Show her the star whose distance in light years is approximately equal to her age. The photons reaching our eyes left that star the year she was born.
My wife's age is closest to the star Beta Virginis. I can see it now "So you're saying you want me to be a born again virgin???? *slams door*" Thanks a bunch dude!
Barring a modest salary - say $200,000 AT MOST, no executive should be permitted to take more out of a company than they put in. Short term profits and asset sales need to be dismissed otherwise the CEO can just gut the company. The total value of the company when they come in vs. when they go out is what the equation should be based on.
It's not that nothing gets in the way of genius. It's that you must be dedicated to study a subject. "Mere mortals" as you put it can also be aided by technology in their quest for knowledge.
All I'm seeing here is excuses for poor teaching technique and boring subject matter.
Your suspicions that I'm not a teacher are incorrect. I've taught at university level. There is also no burden of proof. This isn't a court case. But if there was one it would be on the lecturer who wishes to take the tool away from his students. This is a time when computers have become integral to society. They will be encountered in the work force and they offer advantage. Trying to keep your students in the dark because you are unable to interest them in the subject matter is just about culpable.
I'd hate to see how long kdawson is gone when he takes his 30 minute lunch break.
Boss: it was a 30 minute break. You were gone a month!!! kdawson: Yeah I always get small details like that mixed up. I thought you said months. Sorry.
It's also possible that paper and computers have distinct properties (they're local, not networked) that make them unlike laptops and thus inappropriate for direct comparison. I don't think your analogy fits.
It's possible to extend any analogy beyond it's limits and claim it doesn't fit. My analogy fits well within the bounds it was intended, and that is to demonstrate that banning a distraction does nothing to remove other distractions. A student who wishes to be distracted will find a way with any tool given them. A student who wishes to learn will find a way using that tool or in spite of it.
Students don't exist in a vacuum: they can also distract others and lower the overall quality of discussion and the classroom experience.
If they distract others, you ask them to leave. It's really that simple. If the entire class behaves this way you let them know that you will continue teaching when they stop, and that anyone that doesn't want to be there is free to leave. And you follow through. No threats. At 18 or 21 depending on where you are, they are fully fledged adults in every sense. You are doing them a huge disservice treating them like children.
In addition, it can sometimes be helpful for mild forms of paternalism to be used to nudge someone in the right direction. If students don't like the very minor restrictions in my class, they're welcome to take someone else's. Few do.
No. You are doing your students incredible harm to take this approach. You should be teaching your students to be self sufficient beyond the classroom. Relying on parental nudges is infinitely more detrimental to the development of an adult than any positive influence your course might have. This is exactly why we are seeing young adults in their mid twenties to mid thirties with the maturity of teenagers a generation ago.
I don't think it morally wrong, or something like that, for students to have laptops in class, but apparently I'm not alone in noticing the drawbacks they can have.
You're not alone in failing to manage new technology. That doesn't mean you should give up.
It's also possible that humans have a tendency toward distraction that Internet access in particular enables, per the Google article, or that people often aren't very good at regulating themselves, per Paul Graham's essay; I'm often not good at regulating myself. Hence it can be desirable to remove the means of distraction as a way of removing the distraction itself.
It's not your job to remove the distraction. You are teaching young adults not primary school children. You should certainly suggest that they don't use the technology but you are being foolish to ban laptops. I guarantee that there are students who would learn better with them. Ban activities not related to the class on those machines, and enforce it when they do start distracting others. This allows students who learn with them access to the tool and allows you to step in and put a stop to disruptive behaviour.
Thanks to such a policy, your students come out no more able to learn, no more responsible for their own learning and no more mature than when they went in.
I beg to differ: banning an item that might has a net negative effect on the classroom is responsible because it appears to improve learning and the classroom experience, per the above.
They have a net negative effect on your classroom because you allow them to! As I stated earlier, pen and paper can have a net negative effect if you let your students pass notes, doodle and do unrelated work in your class. Yet because these are well accepted and non-technological tools, no one would support you if you banned them.
You can use google or dictionary.com to look up a term you don't understand. You can also use them to look up obscenities. A good student chooses the former.
