> China may have been regarded for a time as 3rd world
If it's possible for a country to be both second world *and* third world, that's what China was, in the mid twentieth century.
> it doesn't fit the modern spin, as it's too economically powerful
China is in the process of transforming itself economically into a bastion of capitalist success. They're doing it much more gradually than e.g. South Korea did, but they ARE doing it.
> How you know that where and how you > can get malaria and how you can avoid it?
You can look specific places up on the internet, but as a rule malaria is mainly a problem in tropical and sub-tropical areas and is particularly epidemic in the third world. Africa has by far the worst problem, but southern Asia and the tropical parts of Latin America have issues with it as well. If you're planning to travel to any of those places, see a doctor at least a month ahead of time and find out what medications you ought to have. (Besides antimalarials, you'll also want vaccinations for several other tropical diseases.)
> We took a girl there and they said that > the treatment they had (and I have no > idea what it was) kept the disease at > bay, but it would eventually come back.
Yeah, Malaria does that. This is why, if you as a first-world expatriate travel to a country with a malaria problem, they tell you to keep taking the quinine pills the whole time you're there, even though they can cause nausea. You don't want to catch malaria, because there's no known permanent cure.
One antimalarial course per child won't even stop them from dying from malaria. It'll delay it for a while, but malaria will still be around when the antimalarials wear off.
Barium is much more abundant than any of the rare earth elements. (It's about as common in the earth's crust as sulfur, give or take a few percentage points.)
If we were talking about iridium, that would no doubt be done. Barium, however, isn't as rare as all that. (Barium is roughly as abundant in the Earth's crust as sulfur, give or take a few percentage points.)
The supply problem discussed in the article is a result of economic factors. Mostly, the commodity price of barium is not very much higher than what it costs to produce it, so people aren't exactly lining up to supply the stuff. This is inherently a temporary situation, because if the shortage continues for very long the commodity price will increase.
> slashdot sucks when it comes to international character support.
There's a reason for this. If Slashdot *had* foreign character support, people would *use* it. Now, sure, if they restricted themselves to occasionally using a mu in the abbreviation for micrograms, that would be alright; but if you think about it at all you know it wouldn't stop there. If Slashdot had full Unicode support, people would soon be posting comments containing not a single ASCII character in them.
It would be possible to make elaborate modifications to the lameness filter to curtail the Unicode schenanighans, but it's both easier *and* more effective to just categorically strip out everything that's not on a standard US keyboard. And thus with one fell swoop several thousand distinct kinds of lameness are completely eradicated.
> one of the concerns was that the badges > would be used to track students off-campus
Wait, so are they trying to make her _wear_ the thing even when she's not at school? THAT would be a very clear-cut case of the school overstepping their bounds.
If they're NOT doing that, I'm confused about why it matters whether the thing could be used to track her when she's off the campus. She could just not wear it when she's not at school, problem solved.
The other option is to spray a bunch of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. This would create a greenhouse effect and melt the poles (because water is a MUCH more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide), but it would also use up a bunch of water and thus counteract the rise in sea level. Results: no more ice caps plus no more desertification (in fact, the deserts would probably start to shrink) adds up to more usable land. It would be murder on the apple crop, but then again we'd be able to grow mangoes and bananas and whatnot pretty much anywhere in the world. The biggest downside would probably be that we'd have to run the AC year round instead of just 4-5 months. But new buildings could be built with just central AC (no furnace).
> The sky was brown all summer. We cleared > the layer of smoke in a plane, and the blue > of the sky came as quite a shock. I'd actually > forgotten the sky was supposed to look like that.
Oh, I know what you mean. When I was in second grade, we moved to northeastern Ohio and lived there for five years. There were no brushfires (indeed, I'm not even sure that's possible in this climate; the only time it ever gets dry enough is when it's below zero out), but where we lived the word "overcast" wasn't a short-term weather condition; it was just the climate.
When I was in seventh grade, we moved to western Michigan. We arrived after dark, but when I woke up the next morning, I went and found my camera and took pictures, because the sky was actually factually *blue*, and I wasn't sure people would believe me if they didn't see it for themselves.
