One of my respected professors told us flat-out that if you can get paid for work, you should— applying for internships is very counter-productive. I can see the value in certain limited fields (such as animation, mentioned in the article) if they follow the specific rules laid out for under-paid or unpaid interns, but there is absolutely no reason it should spread to the general business community. And if students become convinced that internships are necessary, well, there's a cost savings for the employer with very little benefit to the worker.
My first post-college job was a real job, and I'd had no internship experience prior to that, only good letters of reference from my professors and perhaps a dash of desperation on the part of my employer. But I'd rather work fast food than be an unpaid flunky for a job that didn't really need more than some basic training, which many of these things do. Internships should be left to those fields that demand a high level of immediate competence and inside knowledge, and the rest should be left to legitimate on-the-job training.
These stories never seem to mention that while the publishers want $14.99 at the high end, they also want the ability to price below $9.99 for back titles. Amazon has pushed the $14.99 price point so hard in the hopes that people wouldn't notice the cheaper part.
Do not forget the Law of Unintended Consequences. When you raise taxes on gasoline, you also raise prices on food and every other good that needs to be transported, which includes just about everything. The US is flat-out large and even though we try to do large-scale transportation for goods (such as trains and river shipping where applicable), everything comes down to trucks in the end.
Yes, they're diesel. You think that not taxing diesel would work when there's a heavy tax on gasoline?
Various economists have analyzed the effects of Prop 13 and pretty much agree that the effects of the fallout would have normalized within a decade. It's been more than 30 years since Prop 13, and many other taxes (such as Mello-Roos) have been installed to take place of the "lost" property revenue. And yet— the deterioration has only gotten worse. Plus when spending has gone through the roof regardless of revenue, I can't see where loss of one source of income has done more harm than the expansion of educational bureaucracy (up to 40% in some areas.)
I say this as someone who got an excellent public education in the 80s, with all the bells and whistles, and who cannot find a school that offers anything like that now.
Incidentally, remember that recent thing called the housing boom? Look to various states without the protections of Prop 13 to see what happened to homeowners whose property taxes quadrupled or worse in the course of a single year. Oh, and also recall that the property taxes are set when the house is sold— so the vast churn between 2000 and 2006 increased property taxes by astonishing amounts.
"Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks are taught their Greek. In France every Frenchman knows his language A to Zed..."
There is a local (West Coast USA) Gilbert & Sullivan group that won an international G&S contest in Britain for their performance, primarily because their accents were studied, clear, and accurate, while the locals tended to be sloppy. Sometimes an outsider's perspective is an advantage.
It helps if you have to use different systems with similar programs. To give one example, I got married shortly before the iPod came out and put together a playlist to use at the reception instead of a DJ. That was incredibly difficult to do and I had very few options with which to do it. Then the iPod came out and iTunes and the difference was incredible.
But that was almost a decade ago.
I can't really answer to programs such as iMovie and GarageBand because I got a degree which involved working with actual television studio equipment that was older than I was, and you haven't lived until you're trying to caption something that can process a character approximately once every five seconds. iMovie is intuitive to me because that's the sorts of things I've been involved in (I have regularly used it for creating credit sequences, for example.)
It's not the Apple-specific programs that make me happy to have a Mac, though. It's the multi-platform ones. I use Photoshop for work on a variety of Winboxen and though it works perfectly fine most of the time, sometimes it comes up with the most bizarre errors. Such as remapping keyboard combinations to do different things or opening several dozen IE help windows. My job requires I work with images in bulk so that moves beyond annoying when you've got twenty images in process and the program starts going haywire. And don't TELL me that "End Now" is equivalent to "Force Quit." I've sometimes had to shut down the computer to get it to stop reacting.
When you're happier going home to use the same program on a machine that's eight years old, that tells you something about the user experience. But, as they say, YMMV.
This is a very helpful diagnostic tool as there is still a stigma associated with any sort of mental disorder, particularly in the military. Some subsets handle it better than others; while some groups are more in the mindset of "get it treated" the idea of "malingerers" still holds true in some places. Self-diagnosis lags when there's a stigma attached.
I would also be interested to see this used to help diagnose sexual trauma. Among the female population of the military, rape is still the highest inducer of PTSD, and I'm sure that holds true for civilians as well.
