I could read and write at age 4. I had sufficient phonics skills to work out just about anything in print (tho at that age I often didn't grok the content -- I remember reading a civil war novel, Gray Canaan, and while I followed the battles well enough, the romances passed well overhead). How'd I get that? MY MOM READ TO ME from the time I could sit up. I followed along as she read, and learned reading almost as if it were language itself (indeed, I probably learned it apace with learning to speak coherently; I am not sure the two should really be considered entirely separate skills).
What struck me about your post was that while you've got the right idea (get your kids into as much of a learning environment as possible, as early as possible), you're failing to recognise that reading in particular begins much earlier, most readily via interaction with a parent while the child is still at an age where language absorption is easy and natural.
My sister came from the last architect class that had to do all their drafting with paper and pencil. Since then it's been all CAD.
When the power is out at her work (one of the largest architecture firms on the west coast), she's the only one there who can still continue working -- rather significant when your time is billed at $100/hour.
Having also grown up in Great Falls, I'm wondering just what the heck part of town you lived in (and when), cuz outside of maybe some converted garages in Black Eagle, I don't recall ANY part of town being that poor. Do you remember the address??
I graduated from GFHS in 1972, when a computer meant a mainframe. Having since seen many other systems, and their results, I still point to then and there, and say "THAT is how a school system should be run."
While rehabbing a retired middle-school computer, I came across a game apparently meant to enhance math ability. After messing with it a while, I concluded that what it actually did was teach you how to make the program spit up the desired result, but it taught NOTHING about math.
There should be, but unfortunately, that only seems to apply to shareholders' interests. Another problem is, how do you enforce it, when a bad policy made the bottom line look better today, but kills the company 5 years down the road? Makes it hard to place blame where it belongs.
Appears the writer for Forrest Gump measured success, or lack of it, by "how badly I was defrauded by the accounting department" rather than by "how good of a book I wrote".
Normal people would write a sequel (if they had it in them to do), then should it be optioned for a movie, make sure they got the same contract that makes producers rich, not the profitless one they foolishly signed the last time.
IOW, learn from your mistakes, but don't let that mistake dictate your future creativity (if any) -- rather than this "fuck you all because *I* was naive" sour grapes bullshit.
I remember a software developer making essentially the same post here a few years ago, re an app he'd created. So I fetched the shareware version and gave it a spin. The damned thing was primitive even by my standards, and had more bugs than features. IT DIDN'T DO THE JOB. No matter how many people *installed* it, why would anyone pay money for that? It was charity just giving it a fair try.
"If the tree ring data cannot correctly predict temperatures that are known, why should we trust that it can predict older, unknown temperatures?"
We can't. It qualifies as Made Up Shit, since the width of tree rings depends primarily on water (and to some degree species), not temperature. Cripes, I could demonstrate that from trees right here on my property -- same species, same age, same location and therefore same temperature all the time -- but one is twice the diameter of another... only difference is access to water.
Note: Newly-popular flaxseed meal has 3 times the phytoestrogens of soy, at far greater digestibility. (Sufficient to cause infertility [50% vs the natural 15%] and birth defects in dogs, whereas soy, which absorbs poorly due to mucus generation, does not.)
[I can't find the list offhand, but the content was something like 300,000 units for flaxseed, 100,000 units for soybean meal, and the next highest was 25,000 units, I think per kg of edible product. Average for most typical human-consumed foods was about 2,000. Well, if it prevents vegetarians from reproducing, I'm all for it.;) ]
Probably the single best-balanced (says my biochem background) article I've seen on the subject.
Obesity from too much carb-seeking tends to come in the wake of protein and fat starvation, which are natural results of all this "healthy eating" of the past couple decades. Combine that with the new paranoia about letting kids be kids (gods forbid they have an unsupervised moment) and too much sitting in front of the computer, and it's no wonder we've got a generation as wide as they are tall.
(BTW at 55, devourer of dead cows and slave in the sunshine, I still wear the same clothes I did in college.)
Tho the piece about "picky eating" does remind me of a research article I recently came across on one of the medical/genetics journal sites, which tied "meat tastes icky" type vegetarianism to a hormone disorder, explaining why such a desire sometimes suddenly appears in women following a total hysterectomy.
