges/etc are in the
:)
> same position as mine (closed during July and
> August).
K-12 schools, maybe. Most colleges and universities in my experience run all year with two weeks or so downtime in December near the Christmas holidays.
At least I'm fairly certain that I was teaching a freshman chemistry class this morning until about 11:20.
I've been using Linux since about Slackware 96 - so I know where the author of the article is coming from. Most of his points were quite dead-on accurate ... as long as you're talking about Slackware 96. These days, I use Red Hat - up-to-date versions (7.2 and 7.3) on all my machines. My Linux experience now is quite different from my experiences with Slackware 96.
:)
:)
...
;))
:)
...
Slackware 96 *was* ugly. Heck, FVWM-95 was atrocious. It took me forever to get it to look and act the way I wanted.
With Redhat 7.2/7.3 and Gnome I didn't even have to edit anything.
Back in '96, there really wasn't much you could do for everyday "office" tasks. These days we have Star/Open Office and other rather good office tools. I find (I'm a teacher) that I simply don't need to use MS Office. Plus, I find that my laptop (an IBM thinkpad) is orders of magnitude more stable with Linux/SO/OO than Windows/MSOffice. I'm not talking about OS crashes here (W2K is fairly stable) - I'm talking about application crashes that cause me to lose data. I don't like losing data.
Internet tools? Give me Sylpheed any day over outlook. It loads in a second - even on a slow machine - and lets me *not* look at whatever silly fonts/colors someone has decided to inflict on the faculty today. (Where is the option to have HTML mail rendered as plain text by default in Outlook? Darned if I can find it). I also don't get the virus-of-the-week automatically executing on my machine. A little fringe benefit, I suppose
I use Galeon, and I wouldn't trade it for the latest IE if you paid me. (Well, you could pay me, but it'd have to be a lot.
Hardware? All the hardware on my laptop was autodetected. I plugged in my PCMCIA network card. It Just Worked(tm). Same with my PCMCIA modem. And my JAMP3 player that I bought from Wal Mart for $20. (To be fair, this Just Works on W2K too, but I've yet to be able to make W2K see the multimedia card instead of just the internal memory. Linux sees it just fine.) My USB Zip drive works great too. I didn't even have to configure anything. I plugged it in, booted up, and RH just added it and added a mount point for me (This device actually DID work with Windows with equally little fuss).
I don't buy all the latest little doodads from CompUSA, true. (I don't need 'em.) But for the most part, Linuc Just Works(tm) for me. And keeping up to date is trivial with Red Carpet.
Of course, half the time I think I need something I realize that it's on a RH CD already.
I guess there's something just wrong with me. Linux does what I need it to do. And I'm a (chemistry) teacher, not a programmer.
But if Linux didn't do what I needed, I'd probably look elsewhere. Maybe that shiny new Mac OS
The newer models (as far as I know, anything newer than the 760) have keyboards that don't completely suck. My 380XD (P233) has a pretty nice keyboard, and so did the 600E (PII/something) I used for a while. My 380XD has both the floppy and the CD-ROM built in, but I have no idea whether the newer models stick to this trend.
:)
My old 760XD had both a lousy keyboard and only enough bays for a CD *or* floppy and not both. The swapping of drives I don't mind, but the sucky keyboard I *did*.
> I *JUST* bought an old thinkpad 760dx (used of
... depending on what model Thinkpad you actually have, you might be able to get the sound working).
> course). Now how am I supposed to get the
> soundcard working?
If you mean the 760XD (XGA screen, built-in modem, P166MMX processor, max 104M ram), you've got one of the Thinkpads with a proprietary (mwave) sound / modem setup.
What that means is that you can't get the modem to work (IBM only provided drivers for *newer* mwave modems than yours). You *might* be able to get the sound recognized by Linux as a soundblaster if you load the DOS drivers (in DOS) then use linload to load Linux. I never actually got this to work, but I heard some people did.
Essentially, the modem and sound hardware on a 760XD is useless under Linux. Oops.
(I've heard that some of the less fancy 760s have fairly normal ESS souns cards which *are* compatible with Linux
Anyone who thinks that this is a neat idea obviously hasn't seen the movie "Real Genius".
I can see it now - a call from your boss while you're at work:
Boss (in deep voice): "IT drone, this is god!"
You (groggy from all night gaming session): "Huh?"
Boss: "From now on, stop reading Slashdot instead of working!"
You: "It *is* God!"
> IBM should hire 10 guys like me, pay them
> $25 an hour, UPS them some equipment, and let them
> hack ThinkPads all day from home.
According to a post (this morning!) on the Thinkpad mailing list, IBM's dropping their Thinkpad Linux support project and laying off those employees.