The biggest reason for PTSD is that we, as humans in general, are not wired to cope with extreme trauma. Nor are we particularly wired to cause death. We train our military to automate these actions but in some people the brain can't cope with what the body has done. Look up "Achilles in America" for more information on the subject— there have been many studies done in and out of the military, and there are quite a few higher-ups who want to see the best treatments possible— and some who are looking into ways to mitigate the effects before they occur.
Back in the day, musicians often had patrons. Bach, for example, was subsidized by his church, and Mozart got paid by various high muckety-mucks to writes pieces for them.
These days, very few people have the funds to exclusively subsidize a musician or artist. But we can all subsidize artists a little bit by purchasing their CDs— a little more if we purchase them directly. For example, we buy CDs directly from Devin Townsend, from Canada, thanks to the magic of the Internet. I don't know if he makes a complete living from his music sales but he does well enough to make it more than a hobby. (He's also decently well-known from his label days, on his own and as a member of other bands.)
Personally, I think individual sites or clearinghouse sites are the answer that will eventually come out on top, but I hope a little bit of the subsidizing sticks around.
So this could be a way to have guilt-free veal, I guess. Or foie gras.
I would not be surprised if this is widely adopted in, say, 50 years' time. Epicureans will extol the values of "real" meat over vat meat, environmentalists will fight to make vat meat more affordable, and a generation of kids will wonder what the big deal is, meat is meat and they'd still rather play with the mashed potatoes.
It is not impossible to be friends with people of mediocre intelligence if you are a smart person. The ONLY thing it requires is a little bit of patience when they don't grasp concepts quite as fast as you'd expect. As in, immediately. Granted, there is a gap: I can be friends with moderate-to-intelligent people, and I can be friends with special needs folks, but there's a particular level of "functional but dumb" that I have difficulties with.
I've only met a few of those in my life. One of them worked at my summer camp; when he quit and went home he was incapable of telling the driver where he lived. The kicker was that they called his mom and SHE didn't know their address either. This was fifteen years ago and I've heard that they still talk about him in disbelieving tones at the camp.
Our health provider is "limiting" the vaccine to certain risk groups. These include pregnant ladies, children under a certain age, people with asthma or other chronic airway issues, and so forth. In other words, the specific groups they want to get vaccinated for flu every year.
A few comments about this virus and why vaccination is important:
H1N1 is a combination not seen for at least thirty+ years. Therefore, much of the population has never been exposed to the "surface codes" H1 or N1, which means they don't have partial immunity. This worries medical professionals, since that increases the virulence and the spread if this flu mutates into a deadlier form. (Generally, the flu shifts a few points. This is a major antigen shift.)
Vaccines do not have a 100% success rate. Some people's immune systems don't respond, so while they've been vaccinated, they don't have immunity and are still at risk. However, if the percentage of immunes is high enough, the particular disease never has a chance to get to those who are vulnerable. This is why anti-vaccination efforts are anti-social: your un-vaccinated kid can give my infant or elderly grandmother whooping cough or measles. (There have been a number of immune-compromised people in my family, and my parents watched family members and friends die from diseases that are now vaccine-preventable.)
Vaccines in general cover a larger number of diseases BUT have fewer "triggers" in them. For example, the original vaccine, smallpox, basically had to give you the whole disease to get your immune system going. Now we can separate out a few key proteins or antigens that are specific to the disease, rather than the hundreds that comprise it.
The upshot is, if you are in a risk category, get vaccinated. If you're not, practice good hygiene and wash your hands a lot, eat well, and get plenty of rest. And de-stress! Stressed people get sick easier.
The comments on the video are rather telling. A number of people claim the video must have been faked, because "The Chevy would have barely gotten scratched."
Notably, a number of the panelists on the hearing about the sinking of the Titanic expressed serious doubts that mere ice could have torn iron. In other words, time marches on, but ignorance of physics remains a constant. (Also see, "This is the first time in the history of mankind that fire has melted steel.")
We have one, and will have another within the next year if all goes well. And to give you an example, I loaded up the car for a festival recently with me, my kid, my parents, my brother, and my booster-seated nephewâ" and my tall mom and brother were in the back seat. Six people in a car meant for six.
We would like a second car for commuting but the budget hasn't stretched to that yet.
According to the carseat folks, riding backwards is statistically safer; it lessens the strain on the neck during the higher-velocity front-end impacts. So you're okay.
This sounds like a great idea, but I fear it. You know why? Because something always happens that nobody properly predicts.
