I've never understood how the hell the "fly" on underwear is supposed to work anyway. Looking at how it's contructed, I would first have to shift my penis way over to the left to go in the inside hole. Then I need to make a 90 degree turn (ouch!) to the right. Then snake my, er, snake through the tunnel between the two flaps. Depending on how cold it is, I'm not sure I'd always have enough length to make it to the end of this tunnel. Then I'd have to make another 90 degree turn (!) to the left to exit out the outer hole. And then try to pee through a penis that has two 90 degree bends in it.
Yeah, that's way easier than pulling down the elastic band a bit.
...students should pay respect to those, who enable them to go through life with a half-decent job.
Oh come off it. Are you seriously implying that the public schools are in some way helpful or educational? What you "learn" in primary/secondary school is just the official regurgitation of the stuff you already discovered for yourself by reading books, watching PBS (in later years - the Discovery Channel, etc) and playing with your parents calculators and computers. Real education in stuff you wouldn't learn on your own through curiousity doesn't begin until college.
You could make the "system" arguement and say "high school is BS but you need it to get into college" but that's BS too. I didn't have any trouble getting into a great engineering school dispite bad high school grades (I was defiant, could you guess?, and wouldn't do homework). Worst case you take a year or two of junior college then transfer.
The only mission of the public schools is to break you and turn you into obedient drones who will obey their supervisor and be good robotic workers in the factory. Hence the enphasis on respect your teacher. The ultimate irony, in my opinion as an adult looking back, is that being an obedient drone is not the path to success in life. The drones just get stepped on and exploited.
I think if you write a story, or a song or even a software application you're entitled to control ownership rights of it. Why shouldn't you be? I'm generally curious why authors shouldn't be allowed to have ownership of their works.
I have two major problems with copyright. The first is philosophical - nobody else gets to control their works after they've sold them. If build a chair and sell it to you, it is legally and morally yours, I gave up any claim to it when I sold it. Only in the realm of information can you sell me something and still exercise control over it.
The second problem I have is cultural. I want to encourage derivative creations. Why re-invent the wheel every time you want to tell a story (or whatever) when we have abundant cultural references and materials already? As an example, think of all the King Arthor books/movies/stories around. They would be much more cumbersome if each of these stories had to start from scratch with new characters and establish "this one is noble, that one is pure-hearted, this other guy is a mysterious wizard, oh and King Fred is wise and nobel but he made a tragic mistake and slept with his sister and is trying to atone for it, yada, yada, yada." Since there is no copyright on Arthian legends, you just have to name the character King Arthor and everyone knows what he's basically about. Could you even make Monty Python's "Holy Grail" if you didn't already know what Lancelot was supposed to be like and see it contrasted with the silly, overdamatic Lancelot in the spoof?
And as a coralary to my second point, how do you think stories like King Arthor were formed? I would submit that story tellers added, moddified, and embellished stories over generations. Different versions cropped up (for example did Aurthor get Excaliber from the Lady of the Lake, or did he pull it out of the stone?) and much like open source software, the more popular forks of the story got developed further while the crappy versions died out. I would like to see this sort of iterative creativity in our culture too - how about Star Wars Prequels without Jar-Jar ("The Phantom Edit") or with non-stupid dialog supplanting the George Lucas vesions?
I can accept that this is not a perfect world, and that a short-term limited copyright may be an acceptable compromise. But thats all it is, a compromise with harsh reality, not the ideal situation.
Why does it just have to be one company? You write a law that says "insurance companies must insure everyone who walks in the door at at the same rate" (each company can set its own rate, it just has to offer the same rate to anyone that signs up for that particular coverage plan). Then the insurance company profiles humanity in general to find the average cost of health care per capita and charges a little bit more. This implements Universal Health Care without making the government do it (which we all know is socialism and is teh evil).
The more I think of it, the more I like it. It incetivizes the companies to be efficeit (to lower their costs so they can lower thier premiums to attact more customers) which the government would not be. And it still allows some freedom of priorities as you could choose a company based on say their reputation for good customer service or elect to pay more for plans that offer red-carpet hospitals with mints on the pillows or wacky hippie plans that cover herbalists and holistic healers. And the miserely libertaians can decide not to pay for services they don't use and wait until they are hospitalized to be hit with the bill.