I'd been thinking of the notion that the sky is blue as a sort of weird cultural symbolic thing, like how young children are taught to draw the sun with a dozen or so lines ("rays of light") going out from it in all directions, or the way storybook pictures always depict rivers in blue and white instead of brown, or the Valentine-card "heart shape" that is not in fact shaped anything like a heart at all. Everyone knows the sky is actually a dull gray color. Yet here it was actually *blue* (well, cyan -- close enough). I took pictures, so I could show people later. Only, by the time I got that roll of film developed, I'd figured out that the sky in western Michigan is like that pretty often. After about three years I was nearly used to it, and then we moved back to Ohio. (However, I'm in central Ohio now, and it's not overcast as much here as in northeastern Ohio.)
> The "yotto" prefix is almost completely irrelevant to > human experience, so you should stop worrying about it
That was exactly my point.
My entire experience with the word "metric" centers around two things, neither of which is even vaguely useful or relevant to everyday human experience.
First, in elementary school (starting in about second grade), they tried to make us memorize about three hundred of these stupid prefixes, and I could never keep them all straight. We were quizzed on them regularly for about five years. It was horrible. The only thing worse was long division, which I also hate.
Later, after the internet became a thing, I found out that Europeans have an enormous bee in their bonnet about getting Americans to convert to metric for everything. This is, if possible, even less useful than trying to cram three hundred pointless prefixes into the minds of gradeschool children.
My experience with SI units has been significantly more positive. We used those in science class, and they were convenient and much easier to work with than the imperial ones. (We actually had to do a couple of physics problems with imperial units, and it was horrible. Slugs are the worst.)
But the thing is, all those times we used SI units in science class, nobody ever uttered the word "metric", probably because if they had the students would have instantly gone on the defensive. The word "metric" has very negative associations in America.
> But again, the only units with prefixes you'll experience outside of the > sciences are centimetres, kilometres, millimetres, millilitres, and kilograms.
Americans generally know centimeters and millimeters, because every ruler we ever see has them marked along one edge. (Inches are marked on the other edge.)
Anyone who has taken a high school physics class has used a balance scale to measure things in grams and kilograms, so I happen to have a fair idea how much a kilogram is, but grams and kilograms are not units we see much in day-to-day life outside the science classroom. I think the post office officially has figures in grams for how massive a first-class letter can be before it needs additional postage, but most of us just have an intuitive notion that if it's more than about four sheets of paper in there we slap a second stamp on it to be safe. It's not like most households have equipment that can accurately measure masses that small anyway. For what it's worth, I happen to remember from physics class that the equivalent imperial unit is called the "slug", and I've NEVER seen it used in any other context, ever. Mass just isn't something we measure on a regular day-to-day basis.
Litres are well known because of the two-litre pop bottle, but millilitres are not used directly. In the sciences, of course, they use cc. I have a pretty good idea how much one cc is, because I know how big a centimeter is, but I have no clue how that relates to the litre. Outside the sciences... How much is one two-thousandth of a two-litre bottle, anyway? It's not very much to drink, I'll wager, but beyond that I really have no very clear idea. My mind can intuitively divide things approximately into fractions like a half or a third or a quarter, but one two-thousandth is well beyond the limit for that. I think the measuring spoons in my kitchen drawer actually have the number of ml printed on the handle, in smaller print, right underneath where it says how much of a teaspoon they are (an eighth, a quarter, half, etc.), but I've never bothered to study them, so I don't remember what the figures are. It's not like there are any recipes that call for some number of millilitres of something.
> Colloquial names have not disappeared in countries > that use the metric system. 250ml is a cup, 500ml is > a pint (so is 450ml, 560ml and 600ml, depending on > where you live).
Oh. Somehow I was not aware of this.
If what you say is true, then it strikes me that the US is really just as much on the metric system as anybody. All of the units we colloquially use can be easily converted to metric, should anyone happen to want to do so for any reason. In fact, I'm pretty sure the major ones are all officially defined in terms of SI units.
