We should be trying to get students interested in science.
You'll get more students interested in science by demonstrating that it's useful and at least slightly fun. You won't get students interested in science by telling them that quarks make the math come out right.
How about explaining why protons have a +1 charge and neutrons have no charge? I'd say that's pretty useful. Ditto with explaining the charge of the anti-nucleons.
Actually, they don't explain "why" they have +1 charge. Merely elaborate on the idea that they do so.
Note also that the reason that protons have +1 charge isn't especially useful, in and of itself. Interesting, perhaps, but not useful.
With four combustion chambers each. Traditionally, we call that "sixteen", since we tend to believe that each combustion chamber represents a rocket engine.
Note that multiple rocket engines is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. It can provide redundancy in case of failure, for instance. But it can also be a real nightmare to get them to all go/stop at once.
What do you think would happen, if the USA came to Iran, offering them huge school and economy development support?
Probably the same thing that would happen if we went to North Korea and offered them free food and oil if they'd stop developing nuclear weapons.
Wait, we did that. Read any news about North Korea recently?
If I were in charge in Iran, and one of my enemies offered me massive bribes to play nice, I'd take their bribes, and do whatever I damned well pleased. After all, the bribes show that they're not going to have the nerve to actually stop me or anything....
We might just decide that spending ten times more than any other nation on "guns" is too much, cut it down to, say, five times, spend some of the saving on "butter" and some on repaying the loans we started taking out back in the Reagan days to buy all those "guns", and tell the military-industrial complex to go on a fscking diet already.
For reference, Obama's projected budgets for his first term are such that if the DoD budget were zeroed, deficits would still be in record territory every year.
Though didn't I read recently that one of the European paradises (France, maybe?) would not allow someone to become a citizen because she chose to wear a Burkha?
You portray it as a battle between people, when in fact it was battle between theories.
If you don't think scientists are people, you need to rething things a bit.
Yes, scientists are impressed be names, just like most of the rest of us. "Come look at this, I've just proved Albert Einstein wrong!" is NOT the sort of thing that strengthens one's academic possibilities. Unless you have a holy hell of a lot of proof. And even then, count on a generation of scientists disputing you till the last of the fossils die off.
Is this ideal? Not really. But the world we live includes few things that meet the definition of ideal.
Theoretically, of course, you are correct. the battle is over a theory (wasn't even a battle between theories - whatisname had seen something that GR said couldn't be seen with his apparatus, but he had no theory to explain why he saw the unseeable, just the obervation itself. The theory would have to wait).
But the Names involved would shape the battle.
And Einstein is still a big one. Perhaps the biggest, though Hawking might disagree.
That isn't exactly true. General Relativity predicts exactly how they should behave
GR predicts exactly how they should beahve, if GR is true and correct in every particular. Until we detect enough gravity waves to see whether this is so, we're not entirely sure how gravity waves behave, or that GR is entirely correct.
Which was probably a big part of the reason everyone said "nah, didn't happen" back in '87. If he saw what he thought he saw, then something would've had to've been wrong with GR*, and we can' have that.
* actually not, of course, but that's sure the way it looked in '87 - if this guy is right, Einstein is wrong. And who are you going to believe, him, or Big Al?
As I recall, only the grav waves traveling through hyperspace were FTL. So grav waves could be read by sensors at superluminal velocities, but the impeller drive functioned on the light-speed grav waves. I think.:-P
No, he's right. The Honorverse assumes that gravity waves are FTL. This is false.
But at the time the first Honr story was written, gravity waves hadn't been observed, so it was still possible to include lightspeed gravity waves as "one of those things those poor schlubs in the 20th Century got wrong about physics".
And besides, it made it a lot easier to handwave the FTL communications he needed in the second book.
It's also possible if they were a little more open with information, their economy would have been stronger. Perhaps strong enough that they wouldn't have had the German army right outside of Moscow in the first place.