Adult life restrictive? I don't get how anyone can possibly be nostalgic about teenage life. It is all obligations and no rewards. You have far more responsibilies and obligations as a teen than as an adult. Basically as an adult I have to go to work and pay my bills (and this time of year, my taxes). And my bills actually get paid automatically, I just need to insure that my bank account stays topped off, so really doing my job is my only responsibility.
That would be the job that I can leave anytime I want if I find a job that's more to my liking. The one that I choose because I liked to technical and work/lifestyle aspects of. The one that pays me huge gobs of money because I once threatened to leave and work for the competition.
As a teenager, you have to go to school (under threat of criminal prosecution), do all your homework, do whatever chores your parents randomly assign, go to whatever lame weddings/reunions/family trips/etc. your parents randomly force on you. And for this you get no pay, own no property (except what your parents charitably give you, which they take away randomly) and you have to live with uncofortable relationships with your family that you can't leave or renegotiate in a house of their choosing in a city chosen for thier work/lifestyle ideals.
Screw all that! In the 16+ years since I turned 18, life just gets better and better. I live in a house that I chose, in a location that I chose, maintain what relationships I feel are worthwhile (which includes my parents, its much easier to live with them when I don't have to literally live with them), clean my home when I feel the mess bothers me more than the effort to clean it, own whatever property is valuable enough to me; all paid for by the job I chose under the conditions that I negotiated (and re-negotiated) from a position of strength.
I just don't see anything good about life as a teenager, which was living under constant threat of random punishment for not doing meaningless things you should never have to do in the first place. And getting nothing for it.
>If you are not responsible enough to get in legally (which is not hard at all) then we don't want you here.
Oh, tell me how it's "not hard at all" to come here legally. I've looked into it, and for most people it is basically impossible to ever come here legally. You're pretty damn lucky if you can even get a non-immigrant visa to visit the USA. I've got a girlfriend from another country, basically if I get engaged to her, she can come (although all my friends who've done the same thing recommend getting an immigration lawyer, as the government will give you the runnaround and repeatedly deny the application otherwise). If she doesn't marry me there is no possible legal route for her to immigrate here.
Thanks, I don't have anyhting on the computer with a spell-checker, and tried dozens of spellings, none of which looked right. It was driving me nuts trying to remember how that word was supposed to be spelled. Now I can relax again.
>But I guess the same was not true of English homework, judging by your spelling of despite.
Guilty as charged, I was never as good at spelling as math. I agree with you completely about their being many shades and types of smart. The question is why was I being assigned 100s of multiplication problems when I could easily demonstrate proficiency in it? Maybe I should have been using that time to learn to spell better.
Instead I learned the lession that homework is just a waste of time designed to wear me down and drill obedience into my head and I resisted doing it. That lesson did not serve me very well when I got to college and homework actually was about building skills that you couldn't pick up instantly.
I think the other 2 respondants covered my objections to learning by rote wonderfully, but I'd like to add 2 more things.
In the 24 years of using multiplication since my 4th grade experiences, I still don't have all the multiplication tables "wired" in my head as you suggest. As I said, 7s are tough, I usually double the number, then double it again (to get 4x) then tripple the original number, and add them together. I guess I'd better give back my engineering degree, close up my bank account, and declare myself a failure in life. Oops no, it turns out using basic algeabra in my head is a perfectly adequate solution that renders rote memorization of every possible multiplication problem a waste of time!
I also wanted to add that there's nothing wrong with being lazy, it takes a couple seconds to use my method to calculate 15% and if there was a calculator already out and available I'd use it instead. Who am I trying to impress by doing it in my head? I just want the answer.
I'd like to add that even atheists still have a predisposition to beleiving in god. Its the old "there are no atheists in a foxhole" syndrome. When times get desperate, many atheists will try to pray and I know I have caught myself getting in angry arguements with "God" dispite denighing his existance. We just think our predisposition to believing is a stupid irational human flaw (like being afraid of the dark or getting nervious on a first date) and try to surpress it.
