How do you know that? So far, two for two that I've met who were homeschooled were horribly socially stilted. Two for two of the music teachers I talked to both had the same exact experience with a large number of homeschooled children.
In fact, I learned this in a conversation that started with one of the music teachers complaining about one of her lessons of the day -- which was a homeschooled child. As I recall, she was frustrated that the child was constantly pushing the mother's buttons to get out of doing work, and wouldn't focus.
Complaining about their students lack of attention is common among music teachers, but one of these two women I consider to be one of the few geniuses I have ever known and hold her opinion very highly. In this case that opinion fit perfectly with my own experiences.
Telling me that the things I have seen with my own eyes are some kind of abberation isn't going to convince me. Showing me a charismatic salesman type who was homeschooled would go alot further to changing my opinion.
"Yes, there are cases like those cited, but that will always be the case when you are dealing with a population size of 1-2 million."
I didn't pick two examples from a sample of 1-2 million, I pulled from a sample of two. Both of the people I knew were moving on to college, and were fairly academically successful.
However, they were both socially inept, and were ostrasized to the point that I felt sorry for them. This is definetly not scientific, just my experience. From the strength of the reaction it may just have been bad luck. Noone has made a really good reasoned responce though, so maybe not.
"Most public schools promote a materialistic secular humanistic world-view."
This is way too vague to comment on, other than I guess you are religious.
"The homeschooling movement has been expanding incredibly rapidly: from approximately 50,000 children in 1985 to about 1,000,000 children in 2000 (Scheller; Bielick, 5; Basham, 6)."
Based on those numbers, it's pretty unlikely I interact with homeschooled people on a regular basis. I'm not trying to condemn homeschooling, but I have observed that homeschooled people have terrible social skills.
Two individuals in particular I spent some time with over the course of several years. They were very different. These 16-18 year olds acted like children socially: talking too loudly and often over people, not paying attention to or responding to the interest of the people around them. They had trouble apologizing and compromising. One time I passed one of them unexpectedly in a public setting and said "hi", she reacted with a frozen expression and completely ignored me. It probably didn't help that they were both only childen.
Music teachers I chatted with who sometimes gave lessons to homeschooled children had the same experience. The one exception they mentioned was a group of about 10 kids that were shuffled between the parents for schooling -- monday would be math from one particular parent who was good at it for example.
The lesson seems to be that there is something critical about peer interaction in our culture which homeschooling usually fails to provide.
From the link you provided on homeschooling:
"different results in homeschools than in public schools. What are the results? A more accurate and well-rounded education, strong social skills, trustworthiness, independence, creativity, and higher academic achievements"
Wow... ok I've only known a small number of homeschooled people but they have all had the trait of HORRIBLE social skills in common. They may have a better education in the fundamentals of grammar, mathematics, and history -- but they cannot interact with their peers.
Everyone I've talked to who interacted with homeschooled kids noticed the same thing. Would you disagree?
"Why has a person's immunity declined to such a degree that their body needs help?"
This is ignorant in the extreme. Before antibiotics and immunization the death rate to illness was brutal. I would probably be dead several times over from strep infections as a child if it weren't for penicillin. The "natural" state of humanity is not disease free.
Also to turn your argument back on itself: who is in an even BETTER position than pharmacuticals--who have the FDA and potential lawsuits from patients to worry about--to make money "managing" illness rather than curing it?
Why, quack practitioners of do nothing "medicine". Throw something in like massage that has mild temporary beneficial effects so people can feel it "working" and you've got a winner!
"You're also going to believe in the impartiality of the ones who are doing the testing and verifying. And that the things they choose to test and verify really are superior to the things they choose not to investigate. Trust who you want."
This is what it really comes down to. Alternative medicine is always based on the assumption of some kind of medical conspiracy.
That is not to say that you can't get fucked over by the medical establishment, but alternative medicine is going to always be significantly worse. Its proper place is treating ailments and using methods too mild to be high on the list for mainstream medicine. Like your creaking jaw.
"An allopath believes that a body's symptoms are the problem, and gives his patients substances which counteract the symptom"
This is very dumb. How do you know you are sick? Symptoms. So no symptoms, no sickness. You can make some argument that the realy underlying cause of the symptoms is something else. But, if the symptoms are gone permanently, that is called cured.