BTW as a long-ago biochem major, I've been getting a kick out of your fine posts:)
A point lost in all this is that it doesn't matter how you reach the end result -- a given amino acid is still that same amino acid, with identical nutrient properties, whether it came from a GM crop, a bacterium, a chemistry lab (well, we'll ignore D/L for this discussion), or a wild-type crop. Your body doesn't know or care how it became methoinine or lysine or whatever.
"High quality science can come out of corporate labs, but only when it is in the interests of the company"
Not necessarily. Here's a real example:
Ralston Purina has a big nutritional research kennel. One of their projects was to determine dogs' preferences in protein sources. They published the results in their magazine: All dogs preferred meat; from there it went downhill through eggs, milk, fish, and chicken came in dead last (some dogs preferred to starve rather than eat chicken). On the very next page in the same magazine was an ad for their newest product, "with the great taste of chicken that dogs love!" Clearly marketing and research had never met.
Point being, corporate research may publish real, unbiased results even in the face of contrary BS from the same company's marketing department. Do we really know that Pepsi's research is biased? *Assuming* it's biased (and in line with what the marketing dept. wished to "prove") is just as much "bad science" as if it were indeed biased.
But today's educated idiots prefer to believe that every fringie does far more "legit" research (failing to notice that said fringies usually have something to sell you, too).
Well then, you better stop eating fruit, because that's what fructose is -- fruit sugar.
As to the notion that no big corporation can do honest research -- not necessarily so, or we wouldn't have the many things that came out of the late and lamented Bell Labs, HP's research division, etc. Naturally they hope to make a profit from it, but that doesn't *necessarily* make it crooked research.
In fact, I've seen a lot more deliberately skewed or even outright bogus 'research' from SMALL companies trying to get a leg up on the big boys.
Not so. Fines can be levied by private parties, sometimes with backing per their state charter. And the cite doesn't specify gov't or private party, only "fine or penalty".
Methinks your best bet is a sympathetic reading in bankruptcy court. IOW it doesn't look to me like this can be wholly relied on as an escape hatch from **AA extortion.
In the U.S., evidence obtained illegally by NON-law-enforcement IS allowed in court, and has been used numerous times even in criminal cases. Many drug cases hinge on illegally-obtained evidence from snitches, who can snoop where the cops can't. Snitch snoops your property, tells the cops, "Hey officer, if you search that shed, you'll find drugs and stuff"; cops then proceed to get a warrant for a search, with the "probable cause" being info from the snitch's illegal snooping (trespassing).
But my point was, if one hacker made his way in, and had such a field day with the data, very likely there have been others. And we don't =know= if any of them were **AA snitches, nor what use they might make of the data. Yeah, it won't be useful in U.S. cases against TPB, but it could be in their endless John Doe suits, which don't seem to require much provenance for the evidence.
I mentioned above that I think this sort of judgment is headed in the direction of becoming a form of civil asset forfeiture (with all the abuses and corruption inherent therein), and that we can expect it to become blatantly so in the future. Your thoughts?
5. If you broke a law and were ordered by the court to pay a fine or penalty, your financial obligation will not be discharged in bankruptcy.
Doesn't that mean that judgments on behalf of the RIAA, since they're based on "a fine for breaking a law", would NOT be discharged via bankruptcy??
Regardless, half an average mortgage is hardly reasonable as a penalty for what amounts to digitally shoplifting 2 or 3 CDs. If you were to shoplift the real thing, your penalty would be nowhere near that much.
I'm wondering when these penalties will become conflated with civil asset forfeiture, allowing the offended agency to simply grab anything of yours that they deem to have "committed an offense" or that might "be at risk". I think this is coming (it is already here in some other venues).
Slashdot Mirror
I could read and write at age 4. I had sufficient phonics skills to work out just about anything in print (tho at that age I often didn't grok the content -- I remember reading a civil war novel, Gray Canaan, and while I followed the battles well enough, the romances passed well overhead). How'd I get that? MY MOM READ TO ME from the time I could sit up. I followed along as she read, and learned reading almost as if it were language itself (indeed, I probably learned it apace with learning to speak coherently; I am not sure the two should really be considered entirely separate skills).