Here's an example. Remember station wagons? Not the things they have now, but those great big monstrosities that used to carry something like eight people or a garage band + equipment. You don't see those around any more. Why? Because they raised the fuel standards and there was no way that station wagons could reach that. Bye bye, big loader.
But just because they disappeared, it does not mean the need for large cars disappeared. Enter the minivan-- which has lighter standards, but still stringent. And most earlier examples of minivans were crap for anything but moving people. (Current models sometimes switch pretty well, but may not have engine capacity.) So then what? Enter the SUV. It falls under the "truck" standards, so it doesn't need to meet as stringent requirements. It seats more than four people, which is important for some people, and it can do things like move furniture. It also doesn't drive like a beached whale.
A lot of the posters at Slashdot don't seem to have considered the family angle. Carseats are freaking HUGE and it's sometimes hard to fit them in a sedan. And of course, you can't do more than two since the front seat is off-limits. So no friends. (Remember field trips where the parents used to drive? Yeah, they can't do that any more either. But that's another rant.) Once again, minivan or SUV. And quite honestly, after being in a hit-and-run accident, I wanted five-star safety rating AND a slightly higher profile. So our vehicle is what's called a crossover-- six seats, so when we have a couple of kids we'll still be able to put some adults in. And incidentally, it gets 24-26 miles to the gallon IN city.
The upshot is that yeah, this sounds great. I'm all for better mileage and I shop for it. BUT there's something else that's going to happen that we haven't predicted. It could be safety issues; it could be price. I don't know. But I'm always afraid of well-intentioned things like this coming back to bite us in the butt.
One wonders how many anti-vaxers are two or more generations removed from a threat. I mean, I can point to my parents and say, "My mom got polio as a child, and had rubella while pregnant. Thankfully, my sister was in the lucky unaffected minority; German Measles leads to severe side effects (including brain damage and blindness) in over 50% of affected children. My father lost a sister to measles."
Furthermore, my vaccinated husband caught whooping cough, presumably from someone who wasn't vaccinated. Vaccines do have a failure rate for whatever reason, and we rely on herd immunity to protect those for whom it does not take. My mother-in-law stayed up with him for two weeks, trying to keep him breathing.
Anyone who has heard stories like that when growing up doesn't doubt the need for vaccines. But one wonders if the anti-vaxers are living in a bubble, or never listened to stories like this from their parents or grandparents.
--okay.
One problem I have with trying to convince people about vaccines is explaining how herd immunity works. What I want is a little computer simulation that could be little more than particles moving randomly for a set period of time (equivalent to, say, two weeks.) Into this simulator is introduced a vector, an infected person. The rest of the particles are immunized according to whatever disease this is-- you know, with a particular rate of success of 85-95%. Then you show how it spreads, with the percentages of morbidity and mortality showing up at the end.
The point there is that I'd like this simulation to be adjustable-- you start off with an immunization rate of 95% (with whichever success rate is appropriate for that vaccine) and can change that rate to show what happens to the population as a whole when a portion of the population doesn't get vaccinated. Then you could show people how their "stand on principles" can lead to epidemic or pandemic conditions.
As you might guess, I am not a programmer. Anyone want to rise to the challenge?
Clay- all clay- is basically a mixture of kaolin, water, and larger particles (sand or "grog"- crushed clay bits.) Clays with a low percentage of kaolin and a high percentage of inclusions are low-fire clays, such as terra cotta, while a high percentage of kaolin is necessary for high-fire clays such as porcelin.
Porcelin clays are fired between three and four thousand degrees in order to vitrify- which means, to melt and fuse together. Glazes, which are based in sand and metal, vitrify at a lower temperature, which is why pots have two firings, the first to make them pots instead of shaped clay, and the second to decorate them.
Kaolin is not quite as common as dirt or sand but it is found all over the world and not too difficult to obtain. A good college ceramics department will have a barrel on hand.
The upshot of this, I guess, is that if you are foolish enough to stick your hand into a clay mixer, which is like a Kitchen Aid stand mixer on steroids, and get your hand torn off, sticking your hand into the barrel of kaolin dust would be amazingly good first aid.
A/C is immensely popular because in hot climates (above ninety degrees in summer) even a well-insulated house will not get cool enough for comfort. I grew up in a cinderblock home (pretty nice one, but it was built during a narrow blip before tract homes with prefabricated walls caught on.) We didn't have A/C. The insulation of cinderblock walls is pretty good and gave us a fifteen to twenty degree drop from the outdoors, but when you had a week or two of temperatures over 100 degrees it became impossible to get any sleep or relief.