Also, supposedly there was a super treatment that took survivability from 40% to 99% during the great flu epidemic and nobody noticed this? I've got this bridge I'd like to sell you...
Why does this shit get modded up on slashdot? This is just like creationism: totally irrational belief which falls flat on its face when analyzed logically in SO MANY WAYS that enumerating them seems a waste of time. If you somehow fail to see that this is bullshit you haven't thought about it.
I was saved from having to have a major operation by chiropracty. The operation would have been to fix scoliosis. My doctor said there was no alternative to the operation.
So, I have every reason to be sympathetic to your viewpoint. But even so everything you say is starry eyed bullshit. I'm sorry to be rude about it but the sooner you stop believing this crap the better off you will be.
You are right, I must admit my understanding is very very basic. The main thing that irks me, is WHY WHY WHY is this being trumpeted out to laymen? As you say this theory is in its infancy. Meaning, highly speculative many things could change overnight. So, what ends up happening is this stuff gets thrown out there, then it changes. And all the laymen are left going "silly physicists, they never know what they are talking about, always jumping to conclusions." And the view of the entire physics community goes down a notch. Thats why Greene strikes me as sleazy. I dont mean for this to sound elitist, but someone who doesn't allready have a fairly advanced understanding of physics has no business looking into string theory at this point. It would be far more productive to try to understand well established physical principles. So I disapprove because at this point it is not concrete enough for people not involved in that field to bother with it.
STRING THEORY IS NOT A THEORY. A THEORY MAKES PREDICTIONS
String theory is just a bunch of theoretical constructs which may some day be put together into something useful.
Imagine the concept of "forces" without F=ma. "All the motion we see is actually caused by these things called forces, really. Every time something moves a force was involved."
Pretty useless, it basically is just a tautology: small things aren't electrons and quarks etc, they are actually strings. Every time you see anything it isn't what you think it is, it is really a string or group of strings which happen to behave exactly like what you think it is. Great. So... what?
Alot of people seem to be excited because of the mathematical richness of this area. I am not even nearly competent to evaluate this directly, but thinking back to basic proofs that everyone has done in highschool, if you slip up you end up proving something like "0=0". Maybe this promising mathematical complexity is purely in the math and has no physical meaning. The 21st century equivalent of epicycles.
STRING THEORY IS NOT A THEORY, IT MAKES NO PREDICTIONS
This may not be fair, but Greene struck me as kind of sleazy. Notice how he is both the narrator of the show, and also one of the people being interviewed. Also notice how he breezes past making concrete predictions.
Maybe this criticism isn't fair, and this is how all revolutionary theories look when they are young. But it just struck me that Greene was presenting this stuff as though it was allready laid in stone. He basically tells the narrative story of the triumph of string theory, going from a graduate students pet theory to... a bunch of theorists' pet theory.
String theory hasnt triumphed, isnt even in a position that it is possible for it to triumph yet. So what is Greene praising so boldly? A highly speculative area which is at this point only of interest to pure theorists, since it has (as of yet) zero predictive powers.
At one point I think the lack of evidence gets so painful that he points out that there are alot of researchers working in the field of string theory now. The number is just kind of dropped vaguely like "hundreds of researchers".
The best argument he has for its validity is that it looks promising to alot of people. After all this talk about how modern physics is so confusing and counter-intuitive he circles around and uses intuition (admittedly professional intuition)to justify why this new way of doing things is better.
I am waaaay out of my depth, but it seems that natural lasers are pretty common.
And apparently there is an observed nebula colder than the microwave background.
And I mean that nebula is really really big, so maybe just the distibution of temperatures within it would allow for the possibility of really cold regions.
Basically my argument is against your putting "naturally" in quotes. My thesis here is that there is nothing we can do which isnt reproduced by purely unintelligent processes. All we can do is organize things and tidy them up a bit to get useful work out of them.
Literally the coldest place? Pretty much anything we can do in the lab is probably gonna be reproduced naturally SOMEWHERE. That's why SETI had false alarms. Say some comet out in the middle of space at really really cold degrees K has a high pressure pocket of gas somewhere that suddenly vents to vacuum. That could potentially cool things down to those same levels. Any mechanism we create in a lab almost certainly happens naturally. The only reason this is important is to know that we aren't gonna blow up the universe/this planet by doing something "unnatural" in a physics experiment.