For pity sake, let the student be responsible for their own learning. If they want to use a tool to do it they should be permitted to. At university level, and I'd argue earlier, the student is responsible for learning. If they don't want to learn and are so easily distracted, let them be. That is their choice. Banning an item that might help a student who is there and wants to learn so that a lazy student that doesn't care is not distracted is completely irresponsible. If a student is intent on being distracted they can always do something that doesn't require a computer, like doodle, or even something that you can't prevent like daydream. There are only a couple of exceptions. If the student's distraction becomes disruptive or distracts others (for example a noisy keyboard that prevents concentration) that the lecturer should step in. If the tool interferes with assessment. (eg. Internet in a closed book exam) it should not be permitted (but then I consider closed book exams archaic).
When I lectured part time a lot of lecturers were having trouble with students talking through the lecture. I had a simple approach. I stopped talking if I was being talked over. It worked really well. I treated the students as adults and I gave them respect. I expected the same in return. If they didn't want to be there they were free to leave.
I had nothing to do with creating them but since the law seems secondary and everyone is going crazy and trying to claim they own every image, I think I'd like to lay claim to a few photos I like. I want to start with all the Hubble Images. Actually make that all astro photos. I like them. I should own them. I'd also like to lay claim to all images of sunsets and sunrises. They are cool. Oh and the grand canyon. I've always wanted to visit but never gotten there so this is the next best thing. Which brings me to all images in Yosemite and Yellow Stone. Oh and all nature photos. Well all the good ones. Closer to home I'd like to claim all images of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House. (They can keep the images of Sydney Tower - they're ugly). Of course I have no basis in law or reality for that matter for such wild claims. But that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone these days.
It's about ruining the first trilogy with idiotic premises and horrible acting among other things.
The first group of movies was enjoyable by children and adults alike. Granted Jedi pandered to children with the whole Ewok thing but by and large the stories had universal appeal.
The second set of movies I've seen children fall asleep in. I took my then child cousins to the first movie because they'd never been to the cinemas and they said "Next time can we watch a good movie". One of them fell asleep in the second half. This is from children who'd never been to the cinema!!!
No man is an island. These stereotypes exist whether I like it or not. I have an 18 month old son we are about to have a daughter.
I'm not about to teach my son to play with girl oriented toys like dolls etc. or dress him in dresses. Regardless of what I believe, he would be the one to suffer if I did. He would be teased. He would be ostracised. He would be beaten up. I'm not going to change society as a whole just by making my own house rules that do not fit in. Me and mine would just be labelled weird.
Yes, when you tie yourself into a knot so that the definition no longer makes sense, it's a clear sign you have it wrong.
The definition also raises the question of when the planets got to the status of planethood since in the early solar system they may not have cleared out their own orbits. So one day they were not planets and then a few million years later they were. JUst how cleared out those orbits have to be is also unclear. If suddenly a comet passes through a planet's orbit is it still cleared out? Common sense would say yes. The bad definition they came up with would say it's arbitrary as to how temporary the event is. It's just bad science all round.
Yeah fat lot of good it'll do tracing the signed code to some chinese web site. If the phone manufacturer was so genuinely interested in warning me about unsigned code the option to accept unsigned applets would come with a disclaimer and actually fucking work. This isn't about security - it is about nothing more than selling apps while crushing competition.
You basically just made the exact point I made in my original response to the thread. The scientist is famous and remembered for the contribution they make to their field of expertise. However that scientist can be a complelely unscientific person outside of their breakthrough contribution. My point is that a true scientist doesn't refuse to believe reality or insist that because it feels good to his intuition that something ought to be true he continue to fight the truth, and that a good scientist collaborates (even more so today than before)
Don't fucking lecture me about Einstein's postulates. I've done the basic derivations and understand them. His postulates would have been considered ridiculous based on everyday observation. Someone else would have said "God does not mandate a cosmic speed limit". Then he turns around and is unable to accept other oddities of the universe.
If Apple really cared about empowering the user in the style, manner, and spirit of their legendary 1984 commercial, they would make Flash available -- or rather allow Adobe to make it available -- on the iPhone, Touch, and iPad, and allow the user to decide which user experiences work best for them. Apple only cares about profits and control these days, having become the very thing they once railed against.