And I was a kid, with all that implies. Good health, flexibility, and so on. Not somebody elderly or in medical distress; when they had that huge heat wave in France a few years back hundreds of seniors died because the heat was too much for them, and the temperatures reached were ten or more degrees less than the peak temperatures in California. As somebody pointed out above, many elderly on fixed incomes run their A/C as close to the line as they can to save money; a four-degree rise in temperature could push them over the edge.
Moreover, aerated concrete is not a safe building technique in much of California due to earthquake codes. Concrete and brick don't flex the way wood construction does. Sure, they need to be better insulated, but remember that housing prices in California are still at a stunning ten or more times the median income in many areas; you can bet that better construction will cost more.
Solution? Well, I'd move if we could but Evil Rob's job is here and nowhere else, and it's really hard to give up a job where you're advancing rapidly and doing something you love-- and you literally could not get the same treatment at another company because similar positions don't exist. Ideally we would be able to convince his employers to open up a satellite facility somewhere else, and then send him to staff it, but that's not very likely.:p
Single is a viewpoint in that a person who is single will be more interested in single things such as dating services and what to do in a new or failing relationship, as opposed to a person in a long-term relation ship who may be more interested in, say, kids. Obviously, many people move from a single viewpoint, but I have amazed and astonished people by speaking of the group of friends I have which is composed of singles AND married couples with kids; apparently there is a widespread perception that the two groups are incompatible and you belong to the Single group or the Relationship group. When you move from one category to the other, heaven forbid you keep the same group of friends...
It almost certainly depends on the local paper in question. My mother has been know to quip "It's a pity we don't have a local paper" because our local big-city paper is almost entirely devoted to the AP feed and fluff stories instead of, you know, local news.
I have worked in and around newsrooms from college on and I know, firsthand, where much of the problem lies. Journalism, that is, the finding and reporting of facts, has little to do with a journalism major, which is primarily interested in "the proper form." As the article says, "the emotional center," or, more specifically, an insulated and insular group of people attempting to capture the attention of the audience.
There was a study done on mid-level news markets about eight or nine years ago, and what they found is that reporters have a lot in common with one another. They tend to rent, not to buy. (This is quite understandable, as "two weeks notice" doesn't happen in news; more often a person finds out of Friday that they don't need to come back on Monday.) They tend to live in the city rather than suburban or rural areas. (Again, understandable given the commute.) They tend to be single rather than married (stability issues again) and use certain services more than others-- transit, fitness centers, and so on. The upshot was that the necessary living patterns for reporters-- again, not big-city reporters, but mid-market types-- meant both that a certain point of view was attracted to the lifestyle, and that the point of views of the people involved would necessarily change.
And that viewpoint-- we're not talking political here, though it does play a role-- agrees with 2% of the wider US population. Two percent.
Or in other words, the viewpoints of 98% of the population are foreign to the average reporter. Moreover, the average reporter is your typical person, which by and large means the vast majority of them are, basically, lazy. How many of you just get through your day, doing the basic minimum that your job requires? Well, imagine what that's like as a reporter, when you don't have somebody breathing down your neck to report the facts, but instead have them breathing down your neck to "find the emotional center." That reporter's going to find the emotional center, and is almost certainly going to do so using a mental template (Insert Issue A into Slot B and add Cute Kid/Pet/Quip at end.) You end up with lazy reporting.
Lazy reporting gets you those stories about farmers that always seem to imply that they must be hicks, or slow, or obsessed with "weird things" because they aren't smart/hip/normal enough to move to the city, like "real people." Or the ones that as what [X racial group] thinks about a subject, as if a vast group of people who share a few alleles must have similar opinions. Or, in the most common template of them all, the good little underdog against the evil corporation/city council/religious group.
Why do I get my news online? Because a well-done story, linked back to source documents and complete transcripts, is yards and away from "San Francisco tiger mauls two and kills one; blood and guts at eleven" (past teasers and grainy footage and the obligatory Horrified Bystander.) I know what news is, and I don't confuse it with reality-entertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my respected professors told us flat-out that if you can get paid for work, you should— applying for internships is very counter-productive. I can see the value in certain limited fields (such as animation, mentioned in the article) if they follow the specific rules laid out for under-paid or unpaid interns, but there is absolutely no reason it should spread to the general business community. And if students become convinced that internships are necessary, well, there's a cost savings for the employer with very little benefit to the worker.