Seriously, writing good fiction must be hard and having to know science stuff ontop of that, but it can get insane sometimes.
For example, in Card's book Xenocide he spends many pages explaining how anything can happen and how pseudo-Christian mythology is actually built into the structure of the universe. *BLECH* "You know all that sub-atomic stuff? It's actually really simple, there are really only two particles, here I go blah blah blah" [this was just raw exposition] "and thus we see that with dits and dos thats why everything happens, thus superceding all other laws of physics and letting me do whatever the fuck I want for the rest of the book."
Sundiver by David Brin, there is this space elevator that works like this: there is this really huge sealed cylinder that goes up into space, and since its sealed around the sides the air can't leak out and it stays at sea level pressure the whole way up.
James P Hogan seems to think modern physics is some kind of conspiracy. Literally, he has puppet characters do things like explain in two sentances how relativity is bullshit, but they are suppressed by the eeeeevvvvvviiiillll powerful physics establishment.
The question is why does this kind of thing get published? It seems there is a huge market for scifi that makes the reader feel smart. The premise is that the way we think everything is is wrong, it's actually much much simpler.
Greg Bear? Eh... I guess. That guy I think is one of those "read a bunch of science books and sort of understood them" authors. A step up from the authors (like Card) who seem to get their knowledge from reading other sci-fi but still...
If you want to read good hardcore (aka plausible) scifi I'd recommend "Cold as Ice" by Charles Sheffield as a place to start.
Also, after reading Darwin's Radio, my opinion of that author is pretty much in the toilet. The plot just lost coherence as the book went along, the premise was very compelling but ultimately not well explained.
I guess if by caring more about story and characters you mean giving up on tying up the loose ends in the premise and instead focusing on a romance then... yah.
But anyway if you really care about deep characters and stuff like that over "gee whiz" why are you reading sci fi in the first place?
Heh your comment about just randomly believing the electron has a positive charge reminds me...
Semiconductor physics class the teacher draws a diagram of current moving through a wire then says "ok, so the current goes this way, why do the electrons go the other way?"
Everyone starts mumbling about negative charge etc etc and she all of a sudden bursts out "NO! The electrons move against the current because Benjamin Franklin was an asshole"
If Benjamin Franklin had gone into his lab and assumed things such that the electron would have had a positive charge, generations of second semester physics students would have had an easier time.
Re:Maybe someone knows the answer to this
on
Quantum Wires
·
· Score: 1
If the current is perfectly steady the electric field will be constant and there will be no radiation.
The name of the book was manifold space. Great sci-fi, probably Baxter's best book. Dont read the other manifold books they are in no way part of a series.
I remember picking up that book and being floored by the fact that it starts off with the Fermi paradox. The downside is the plot is pretty morbid. I won't give away the ending but prepare to be underwhelmed with the rewards all of the main characters get for in some cases literally thousands of years of tireless effort towards the safety of humanity and life in general
Yea, wrist problems isnt rocket science-- the tendons go through the front of your arm, so if your wrist is bent back while you are working your fingers *owch*
What you need is to have your wrist flat or bent inward slightly to avoid tendonitis. This thing actually looks somewhat worse than a standard mouse from the pictures since that huge hump will force your wrist to bend way back.
If anyone is seriously looking at a mouse to avoid tendonitis I'd recommend this one:
http://www.3m.com/us/office/myworkspace/mos_ergo.j html
It looks kinda goofy but it doesnt take that long to get used to and you can play games on it. After those 7 hour counter strike days you dont have that stiff soreness in your wrist. Your left hand is still pretty stiff and your eyes hurt, but its something anyway.
They allready started pitching this last year. I was looking at laptops at Microcenter and the salesman starts making his pitch. First he says the video card has 64mb (it was 32), then he starts going off about how the video card can use system ram so that will take care of any performance problems due to low ram. Wow... anyway, ya don't buy from Microcenter their salesmen will lie to your face and the "sales" that they have are actually just marking down to the regular price you could get at Costco.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know that? So far, two for two that I've met who were homeschooled were horribly socially stilted. Two for two of the music teachers I talked to both had the same exact experience with a large number of homeschooled children.