Just look at story. "Insanely great mobile experience"???? Give me a break. I am sick and tired of this company being hailed as god's gift to design and bug free products. It just isn't true. They are one of the least open, most overpriced, most marketing based companies on the planet. Their products don't "just work". What they do is force you to work in a limited way according to their rules and in Apple's interests. Yet otherwise intelligent people start foaming at the mouth about how great Apple is and repeating their marketing drivel verbatim. It's just plain disturbing. Apple's genius is the marketing, which seems to brainwash intelligent people.
Pretending that everyone knew Bell's Theorem 20 years before it was even written means you don't have the slightest fucking clue of what you're talking about.
Well it would, if that is the view I held. Straw men and ad hominem don't change what I said, and at no point did I say that Bell's theorum was known 20 years before it was written. It's just that you're too obtuse to understand what I actually said.
You're pretending the scientific method has something to do with being nice to people, collaborating with others, and knowing ahead of time which way science will fall out. By this standard, I think you're looking for a nice, socialist, psychic, not a scientist.
So you think it's more logical to be a nasty fuckwit who can't collaborate? That's your vision of a true scientist? Anyone who's nice must be a psychic? That is so completely twisted that it makes you look foolish. Most of science is collaboration and communication. The nutty professor ideal has long had it's day.
Have a nice life. I'm not wasting my time with you anymore.
AFAIK he didn't refuse to believe that they behaved the way that they did, but rather he refused to believe a hypothesis put forward as an explanation for why they behaved that way.
AFAIK he refused to even look at the math.
His theories were accepted (and even praised) well before they were proven with any kind of experiment.
Nonsense. He only became famous outside of scientific circles after General Relativity's predicitons regarding the bending of starlight were proven. He then suddenly became an over night sensation.
I really don't see the point in arguing with you further. You have your facts wrong and are basically talking out of the wrong hole. I don't have any more time for you.
Yet you're perfectly willing to accept that the definition of a "dwarf planet" is not a subclass of the defintion of a planet???
I have no issue with Pluto being reclassified as an object other than a planet, but the IAU's resolution was abysmal and inconsistent. By annoying those who wished to hold onto the view that Pluto is a planet, defining a planet as a body that orbits our sun (so technically an extrasolar planet isn't a planet) and making a mess of th new term they introduced (dwarf planet not a type of planet) they couldn't have done worse!!!
Yeah lets go get a dev cert, and a signing app just to run software. No biggy if you're a developer I guess. But an end user shouldn't need to jump through hoops.
I think you're confusing "unscientific" with "everything that annoys syousef"
I think you're confusing straw men and ad hominem with an actual counter argument.
If a scientist gets into an argument with another scientist over priority (and who published first IS related to science, whether you like it or not) annoys syousef, therefore, by definition, it is not science. Even though it is. Scientists working on their own are not scientists! Syousef says so!
Lets add a little bit of a straw man to that ad hominem, since you're incapable of an actual refutation that isn't filled with weak drivel.
Do you realize how uninformed you sound?
Do you realise what a sarcastic self righteous prick that can't make a point without getting personal you are? I'm uninformed to masters level, but don't let actual facts get in the way of your arguments.
Your only valid point is when people ignore conclusive evidence in favor of personal beliefs, that is unscientific.
Thanks for acknowledging a valid point, but I think you missed the others that I made.
But you are apparently ignorant of the fact that Bell's Theorem was published a decade after Einstein's death, and actual experiments came even later, so your claim that "Einstein argued the last half of his life against it" is completely fucking preposterous
Talk about uninformed. His own colleagues thought he had isolated himself and wasted his life well before Bell's theorum. I didn't say that they considered that he wasted half his life BECAUSE of Bell's theorum, though that is arguably the consensus now. (Bell's theorum doesn't help).
What would you know about the scientific method. You've proven you can't even argue logically. Nothing but a combination of straw men, reductio ad aburdum and ad hominem. Gimme a break.
Slashdot Mirror
Show her the star whose distance in light years is approximately equal to her age. The photons reaching our eyes left that star the year she was born.
My wife's age is closest to the star Beta Virginis. I can see it now "So you're saying you want me to be a born again virgin???? *slams door*" Thanks a bunch dude!