My first post-college job was a real job, and I'd had no internship experience prior to that, only good letters of reference from my professors and perhaps a dash of desperation on the part of my employer. But I'd rather work fast food than be an unpaid flunky for a job that didn't really need more than some basic training, which many of these things do. Internships should be left to those fields that demand a high level of immediate competence and inside knowledge, and the rest should be left to legitimate on-the-job training.
We don't have a VAT. Yet.
These stories never seem to mention that while the publishers want $14.99 at the high end, they also want the ability to price below $9.99 for back titles. Amazon has pushed the $14.99 price point so hard in the hopes that people wouldn't notice the cheaper part.
Do not forget the Law of Unintended Consequences. When you raise taxes on gasoline, you also raise prices on food and every other good that needs to be transported, which includes just about everything. The US is flat-out large and even though we try to do large-scale transportation for goods (such as trains and river shipping where applicable), everything comes down to trucks in the end.
Yes, they're diesel. You think that not taxing diesel would work when there's a heavy tax on gasoline?
Various economists have analyzed the effects of Prop 13 and pretty much agree that the effects of the fallout would have normalized within a decade. It's been more than 30 years since Prop 13, and many other taxes (such as Mello-Roos) have been installed to take place of the "lost" property revenue. And yet— the deterioration has only gotten worse. Plus when spending has gone through the roof regardless of revenue, I can't see where loss of one source of income has done more harm than the expansion of educational bureaucracy (up to 40% in some areas.)
I say this as someone who got an excellent public education in the 80s, with all the bells and whistles, and who cannot find a school that offers anything like that now.
Incidentally, remember that recent thing called the housing boom? Look to various states without the protections of Prop 13 to see what happened to homeowners whose property taxes quadrupled or worse in the course of a single year. Oh, and also recall that the property taxes are set when the house is sold— so the vast churn between 2000 and 2006 increased property taxes by astonishing amounts.
"Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks are taught their Greek.
In France every Frenchman knows his language A to Zed..."
There is a local (West Coast USA) Gilbert & Sullivan group that won an international G&S contest in Britain for their performance, primarily because their accents were studied, clear, and accurate, while the locals tended to be sloppy. Sometimes an outsider's perspective is an advantage.
Proper nouns, such as names or things, require the apostrophe. Pronouns do not. "It" is a pronoun. Remember your Schoolhouse Rock.
It helps if you have to use different systems with similar programs. To give one example, I got married shortly before the iPod came out and put together a playlist to use at the reception instead of a DJ. That was incredibly difficult to do and I had very few options with which to do it. Then the iPod came out and iTunes and the difference was incredible.
But that was almost a decade ago.
I can't really answer to programs such as iMovie and GarageBand because I got a degree which involved working with actual television studio equipment that was older than I was, and you haven't lived until you're trying to caption something that can process a character approximately once every five seconds. iMovie is intuitive to me because that's the sorts of things I've been involved in (I have regularly used it for creating credit sequences, for example.)
It's not the Apple-specific programs that make me happy to have a Mac, though. It's the multi-platform ones. I use Photoshop for work on a variety of Winboxen and though it works perfectly fine most of the time, sometimes it comes up with the most bizarre errors. Such as remapping keyboard combinations to do different things or opening several dozen IE help windows. My job requires I work with images in bulk so that moves beyond annoying when you've got twenty images in process and the program starts going haywire. And don't TELL me that "End Now" is equivalent to "Force Quit." I've sometimes had to shut down the computer to get it to stop reacting.
When you're happier going home to use the same program on a machine that's eight years old, that tells you something about the user experience. But, as they say, YMMV.
This is a very helpful diagnostic tool as there is still a stigma associated with any sort of mental disorder, particularly in the military. Some subsets handle it better than others; while some groups are more in the mindset of "get it treated" the idea of "malingerers" still holds true in some places. Self-diagnosis lags when there's a stigma attached.
I would also be interested to see this used to help diagnose sexual trauma. Among the female population of the military, rape is still the highest inducer of PTSD, and I'm sure that holds true for civilians as well.