You've obviously not read much about Soviet industry. While it was not comparable to American (face it, 40 years before WW2, Russia was just leaving the Dark Ages in many ways), it was impressive.
The T-34, for all its design flaws (yes, despite its reputation as a miracle of a tank, it had design flaws. Lots of them, many incredibly obvious to a ten-year-old), was years ahead of the rest of the world. And in spite of the Germans overrunning the Russian industrial heartland, produced in job-lots. Soviet and US tank production were comparable, for instance.
Likewise, aircraft.
Likewise most of the other "obvious" weapons of war.
"Obvious", by the way, means weapons and ammo. It doesn't include things that make it possible for your weapons to be used, like trucks (they built a lot of them, but not a fraction as many as they needed - they got the rest from us).
And while another respondent suggested that the retreat to Moscow was all part of the plan, that's not true either. If it had been part of the plan, then the Soviet government wouldn't have made last-minute plans to evacuate Moscow, they'd have evacuated Moscow early, as they moved the tank factories early.
The Soviets recognized, quite early, and quite correctly, that maps ARE WEAPONS. And that an accurate map in the hands of your enemy is a weapon pointed at your head.
We went a different route. And we won, in the long run, so I'll go with what worked for us the last time.
But remember, if the Germans had had accurate maps of the Soviet Union, they might very well have defeated the Soviets that first summer.
RTFA. It's a clinical trial, it has two years yet to run.
After that, I expect that the designers will do BionicEyeMk2, and there'll be another clinical trial. Maybe in a decade, this will become generally available.
Well, generally available to people with Retinitis Pigmentosa, anyway. It's intended to help people with that condition, not just any old blind guy. What other forms of blindness it might be useful for remains to be seen.
But if you dare say "Maybe we shouldn't put automatic assault rifles into the hands of anyone with a driver's license", then the gun freaks go ape-shit.
Alas, "automatic assault rifles" require quite a bit more than a driver's license to get. Since sometime in the 1930's.
Most likely you meant "semi-automatic assault weapons". Which are functionally the same as "semi-automatic hunting rifles". Yes, the latter exist. Browning makes a rather good one. And it's FAR more deadly than any "semi-auto assault weapon" ever built, given that it comes in heavier calibers, and functions just as quickly.
Note, by the way, that buying a "semi-automatic assault weapon" (like any other firearm of any type) from a dealer requires a Federal background check. Which can't be passed till you turn 18 (for a long-gun), or 21 (for a handgun). In addition to whatever State and local laws might apply.
Note, further, that the last time we banned "assault weapons", we actually banned "semi-automatic assault weapons". Oddly enough, that law made it illegal to buy a semi-automatic version of the AK-47 (sometimes known as a MAK-90, it looked like an AK while lacking the defining chracteristic of the AK) while leaving it perfectly legal to buy a FULLY automatic version of the AK-47 (a real AK-47, in other words).
If we just blurred all maps, the terrorists couldn't even find their targets!
You jest.
In 1941, maps of the Soviet Union available to Germany showed a major highway going from Moscow to very nearly the border. The Germans planned one axis of their invasion around that highway, since they knew that differing rail guages between the two countries would limit their ability to move supplies from Germany to the front.
Shame that that highway never actually existed. Maps of the interior of the Soviet Union were generally kept secret, even from their own soldiers, or...inaccurate, shall we say?
In other words, it's an idea that has worked in the past.
Won't work here and now, of course. It's not, after all, hard to rent a car and drive past a place to take pictures years before you hit it. Then do the same the week before to bring everything up to date with recent changes.
In other words, this is yet another stupid idea from a politician who doesn't quite understand that the djinn left the bottle decades ago, and isn't being put back in anytime soon. Certainly not by legislation.
All of which have a higher average life expectancy than the United States.
You'll have to excuse me for wondering whether there's a relationship between Universal Healthcare and life expectancy.
It is just barely possible that other factors affect life exepctancy - like the food we eat (yes, the average American diet is different from the average European diet), and the exercise we get (I can't think of a bigger bunch of lazy slobs than Americans, me included).
