Don't get me wrong before I even start... this is definitely bullshit. That being said, though, there is at least something to be learned here, and this may actually not be that bad, when taken in perspective. (I know the average/.er is foaming at the mouth already, but read on.)
The main reason that this is bullshit is that, clearly, once you're on this list, you're more likely to be suspected of a future crime, and, with a little thought, I think it's clear that this makes you more likely to be convicted of a crime you didn't commit. And, of course, the way you get on this list is that you "look suspicious" to an officer.
I think therein lies a big problem with this kind (drug and violent crime) of law enforcement. A big factor in whether or not you are suspected and/or arrested for a crime, in these cases, is what a given policeman's impression is of you. Now, don't get me wrong... I think there are a lot of honest and well-meaning policemen out there. But some of them are not, and, more importantly, it's easy for well-meaning guys to still have a wrong impression. This is a major reason that minorities have such a bad record with the police. Study after study has shown that race makes a suspect look more or less likely to the police.
Long story short, one of the things this does is point out to people how "suspects" get on the police's shitlist... sometimes only by their race, and usually over nothing big. In the end, this may actually do good. Look, this database is, at the very least, a very accurate map of what police in Wilmington think a criminal "should look like". At the very least we can see what's going on. Furthermore, if the cops' prejudices are explicitly written down somewhere, perhaps that's better than being secret.
Microevolution doesn't conflict with Christianity per se, but just as any science cannot be apolitical, many humanist authors have (mis)used the theories of evolution to attack Christian belief. Macroevolution is in direct contrast with Christianity, however, and most Christians do not distinguish between the two.
Ok, I'm not going to give a detailed rebuttal of exactly where and why you're wrong in your science in the above post, since 1] other people will surely do so, and 2] you won't listen anyway. Let me suffice by saying that you don't have a good understanding of current scientific theory (e.g. the 2nd Law of Thermo) and you don't understand the scientific method.
What I would like to talk about is your last point, about how humanist authors have used evolution to attack Christianity. What you say is to some degree true. Some people are going to attack Christianity no matter what (many of the people here on/. qualify), because they're atheists, or they have a chip on their shoulder, or whatever. Unfortunately, though, the reason they have so much ammunition to do so is mostly the Christians' fault.
Evolution is a scientific theory. We can debate its merits scientifically, but it is not inherently anti-Christian. If you think it is, ask the majority of Christians (many Catholics, many types of Protestants), even in the US, who accept the theory of evolution. The real problem, and the reason that creationists look like fools, is that some Christians believe that they must attack the scientific theory of evolution on religious grounds. This is a prospect which has no chance of success. I mean, the people you'll convince with religious arguments are already on your side, and the others will ignore you. These creationists believe so strongly that they should attack evolution that a lot of (at best) ill-informed and ignorant things come out of their mouth. That's what gives the humanists more ammunition.
Look, trust me, as a man who is pro-religion in this modern day, you guys are hurting the cause. Whenever you post something like the above, you convince some people that all believers are anti-scientific nutcases. Do you think that helps atheism or hurts it?
What's also an interesting question to consider (not that this is at all close to it yet) us what is the chances of life evolving on earth, or on earth-like planets?
For example, it may be true that the odds of life developing on earth are 1 in a billion, and it just happened to happen. OTOH, it could be close to 1. Knowing these probabilities could help us estimate the possibilities of there being other life in the universe. All we can say now is that the probability is more than 0, but who knows how much more?
This is true... but you always run into this sort of trouble when you have a non-metric (or non-10-base) system. We would never have this problem with meters and millimeters and so forth.
The clear solution to this problem is to use metric time. I'm sure that would never happen, but we could conceivably break each day into metric units. Each Mhour would be a tenth of a day (or 2 hrs., 24 min. of the old units). Then would could make an Mminute one hundreth of an hour (or 1 min., 26.4 sec. old units), and then an Msec would be one hundredth of that (.864 old seconds). So, everything would be the same up to an order of magnitude or so. As much sense as this makes, it ain't gonna happen. Hell, in the US, we're having trouble converting to other metric units, so this won't happen.
On an even more off-topic note, this reminds me of something a long time ago. When I was in high-school, I was a waiter at this restaurant, and there was a timeclock which (as most do) actually recorded everything, not in hours and minutes, but decimal hours. For example, if you clocked in at 4:30pm, it would say 4.50pm. So, anyway, there was a couple of times that the dishwashers (who spoke only Spanish and no English) were asking me what the story was with the machine, since it always put "the wrong time".