Why don't we just pass a law proclaiming that the United States officially does use the metric system? The law doesn't need, in terms of actual practice, to actually *require* anything of anyone. It just needs to state that, de jure, the United States is using the metric system.
Then if anybody tries to give us any flack about metric adoption, we can act all offended and pretend we have no idea what they're on about. (What do you mean, the US should use the metric system? Of course the US uses the metric system. It's the law!) I suppose we could even take a page out of China's book and require other countries' governments, if they want to engage in trade and diplomatic relations with us, to officially acknowledge that it is our position that we are using the metric system, and we could claim that this means they agree with us and that it is an international worldwide consensus that we are using the metric system.
I'm familiar with SI units. I used them in science classes, in both high school and college. I actually rather like SI. It's easy to work with, especially for science stuff. I have no particular objection to using SI.
It's the metric system that I hate. All those horrible prefixes they tried to teach us in elementary school, deca and deci and hecto and pica and yotto and dozens of others, most of which I don't remember at all, all of which serve no useful purpose except to make the list of things you have to memorize so long that nobody can actually learn it all. We will NEVER convert to that system, you hear me, NEVER. The government can pass any law it wants, but it won't matter. I will *never* measure anything in yottolitres, and they CAN'T MAKE ME.
Also, I don't have any great love for the Celsius temperature scale. For talking about the weather, Fahrenheit is perfect, and for everything else you really should be using kelvins. (Umm, okay, I do actually use oven temperatures in Fahrenheit, and I suppose Celsius would be equally okay for that, but the advantages to converting from one to the other would be negligible. It's not like I can't easily convert the oven temps on foreign recipes if I want to try them out -- although, come to think of it, I find recipes on the internet all the time, and the temps are always in Fahrenheit already, so either Americans are posting most of the English-language recipes on the internet or else somebody on the other side of the water is being a bit of a hypocrite about how important it is to use Celsius for everything.)
> If you need to calibrate a thermometer you just made > (and don't have a known good thermometer to do it > against) freezing and boiling water is a lot easier than > messing around with liquid nitrogen.
Compared to getting the air pressure in your room calibrated to exactly 101.325 KPa, I'm not sure the melting and boiling points of the material are such a big deal here.
Anyway, Celsius may be convenient for chemists, but Fahrenheit makes more sense for discussing weather, which is what normal people mostly use temperature for. Physicists, of course, use kelvins.
> It is perfectly reasonable (but generally not done) to talk in metric kilo- and milli- radians.
That is not reasonable at all, which is in fact exactly why it's not generally done.
Angle measurements are, for extremely obvious reasons, virtually always[1] expressed in terms of pi. Since 1000 is not even remotely divisible by pi, multiples of 1000 make no sense whatsoever. Furthermore, angle measurements are generally expressed modulo 2*pi (or sometimes just the absolute value is modulo 2*pi and the sign is left on).
One notable exception to this is when you're talking about windings (e.g., in topology), but then you usually use the number of whole turns instead -- multiples of 2*pi, in other words.
--- Footnote: [1] When I say "virtually always" here, I really mean "virtually always among mathematicians, when there's no need to mollycoddle an audience that doesn't even know basic trig." Obviously when you're talking to laypeople you usually use degrees, but that's neither here nor there.
On the one hand, flu shots are so inherently stupid, it boggles the mind that a *hospital* of all employers would make them mandatory. They really ought to know better. Flu shots do, to a first approximation, absolutely nothing -- they certainly have not been shown to be effective enough to warrant any kind of mandatory policy.
On the other hand, I am rather intimately familiar with the Christian faith, and it provides absolutely no valid religious grounds for refusing vaccination. Some of the cults[1] (e.g., J.W.) refuse transfusions and/or vaccinations, but I'm not aware of any legitimately Christian denomination that teaches against them, and the Bible certainly does not.
On the gripping hand, I'm not sure this case is really about flu shots at all.
--- Footnotes: [1] - I am using the word "cult" here in the theological sense -- a group that claims to be rooted in Christianity but denies core tenets of the faith (usually, the diety of Christ).
Yeah, but you still haven't caught up with me. I'm using Emacs 23.2.1. Since 23 is more than 22, clearly I'm better than you. Though I really should upgrade to version 24 one of these days.