The biggest reason for PTSD is that we, as humans in general, are not wired to cope with extreme trauma. Nor are we particularly wired to cause death. We train our military to automate these actions but in some people the brain can't cope with what the body has done. Look up "Achilles in America" for more information on the subject— there have been many studies done in and out of the military, and there are quite a few higher-ups who want to see the best treatments possible— and some who are looking into ways to mitigate the effects before they occur.
Back in the day, musicians often had patrons. Bach, for example, was subsidized by his church, and Mozart got paid by various high muckety-mucks to writes pieces for them.
These days, very few people have the funds to exclusively subsidize a musician or artist. But we can all subsidize artists a little bit by purchasing their CDs— a little more if we purchase them directly. For example, we buy CDs directly from Devin Townsend, from Canada, thanks to the magic of the Internet. I don't know if he makes a complete living from his music sales but he does well enough to make it more than a hobby. (He's also decently well-known from his label days, on his own and as a member of other bands.)
Personally, I think individual sites or clearinghouse sites are the answer that will eventually come out on top, but I hope a little bit of the subsidizing sticks around.
So this could be a way to have guilt-free veal, I guess. Or foie gras.
I would not be surprised if this is widely adopted in, say, 50 years' time. Epicureans will extol the values of "real" meat over vat meat, environmentalists will fight to make vat meat more affordable, and a generation of kids will wonder what the big deal is, meat is meat and they'd still rather play with the mashed potatoes.
It is not impossible to be friends with people of mediocre intelligence if you are a smart person. The ONLY thing it requires is a little bit of patience when they don't grasp concepts quite as fast as you'd expect. As in, immediately. Granted, there is a gap: I can be friends with moderate-to-intelligent people, and I can be friends with special needs folks, but there's a particular level of "functional but dumb" that I have difficulties with.
I've only met a few of those in my life. One of them worked at my summer camp; when he quit and went home he was incapable of telling the driver where he lived. The kicker was that they called his mom and SHE didn't know their address either. This was fifteen years ago and I've heard that they still talk about him in disbelieving tones at the camp.
I have a friend who died this spring and got a suggestion that I "reconnect" with her. Um, no. Thanks.
Our health provider is "limiting" the vaccine to certain risk groups. These include pregnant ladies, children under a certain age, people with asthma or other chronic airway issues, and so forth. In other words, the specific groups they want to get vaccinated for flu every year.
A few comments about this virus and why vaccination is important:
H1N1 is a combination not seen for at least thirty+ years. Therefore, much of the population has never been exposed to the "surface codes" H1 or N1, which means they don't have partial immunity. This worries medical professionals, since that increases the virulence and the spread if this flu mutates into a deadlier form. (Generally, the flu shifts a few points. This is a major antigen shift.)
Vaccines do not have a 100% success rate. Some people's immune systems don't respond, so while they've been vaccinated, they don't have immunity and are still at risk. However, if the percentage of immunes is high enough, the particular disease never has a chance to get to those who are vulnerable. This is why anti-vaccination efforts are anti-social: your un-vaccinated kid can give my infant or elderly grandmother whooping cough or measles. (There have been a number of immune-compromised people in my family, and my parents watched family members and friends die from diseases that are now vaccine-preventable.)
Vaccines in general cover a larger number of diseases BUT have fewer "triggers" in them. For example, the original vaccine, smallpox, basically had to give you the whole disease to get your immune system going. Now we can separate out a few key proteins or antigens that are specific to the disease, rather than the hundreds that comprise it.
The upshot is, if you are in a risk category, get vaccinated. If you're not, practice good hygiene and wash your hands a lot, eat well, and get plenty of rest. And de-stress! Stressed people get sick easier.
The comments on the video are rather telling. A number of people claim the video must have been faked, because "The Chevy would have barely gotten scratched."
Notably, a number of the panelists on the hearing about the sinking of the Titanic expressed serious doubts that mere ice could have torn iron. In other words, time marches on, but ignorance of physics remains a constant. (Also see, "This is the first time in the history of mankind that fire has melted steel.")
We have one, and will have another within the next year if all goes well. And to give you an example, I loaded up the car for a festival recently with me, my kid, my parents, my brother, and my booster-seated nephewâ" and my tall mom and brother were in the back seat. Six people in a car meant for six.
We would like a second car for commuting but the budget hasn't stretched to that yet.
According to the carseat folks, riding backwards is statistically safer; it lessens the strain on the neck during the higher-velocity front-end impacts. So you're okay.