In fact, I learned this in a conversation that started with one of the music teachers complaining about one of her lessons of the day -- which was a homeschooled child. As I recall, she was frustrated that the child was constantly pushing the mother's buttons to get out of doing work, and wouldn't focus.
Complaining about their students lack of attention is common among music teachers, but one of these two women I consider to be one of the few geniuses I have ever known and hold her opinion very highly. In this case that opinion fit perfectly with my own experiences.
Telling me that the things I have seen with my own eyes are some kind of abberation isn't going to convince me. Showing me a charismatic salesman type who was homeschooled would go alot further to changing my opinion.
"Yes, there are cases like those cited, but that will always be the case when you are dealing with a population size of 1-2 million."
I didn't pick two examples from a sample of 1-2 million, I pulled from a sample of two. Both of the people I knew were moving on to college, and were fairly academically successful.
However, they were both socially inept, and were ostrasized to the point that I felt sorry for them. This is definetly not scientific, just my experience. From the strength of the reaction it may just have been bad luck. Noone has made a really good reasoned responce though, so maybe not.
"Most public schools promote a materialistic secular humanistic world-view."
This is way too vague to comment on, other than I guess you are religious.
"The homeschooling movement has been expanding incredibly rapidly: from approximately 50,000 children in 1985 to about 1,000,000 children in 2000 (Scheller; Bielick, 5; Basham, 6)."
Based on those numbers, it's pretty unlikely I interact with homeschooled people on a regular basis. I'm not trying to condemn homeschooling, but I have observed that homeschooled people have terrible social skills.
Two individuals in particular I spent some time with over the course of several years. They were very different. These 16-18 year olds acted like children socially: talking too loudly and often over people, not paying attention to or responding to the interest of the people around them. They had trouble apologizing and compromising. One time I passed one of them unexpectedly in a public setting and said "hi", she reacted with a frozen expression and completely ignored me. It probably didn't help that they were both only childen.
Music teachers I chatted with who sometimes gave lessons to homeschooled children had the same experience. The one exception they mentioned was a group of about 10 kids that were shuffled between the parents for schooling -- monday would be math from one particular parent who was good at it for example.
The lesson seems to be that there is something critical about peer interaction in our culture which homeschooling usually fails to provide.
From the link you provided on homeschooling:
"different results in homeschools than in public schools. What are the results? A more accurate and well-rounded education, strong social skills, trustworthiness, independence, creativity, and higher academic achievements"
Wow... ok I've only known a small number of homeschooled people but they have all had the trait of HORRIBLE social skills in common. They may have a better education in the fundamentals of grammar, mathematics, and history -- but they cannot interact with their peers.
Everyone I've talked to who interacted with homeschooled kids noticed the same thing. Would you disagree?
this has been posted before just fyi... funny and ontopic though
"Why has a person's immunity declined to such a degree that their body needs help?"
This is ignorant in the extreme. Before antibiotics and immunization the death rate to illness was brutal. I would probably be dead several times over from strep infections as a child if it weren't for penicillin. The "natural" state of humanity is not disease free.
Also to turn your argument back on itself: who is in an even BETTER position than pharmacuticals--who have the FDA and potential lawsuits from patients to worry about--to make money "managing" illness rather than curing it?
Why, quack practitioners of do nothing "medicine". Throw something in like massage that has mild temporary beneficial effects so people can feel it "working" and you've got a winner!
"You're also going to believe in the impartiality of the ones who are doing the testing and verifying. And that the things they choose to test and verify really are superior to the things they choose not to investigate. Trust who you want."
This is what it really comes down to. Alternative medicine is always based on the assumption of some kind of medical conspiracy.
That is not to say that you can't get fucked over by the medical establishment, but alternative medicine is going to always be significantly worse. Its proper place is treating ailments and using methods too mild to be high on the list for mainstream medicine. Like your creaking jaw.
"An allopath believes that a body's symptoms are the problem, and gives his patients substances which counteract the symptom"
This is very dumb. How do you know you are sick? Symptoms. So no symptoms, no sickness. You can make some argument that the realy underlying cause of the symptoms is something else. But, if the symptoms are gone permanently, that is called cured.
Also, supposedly there was a super treatment that took survivability from 40% to 99% during the great flu epidemic and nobody noticed this? I've got this bridge I'd like to sell you...