When corrected for other factors, is there a positive correlation between Universal Healthcare and life expectancy? Inquiring minds want to know....
Note that I used the less emotionally-charged phrase "Universal Healthcare" rather than "socialized medicine", even though pretty much every argument I've seen isn't really over "Universal Healthcare", but rather over "socialized medicine". So you may replace the one phrase with the other in your analysis if it makes you feel better.
Uh, did you read the whole thread before replying? I don't think you did. The thread was about what would happen if every family had to support their elderly by itself. That would require 5+ kids per family and basically doubling the population every generation. Pooling the costs would reduce the need for population growth, dictated by simple statistics, since the standard deviation of the cost per elderly person goes down.
Yes, actually I did. I wasn't responding to the whole thread, only to the rather moronic suggestion that the USA is overpopulated.
Note, by the way, that pooling the costs of taking care of the elderly doesn't really save anything.
It means that Family One may save a few bucks when Aunt May dies young, but they'll have to spend more to cover Family Two's Uncle Bob who lived to be 300.
Right now, today, we're paying for Social Security nicely. We have about 3 wage-earners supporting each SS recipient. Which would be comparable to a family with twelve children supporting all four grandparents. Or three families with four kids each doing the same.
That number WILL GO DOWN. We don't typically have three children per family any more. Entirely too many of us (me included) don't have two per family. And our lifespans are going up all the time, so a higher percentage of us are using SS for longer and longer periods (When SS was created, "retirement age" was picked to "average age of death" of Americans, so only half of Americans were expected to live to collect ANYTHING. Now, average age of death is ten years more than retirement age, so most everyone lives long enough to collect something, and half of us collect for ten-plus years).
It is a problem that won't go away - we've modified a system meant to be a "last resort" sort of thing to a "routine part of life" thing. Something has to give at some point - my personal bet is that US T-Bills will be derated to Junk Bond status within 25 years, but it's possible you'll be able to find enough Congresscritters to raise SS retirement age to 80 sooner than that. Not likely, but possible.
Out of the patent, insurer, and doctor relationship it's the insurer making the really big profits.
Well, no.
A quick google, and I find that health insurance company profits tend to range from -2% to 8%, averaging about 5%.
I compare that to the 6.3% growth rate of the Dow Jones over the last 20 years (including the recent fall to levels not seen since (Horrors!) six years ago).
So most health insurance companies aren't going broke in the business, but the profits they're making are none too impressive. I note that in the same year, Exxon had higher absolute profits (40 billion as opposed to 11 billion for the top 13 health insurers combined), as well as a higher profit margin (7.6%).
And Exxon's profit margin at the time was rather lower than average for manufacturers in the USA that year.
So it's not terribly clear that the Health Insurance companies are ripping people off right and left. They may be, but if they are, they're barely staying ahead of bankruptcy even with the ripoffs...
Overpopulation has nothing to do with overcrowding and everything to do with resources. How are you going to support a population of Americans that doubles every generation? Simple answer: You aren't, at least not for long.
Almost true. If the American population doubled in the next generation (it won't, it's barely increasing without immigration), we'd still have more space and resources per capita than most of the rest of the countries in the world.
I point out that China has a vastly larger population than we do, with less space, and fewer resources. They may be overpopulated, we aren't.
Does this mean we can increase in population without limit? No. But the fact that we can't increase in population without limit is completely irrelevant to the question of whether we're overpopulated right now, today.
Yay, let's go back to everyone having a minimum of five kids (the more the better). Overpopulation be damned.
The USA has a lower population density than any European country. So we're not overpopulated, whatever you may have been told.
Keep in mind, Social Security was designed on the assumption that you'd have those five kids paying taxes in to cover the payments out to you. It's going to be a world of hurt when we reach the point that, say, ONE grandchild is paying SS taxes for all four grandparents.