..based on profits as well as assets and staffing
Barring a modest salary - say $200,000 AT MOST, no executive should be permitted to take more out of a company than they put in. Short term profits and asset sales need to be dismissed otherwise the CEO can just gut the company. The total value of the company when they come in vs. when they go out is what the equation should be based on.
Or for impressing a geeky girl once could try to execute an injection attack.
Dude! Not cool! If it's an attack you'll find yourself before a judge.
It's not that nothing gets in the way of genius. It's that you must be dedicated to study a subject. "Mere mortals" as you put it can also be aided by technology in their quest for knowledge.
All I'm seeing here is excuses for poor teaching technique and boring subject matter.
Your suspicions that I'm not a teacher are incorrect. I've taught at university level. There is also no burden of proof. This isn't a court case. But if there was one it would be on the lecturer who wishes to take the tool away from his students. This is a time when computers have become integral to society. They will be encountered in the work force and they offer advantage. Trying to keep your students in the dark because you are unable to interest them in the subject matter is just about culpable.
2.5 years is not 30 years, it’s 30 months.
I'd hate to see how long kdawson is gone when he takes his 30 minute lunch break.
Boss: it was a 30 minute break. You were gone a month!!!
kdawson: Yeah I always get small details like that mixed up. I thought you said months. Sorry.
Rails makes developers happier, not unemployed.
When you've had a lousy job, the two aren't mutually exclusive. I want assurances that they don't intend to make me happier BY making me unemployed ;-)
It's also possible that paper and computers have distinct properties (they're local, not networked) that make them unlike laptops and thus inappropriate for direct comparison. I don't think your analogy fits.
It's possible to extend any analogy beyond it's limits and claim it doesn't fit. My analogy fits well within the bounds it was intended, and that is to demonstrate that banning a distraction does nothing to remove other distractions. A student who wishes to be distracted will find a way with any tool given them. A student who wishes to learn will find a way using that tool or in spite of it.
Students don't exist in a vacuum: they can also distract others and lower the overall quality of discussion and the classroom experience.
If they distract others, you ask them to leave. It's really that simple. If the entire class behaves this way you let them know that you will continue teaching when they stop, and that anyone that doesn't want to be there is free to leave. And you follow through. No threats. At 18 or 21 depending on where you are, they are fully fledged adults in every sense. You are doing them a huge disservice treating them like children.
In addition, it can sometimes be helpful for mild forms of paternalism to be used to nudge someone in the right direction. If students don't like the very minor restrictions in my class, they're welcome to take someone else's. Few do.
No. You are doing your students incredible harm to take this approach. You should be teaching your students to be self sufficient beyond the classroom. Relying on parental nudges is infinitely more detrimental to the development of an adult than any positive influence your course might have. This is exactly why we are seeing young adults in their mid twenties to mid thirties with the maturity of teenagers a generation ago.
I don't think it morally wrong, or something like that, for students to have laptops in class, but apparently I'm not alone in noticing the drawbacks they can have.
You're not alone in failing to manage new technology. That doesn't mean you should give up.
It's also possible that humans have a tendency toward distraction that Internet access in particular enables, per the Google article, or that people often aren't very good at regulating themselves, per Paul Graham's essay; I'm often not good at regulating myself. Hence it can be desirable to remove the means of distraction as a way of removing the distraction itself.
It's not your job to remove the distraction. You are teaching young adults not primary school children. You should certainly suggest that they don't use the technology but you are being foolish to ban laptops. I guarantee that there are students who would learn better with them. Ban activities not related to the class on those machines, and enforce it when they do start distracting others. This allows students who learn with them access to the tool and allows you to step in and put a stop to disruptive behaviour.
Thanks to such a policy, your students come out no more able to learn, no more responsible for their own learning and no more mature than when they went in.
I beg to differ: banning an item that might has a net negative effect on the classroom is responsible because it appears to improve learning and the classroom experience, per the above.
They have a net negative effect on your classroom because you allow them to! As I stated earlier, pen and paper can have a net negative effect if you let your students pass notes, doodle and do unrelated work in your class. Yet because these are well accepted and non-technological tools, no one would support you if you banned them.
You can use google or dictionary.com to look up a term you don't understand. You can also use them to look up obscenities. A good student chooses the former.