Why does this shit get modded up on slashdot? This is just like creationism: totally irrational belief which falls flat on its face when analyzed logically in SO MANY WAYS that enumerating them seems a waste of time. If you somehow fail to see that this is bullshit you haven't thought about it.
I was saved from having to have a major operation by chiropracty. The operation would have been to fix scoliosis. My doctor said there was no alternative to the operation.
So, I have every reason to be sympathetic to your viewpoint. But even so everything you say is starry eyed bullshit. I'm sorry to be rude about it but the sooner you stop believing this crap the better off you will be.
"Humans are basically entropy pumps." Heh that is awesome.
String theory has been around for two decades now. How long does "infancy" last?
You are right, I must admit my understanding is very very basic. The main thing that irks me, is WHY WHY WHY is this being trumpeted out to laymen?
As you say this theory is in its infancy. Meaning, highly speculative many things could change overnight.
So, what ends up happening is this stuff gets thrown out there, then it changes. And all the laymen are left going "silly physicists, they never know what they are talking about, always jumping to conclusions."
And the view of the entire physics community goes down a notch. Thats why Greene strikes me as sleazy. I dont mean for this to sound elitist, but someone who doesn't allready have a fairly advanced understanding of physics has no business looking into string theory at this point. It would be far more productive to try to understand well established physical principles.
So I disapprove because at this point it is not concrete enough for people not involved in that field to bother with it.
STRING THEORY IS NOT A THEORY. A THEORY MAKES PREDICTIONS
String theory is just a bunch of theoretical constructs which may some day be put together into something useful.
Imagine the concept of "forces" without F=ma. "All the motion we see is actually caused by these things called forces, really. Every time something moves a force was involved."
Pretty useless, it basically is just a tautology: small things aren't electrons and quarks etc, they are actually strings. Every time you see anything it isn't what you think it is, it is really a string or group of strings which happen to behave exactly like what you think it is. Great. So... what?
Alot of people seem to be excited because of the mathematical richness of this area. I am not even nearly competent to evaluate this directly, but thinking back to basic proofs that everyone has done in highschool, if you slip up you end up proving something like "0=0". Maybe this promising mathematical complexity is purely in the math and has no physical meaning. The 21st century equivalent of epicycles.
STRING THEORY IS NOT A THEORY, IT MAKES NO PREDICTIONS
This may not be fair, but Greene struck me as kind of sleazy. Notice how he is both the narrator of the show, and also one of the people being interviewed. Also notice how he breezes past making concrete predictions.
Maybe this criticism isn't fair, and this is how all revolutionary theories look when they are young. But it just struck me that Greene was presenting this stuff as though it was allready laid in stone. He basically tells the narrative story of the triumph of string theory, going from a graduate students pet theory to... a bunch of theorists' pet theory.
String theory hasnt triumphed, isnt even in a position that it is possible for it to triumph yet. So what is Greene praising so boldly? A highly speculative area which is at this point only of interest to pure theorists, since it has (as of yet) zero predictive powers.
At one point I think the lack of evidence gets so painful that he points out that there are alot of researchers working in the field of string theory now. The number is just kind of dropped vaguely like "hundreds of researchers".
The best argument he has for its validity is that it looks promising to alot of people. After all this talk about how modern physics is so confusing and counter-intuitive he circles around and uses intuition (admittedly professional intuition)to justify why this new way of doing things is better.
I am waaaay out of my depth, but it seems that natural lasers are pretty common.
And apparently there is an observed nebula colder than the microwave background.
And I mean that nebula is really really big, so maybe just the distibution of temperatures within it would allow for the possibility of really cold regions.
Basically my argument is against your putting "naturally" in quotes. My thesis here is that there is nothing we can do which isnt reproduced by purely unintelligent processes. All we can do is organize things and tidy them up a bit to get useful work out of them.
ian banks... hmmm have to check that out thanks, any particular book youd recommend to start with?
Literally the coldest place? Pretty much anything we can do in the lab is probably gonna be reproduced naturally SOMEWHERE. That's why SETI had false alarms.
Say some comet out in the middle of space at really really cold degrees K has a high pressure pocket of gas somewhere that suddenly vents to vacuum. That could potentially cool things down to those same levels.