This sounds like a great idea, but I fear it. You know why? Because something always happens that nobody properly predicts.
Here's an example. Remember station wagons? Not the things they have now, but those great big monstrosities that used to carry something like eight people or a garage band + equipment. You don't see those around any more. Why? Because they raised the fuel standards and there was no way that station wagons could reach that. Bye bye, big loader.
But just because they disappeared, it does not mean the need for large cars disappeared. Enter the minivan-- which has lighter standards, but still stringent. And most earlier examples of minivans were crap for anything but moving people. (Current models sometimes switch pretty well, but may not have engine capacity.) So then what? Enter the SUV. It falls under the "truck" standards, so it doesn't need to meet as stringent requirements. It seats more than four people, which is important for some people, and it can do things like move furniture. It also doesn't drive like a beached whale.
A lot of the posters at Slashdot don't seem to have considered the family angle. Carseats are freaking HUGE and it's sometimes hard to fit them in a sedan. And of course, you can't do more than two since the front seat is off-limits. So no friends. (Remember field trips where the parents used to drive? Yeah, they can't do that any more either. But that's another rant.) Once again, minivan or SUV. And quite honestly, after being in a hit-and-run accident, I wanted five-star safety rating AND a slightly higher profile. So our vehicle is what's called a crossover-- six seats, so when we have a couple of kids we'll still be able to put some adults in. And incidentally, it gets 24-26 miles to the gallon IN city.
The upshot is that yeah, this sounds great. I'm all for better mileage and I shop for it. BUT there's something else that's going to happen that we haven't predicted. It could be safety issues; it could be price. I don't know. But I'm always afraid of well-intentioned things like this coming back to bite us in the butt.
I agree with Shados. YouTube, please! :)
One wonders how many anti-vaxers are two or more generations removed from a threat. I mean, I can point to my parents and say, "My mom got polio as a child, and had rubella while pregnant. Thankfully, my sister was in the lucky unaffected minority; German Measles leads to severe side effects (including brain damage and blindness) in over 50% of affected children. My father lost a sister to measles."
Furthermore, my vaccinated husband caught whooping cough, presumably from someone who wasn't vaccinated. Vaccines do have a failure rate for whatever reason, and we rely on herd immunity to protect those for whom it does not take. My mother-in-law stayed up with him for two weeks, trying to keep him breathing.
Anyone who has heard stories like that when growing up doesn't doubt the need for vaccines. But one wonders if the anti-vaxers are living in a bubble, or never listened to stories like this from their parents or grandparents.
--okay.
One problem I have with trying to convince people about vaccines is explaining how herd immunity works. What I want is a little computer simulation that could be little more than particles moving randomly for a set period of time (equivalent to, say, two weeks.) Into this simulator is introduced a vector, an infected person. The rest of the particles are immunized according to whatever disease this is-- you know, with a particular rate of success of 85-95%. Then you show how it spreads, with the percentages of morbidity and mortality showing up at the end.
The point there is that I'd like this simulation to be adjustable-- you start off with an immunization rate of 95% (with whichever success rate is appropriate for that vaccine) and can change that rate to show what happens to the population as a whole when a portion of the population doesn't get vaccinated. Then you could show people how their "stand on principles" can lead to epidemic or pandemic conditions.
As you might guess, I am not a programmer. Anyone want to rise to the challenge?
Clay- all clay- is basically a mixture of kaolin, water, and larger particles (sand or "grog"- crushed clay bits.) Clays with a low percentage of kaolin and a high percentage of inclusions are low-fire clays, such as terra cotta, while a high percentage of kaolin is necessary for high-fire clays such as porcelin.
Porcelin clays are fired between three and four thousand degrees in order to vitrify- which means, to melt and fuse together. Glazes, which are based in sand and metal, vitrify at a lower temperature, which is why pots have two firings, the first to make them pots instead of shaped clay, and the second to decorate them.
Kaolin is not quite as common as dirt or sand but it is found all over the world and not too difficult to obtain. A good college ceramics department will have a barrel on hand.
The upshot of this, I guess, is that if you are foolish enough to stick your hand into a clay mixer, which is like a Kitchen Aid stand mixer on steroids, and get your hand torn off, sticking your hand into the barrel of kaolin dust would be amazingly good first aid.