For pity sake, let the student be responsible for their own learning. If they want to use a tool to do it they should be permitted to. At university level, and I'd argue earlier, the student is responsible for learning. If they don't want to learn and are so easily distracted, let them be. That is their choice. Banning an item that might help a student who is there and wants to learn so that a lazy student that doesn't care is not distracted is completely irresponsible. If a student is intent on being distracted they can always do something that doesn't require a computer, like doodle, or even something that you can't prevent like daydream. There are only a couple of exceptions. If the student's distraction becomes disruptive or distracts others (for example a noisy keyboard that prevents concentration) that the lecturer should step in. If the tool interferes with assessment. (eg. Internet in a closed book exam) it should not be permitted (but then I consider closed book exams archaic).
When I lectured part time a lot of lecturers were having trouble with students talking through the lecture. I had a simple approach. I stopped talking if I was being talked over. It worked really well. I treated the students as adults and I gave them respect. I expected the same in return. If they didn't want to be there they were free to leave.
I had nothing to do with creating them but since the law seems secondary and everyone is going crazy and trying to claim they own every image, I think I'd like to lay claim to a few photos I like. I want to start with all the Hubble Images. Actually make that all astro photos. I like them. I should own them. I'd also like to lay claim to all images of sunsets and sunrises. They are cool. Oh and the grand canyon. I've always wanted to visit but never gotten there so this is the next best thing. Which brings me to all images in Yosemite and Yellow Stone. Oh and all nature photos. Well all the good ones. Closer to home I'd like to claim all images of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House. (They can keep the images of Sydney Tower - they're ugly). Of course I have no basis in law or reality for that matter for such wild claims. But that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone these days.
Lebbos never were particularly enlightened on gender issues.
Please mod +1:Funny because I'm not even Lebanese. AC took aim with his rascism canon and missed by a mile.
It's about ruining the first trilogy with idiotic premises and horrible acting among other things.
The first group of movies was enjoyable by children and adults alike. Granted Jedi pandered to children with the whole Ewok thing but by and large the stories had universal appeal.
The second set of movies I've seen children fall asleep in. I took my then child cousins to the first movie because they'd never been to the cinemas and they said "Next time can we watch a good movie". One of them fell asleep in the second half. This is from children who'd never been to the cinema!!!
No man is an island. These stereotypes exist whether I like it or not. I have an 18 month old son we are about to have a daughter.
I'm not about to teach my son to play with girl oriented toys like dolls etc. or dress him in dresses. Regardless of what I believe, he would be the one to suffer if I did. He would be teased. He would be ostracised. He would be beaten up. I'm not going to change society as a whole just by making my own house rules that do not fit in. Me and mine would just be labelled weird.
Yes, when you tie yourself into a knot so that the definition no longer makes sense, it's a clear sign you have it wrong.
The definition also raises the question of when the planets got to the status of planethood since in the early solar system they may not have cleared out their own orbits. So one day they were not planets and then a few million years later they were. JUst how cleared out those orbits have to be is also unclear. If suddenly a comet passes through a planet's orbit is it still cleared out? Common sense would say yes. The bad definition they came up with would say it's arbitrary as to how temporary the event is. It's just bad science all round.
...95% probability actually. So I didn't bother.
Yeah fat lot of good it'll do tracing the signed code to some chinese web site. If the phone manufacturer was so genuinely interested in warning me about unsigned code the option to accept unsigned applets would come with a disclaimer and actually fucking work. This isn't about security - it is about nothing more than selling apps while crushing competition.
You basically just made the exact point I made in my original response to the thread. The scientist is famous and remembered for the contribution they make to their field of expertise. However that scientist can be a complelely unscientific person outside of their breakthrough contribution. My point is that a true scientist doesn't refuse to believe reality or insist that because it feels good to his intuition that something ought to be true he continue to fight the truth, and that a good scientist collaborates (even more so today than before)
Don't fucking lecture me about Einstein's postulates. I've done the basic derivations and understand them. His postulates would have been considered ridiculous based on everyday observation. Someone else would have said "God does not mandate a cosmic speed limit". Then he turns around and is unable to accept other oddities of the universe.