> There is no part of the midwest that is majority non-drinkers.
I didn't say the majority were teetotal (although a *lot* of people are effectively so close to teetotal as makes no practical nevermind, particularly in the lower half or so of the middle class). What I said is, respectable people don't go to bars or otherwise let themselves be publicly associated with alcohol. Most folks who drink do so only in private -- at home, generally. Most alcoholic beverages that are sold are sold at grocery stores, where people can sort of half-hide it between the breakfast cereal and the Charmin, so nobody but the checkout clerk will notice what they bought. This is common in most smaller communities (any city small enough that people expect to routinely run into people they know just by chance) throughout Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania at least.
> Its always a negative to find out someone > has ever been to a party with alcohol.
In the Midwest, it is. Respectable people can't be publicly seen having anything to do with alcohol (as a beverage; using denatured alcohol as paint thinner or whatever is fine). It's unprofessional, like having a visible tattoo or refusing to ever bathe. You will NOT get hired for any job that requires a college degree (or many that don't), and people will not take you seriously in other contexts as well. Anyone with any amount of social acumen, as you put it, would not need to be told this. You're supposed to know this stuff, based on the fact that you live in society and pay SOME attention to how it works. (That's assuming you live here, in the Midwest. More on that point in a moment.)
Realistically, if you want people in society -- including prospective employers -- to respect you, then you have to have some measure of respect for the cultural requirements of the society you live in. The details do vary from culture to culture. In Japan, for example, there is no significant negative social stigma associated with alcohol, but heaven forfend you should ever tell your boss what you actually think about anything at all (UNLESS you are stoned out of your mind, in which case then it's fine). So maybe where you live it's different. I don't know, because I don't know where you live.
But yes, in some parts of the world being associated with drunken revelry is viewed as highly unprofessional and will definitely put a serious damper on your career plans, among other things.
> Africa has the world's fastest-growing middle class
Translation for people who didn't major in math: Africa has almost no middle class.
When something is really really small, even the tiniest amount of growth appears quite large when expressed as a percentage. It's like when I say that the game my friends and I invented is the fastest-growing game in the world, because two nights ago there were only two of us playing it, but last night we had a party and played it with eight of our friends, so it experienced 400% growth in a single night, which if we extrapolate it out (assuming we maintain the same growth rate) would be hundreds of thousands of percent growth per annum.
Now, Africa's middle class isn't quite _that_ small. In fact, I believe there are more than eight people in the middle class in Nigeria alone. Nonetheless, Africa's middle class is excruciatingly small compared to the middle class on any other inhabited continent you care to name.
Slashdot Mirror
> China may have been regarded for a time as 3rd world
If it's possible for a country to be both second world *and* third world, that's what China was, in the mid twentieth century.
> it doesn't fit the modern spin, as it's too economically powerful
China is in the process of transforming itself economically into a bastion of capitalist success. They're doing it much more gradually than e.g. South Korea did, but they ARE doing it.
> How you know that where and how you
> can get malaria and how you can avoid it?
You can look specific places up on the internet, but as a rule malaria is mainly a problem in tropical and sub-tropical areas and is particularly epidemic in the third world. Africa has by far the worst problem, but southern Asia and the tropical parts of Latin America have issues with it as well. If you're planning to travel to any of those places, see a doctor at least a month ahead of time and find out what medications you ought to have. (Besides antimalarials, you'll also want vaccinations for several other tropical diseases.)
> We took a girl there and they said that
> the treatment they had (and I have no
> idea what it was) kept the disease at
> bay, but it would eventually come back.
Yeah, Malaria does that. This is why, if you as a first-world expatriate travel to a country with a malaria problem, they tell you to keep taking the quinine pills the whole time you're there, even though they can cause nausea. You don't want to catch malaria, because there's no known permanent cure.
One antimalarial course per child won't even stop them from dying from malaria. It'll delay it for a while, but malaria will still be around when the antimalarials wear off.
Barium is much more abundant than any of the rare earth elements. (It's about as common in the earth's crust as sulfur, give or take a few percentage points.)