A/C is immensely popular because in hot climates (above ninety degrees in summer) even a well-insulated house will not get cool enough for comfort. I grew up in a cinderblock home (pretty nice one, but it was built during a narrow blip before tract homes with prefabricated walls caught on.) We didn't have A/C. The insulation of cinderblock walls is pretty good and gave us a fifteen to twenty degree drop from the outdoors, but when you had a week or two of temperatures over 100 degrees it became impossible to get any sleep or relief.
:p
And I was a kid, with all that implies. Good health, flexibility, and so on. Not somebody elderly or in medical distress; when they had that huge heat wave in France a few years back hundreds of seniors died because the heat was too much for them, and the temperatures reached were ten or more degrees less than the peak temperatures in California. As somebody pointed out above, many elderly on fixed incomes run their A/C as close to the line as they can to save money; a four-degree rise in temperature could push them over the edge.
Moreover, aerated concrete is not a safe building technique in much of California due to earthquake codes. Concrete and brick don't flex the way wood construction does. Sure, they need to be better insulated, but remember that housing prices in California are still at a stunning ten or more times the median income in many areas; you can bet that better construction will cost more.
Solution? Well, I'd move if we could but Evil Rob's job is here and nowhere else, and it's really hard to give up a job where you're advancing rapidly and doing something you love-- and you literally could not get the same treatment at another company because similar positions don't exist. Ideally we would be able to convince his employers to open up a satellite facility somewhere else, and then send him to staff it, but that's not very likely.
Single is a viewpoint in that a person who is single will be more interested in single things such as dating services and what to do in a new or failing relationship, as opposed to a person in a long-term relation ship who may be more interested in, say, kids. Obviously, many people move from a single viewpoint, but I have amazed and astonished people by speaking of the group of friends I have which is composed of singles AND married couples with kids; apparently there is a widespread perception that the two groups are incompatible and you belong to the Single group or the Relationship group. When you move from one category to the other, heaven forbid you keep the same group of friends...
It almost certainly depends on the local paper in question. My mother has been know to quip "It's a pity we don't have a local paper" because our local big-city paper is almost entirely devoted to the AP feed and fluff stories instead of, you know, local news.
I have worked in and around newsrooms from college on and I know, firsthand, where much of the problem lies. Journalism, that is, the finding and reporting of facts, has little to do with a journalism major, which is primarily interested in "the proper form." As the article says, "the emotional center," or, more specifically, an insulated and insular group of people attempting to capture the attention of the audience.
There was a study done on mid-level news markets about eight or nine years ago, and what they found is that reporters have a lot in common with one another. They tend to rent, not to buy. (This is quite understandable, as "two weeks notice" doesn't happen in news; more often a person finds out of Friday that they don't need to come back on Monday.) They tend to live in the city rather than suburban or rural areas. (Again, understandable given the commute.) They tend to be single rather than married (stability issues again) and use certain services more than others-- transit, fitness centers, and so on. The upshot was that the necessary living patterns for reporters-- again, not big-city reporters, but mid-market types-- meant both that a certain point of view was attracted to the lifestyle, and that the point of views of the people involved would necessarily change.
And that viewpoint-- we're not talking political here, though it does play a role-- agrees with 2% of the wider US population. Two percent.
Or in other words, the viewpoints of 98% of the population are foreign to the average reporter. Moreover, the average reporter is your typical person, which by and large means the vast majority of them are, basically, lazy. How many of you just get through your day, doing the basic minimum that your job requires? Well, imagine what that's like as a reporter, when you don't have somebody breathing down your neck to report the facts, but instead have them breathing down your neck to "find the emotional center." That reporter's going to find the emotional center, and is almost certainly going to do so using a mental template (Insert Issue A into Slot B and add Cute Kid/Pet/Quip at end.) You end up with lazy reporting.
Lazy reporting gets you those stories about farmers that always seem to imply that they must be hicks, or slow, or obsessed with "weird things" because they aren't smart/hip/normal enough to move to the city, like "real people." Or the ones that as what [X racial group] thinks about a subject, as if a vast group of people who share a few alleles must have similar opinions. Or, in the most common template of them all, the good little underdog against the evil corporation/city council/religious group.
Why do I get my news online? Because a well-done story, linked back to source documents and complete transcripts, is yards and away from "San Francisco tiger mauls two and kills one; blood and guts at eleven" (past teasers and grainy footage and the obligatory Horrified Bystander.) I know what news is, and I don't confuse it with reality-entertainment.