That wasn't true in the old days when you had to be healthy enough to work on the field to pay your taxes.
Well, no.
In those days, you paid no taxes to the Federal government. And not much to the State government. Local Property taxes pretty much covered it. And they only existed to pay for public schools and the local sheriff/marshal.
The ones who suffer aren't the poor, but the lower middle-class, who aren't poor enough for handouts from Uncle Sugar, and aren't wealthy enough to handle it themselves.
So let me put it this way: there are more of us than there are of you and we're taking your money.
Well, at least you understand the major function of government - armed robbery of Peter to pay Paul. Which at least has the virtue of making Paul a supporter.
Otherwise, that particular line certainly would doom any Universal Health Care proposal, if it were uttered by any of its originators.
In other words, "shut up, you're making your side look stupid"
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I take it your schools didn't mention that war between China and the Soviet Union? Or between China and Vietnam? Or....
You'll get more students interested in science by demonstrating that it's useful and at least slightly fun. You won't get students interested in science by telling them that quarks make the math come out right.
Actually, they don't explain "why" they have +1 charge. Merely elaborate on the idea that they do so.
Note also that the reason that protons have +1 charge isn't especially useful, in and of itself. Interesting, perhaps, but not useful.
Perhaps when they find some use for quarks, they'll start teaching schoolchildren about them.
Assuming, of course, that the "violent idiots" don't kill you first.
Note that there is little historical evidence that non-violence is particularly useful for survival unless your (hypothetical) enemies adopt it first.
With four combustion chambers each. Traditionally, we call that "sixteen", since we tend to believe that each combustion chamber represents a rocket engine.
Note that multiple rocket engines is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. It can provide redundancy in case of failure, for instance. But it can also be a real nightmare to get them to all go/stop at once.
Probably the same thing that would happen if we went to North Korea and offered them free food and oil if they'd stop developing nuclear weapons.
Wait, we did that. Read any news about North Korea recently?
If I were in charge in Iran, and one of my enemies offered me massive bribes to play nice, I'd take their bribes, and do whatever I damned well pleased. After all, the bribes show that they're not going to have the nerve to actually stop me or anything....
For reference, Obama's projected budgets for his first term are such that if the DoD budget were zeroed, deficits would still be in record territory every year.
Though didn't I read recently that one of the European paradises (France, maybe?) would not allow someone to become a citizen because she chose to wear a Burkha?
Don't even have to do that. Arian Christians didn't consider Jesus of Nazareth to be holy in the way you obviously mean.
If you don't think scientists are people, you need to rething things a bit.
Yes, scientists are impressed be names, just like most of the rest of us. "Come look at this, I've just proved Albert Einstein wrong!" is NOT the sort of thing that strengthens one's academic possibilities. Unless you have a holy hell of a lot of proof. And even then, count on a generation of scientists disputing you till the last of the fossils die off.
Is this ideal? Not really. But the world we live includes few things that meet the definition of ideal.
Theoretically, of course, you are correct. the battle is over a theory (wasn't even a battle between theories - whatisname had seen something that GR said couldn't be seen with his apparatus, but he had no theory to explain why he saw the unseeable, just the obervation itself. The theory would have to wait).
But the Names involved would shape the battle.
And Einstein is still a big one. Perhaps the biggest, though Hawking might disagree.
GR predicts exactly how they should beahve, if GR is true and correct in every particular. Until we detect enough gravity waves to see whether this is so, we're not entirely sure how gravity waves behave, or that GR is entirely correct.
Which was probably a big part of the reason everyone said "nah, didn't happen" back in '87. If he saw what he thought he saw, then something would've had to've been wrong with GR*, and we can' have that.
* actually not, of course, but that's sure the way it looked in '87 - if this guy is right, Einstein is wrong. And who are you going to believe, him, or Big Al?
No, he's right. The Honorverse assumes that gravity waves are FTL. This is false.