Now, I'm pretty comfortable with changing units, so it never bothered me, but it was hard to explain. Actually, I'm thinking that to explain about breaking an hour into anything other than 60 pieces, in English, say, to my mom, would be extremely hard. Now, I had to do it in Spanish, which I had sort of learned around the house and the neighborhood, and had never had any school on. Whew. I don't think I ever explained it to these dudes... the closest I came to making them happy was that I convinced them if the timeclock was crazed out, I wouldn't use it either.
I am interested in knowing the views of all you calm people out there as to why evolution is so vigorously attacked by America's religious Christians alone and not so much by other religions/countries?
This is an interesting question. First, though, I would like to point out that it is not only Christians, and not only in America, that evolution is attacked by religious fundamentalists on religious grounds. This does happen in many countries, and typically by many religions. That being said, your point is well taken, that it is mostly Christians, and definitely mostly in the United States, where religious attacks on evolution are prevalent.
One factor which contributes to this, in my mind, is America's notion of egalitarianism. (Ironically, possibly) There is a notion which I have only seen held by Americans which goes something along the lines of "Everyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's, so to hell with the experts, our opinion needs to be part of the debate". So what's the connection? I think the connection is that a lot of Americans, no matter what their level of education, feel competent to speak on scientific matters. As one might imagine, this typically leads to a lot of expressed opinions which are, to say the least, ill-informed. This is in contrast to other countries, where this attitude of "everyone's opinion is equal" seems much less prevalent. (I grant that I don't have much data to back up the above, so you can fairly categorize it as anecdotal.) What this leads to is that people ignore the experts' opinions on (say) evolution, and think that whatever they feel is a convincing argument for (say) creationism is as good as what the scientific community thinks. This is, IMHO, a specifically American trait, and this is why you see this manifested so much in the US.
----Now, don't get me wrong. As an American,
I think that usually, this egalitarianism is a great thing. It leads us to have what is probably the closest thing to a meritocracy as is possible in 2002, and I think that is a Good Thing. Just sometimes, it causes a little trouble.----
Another thing which I think contributes is that Americans are more distrustful of centralized authority than any group of people I can think of. Americans don't believe anything the government says. Conspiracy theories are a staple of American culture. Now, there are other countries which have a CT subculture (France and India do come to mind), but in the US, CT is completely mainstream. I'm reminded of this article just recently on/. Anyway, I think that this massive distrust of authority leads to more belief in creationism (and further many other types of pseudoscience). Anything which the Scientific Establishment tells us, but is obvious wrong just by common sense, must be wrong, right?
A third factor is that many people of my parents' generation (just pre-Baby Boom), and most people of my grandparents' generation, were taught creationism in school. Neither of my parents were taught anything but lip-service concerning evolution, and were explicitly told by their science teachers that evolution was wrong. (I have in my mind's eye a teacher saying "Well, the damnyankees made us put this in the book, but...") Ok, perhaps this is in the South and not over the rest of the country, but this definitely plays a role. I mean, I admit that I have trouble thinking of Kazakhstan as a country (or, hell, even Germany) because it wasn't around when I was in grammar school. I mean, I'm up to date only on the things which I do. Certainly nonscientists will not hear anything about the evolution vs. creationism debate after they finish their eduction, so whatever they heard as kids sticks. Now, I don't have any idea what kids in other countries were taught 40 years ago, so this may or may not be a factor. It will also be interesting to see whether or not these people will be common in my age group in 30 years or so.
All in all, I could be completely wrong and none of the above plays a role, but it does sound right. And it is an intruiging question: Why American Christians have this one issue, and rarely any other type of religous person makes a big deal out of it. For myself, I am both a practicing religious person and a working mathematician, and I see no conflict between my faith and the scientific method.
Another very interesting question which I have posed many times in my life, but never found a reasonable answer to is, essentially, Why do people find a conflict between their faith and science? In the context of this discussion, why do creationists feel a need to discredit the scientific community on the subject of evolution? This is something which seems like a complete waste of energy to me.
One who has faith could say
I believe that there is no conflict between faith and science,
I believe (say) in the Bible literally, and all of this science is crap, so to hell with you scientists, or even
science is ok when it comes to engineering and rocketships, but I don't believe it has anything useful to say about the origins of man, so I will ignore science and listen to the Bible on this score.