So, topologically speaking, a human is isomorphic to a coffee cup?
If we were talking about iridium, that would no doubt be done. Barium, however, isn't as rare as all that. (Barium is roughly as abundant in the Earth's crust as sulfur, give or take a few percentage points.)
The supply problem discussed in the article is a result of economic factors. Mostly, the commodity price of barium is not very much higher than what it costs to produce it, so people aren't exactly lining up to supply the stuff. This is inherently a temporary situation, because if the shortage continues for very long the commodity price will increase.
> slashdot sucks when it comes to international character support.
There's a reason for this. If Slashdot *had* foreign character support, people would *use* it. Now, sure, if they restricted themselves to occasionally using a mu in the abbreviation for micrograms, that would be alright; but if you think about it at all you know it wouldn't stop there. If Slashdot had full Unicode support, people would soon be posting comments containing not a single ASCII character in them.
It would be possible to make elaborate modifications to the lameness filter to curtail the Unicode schenanighans, but it's both easier *and* more effective to just categorically strip out everything that's not on a standard US keyboard. And thus with one fell swoop several thousand distinct kinds of lameness are completely eradicated.
Wouldn't it be simpler to define the kilogram in terms of the rest mass of a neutron (or maybe a proton)?
> one of the concerns was that the badges
> would be used to track students off-campus
Wait, so are they trying to make her _wear_ the thing even when she's not at school? THAT would be a very clear-cut case of the school overstepping their bounds.
If they're NOT doing that, I'm confused about why it matters whether the thing could be used to track her when she's off the campus. She could just not wear it when she's not at school, problem solved.
> everything is BIG
Australia, eh? I thought that was Texas. (Even the _vowels_ are all long in Tayksas.)
The other option is to spray a bunch of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. This would create a greenhouse effect and melt the poles (because water is a MUCH more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide), but it would also use up a bunch of water and thus counteract the rise in sea level. Results: no more ice caps plus no more desertification (in fact, the deserts would probably start to shrink) adds up to more usable land. It would be murder on the apple crop, but then again we'd be able to grow mangoes and bananas and whatnot pretty much anywhere in the world. The biggest downside would probably be that we'd have to run the AC year round instead of just 4-5 months. But new buildings could be built with just central AC (no furnace).
> The sky was brown all summer. We cleared
> the layer of smoke in a plane, and the blue
> of the sky came as quite a shock. I'd actually
> forgotten the sky was supposed to look like that.
Oh, I know what you mean. When I was in second grade, we moved to northeastern Ohio and lived there for five years. There were no brushfires (indeed, I'm not even sure that's possible in this climate; the only time it ever gets dry enough is when it's below zero out), but where we lived the word "overcast" wasn't a short-term weather condition; it was just the climate.
When I was in seventh grade, we moved to western Michigan. We arrived after dark, but when I woke up the next morning, I went and found my camera and took pictures, because the sky was actually factually *blue*, and I wasn't sure people would believe me if they didn't see it for themselves.
I'd been thinking of the notion that the sky is blue as a sort of weird cultural symbolic thing, like how young children are taught to draw the sun with a dozen or so lines ("rays of light") going out from it in all directions, or the way storybook pictures always depict rivers in blue and white instead of brown, or the Valentine-card "heart shape" that is not in fact shaped anything like a heart at all. Everyone knows the sky is actually a dull gray color. Yet here it was actually *blue* (well, cyan -- close enough). I took pictures, so I could show people later. Only, by the time I got that roll of film developed, I'd figured out that the sky in western Michigan is like that pretty often. After about three years I was nearly used to it, and then we moved back to Ohio. (However, I'm in central Ohio now, and it's not overcast as much here as in northeastern Ohio.)
> The "yotto" prefix is almost completely irrelevant to
> human experience, so you should stop worrying about it
That was exactly my point.
My entire experience with the word "metric" centers around two things, neither of which is even vaguely useful or relevant to everyday human experience.
First, in elementary school (starting in about second grade), they tried to make us memorize about three hundred of these stupid prefixes, and I could never keep them all straight. We were quizzed on them regularly for about five years. It was horrible. The only thing worse was long division, which I also hate.