After all, people are predisposed to thinking of the earth as flat, that doesn't mean its actually true.
But there is nothing to get better at! Once you've done a couple dozen multiplication problems, you can do multiplication perfectly. Calculating a 15% tip is easy, you move the decimal point over one (to get ten pecent, if you're not too concerned about precision you just drop the last digit) then you halve that number (to get 5%) and add the 2 together. Anyone who reaches for a calculator to do that is just being lazy. There is nothing even remotely hard about that problem. Multiplying by 7 is rougher to do in your head, but still no big deal. What exactly are you going to practice? There is nothing to get better at. Maybe instead of spending 1-2 hours per day for months in 4th grade on multiplication, they could move on to division, fractions/decimals and then into basic algebra and quadradic equations etc. But instead they make you practice to improve a skill you can already do perfectly.
In my elementary school experience, they never really graded the homework anyway. The just collected it and gave you a 10 (out of ten) if you turned it in complete (you got a 5 if it was only half-done, etc). Then the total of all homework was 50% of your grade, since "working hard" was more important than "learning".
>Understanding how a math problem is solved is very important, but actually sitting down and solving 4 or 5 samples of increasing complexity nails it down for good.
4 or 5 samples, sure. But when I was in 4th grade learning multiplication, the standard was 20-30 samples. Per day. For the entire academic year.
4-5 math problems wouldn't be homework, it would be jot-it-down-in-a-few-minutes work. When I was in late elementary / early jr. high, my school district's standard was 1 hour of homework per subject every day. That meant 5 hours of work per night, minimum (there were 6 subjects, but P.E. didn't generate homework).
It varies a bit by school district, but gennerally the accademic year that you turn 6 years old is when you start "Kindergarden", which is a half day of learning the Alphabet and maybe some fingerpainting or sing-alongs. Then next year (when you turn 7) is "first grade" and then it continues through "12th grade" (when you turn 18) which is the end of secondary education.
So age = grade + 5 or 6 years. Occationally they let extra bright kids skip ahead one grade or hold back a student that performed poorly, but both are very rare.
Spot-on! Math homework was the absolute worst and I spent much of my life thinking math was stupid and useless (and now I'm an Elecrical Engineer!).
Multiplication is not a hard thing, yet we spent 1-2 hours per day on multiplication homework for the entire 4th grade year to learn a skill that really takes maybe a few days to master completely.
I simply stopped doing all homework in the 4th grade, which meant for the rest of my elementary, junoir high, and high school I got either A's (based on my test scores) or F's (based on my homework). I had to repeat many classes until I got a teacher that graded on tests more than homework.
As a kid, I figured the best way to teach math would be by computer (we had some early experimental computers that taught math lessions at one of my schools in the gifted program, but we were never graded on the computer lessons). The computer would be programmed to move along once you could consistantly solve that type of problem (though it would randomly review old concepts to make sure you hadn't forgotten). That way the work would be individually tailored automattically.
>Yes, a lot of school is rote drudgery. a lot of LIFE is rote drudgery--you don't always get to do only the things you want to do. You think most people like paying bills, doing taxes, working out finances, etc?
But here in real life, we only do the rote drudgery that is advantagous to us. I pay my electric bill so I continue to get electricity and don't have to pay more later. Homework was just drudgery for the sake of drudgery. If the lessons had been even remotely challenging, it would have been drudgery for the sake of mastering new skills, which isn't so bad.
Also note that society is constantly looking for creative and intellegent ways to reduce that drudgery to the minimum. My electric bill automatically deducts itself from my checking account (which my paycheck automatically deposits into). Homework is ineffecient by design, it's just supposed to use up time.
>I knew a lot of people in highschool who were extremely intelligent but never applied themselves for reasons similar to what you say--it's stupid, the teachers are dumb, too easy, not worth your time, etc.
Well, radicall idea here, maybe we should make lessions that aren't stupid, taught by smart teachers, that are challenging and worth the time to do. Maybe then students like me wouldn't get a bad attitude about it and do so poorly when we reach college.