All of these positions seem reasonable (at least philosophically) to me, even though I strongly disagree with the last two. But another alternative, which I have seen a lot and completely bewilders me, is that creationists try to debunk evolution, typically using a combination of both scientific and biblical arguments, and sometimes just scientific. This is analogous to the people who try to use archaeology to "prove" that Noah had an ark with all of these animals in it. First, this proposition strikes me as philosophically absurd, but more importantly, completely useless. Let's say that you prove that there really was a dude named Noah, he really did have an Ark, and it had all these animals on it. So what? Will that make me believe more in the Ten Commandments, or the Five Pillars of Islam, or whatever? I can't imagine that it would, and I can't understand people who think it would. For example, let's say that someone convinces me that the scientists are all wrong on evolution. This will cause me to believe in Jesus?
I have just never understood this fourth position, since it seems like a complete waste of time. It's also philosophically sort of weird, since people are trying to use scientific arguments to prove the Bible is truth word-for-word. This seems, at least, ironic.
Well, anyway, just my 2 cents, and I hope the content justified the length.
But what happens when you have to show it everyplace you go? what happens if you change a pattern of behaviour and it sets of a red flag and suddenly your being investigated?
I don't need to show my state ID "everyplace I go". If I change my behavior, it doesn't set off any flags in my state government, even though I am forced to carry a state-issued ID at (essentially) all times.
The editors came up real short on this one. After reading the/. blurb, it sounded like an actual piece of journalism that was reporting on this. Ok, fine.
Then I went to the website that this came from. Let me give those of you who bought this a clue: Any website which has "Consciousness Studies" on the front page is not anything close to reputable when it comes to speculating about objects flying in the air.
Perhaps I'm being a bit thick-headed and missed the sarcasm, but it sure seemed like this was honestly submitted, and this is nothing but a load of crap.
If it already existed there wouldn't be so many pushes in Congress to pass new legislation creating it.
I agree with most of what you said, and with most of the spirit of your post, but this one line just ain't right. The unspoken assumption in your claim is that Congress doesn't pass redundant legislation, which, as we all know, is nowhere near correct.
Ok, maybe it's just me, but there's one reason I don't like playing pinball, and it hasn't been mentioned yet.
It's that every pinball game is exactly the same. There's a ball which rolls at you, you have the flippers, etc. Ok, perhaps they can change things up, put some flippers up top, maybe have some complicated bonus scoring, but the bottom line is, a ball rolls at you, and you hit it up. Repeatedly.
Ok, maybe some people really dig this concept, so they're all over it. But these people are insane.
If you could design a pinball machine that was somehow radically different from others, then you'd have a market for it. But it wouldn't really be a pinball machine then.
The article describes how they excluded the obvious culprits: melting ice, earth movements, atmosphere etc. And finally concluded that it is related to ocean circulation. Now that gives me the creeps!
Why the creeps? Because ocean circulation changes can happen relatively quickly and are implicated in the starting / stopping of ice ages. They are crucial indicators for climate change. And when the ocean circulation changes there is nothing humans can do about it.
Why are you more worried about ocean circulation than melting ice, atmoshperic changes, etc.? We can't do shite about any of them...
Aw, man, just reading that article brought back some serious memories. In my case, I wasn't in the Jersey area, but New Orleans. We had the "Assassin's Guild", the "Octagon", the "Bates Motel". Those were some good days.
I remember when Proving Grounds was taken seriously (I once had a Vorpal Blade), and, then when TradeWars and FoodFight came out, I thought online gaming had gotten as sophisticated as it was going to get.
A lot of things are better these days, but I really do miss the quality of the posting. You were in a little culture of about 100 people, and you knew them all pretty well (even if they called themselves the "Dead Kennedy" and "PhonePhreak"). There were some quality political discussions back in the day, and the people would ally on the traditional idelogical grounds.
Ok, maybe I'm sounding like an Old Fart (TM), but I miss those days too.
I agree. Breeding animals to suit human whim is totally wrong.
Aside from this link, then, you would characterize the existence of any breed of dog as "totally wrong"? Or cows, or even horses?
Kneejerk reaction aside, almost every animal we interact with on a daily basis has been changed to suit our needs. To be honest, we've also changed a bit to suit their needs, too. It's a bit overkill to dismiss all of the last 5-10000 years of animal husbandry as "completely wrong", wouldn't you say?
Actually, I've noticed that I've been getting less and less tolerant of roller coasters myself. For example, last summer the gf and I, and some friends, went to Six Flags and we did that Superman crazy ride, and all of the other rides also.