It looks like you'd be better off staying with those Dells if their Linux compatibility is good...
Here's an excerpt from the message to the Thinkpad mailing list about Linux support for Thinkpads:
>> But, after 3 years, IBM has decided to
>> no longer fund that project, and as of Monday,
>> June 24th, [the guy who sent the mail] will be
>> layed-off from IBM as part
>> of IBM's recent Server Group "resource action."
> Perhaps because you aren't supposed to move
... :)
> accident victims, it could aggrivate their wounds.
> Not sure how that applies to lightsaber cuts and
> force burns(dark side lightening attack thingy
> does burn right?)
Anakin's "wound" was already cauterized, and he's not likely to be hurt more by a movement a foot or two to the side. I don't recall everything wrong with Obi-Wan, but I distinctly don't remember crushed ribs, broken bones, or spinal column injuries.
You might say that, assuming Yoda were to win the fight with Dooku if he'd used a *quicker* means to rescue Anakin and Obi-Wan, he would have saved *millions* of lives by preventing many of the events in the later Star Wars episodes.
Of course, maybe this was part of Lucas's point - that the Jedi *are* blind and incredibly shortsighted and they *need* a good swift butt-kicking by the more cunning Dark Side to whip them back into shape.
Yoda in particular wouldn't recognize the Dark Side until it swam up and bit him in the ass
> Am I the only one not blinding by the horrible
:)
> quality of the Playstation?
Apparently, you're blinded by *something*...
> The only benefit the thing had in it's time was
> the storage medium allowing tons of crap to be
> stuck on a CD.
You're surely thinking of the SegaCD, which was probably the pioneer of "stick a bunch of junk on a CD-ROM and sell it". Granted, the SegaCD had a few good games (Lunar, Lunar:EB, Snatcher, etc.), but much of what was released for that system was FMV garbage.
The nice thing about the Playstation was that it had a whole lot of games that *weren't* just "shovel junk onto a CD". Ridge Racer, Tekken, Raiden Project, Namco Museum, etc. (to name a few of the earlier titles).
> If Nintendo wasn't so strict with its
> blood/gore/mature rating crap...
Ahh yes, Nintendo. Nintendo wasn't *any* competition to the Playstation {Remember - Nintendo's then-current console was the SNES) until the N64 came out - which was long after the Playstation hit critical mass. And then the N64 came, with its very limited group of expensive (compared to Playstaiton) first-run titles - of which about the only hit was Mario 64. No wonder the Playstation dominated!
> Now, I'm not sure how long Yoda could keep up
> fighting like that, but the way it looked to me,
> he would have won if he hadn't had to save Obi Wan
> and Anakin.
Speaking of, why didn't Yoda simply move Anakin and Obi-Wan out of the way rather than trying to hold up the big whatever-it-was-that-was-going-to-crush-them? It's already been established that it's easier to "force" smaller objects to move.
"So you see, Lone Starr, why evil always triumphs. Because good is dumb..." (Dark Helmet - Spaceballs)
> That's low enough for me! I'm off to get my
> GameCube. Really, that's about as much as I'm
> willing to pay for a non-upgradable piece of
> hardware that will be obsolete in a year...
You mean something that's usually non-upgradable and obsolete in a year like, ohh, a video card for a PC? Some of the fancier graphics cards cost more than a console!
Unless things get *really* lousy in the console market, video game consoles have a staying power greater than a year. Even the *Dreamcast* was around longer than a year!
Consider the Playstation. There are still games being released for that old beast.
> Why are browsers so bloated, anyway? My poor
> 133 MHz Pentium with 64 Mb RAM [...] is barely
> able to cope with Netscape 6.
You might want to try a more lightweight browser with the same rendering engine - say, Galeon.
My main workstation is an IBM Thinkpad model 760XD. That's a P166MMX / 80M RAM / 3G HD. Right now I'm running Gnome (minus nautilus), Galeon (to respond to this post), Star Office (to do my actual work), and several smaller apps. I may update to 104M, but my system's quite usable now.
One thing I do is to use Dillo (http://dillo.cipsga.org.br/) for quick browsing. It's very light, depends only on GTK, and loads in a second or so - even with the apps I'm already running.
> School districts need to learn to let competent
:)
> people do their jobs. They hire them, underpay
> them, then micromanage them until they get
> burned out or quit.
So are you talking about the sysadmins getting burned out or the teachers?
I know, I know - don't feed the trolls, but:
:)
> AFAIK, no distro has a journaling FS by default.
Well, except for Mandrake (ext3?), SuSE (ReiserFS), and Red Hat (ext3). And we all know that NOBODY runs any of those.
(Do Debian and Slackware have a journaling FS on by default these days? I don't know, as I run mostly Red Hat.)