You must have gone to much different schools than me. When I was in public schools, I easily got 95-100% on all tests without doing any homework, opening the textbook, or doing anything other than half-heartedly listening to the teachers lecure.
Math was especially true in this regard, math homework was nothing more than endless repetition of braindead problems designed to wear down your spirit and break you as a human being. Dispite being easy enough for a retarded monkey to do, math homework took a couple hours to complete each night just from sheer volume. That's why I stopped doing it in 4th grade. Depending on the teacher, this meant I got either an A (due to near perfect test performance) or an F (due to 0 homework turned in) throughout the rest of my primary and secondary schooling.
It took me a while to figure out how "solid state drives" could in any way be "crackpot". My first reaction was "I've never even heard of a non-solid state drive in this day and age!" I actually had to RTFA to figure it out.
They meant computer storage drives...
not motor control drives...
which are what I work on for a living.
But how many people do leave their hometowns? How many of us joined the military, went to a far away university, or got a job in "the big city" because we hated our families and/or the people in the town we grew up in? How often do people move somewhere new to "reboot" and get away from old fueds/relationships that went bad/embarrasing things they did in the past? How many people felt the didn't fit in where they were born and moved elsewhere to someplace where the culture matched their pesonality better? How many of us geeks in the USA started dating women from Asia after discovering U.S. women didn't want us?
Now imagine that you can never get away from your overbearing family, nor can you escape the stupid majority religion/culture/values of the dumb small town you grew up in, you can never make a fresh start in a new city when you want to get away from the past, and if you don't fit in here and local girls don't like your type you're just stuck with it. I think depression would be pretty common.
Whether of not you agree with either side, do the states stand a chance of this resistance actually flying constitutionally? It seems to me that the Supremecy Clause of the Constitution, combined with one of the enumerated powers of Congress makes this a slam dunk for the Feds. As to enumerated powers, you can make a much stronger case that ID cards are part of Interstate Commerce than growing cannabis plants for personal consuption is, and the Feds still control that with the full support of the Supreme Court.
That is totally wrong and backwards. I don't have a Webster's to check, but if you're right then that means they're wrong too. And that really annoys me. During the '80s (when I was in school) "nerds" were high-IQ, computer-using, Star-Trek-loving, brainiacs. "Geeks" were anyone so uncool that a regular person would be embarassed to be seen with then. Technically, "nerd" was a subset of "geek", but "geek" was usually reserved for the "special" kids that literally rode the short bus to school (or someone that you metaforically wanted to compare to the devolopmentally disabled).
Sometime in the mid to late '90s, people started using them backwards. At the same time, the stereotype changed from "90 pound weakling that dresses too nicely and will probably get rich by inventing new technology" to "300 pound loser with a stained shirt who never showers and lives in his parents basement". The annoys me too, when did we change from "Professor Frink" into "The Comic Book Guy"?
What great advice:
Step 1: Decide what kind of friends you want and make a plan to make these types of friends....
So to make friends, my first step is to figure out a plan for how to make friend. Gee thanks, if I knew how to do that I would already be able to make friends on my own.
Next WikiHow: How to get rich
Step 1: Decide how much money you want to have and make a plan for how to get it....
I've got a question for for you. Where do you go that you meet all these intellegent interesting people?
I have been thinking recently of joining Mensa (I assume I can pass their test, I always scored about 3 S.D.s above the mean on I.Q. tests as a kid) because other than a few coworkers, I haven't had any friends or social life since I graduated from my University (5 years ago). I don't socialize well with regular people. I'm mature enough to admit that they aren't inferior, but they still like to talk about things I find uncomfortable or boring, and I like to talk about things they find boring or wierd. Plus high IQ people and regular people just have a different way of doing/discussing things and have different cultural references (Simpsons, Star Trek, Slashdot etc...). I can "fake" my way through an hour or two of conversation with them, but its really unplesant for me.