What struck me about your post was that while you've got the right idea (get your kids into as much of a learning environment as possible, as early as possible), you're failing to recognise that reading in particular begins much earlier, most readily via interaction with a parent while the child is still at an age where language absorption is easy and natural.
Help your kid out -- read to him NOW.
My sister came from the last architect class that had to do all their drafting with paper and pencil. Since then it's been all CAD.
When the power is out at her work (one of the largest architecture firms on the west coast), she's the only one there who can still continue working -- rather significant when your time is billed at $100/hour.
Having also grown up in Great Falls, I'm wondering just what the heck part of town you lived in (and when), cuz outside of maybe some converted garages in Black Eagle, I don't recall ANY part of town being that poor. Do you remember the address??
I graduated from GFHS in 1972, when a computer meant a mainframe. Having since seen many other systems, and their results, I still point to then and there, and say "THAT is how a school system should be run."
I don't see John Madden Football translating to a career on the gridiron, do you??
While rehabbing a retired middle-school computer, I came across a game apparently meant to enhance math ability. After messing with it a while, I concluded that what it actually did was teach you how to make the program spit up the desired result, but it taught NOTHING about math.
There should be, but unfortunately, that only seems to apply to shareholders' interests. Another problem is, how do you enforce it, when a bad policy made the bottom line look better today, but kills the company 5 years down the road? Makes it hard to place blame where it belongs.
Appears the writer for Forrest Gump measured success, or lack of it, by "how badly I was defrauded by the accounting department" rather than by "how good of a book I wrote".
Normal people would write a sequel (if they had it in them to do), then should it be optioned for a movie, make sure they got the same contract that makes producers rich, not the profitless one they foolishly signed the last time.
IOW, learn from your mistakes, but don't let that mistake dictate your future creativity (if any) -- rather than this "fuck you all because *I* was naive" sour grapes bullshit.
I remember a software developer making essentially the same post here a few years ago, re an app he'd created. So I fetched the shareware version and gave it a spin. The damned thing was primitive even by my standards, and had more bugs than features. IT DIDN'T DO THE JOB. No matter how many people *installed* it, why would anyone pay money for that? It was charity just giving it a fair try.
"If the tree ring data cannot correctly predict temperatures that are known, why should we trust that it can predict older, unknown temperatures?"
We can't. It qualifies as Made Up Shit, since the width of tree rings depends primarily on water (and to some degree species), not temperature. Cripes, I could demonstrate that from trees right here on my property -- same species, same age, same location and therefore same temperature all the time -- but one is twice the diameter of another ... only difference is access to water.
Vegetarians often have peculiar delusions about protein content. I see this kind of crap about soy all the time.
Tho I should have ended that paragraph after "delusions". ;)
Speaking of soy:
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/
Note: Newly-popular flaxseed meal has 3 times the phytoestrogens of soy, at far greater digestibility. (Sufficient to cause infertility [50% vs the natural 15%] and birth defects in dogs, whereas soy, which absorbs poorly due to mucus generation, does not.)
[I can't find the list offhand, but the content was something like 300,000 units for flaxseed, 100,000 units for soybean meal, and the next highest was 25,000 units, I think per kg of edible product. Average for most typical human-consumed foods was about 2,000. Well, if it prevents vegetarians from reproducing, I'm all for it. ;) ]
Good article on the subject:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?pagewanted=print
Probably the single best-balanced (says my biochem background) article I've seen on the subject.
Obesity from too much carb-seeking tends to come in the wake of protein and fat starvation, which are natural results of all this "healthy eating" of the past couple decades. Combine that with the new paranoia about letting kids be kids (gods forbid they have an unsupervised moment) and too much sitting in front of the computer, and it's no wonder we've got a generation as wide as they are tall.
(BTW at 55, devourer of dead cows and slave in the sunshine, I still wear the same clothes I did in college.)
LOL! Tho given the modern deluge of educated idiots, you gotta wonder why we don't just let natural selection do its job. ;)
In a dog, the diagnosis would be easy: Pancreatic insufficiency (caused by a simple recessive gene).
"my children and my wife, after having been on a mostly-vegan diet for several years, have developed similar (though much less severe) sensitivities."
Doesn't this, all by itself, warn you of something??
Tho the piece about "picky eating" does remind me of a research article I recently came across on one of the medical/genetics journal sites, which tied "meat tastes icky" type vegetarianism to a hormone disorder, explaining why such a desire sometimes suddenly appears in women following a total hysterectomy.