Later, after the internet became a thing, I found out that Europeans have an enormous bee in their bonnet about getting Americans to convert to metric for everything. This is, if possible, even less useful than trying to cram three hundred pointless prefixes into the minds of gradeschool children.
My experience with SI units has been significantly more positive. We used those in science class, and they were convenient and much easier to work with than the imperial ones. (We actually had to do a couple of physics problems with imperial units, and it was horrible. Slugs are the worst.)
But the thing is, all those times we used SI units in science class, nobody ever uttered the word "metric", probably because if they had the students would have instantly gone on the defensive. The word "metric" has very negative associations in America.
> But again, the only units with prefixes you'll experience outside of the
> sciences are centimetres, kilometres, millimetres, millilitres, and kilograms.
Americans generally know centimeters and millimeters, because every ruler we ever see has them marked along one edge. (Inches are marked on the other edge.)
Anyone who has taken a high school physics class has used a balance scale to measure things in grams and kilograms, so I happen to have a fair idea how much a kilogram is, but grams and kilograms are not units we see much in day-to-day life outside the science classroom. I think the post office officially has figures in grams for how massive a first-class letter can be before it needs additional postage, but most of us just have an intuitive notion that if it's more than about four sheets of paper in there we slap a second stamp on it to be safe. It's not like most households have equipment that can accurately measure masses that small anyway. For what it's worth, I happen to remember from physics class that the equivalent imperial unit is called the "slug", and I've NEVER seen it used in any other context, ever. Mass just isn't something we measure on a regular day-to-day basis.
Litres are well known because of the two-litre pop bottle, but millilitres are not used directly. In the sciences, of course, they use cc. I have a pretty good idea how much one cc is, because I know how big a centimeter is, but I have no clue how that relates to the litre. Outside the sciences... How much is one two-thousandth of a two-litre bottle, anyway? It's not very much to drink, I'll wager, but beyond that I really have no very clear idea. My mind can intuitively divide things approximately into fractions like a half or a third or a quarter, but one two-thousandth is well beyond the limit for that. I think the measuring spoons in my kitchen drawer actually have the number of ml printed on the handle, in smaller print, right underneath where it says how much of a teaspoon they are (an eighth, a quarter, half, etc.), but I've never bothered to study them, so I don't remember what the figures are. It's not like there are any recipes that call for some number of millilitres of something.
> Colloquial names have not disappeared in countries
> that use the metric system. 250ml is a cup, 500ml is
> a pint (so is 450ml, 560ml and 600ml, depending on
> where you live).
Oh. Somehow I was not aware of this.
If what you say is true, then it strikes me that the US is really just as much on the metric system as anybody. All of the units we colloquially use can be easily converted to metric, should anyone happen to want to do so for any reason. In fact, I'm pretty sure the major ones are all officially defined in terms of SI units.
Why don't we just pass a law proclaiming that the United States officially does use the metric system? The law doesn't need, in terms of actual practice, to actually *require* anything of anyone. It just needs to state that, de jure, the United States is using the metric system.
Then if anybody tries to give us any flack about metric adoption, we can act all offended and pretend we have no idea what they're on about. (What do you mean, the US should use the metric system? Of course the US uses the metric system. It's the law!) I suppose we could even take a page out of China's book and require other countries' governments, if they want to engage in trade and diplomatic relations with us, to officially acknowledge that it is our position that we are using the metric system, and we could claim that this means they agree with us and that it is an international worldwide consensus that we are using the metric system.
I'm familiar with SI units. I used them in science classes, in both high school and college. I actually rather like SI. It's easy to work with, especially for science stuff. I have no particular objection to using SI.
It's the metric system that I hate. All those horrible prefixes they tried to teach us in elementary school, deca and deci and hecto and pica and yotto and dozens of others, most of which I don't remember at all, all of which serve no useful purpose except to make the list of things you have to memorize so long that nobody can actually learn it all. We will NEVER convert to that system, you hear me, NEVER. The government can pass any law it wants, but it won't matter. I will *never* measure anything in yottolitres, and they CAN'T MAKE ME.