Anyway I had been considering it because I just don't see any other avenues to finding other people that I would be confortable socializing with. I went to a pretty selective University known for its Engineering programs, and while I was there it was so wonderful to have a wide circle of friends and aquaintances. Since graduating though there just hasn't been anything around my new home that would enable me to meet others like myself.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never understood how the hell the "fly" on underwear is supposed to work anyway. Looking at how it's contructed, I would first have to shift my penis way over to the left to go in the inside hole. Then I need to make a 90 degree turn (ouch!) to the right. Then snake my, er, snake through the tunnel between the two flaps. Depending on how cold it is, I'm not sure I'd always have enough length to make it to the end of this tunnel. Then I'd have to make another 90 degree turn (!) to the left to exit out the outer hole. And then try to pee through a penis that has two 90 degree bends in it.
Yeah, that's way easier than pulling down the elastic band a bit.
Oh come off it. Are you seriously implying that the public schools are in some way helpful or educational? What you "learn" in primary/secondary school is just the official regurgitation of the stuff you already discovered for yourself by reading books, watching PBS (in later years - the Discovery Channel, etc) and playing with your parents calculators and computers. Real education in stuff you wouldn't learn on your own through curiousity doesn't begin until college.
You could make the "system" arguement and say "high school is BS but you need it to get into college" but that's BS too. I didn't have any trouble getting into a great engineering school dispite bad high school grades (I was defiant, could you guess?, and wouldn't do homework). Worst case you take a year or two of junior college then transfer.
The only mission of the public schools is to break you and turn you into obedient drones who will obey their supervisor and be good robotic workers in the factory. Hence the enphasis on respect your teacher. The ultimate irony, in my opinion as an adult looking back, is that being an obedient drone is not the path to success in life. The drones just get stepped on and exploited.
I have two major problems with copyright. The first is philosophical - nobody else gets to control their works after they've sold them. If build a chair and sell it to you, it is legally and morally yours, I gave up any claim to it when I sold it. Only in the realm of information can you sell me something and still exercise control over it.
The second problem I have is cultural. I want to encourage derivative creations. Why re-invent the wheel every time you want to tell a story (or whatever) when we have abundant cultural references and materials already? As an example, think of all the King Arthor books/movies/stories around. They would be much more cumbersome if each of these stories had to start from scratch with new characters and establish "this one is noble, that one is pure-hearted, this other guy is a mysterious wizard, oh and King Fred is wise and nobel but he made a tragic mistake and slept with his sister and is trying to atone for it, yada, yada, yada." Since there is no copyright on Arthian legends, you just have to name the character King Arthor and everyone knows what he's basically about. Could you even make Monty Python's "Holy Grail" if you didn't already know what Lancelot was supposed to be like and see it contrasted with the silly, overdamatic Lancelot in the spoof?
And as a coralary to my second point, how do you think stories like King Arthor were formed? I would submit that story tellers added, moddified, and embellished stories over generations. Different versions cropped up (for example did Aurthor get Excaliber from the Lady of the Lake, or did he pull it out of the stone?) and much like open source software, the more popular forks of the story got developed further while the crappy versions died out. I would like to see this sort of iterative creativity in our culture too - how about Star Wars Prequels without Jar-Jar ("The Phantom Edit") or with non-stupid dialog supplanting the George Lucas vesions?
I can accept that this is not a perfect world, and that a short-term limited copyright may be an acceptable compromise. But thats all it is, a compromise with harsh reality, not the ideal situation.
Why does it just have to be one company? You write a law that says "insurance companies must insure everyone who walks in the door at at the same rate" (each company can set its own rate, it just has to offer the same rate to anyone that signs up for that particular coverage plan). Then the insurance company profiles humanity in general to find the average cost of health care per capita and charges a little bit more. This implements Universal Health Care without making the government do it (which we all know is socialism and is teh evil).
The more I think of it, the more I like it. It incetivizes the companies to be efficeit (to lower their costs so they can lower thier premiums to attact more customers) which the government would not be. And it still allows some freedom of priorities as you could choose a company based on say their reputation for good customer service or elect to pay more for plans that offer red-carpet hospitals with mints on the pillows or wacky hippie plans that cover herbalists and holistic healers. And the miserely libertaians can decide not to pay for services they don't use and wait until they are hospitalized to be hit with the bill.