If Apple really cared about empowering the user in the style, manner, and spirit of their legendary 1984 commercial, they would make Flash available -- or rather allow Adobe to make it available -- on the iPhone, Touch, and iPad, and allow the user to decide which user experiences work best for them. Apple only cares about profits and control these days, having become the very thing they once railed against.
Just look at story. "Insanely great mobile experience"???? Give me a break. I am sick and tired of this company being hailed as god's gift to design and bug free products. It just isn't true. They are one of the least open, most overpriced, most marketing based companies on the planet. Their products don't "just work". What they do is force you to work in a limited way according to their rules and in Apple's interests. Yet otherwise intelligent people start foaming at the mouth about how great Apple is and repeating their marketing drivel verbatim. It's just plain disturbing. Apple's genius is the marketing, which seems to brainwash intelligent people.
Pretending that everyone knew Bell's Theorem 20 years before it was even written means you don't have the slightest fucking clue of what you're talking about.
Well it would, if that is the view I held. Straw men and ad hominem don't change what I said, and at no point did I say that Bell's theorum was known 20 years before it was written. It's just that you're too obtuse to understand what I actually said.
You're pretending the scientific method has something to do with being nice to people, collaborating with others, and knowing ahead of time which way science will fall out. By this standard, I think you're looking for a nice, socialist, psychic, not a scientist.
So you think it's more logical to be a nasty fuckwit who can't collaborate? That's your vision of a true scientist? Anyone who's nice must be a psychic? That is so completely twisted that it makes you look foolish. Most of science is collaboration and communication. The nutty professor ideal has long had it's day.
Have a nice life. I'm not wasting my time with you anymore.
AFAIK he didn't refuse to believe that they behaved the way that they did, but rather he refused to believe a hypothesis put forward as an explanation for why they behaved that way.
AFAIK he refused to even look at the math.
His theories were accepted (and even praised) well before they were proven with any kind of experiment.
Nonsense. He only became famous outside of scientific circles after General Relativity's predicitons regarding the bending of starlight were proven. He then suddenly became an over night sensation.
I really don't see the point in arguing with you further. You have your facts wrong and are basically talking out of the wrong hole. I don't have any more time for you.
Your dismissal of all theoretical work as not being science is just plain ridiculous. I see no point in arguing further.
Yet you're perfectly willing to accept that the definition of a "dwarf planet" is not a subclass of the defintion of a planet???
I have no issue with Pluto being reclassified as an object other than a planet, but the IAU's resolution was abysmal and inconsistent. By annoying those who wished to hold onto the view that Pluto is a planet, defining a planet as a body that orbits our sun (so technically an extrasolar planet isn't a planet) and making a mess of th new term they introduced (dwarf planet not a type of planet) they couldn't have done worse!!!
Yeah lets go get a dev cert, and a signing app just to run software. No biggy if you're a developer I guess. But an end user shouldn't need to jump through hoops.
I think you're confusing "unscientific" with "everything that annoys syousef"
I think you're confusing straw men and ad hominem with an actual counter argument.
If a scientist gets into an argument with another scientist over priority (and who published first IS related to science, whether you like it or not) annoys syousef, therefore, by definition, it is not science. Even though it is. Scientists working on their own are not scientists! Syousef says so!
Lets add a little bit of a straw man to that ad hominem, since you're incapable of an actual refutation that isn't filled with weak drivel.
Do you realize how uninformed you sound?
Do you realise what a sarcastic self righteous prick that can't make a point without getting personal you are? I'm uninformed to masters level, but don't let actual facts get in the way of your arguments.
Your only valid point is when people ignore conclusive evidence in favor of personal beliefs, that is unscientific.
Thanks for acknowledging a valid point, but I think you missed the others that I made.
But you are apparently ignorant of the fact that Bell's Theorem was published a decade after Einstein's death, and actual experiments came even later, so your claim that "Einstein argued the last half of his life against it" is completely fucking preposterous
Talk about uninformed. His own colleagues thought he had isolated himself and wasted his life well before Bell's theorum. I didn't say that they considered that he wasted half his life BECAUSE of Bell's theorum, though that is arguably the consensus now. (Bell's theorum doesn't help).
What would you know about the scientific method. You've proven you can't even argue logically. Nothing but a combination of straw men, reductio ad aburdum and ad hominem. Gimme a break.