Now, I thought I was just getting too old for this kind of thing (my age is a perfect number about to turn into a prime), but, then again, maybe the rides are getting crazier, and perhaps they're getting too crazy. In particular, I was extremely dizzy after some of the faster rides (didn't have any trouble with the spinning teacups or whatever). Also, the whole crew I was with (all about my age) got a little sick. Again, I thought it was because the old crew is getting too old to be flying around, but maybe it's the coasters, too. Any younger folk have similar experiences over the last few years?
I don't know if I'll worry about it too much, since the tin foil hat I use to keep out the CIA beams isn't working so well either.
Read the excellent tetralogy by Dan Simmons, which starts with the book Hyperion. I don't want to say too much and give a spoiler, but it's really good stuff.
Yeah, go ahead and mod me down for "Offtopic", punk.
Slashdot Mirror
The main reason that this is bullshit is that, clearly, once you're on this list, you're more likely to be suspected of a future crime, and, with a little thought, I think it's clear that this makes you more likely to be convicted of a crime you didn't commit. And, of course, the way you get on this list is that you "look suspicious" to an officer.
I think therein lies a big problem with this kind (drug and violent crime) of law enforcement. A big factor in whether or not you are suspected and/or arrested for a crime, in these cases, is what a given policeman's impression is of you. Now, don't get me wrong... I think there are a lot of honest and well-meaning policemen out there. But some of them are not, and, more importantly, it's easy for well-meaning guys to still have a wrong impression. This is a major reason that minorities have such a bad record with the police. Study after study has shown that race makes a suspect look more or less likely to the police.
Long story short, one of the things this does is point out to people how "suspects" get on the police's shitlist... sometimes only by their race, and usually over nothing big. In the end, this may actually do good. Look, this database is, at the very least, a very accurate map of what police in Wilmington think a criminal "should look like". At the very least we can see what's going on. Furthermore, if the cops' prejudices are explicitly written down somewhere, perhaps that's better than being secret.
Ok, I'm not going to give a detailed rebuttal of exactly where and why you're wrong in your science in the above post, since 1] other people will surely do so, and 2] you won't listen anyway. Let me suffice by saying that you don't have a good understanding of current scientific theory (e.g. the 2nd Law of Thermo) and you don't understand the scientific method.
What I would like to talk about is your last point, about how humanist authors have used evolution to attack Christianity. What you say is to some degree true. Some people are going to attack Christianity no matter what (many of the people here on /. qualify), because they're atheists, or they have a chip on their shoulder, or whatever. Unfortunately, though, the reason they have so much ammunition to do so is mostly the Christians' fault.
Evolution is a scientific theory. We can debate its merits scientifically, but it is not inherently anti-Christian. If you think it is, ask the majority of Christians (many Catholics, many types of Protestants), even in the US, who accept the theory of evolution. The real problem, and the reason that creationists look like fools, is that some Christians believe that they must attack the scientific theory of evolution on religious grounds. This is a prospect which has no chance of success. I mean, the people you'll convince with religious arguments are already on your side, and the others will ignore you. These creationists believe so strongly that they should attack evolution that a lot of (at best) ill-informed and ignorant things come out of their mouth. That's what gives the humanists more ammunition.
Look, trust me, as a man who is pro-religion in this modern day, you guys are hurting the cause. Whenever you post something like the above, you convince some people that all believers are anti-scientific nutcases. Do you think that helps atheism or hurts it?
For example, it may be true that the odds of life developing on earth are 1 in a billion, and it just happened to happen. OTOH, it could be close to 1. Knowing these probabilities could help us estimate the possibilities of there being other life in the universe. All we can say now is that the probability is more than 0, but who knows how much more?
Yeah... unfortunately, the problem with /. is that since that wasn't one of the first 20 posts, noone will ever see it. Oh well...
The clear solution to this problem is to use metric time. I'm sure that would never happen, but we could conceivably break each day into metric units. Each Mhour would be a tenth of a day (or 2 hrs., 24 min. of the old units). Then would could make an Mminute one hundreth of an hour (or 1 min., 26.4 sec. old units), and then an Msec would be one hundredth of that (.864 old seconds). So, everything would be the same up to an order of magnitude or so. As much sense as this makes, it ain't gonna happen. Hell, in the US, we're having trouble converting to other metric units, so this won't happen.