All in all, this would be a pretty good solution.
>Meanwhile my water heater takes up 5.5 kilowatts, nearly a thousand times more.
Dude, you have an electric water heater?!?!?! You must be spending more money than Bill Gates. Why not get a gas one like everyone else?
Adult life restrictive? I don't get how anyone can possibly be nostalgic about teenage life. It is all obligations and no rewards. You have far more responsibilies and obligations as a teen than as an adult. Basically as an adult I have to go to work and pay my bills (and this time of year, my taxes). And my bills actually get paid automatically, I just need to insure that my bank account stays topped off, so really doing my job is my only responsibility.
That would be the job that I can leave anytime I want if I find a job that's more to my liking. The one that I choose because I liked to technical and work/lifestyle aspects of. The one that pays me huge gobs of money because I once threatened to leave and work for the competition.
As a teenager, you have to go to school (under threat of criminal prosecution), do all your homework, do whatever chores your parents randomly assign, go to whatever lame weddings/reunions/family trips/etc. your parents randomly force on you. And for this you get no pay, own no property (except what your parents charitably give you, which they take away randomly) and you have to live with uncofortable relationships with your family that you can't leave or renegotiate in a house of their choosing in a city chosen for thier work/lifestyle ideals.
Screw all that! In the 16+ years since I turned 18, life just gets better and better. I live in a house that I chose, in a location that I chose, maintain what relationships I feel are worthwhile (which includes my parents, its much easier to live with them when I don't have to literally live with them), clean my home when I feel the mess bothers me more than the effort to clean it, own whatever property is valuable enough to me; all paid for by the job I chose under the conditions that I negotiated (and re-negotiated) from a position of strength.
I just don't see anything good about life as a teenager, which was living under constant threat of random punishment for not doing meaningless things you should never have to do in the first place. And getting nothing for it.
I read the headline with the words "Venom" and "Web" and thought the article was about Spider-Man.
>If you are not responsible enough to get in legally (which is not hard at all) then we don't want you here.
Oh, tell me how it's "not hard at all" to come here legally. I've looked into it, and for most people it is basically impossible to ever come here legally. You're pretty damn lucky if you can even get a non-immigrant visa to visit the USA. I've got a girlfriend from another country, basically if I get engaged to her, she can come (although all my friends who've done the same thing recommend getting an immigration lawyer, as the government will give you the runnaround and repeatedly deny the application otherwise). If she doesn't marry me there is no possible legal route for her to immigrate here.
Thanks, I don't have anyhting on the computer with a spell-checker, and tried dozens of spellings, none of which looked right. It was driving me nuts trying to remember how that word was supposed to be spelled. Now I can relax again.
Guilty as charged, I was never as good at spelling as math. I agree with you completely about their being many shades and types of smart. The question is why was I being assigned 100s of multiplication problems when I could easily demonstrate proficiency in it? Maybe I should have been using that time to learn to spell better.
Instead I learned the lession that homework is just a waste of time designed to wear me down and drill obedience into my head and I resisted doing it. That lesson did not serve me very well when I got to college and homework actually was about building skills that you couldn't pick up instantly.
I think the other 2 respondants covered my objections to learning by rote wonderfully, but I'd like to add 2 more things.
In the 24 years of using multiplication since my 4th grade experiences, I still don't have all the multiplication tables "wired" in my head as you suggest. As I said, 7s are tough, I usually double the number, then double it again (to get 4x) then tripple the original number, and add them together. I guess I'd better give back my engineering degree, close up my bank account, and declare myself a failure in life. Oops no, it turns out using basic algeabra in my head is a perfectly adequate solution that renders rote memorization of every possible multiplication problem a waste of time!
I also wanted to add that there's nothing wrong with being lazy, it takes a couple seconds to use my method to calculate 15% and if there was a calculator already out and available I'd use it instead. Who am I trying to impress by doing it in my head? I just want the answer.
I'd like to add that even atheists still have a predisposition to beleiving in god. Its the old "there are no atheists in a foxhole" syndrome. When times get desperate, many atheists will try to pray and I know I have caught myself getting in angry arguements with "God" dispite denighing his existance. We just think our predisposition to believing is a stupid irational human flaw (like being afraid of the dark or getting nervious on a first date) and try to surpress it.