BTW as a long-ago biochem major, I've been getting a kick out of your fine posts :)
A point lost in all this is that it doesn't matter how you reach the end result -- a given amino acid is still that same amino acid, with identical nutrient properties, whether it came from a GM crop, a bacterium, a chemistry lab (well, we'll ignore D/L for this discussion), or a wild-type crop. Your body doesn't know or care how it became methoinine or lysine or whatever.
"High quality science can come out of corporate labs, but only when it is in the interests of the company"
Not necessarily. Here's a real example:
Ralston Purina has a big nutritional research kennel. One of their projects was to determine dogs' preferences in protein sources. They published the results in their magazine: All dogs preferred meat; from there it went downhill through eggs, milk, fish, and chicken came in dead last (some dogs preferred to starve rather than eat chicken). On the very next page in the same magazine was an ad for their newest product, "with the great taste of chicken that dogs love!" Clearly marketing and research had never met.
Point being, corporate research may publish real, unbiased results even in the face of contrary BS from the same company's marketing department. Do we really know that Pepsi's research is biased? *Assuming* it's biased (and in line with what the marketing dept. wished to "prove") is just as much "bad science" as if it were indeed biased.
But today's educated idiots prefer to believe that every fringie does far more "legit" research (failing to notice that said fringies usually have something to sell you, too).
Well then, you better stop eating fruit, because that's what fructose is -- fruit sugar.
As to the notion that no big corporation can do honest research -- not necessarily so, or we wouldn't have the many things that came out of the late and lamented Bell Labs, HP's research division, etc. Naturally they hope to make a profit from it, but that doesn't *necessarily* make it crooked research.
In fact, I've seen a lot more deliberately skewed or even outright bogus 'research' from SMALL companies trying to get a leg up on the big boys.
Not so. Fines can be levied by private parties, sometimes with backing per their state charter. And the cite doesn't specify gov't or private party, only "fine or penalty".
Methinks your best bet is a sympathetic reading in bankruptcy court. IOW it doesn't look to me like this can be wholly relied on as an escape hatch from **AA extortion.
In the U.S., evidence obtained illegally by NON-law-enforcement IS allowed in court, and has been used numerous times even in criminal cases. Many drug cases hinge on illegally-obtained evidence from snitches, who can snoop where the cops can't. Snitch snoops your property, tells the cops, "Hey officer, if you search that shed, you'll find drugs and stuff"; cops then proceed to get a warrant for a search, with the "probable cause" being info from the snitch's illegal snooping (trespassing).
But my point was, if one hacker made his way in, and had such a field day with the data, very likely there have been others. And we don't =know= if any of them were **AA snitches, nor what use they might make of the data. Yeah, it won't be useful in U.S. cases against TPB, but it could be in their endless John Doe suits, which don't seem to require much provenance for the evidence.
I mentioned above that I think this sort of judgment is headed in the direction of becoming a form of civil asset forfeiture (with all the abuses and corruption inherent therein), and that we can expect it to become blatantly so in the future. Your thoughts?
But your cite includes this:
5. If you broke a law and were ordered by the court to pay a fine or penalty, your financial obligation will not be discharged in bankruptcy.
Doesn't that mean that judgments on behalf of the RIAA, since they're based on "a fine for breaking a law", would NOT be discharged via bankruptcy??
Regardless, half an average mortgage is hardly reasonable as a penalty for what amounts to digitally shoplifting 2 or 3 CDs. If you were to shoplift the real thing, your penalty would be nowhere near that much.
I'm wondering when these penalties will become conflated with civil asset forfeiture, allowing the offended agency to simply grab anything of yours that they deem to have "committed an offense" or that might "be at risk". I think this is coming (it is already here in some other venues).
Well, here's another question: if Random Security Expert can hack into TPB, how do we know that Some **AA Hireling hasn't done the same??
I'm not the one worrying about what some professor does ;)
And I don't suppose its range can be guaranteed, but are you in class to learn, or to gab on your cell phone??
It's illegal to do a lot of things that aren't necessarily *wrong*.
Flipside, I can name a lot of gov't departments that do illegal things all the time. Does that bother you?