But at the time the first Honr story was written, gravity waves hadn't been observed, so it was still possible to include lightspeed gravity waves as "one of those things those poor schlubs in the 20th Century got wrong about physics".
And besides, it made it a lot easier to handwave the FTL communications he needed in the second book.
You've obviously not read much about Soviet industry. While it was not comparable to American (face it, 40 years before WW2, Russia was just leaving the Dark Ages in many ways), it was impressive.
The T-34, for all its design flaws (yes, despite its reputation as a miracle of a tank, it had design flaws. Lots of them, many incredibly obvious to a ten-year-old), was years ahead of the rest of the world. And in spite of the Germans overrunning the Russian industrial heartland, produced in job-lots. Soviet and US tank production were comparable, for instance.
Likewise, aircraft.
Likewise most of the other "obvious" weapons of war.
"Obvious", by the way, means weapons and ammo. It doesn't include things that make it possible for your weapons to be used, like trucks (they built a lot of them, but not a fraction as many as they needed - they got the rest from us).
And while another respondent suggested that the retreat to Moscow was all part of the plan, that's not true either. If it had been part of the plan, then the Soviet government wouldn't have made last-minute plans to evacuate Moscow, they'd have evacuated Moscow early, as they moved the tank factories early.
The Soviets recognized, quite early, and quite correctly, that maps ARE WEAPONS. And that an accurate map in the hands of your enemy is a weapon pointed at your head.
We went a different route. And we won, in the long run, so I'll go with what worked for us the last time.
But remember, if the Germans had had accurate maps of the Soviet Union, they might very well have defeated the Soviets that first summer.
RTFA. It's a clinical trial, it has two years yet to run.
After that, I expect that the designers will do BionicEyeMk2, and there'll be another clinical trial. Maybe in a decade, this will become generally available.
Well, generally available to people with Retinitis Pigmentosa, anyway. It's intended to help people with that condition, not just any old blind guy. What other forms of blindness it might be useful for remains to be seen.
Alas, "automatic assault rifles" require quite a bit more than a driver's license to get. Since sometime in the 1930's.
Most likely you meant "semi-automatic assault weapons". Which are functionally the same as "semi-automatic hunting rifles". Yes, the latter exist. Browning makes a rather good one. And it's FAR more deadly than any "semi-auto assault weapon" ever built, given that it comes in heavier calibers, and functions just as quickly.
Note, by the way, that buying a "semi-automatic assault weapon" (like any other firearm of any type) from a dealer requires a Federal background check. Which can't be passed till you turn 18 (for a long-gun), or 21 (for a handgun). In addition to whatever State and local laws might apply.
Note, further, that the last time we banned "assault weapons", we actually banned "semi-automatic assault weapons". Oddly enough, that law made it illegal to buy a semi-automatic version of the AK-47 (sometimes known as a MAK-90, it looked like an AK while lacking the defining chracteristic of the AK) while leaving it perfectly legal to buy a FULLY automatic version of the AK-47 (a real AK-47, in other words).
You jest.
In 1941, maps of the Soviet Union available to Germany showed a major highway going from Moscow to very nearly the border. The Germans planned one axis of their invasion around that highway, since they knew that differing rail guages between the two countries would limit their ability to move supplies from Germany to the front.
Shame that that highway never actually existed. Maps of the interior of the Soviet Union were generally kept secret, even from their own soldiers, or...inaccurate, shall we say?
In other words, it's an idea that has worked in the past.
Won't work here and now, of course. It's not, after all, hard to rent a car and drive past a place to take pictures years before you hit it. Then do the same the week before to bring everything up to date with recent changes.
In other words, this is yet another stupid idea from a politician who doesn't quite understand that the djinn left the bottle decades ago, and isn't being put back in anytime soon. Certainly not by legislation.
You'll have to excuse me for wondering whether there's a relationship between Universal Healthcare and life expectancy.
It is just barely possible that other factors affect life exepctancy - like the food we eat (yes, the average American diet is different from the average European diet), and the exercise we get (I can't think of a bigger bunch of lazy slobs than Americans, me included).