On an even more off-topic note, this reminds me of something a long time ago. When I was in high-school, I was a waiter at this restaurant, and there was a timeclock which (as most do) actually recorded everything, not in hours and minutes, but decimal hours. For example, if you clocked in at 4:30pm, it would say 4.50pm. So, anyway, there was a couple of times that the dishwashers (who spoke only Spanish and no English) were asking me what the story was with the machine, since it always put "the wrong time".
Now, I'm pretty comfortable with changing units, so it never bothered me, but it was hard to explain. Actually, I'm thinking that to explain about breaking an hour into anything other than 60 pieces, in English, say, to my mom, would be extremely hard. Now, I had to do it in Spanish, which I had sort of learned around the house and the neighborhood, and had never had any school on. Whew. I don't think I ever explained it to these dudes... the closest I came to making them happy was that I convinced them if the timeclock was crazed out, I wouldn't use it either.
This is an interesting question. First, though, I would like to point out that it is not only Christians, and not only in America, that evolution is attacked by religious fundamentalists on religious grounds. This does happen in many countries, and typically by many religions. That being said, your point is well taken, that it is mostly Christians, and definitely mostly in the United States, where religious attacks on evolution are prevalent.
One factor which contributes to this, in my mind, is America's notion of egalitarianism. (Ironically, possibly) There is a notion which I have only seen held by Americans which goes something along the lines of "Everyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's, so to hell with the experts, our opinion needs to be part of the debate". So what's the connection? I think the connection is that a lot of Americans, no matter what their level of education, feel competent to speak on scientific matters. As one might imagine, this typically leads to a lot of expressed opinions which are, to say the least, ill-informed. This is in contrast to other countries, where this attitude of "everyone's opinion is equal" seems much less prevalent. (I grant that I don't have much data to back up the above, so you can fairly categorize it as anecdotal.) What this leads to is that people ignore the experts' opinions on (say) evolution, and think that whatever they feel is a convincing argument for (say) creationism is as good as what the scientific community thinks. This is, IMHO, a specifically American trait, and this is why you see this manifested so much in the US.
----Now, don't get me wrong. As an American, I think that usually, this egalitarianism is a great thing. It leads us to have what is probably the closest thing to a meritocracy as is possible in 2002, and I think that is a Good Thing. Just sometimes, it causes a little trouble.----
Another thing which I think contributes is that Americans are more distrustful of centralized authority than any group of people I can think of. Americans don't believe anything the government says. Conspiracy theories are a staple of American culture. Now, there are other countries which have a CT subculture (France and India do come to mind), but in the US, CT is completely mainstream. I'm reminded of this article just recently on /. Anyway, I think that this massive distrust of authority leads to more belief in creationism (and further many other types of pseudoscience). Anything which the Scientific Establishment tells us, but is obvious wrong just by common sense, must be wrong, right?
A third factor is that many people of my parents' generation (just pre-Baby Boom), and most people of my grandparents' generation, were taught creationism in school. Neither of my parents were taught anything but lip-service concerning evolution, and were explicitly told by their science teachers that evolution was wrong. (I have in my mind's eye a teacher saying "Well, the damnyankees made us put this in the book, but...") Ok, perhaps this is in the South and not over the rest of the country, but this definitely plays a role. I mean, I admit that I have trouble thinking of Kazakhstan as a country (or, hell, even Germany) because it wasn't around when I was in grammar school. I mean, I'm up to date only on the things which I do. Certainly nonscientists will not hear anything about the evolution vs. creationism debate after they finish their eduction, so whatever they heard as kids sticks. Now, I don't have any idea what kids in other countries were taught 40 years ago, so this may or may not be a factor. It will also be interesting to see whether or not these people will be common in my age group in 30 years or so.
All in all, I could be completely wrong and none of the above plays a role, but it does sound right. And it is an intruiging question: Why American Christians have this one issue, and rarely any other type of religous person makes a big deal out of it. For myself, I am both a practicing religious person and a working mathematician, and I see no conflict between my faith and the scientific method.
Another very interesting question which I have posed many times in my life, but never found a reasonable answer to is, essentially, Why do people find a conflict between their faith and science? In the context of this discussion, why do creationists feel a need to discredit the scientific community on the subject of evolution? This is something which seems like a complete waste of energy to me.
One who has faith could say
- I believe that there is no conflict between faith and science,
- I believe (say) in the Bible literally, and all of this science is crap, so to hell with you scientists, or even
- science is ok when it comes to engineering and rocketships, but I don't believe it has anything useful to say about the origins of man, so I will ignore science and listen to the Bible on this score.