After all, people are predisposed to thinking of the earth as flat, that doesn't mean its actually true.
But there is nothing to get better at! Once you've done a couple dozen multiplication problems, you can do multiplication perfectly. Calculating a 15% tip is easy, you move the decimal point over one (to get ten pecent, if you're not too concerned about precision you just drop the last digit) then you halve that number (to get 5%) and add the 2 together. Anyone who reaches for a calculator to do that is just being lazy. There is nothing even remotely hard about that problem. Multiplying by 7 is rougher to do in your head, but still no big deal. What exactly are you going to practice? There is nothing to get better at. Maybe instead of spending 1-2 hours per day for months in 4th grade on multiplication, they could move on to division, fractions/decimals and then into basic algebra and quadradic equations etc. But instead they make you practice to improve a skill you can already do perfectly.
In my elementary school experience, they never really graded the homework anyway. The just collected it and gave you a 10 (out of ten) if you turned it in complete (you got a 5 if it was only half-done, etc). Then the total of all homework was 50% of your grade, since "working hard" was more important than "learning".
>Understanding how a math problem is solved is very important, but actually sitting down and solving 4 or 5 samples of increasing complexity nails it down for good.
4 or 5 samples, sure. But when I was in 4th grade learning multiplication, the standard was 20-30 samples. Per day. For the entire academic year.
4-5 math problems wouldn't be homework, it would be jot-it-down-in-a-few-minutes work. When I was in late elementary / early jr. high, my school district's standard was 1 hour of homework per subject every day. That meant 5 hours of work per night, minimum (there were 6 subjects, but P.E. didn't generate homework).
It varies a bit by school district, but gennerally the accademic year that you turn 6 years old is when you start "Kindergarden", which is a half day of learning the Alphabet and maybe some fingerpainting or sing-alongs. Then next year (when you turn 7) is "first grade" and then it continues through "12th grade" (when you turn 18) which is the end of secondary education.
So age = grade + 5 or 6 years. Occationally they let extra bright kids skip ahead one grade or hold back a student that performed poorly, but both are very rare.
Spot-on! Math homework was the absolute worst and I spent much of my life thinking math was stupid and useless (and now I'm an Elecrical Engineer!).
Multiplication is not a hard thing, yet we spent 1-2 hours per day on multiplication homework for the entire 4th grade year to learn a skill that really takes maybe a few days to master completely. I simply stopped doing all homework in the 4th grade, which meant for the rest of my elementary, junoir high, and high school I got either A's (based on my test scores) or F's (based on my homework). I had to repeat many classes until I got a teacher that graded on tests more than homework.
As a kid, I figured the best way to teach math would be by computer (we had some early experimental computers that taught math lessions at one of my schools in the gifted program, but we were never graded on the computer lessons). The computer would be programmed to move along once you could consistantly solve that type of problem (though it would randomly review old concepts to make sure you hadn't forgotten). That way the work would be individually tailored automattically.
But here in real life, we only do the rote drudgery that is advantagous to us. I pay my electric bill so I continue to get electricity and don't have to pay more later. Homework was just drudgery for the sake of drudgery. If the lessons had been even remotely challenging, it would have been drudgery for the sake of mastering new skills, which isn't so bad.
Also note that society is constantly looking for creative and intellegent ways to reduce that drudgery to the minimum. My electric bill automatically deducts itself from my checking account (which my paycheck automatically deposits into). Homework is ineffecient by design, it's just supposed to use up time.
>I knew a lot of people in highschool who were extremely intelligent but never applied themselves for reasons similar to what you say--it's stupid, the teachers are dumb, too easy, not worth your time, etc.Well, radicall idea here, maybe we should make lessions that aren't stupid, taught by smart teachers, that are challenging and worth the time to do. Maybe then students like me wouldn't get a bad attitude about it and do so poorly when we reach college.