Any mechanism we create in a lab almost certainly happens naturally. The only reason this is important is to know that we aren't gonna blow up the universe/this planet by doing something "unnatural" in a physics experiment.
Seriously, writing good fiction must be hard and having to know science stuff ontop of that, but it can get insane sometimes. For example, in Card's book Xenocide he spends many pages explaining how anything can happen and how pseudo-Christian mythology is actually built into the structure of the universe. *BLECH* "You know all that sub-atomic stuff? It's actually really simple, there are really only two particles, here I go blah blah blah" [this was just raw exposition] "and thus we see that with dits and dos thats why everything happens, thus superceding all other laws of physics and letting me do whatever the fuck I want for the rest of the book." Sundiver by David Brin, there is this space elevator that works like this: there is this really huge sealed cylinder that goes up into space, and since its sealed around the sides the air can't leak out and it stays at sea level pressure the whole way up. James P Hogan seems to think modern physics is some kind of conspiracy. Literally, he has puppet characters do things like explain in two sentances how relativity is bullshit, but they are suppressed by the eeeeevvvvvviiiillll powerful physics establishment. The question is why does this kind of thing get published? It seems there is a huge market for scifi that makes the reader feel smart. The premise is that the way we think everything is is wrong, it's actually much much simpler.
Greg Bear? Eh... I guess. That guy I think is one of those "read a bunch of science books and sort of understood them" authors. A step up from the authors (like Card) who seem to get their knowledge from reading other sci-fi but still...
If you want to read good hardcore (aka plausible) scifi I'd recommend "Cold as Ice" by Charles Sheffield as a place to start.
Also, after reading Darwin's Radio, my opinion of that author is pretty much in the toilet. The plot just lost coherence as the book went along, the premise was very compelling but ultimately not well explained.
I guess if by caring more about story and characters you mean giving up on tying up the loose ends in the premise and instead focusing on a romance then... yah.
But anyway if you really care about deep characters and stuff like that over "gee whiz" why are you reading sci fi in the first place?
hmmm... losers eh?
Heh your comment about just randomly believing the electron has a positive charge reminds me...
Semiconductor physics class the teacher draws a diagram of current moving through a wire then says
"ok, so the current goes this way, why do the electrons go the other way?"
Everyone starts mumbling about negative charge etc etc and she all of a sudden bursts out "NO! The electrons move against the current because Benjamin Franklin was an asshole"
If Benjamin Franklin had gone into his lab and assumed things such that the electron would have had a positive charge, generations of second semester physics students would have had an easier time.
If the current is perfectly steady the electric field will be constant and there will be no radiation.
The name of the book was manifold space. Great sci-fi, probably Baxter's best book. Dont read the other manifold books they are in no way part of a series.
I remember picking up that book and being floored by the fact that it starts off with the Fermi paradox. The downside is the plot is pretty morbid. I won't give away the ending but prepare to be underwhelmed with the rewards all of the main characters get for in some cases literally thousands of years of tireless effort towards the safety of humanity and life in general
Yea, wrist problems isnt rocket science-- the tendons go through the front of your arm, so if your wrist is bent back while you are working your fingers *owch*j html
What you need is to have your wrist flat or bent inward slightly to avoid tendonitis. This thing actually looks somewhat worse than a standard mouse from the pictures since that huge hump will force your wrist to bend way back.
If anyone is seriously looking at a mouse to avoid tendonitis I'd recommend this one:
http://www.3m.com/us/office/myworkspace/mos_ergo.
It looks kinda goofy but it doesnt take that long to get used to and you can play games on it. After those 7 hour counter strike days you dont have that stiff soreness in your wrist. Your left hand is still pretty stiff and your eyes hurt, but its something anyway.
"artists and other such people who (for whatever reason) are less keen to do hobbyish projects"
Wow. Artists are not keen to do things out of interest? Think about that for two seconds.
They allready started pitching this last year. I was looking at laptops at Microcenter and the salesman starts making his pitch. First he says the video card has 64mb (it was 32), then he starts going off about how the video card can use system ram so that will take care of any performance problems due to low ram.
Wow... anyway, ya don't buy from Microcenter their salesmen will lie to your face and the "sales" that they have are actually just marking down to the regular price you could get at Costco.