All of these positions seem reasonable (at least philosophically) to me, even though I strongly disagree with the last two. But another alternative, which I have seen a lot and completely bewilders me, is that creationists try to debunk evolution, typically using a combination of both scientific and biblical arguments, and sometimes just scientific. This is analogous to the people who try to use archaeology to "prove" that Noah had an ark with all of these animals in it. First, this proposition strikes me as philosophically absurd, but more importantly, completely useless. Let's say that you prove that there really was a dude named Noah, he really did have an Ark, and it had all these animals on it. So what? Will that make me believe more in the Ten Commandments, or the Five Pillars of Islam, or whatever? I can't imagine that it would, and I can't understand people who think it would. For example, let's say that someone convinces me that the scientists are all wrong on evolution. This will cause me to believe in Jesus?I have just never understood this fourth position, since it seems like a complete waste of time. It's also philosophically sort of weird, since people are trying to use scientific arguments to prove the Bible is truth word-for-word. This seems, at least, ironic.
Well, anyway, just my 2 cents, and I hope the content justified the length.
True
That's why we're still being eaten by saber-tooth tigers.
I don't need to show my state ID "everyplace I go". If I change my behavior, it doesn't set off any flags in my state government, even though I am forced to carry a state-issued ID at (essentially) all times.
Why would having a federal ID change any of this?
Then I went to the website that this came from. Let me give those of you who bought this a clue: Any website which has "Consciousness Studies" on the front page is not anything close to reputable when it comes to speculating about objects flying in the air.
Perhaps I'm being a bit thick-headed and missed the sarcasm, but it sure seemed like this was honestly submitted, and this is nothing but a load of crap.
I agree with most of what you said, and with most of the spirit of your post, but this one line just ain't right. The unspoken assumption in your claim is that Congress doesn't pass redundant legislation, which, as we all know, is nowhere near correct.
It's that every pinball game is exactly the same. There's a ball which rolls at you, you have the flippers, etc. Ok, perhaps they can change things up, put some flippers up top, maybe have some complicated bonus scoring, but the bottom line is, a ball rolls at you, and you hit it up. Repeatedly.
Ok, maybe some people really dig this concept, so they're all over it. But these people are insane.
If you could design a pinball machine that was somehow radically different from others, then you'd have a market for it. But it wouldn't really be a pinball machine then.
Why are you more worried about ocean circulation than melting ice, atmoshperic changes, etc.? We can't do shite about any of them...
You walk out of a movie halfway through, after paying nine bucks, because some details are wrong?
And you think physics mistakes are stupid?
I remember when Proving Grounds was taken seriously (I once had a Vorpal Blade), and, then when TradeWars and FoodFight came out, I thought online gaming had gotten as sophisticated as it was going to get.
A lot of things are better these days, but I really do miss the quality of the posting. You were in a little culture of about 100 people, and you knew them all pretty well (even if they called themselves the "Dead Kennedy" and "PhonePhreak"). There were some quality political discussions back in the day, and the people would ally on the traditional idelogical grounds.
Ok, maybe I'm sounding like an Old Fart (TM), but I miss those days too.
Why don't you submit it again?
You have clearly generated bad karma in millions of your past lives.
What does this say about where /.ers read from?
Heh.
Aside from this link, then, you would characterize the existence of any breed of dog as "totally wrong"? Or cows, or even horses?
Kneejerk reaction aside, almost every animal we interact with on a daily basis has been changed to suit our needs. To be honest, we've also changed a bit to suit their needs, too. It's a bit overkill to dismiss all of the last 5-10000 years of animal husbandry as "completely wrong", wouldn't you say?
Two things:
You have no chance to learn make your time
Well, after that description, I certainly believe you're at Oberlin...;-)
So maybe I should start teaching third-order ODEs in my DiffEq class?
Heh.
Now, I thought I was just getting too old for this kind of thing (my age is a perfect number about to turn into a prime), but, then again, maybe the rides are getting crazier, and perhaps they're getting too crazy. In particular, I was extremely dizzy after some of the faster rides (didn't have any trouble with the spinning teacups or whatever). Also, the whole crew I was with (all about my age) got a little sick. Again, I thought it was because the old crew is getting too old to be flying around, but maybe it's the coasters, too. Any younger folk have similar experiences over the last few years?
I don't know if I'll worry about it too much, since the tin foil hat I use to keep out the CIA beams isn't working so well either.
Yeah, go ahead and mod me down for "Offtopic", punk.
Academia.
You've heard of universities and tenured professors, right? This is exactly what they do, day in and day out.