You must have gone to much different schools than me. When I was in public schools, I easily got 95-100% on all tests without doing any homework, opening the textbook, or doing anything other than half-heartedly listening to the teachers lecure.
Math was especially true in this regard, math homework was nothing more than endless repetition of braindead problems designed to wear down your spirit and break you as a human being. Dispite being easy enough for a retarded monkey to do, math homework took a couple hours to complete each night just from sheer volume. That's why I stopped doing it in 4th grade. Depending on the teacher, this meant I got either an A (due to near perfect test performance) or an F (due to 0 homework turned in) throughout the rest of my primary and secondary schooling.
It took me a while to figure out how "solid state drives" could in any way be "crackpot". My first reaction was "I've never even heard of a non-solid state drive in this day and age!" I actually had to RTFA to figure it out.
They meant computer storage drives...
not motor control drives...
which are what I work on for a living.
D'oh!
But how many people do leave their hometowns? How many of us joined the military, went to a far away university, or got a job in "the big city" because we hated our families and/or the people in the town we grew up in? How often do people move somewhere new to "reboot" and get away from old fueds/relationships that went bad/embarrasing things they did in the past? How many people felt the didn't fit in where they were born and moved elsewhere to someplace where the culture matched their pesonality better? How many of us geeks in the USA started dating women from Asia after discovering U.S. women didn't want us?
Now imagine that you can never get away from your overbearing family, nor can you escape the stupid majority religion/culture/values of the dumb small town you grew up in, you can never make a fresh start in a new city when you want to get away from the past, and if you don't fit in here and local girls don't like your type you're just stuck with it. I think depression would be pretty common.
Whether of not you agree with either side, do the states stand a chance of this resistance actually flying constitutionally? It seems to me that the Supremecy Clause of the Constitution, combined with one of the enumerated powers of Congress makes this a slam dunk for the Feds. As to enumerated powers, you can make a much stronger case that ID cards are part of Interstate Commerce than growing cannabis plants for personal consuption is, and the Feds still control that with the full support of the Supreme Court.
That is totally wrong and backwards. I don't have a Webster's to check, but if you're right then that means they're wrong too. And that really annoys me. During the '80s (when I was in school) "nerds" were high-IQ, computer-using, Star-Trek-loving, brainiacs. "Geeks" were anyone so uncool that a regular person would be embarassed to be seen with then. Technically, "nerd" was a subset of "geek", but "geek" was usually reserved for the "special" kids that literally rode the short bus to school (or someone that you metaforically wanted to compare to the devolopmentally disabled).
Sometime in the mid to late '90s, people started using them backwards. At the same time, the stereotype changed from "90 pound weakling that dresses too nicely and will probably get rich by inventing new technology" to "300 pound loser with a stained shirt who never showers and lives in his parents basement". The annoys me too, when did we change from "Professor Frink" into "The Comic Book Guy"?
Step 1: Decide what kind of friends you want and make a plan to make these types of friends....
So to make friends, my first step is to figure out a plan for how to make friend. Gee thanks, if I knew how to do that I would already be able to make friends on my own.
Next WikiHow: How to get rich
Step 1: Decide how much money you want to have and make a plan for how to get it....
I've got a question for for you. Where do you go that you meet all these intellegent interesting people?
I have been thinking recently of joining Mensa (I assume I can pass their test, I always scored about 3 S.D.s above the mean on I.Q. tests as a kid) because other than a few coworkers, I haven't had any friends or social life since I graduated from my University (5 years ago). I don't socialize well with regular people. I'm mature enough to admit that they aren't inferior, but they still like to talk about things I find uncomfortable or boring, and I like to talk about things they find boring or wierd. Plus high IQ people and regular people just have a different way of doing/discussing things and have different cultural references (Simpsons, Star Trek, Slashdot etc...). I can "fake" my way through an hour or two of conversation with them, but its really unplesant for me.
Anyway I had been considering it because I just don't see any other avenues to finding other people that I would be confortable socializing with. I went to a pretty selective University known for its Engineering programs, and while I was there it was so wonderful to have a wide circle of friends and aquaintances. Since graduating though there just hasn't been anything around my new home that would enable me to meet others like myself.