When corrected for other factors, is there a positive correlation between Universal Healthcare and life expectancy? Inquiring minds want to know....
Note that I used the less emotionally-charged phrase "Universal Healthcare" rather than "socialized medicine", even though pretty much every argument I've seen isn't really over "Universal Healthcare", but rather over "socialized medicine". So you may replace the one phrase with the other in your analysis if it makes you feel better.
Yes, actually I did. I wasn't responding to the whole thread, only to the rather moronic suggestion that the USA is overpopulated.
Note, by the way, that pooling the costs of taking care of the elderly doesn't really save anything.
It means that Family One may save a few bucks when Aunt May dies young, but they'll have to spend more to cover Family Two's Uncle Bob who lived to be 300.
Right now, today, we're paying for Social Security nicely. We have about 3 wage-earners supporting each SS recipient. Which would be comparable to a family with twelve children supporting all four grandparents. Or three families with four kids each doing the same.
That number WILL GO DOWN. We don't typically have three children per family any more. Entirely too many of us (me included) don't have two per family. And our lifespans are going up all the time, so a higher percentage of us are using SS for longer and longer periods (When SS was created, "retirement age" was picked to "average age of death" of Americans, so only half of Americans were expected to live to collect ANYTHING. Now, average age of death is ten years more than retirement age, so most everyone lives long enough to collect something, and half of us collect for ten-plus years).
It is a problem that won't go away - we've modified a system meant to be a "last resort" sort of thing to a "routine part of life" thing. Something has to give at some point - my personal bet is that US T-Bills will be derated to Junk Bond status within 25 years, but it's possible you'll be able to find enough Congresscritters to raise SS retirement age to 80 sooner than that. Not likely, but possible.
Well, no.
A quick google, and I find that health insurance company profits tend to range from -2% to 8%, averaging about 5%.
I compare that to the 6.3% growth rate of the Dow Jones over the last 20 years (including the recent fall to levels not seen since (Horrors!) six years ago).
So most health insurance companies aren't going broke in the business, but the profits they're making are none too impressive. I note that in the same year, Exxon had higher absolute profits (40 billion as opposed to 11 billion for the top 13 health insurers combined), as well as a higher profit margin (7.6%).
And Exxon's profit margin at the time was rather lower than average for manufacturers in the USA that year.
So it's not terribly clear that the Health Insurance companies are ripping people off right and left. They may be, but if they are, they're barely staying ahead of bankruptcy even with the ripoffs...
Almost true. If the American population doubled in the next generation (it won't, it's barely increasing without immigration), we'd still have more space and resources per capita than most of the rest of the countries in the world.
I point out that China has a vastly larger population than we do, with less space, and fewer resources. They may be overpopulated, we aren't.
Does this mean we can increase in population without limit? No. But the fact that we can't increase in population without limit is completely irrelevant to the question of whether we're overpopulated right now, today.
The USA has a lower population density than any European country. So we're not overpopulated, whatever you may have been told.
Keep in mind, Social Security was designed on the assumption that you'd have those five kids paying taxes in to cover the payments out to you. It's going to be a world of hurt when we reach the point that, say, ONE grandchild is paying SS taxes for all four grandparents.
Well, no.
In those days, you paid no taxes to the Federal government. And not much to the State government. Local Property taxes pretty much covered it. And they only existed to pay for public schools and the local sheriff/marshal.
No. Medicaid takes care of that.
The ones who suffer aren't the poor, but the lower middle-class, who aren't poor enough for handouts from Uncle Sugar, and aren't wealthy enough to handle it themselves.
Well, at least you understand the major function of government - armed robbery of Peter to pay Paul. Which at least has the virtue of making Paul a supporter.
Otherwise, that particular line certainly would doom any Universal Health Care proposal, if it were uttered by any of its originators.
In other words, "shut up, you're making your side look stupid"