Also, I don't have any great love for the Celsius temperature scale. For talking about the weather, Fahrenheit is perfect, and for everything else you really should be using kelvins. (Umm, okay, I do actually use oven temperatures in Fahrenheit, and I suppose Celsius would be equally okay for that, but the advantages to converting from one to the other would be negligible. It's not like I can't easily convert the oven temps on foreign recipes if I want to try them out -- although, come to think of it, I find recipes on the internet all the time, and the temps are always in Fahrenheit already, so either Americans are posting most of the English-language recipes on the internet or else somebody on the other side of the water is being a bit of a hypocrite about how important it is to use Celsius for everything.)
> If you need to calibrate a thermometer you just made
> (and don't have a known good thermometer to do it
> against) freezing and boiling water is a lot easier than
> messing around with liquid nitrogen.
Compared to getting the air pressure in your room
calibrated to exactly 101.325 KPa, I'm not sure the
melting and boiling points of the material are such
a big deal here.
Anyway, Celsius may be convenient for chemists,
but Fahrenheit makes more sense for discussing
weather, which is what normal people mostly use
temperature for. Physicists, of course, use kelvins.
> It is perfectly reasonable (but generally not done) to talk in metric kilo- and milli- radians.
That is not reasonable at all, which is in fact exactly why it's not generally done.
Angle measurements are, for extremely obvious reasons, virtually always[1] expressed in terms of pi. Since 1000 is not even remotely divisible by pi, multiples of 1000 make no sense whatsoever. Furthermore, angle measurements are generally expressed modulo 2*pi (or sometimes just the absolute value is modulo 2*pi and the sign is left on).
One notable exception to this is when you're talking about windings (e.g., in topology), but then you usually use the number of whole turns instead -- multiples of 2*pi, in other words.
---
Footnote:
[1] When I say "virtually always" here, I really mean "virtually always among mathematicians, when there's no need to mollycoddle an audience that doesn't even know basic trig." Obviously when you're talking to laypeople you usually use degrees, but that's neither here nor there.
On the one hand, flu shots are so inherently stupid, it boggles the mind that a *hospital* of all employers would make them mandatory. They really ought to know better. Flu shots do, to a first approximation, absolutely nothing -- they certainly have not been shown to be effective enough to warrant any kind of mandatory policy.
On the other hand, I am rather intimately familiar with the Christian faith, and it provides absolutely no valid religious grounds for refusing vaccination. Some of the cults[1] (e.g., J.W.) refuse transfusions and/or vaccinations, but I'm not aware of any legitimately Christian denomination that teaches against them, and the Bible certainly does not.
On the gripping hand, I'm not sure this case is really about flu shots at all.
---
Footnotes:
[1] - I am using the word "cult" here in the theological sense -- a group that claims to be rooted in Christianity but denies core tenets of the faith (usually, the diety of Christ).
Oh, and my Gecko version is 20081217. That's WAY bigger than your puny little Firefox version number. So there.
Yeah, but you still haven't caught up with me. I'm using Emacs 23.2.1. Since 23 is more than 22, clearly I'm better than you. Though I really should upgrade to version 24 one of these days.
> There is no part of the midwest that is majority non-drinkers.
I didn't say the majority were teetotal (although a *lot* of people are effectively so close to teetotal as makes no practical nevermind, particularly in the lower half or so of the middle class). What I said is, respectable people don't go to bars or otherwise let themselves be publicly associated with alcohol. Most folks who drink do so only in private -- at home, generally. Most alcoholic beverages that are sold are sold at grocery stores, where people can sort of half-hide it between the breakfast cereal and the Charmin, so nobody but the checkout clerk will notice what they bought. This is common in most smaller communities (any city small enough that people expect to routinely run into people they know just by chance) throughout Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania at least.
> Its always a negative to find out someone
> has ever been to a party with alcohol.
In the Midwest, it is. Respectable people can't be publicly seen having anything to do with alcohol (as a beverage; using denatured alcohol as paint thinner or whatever is fine). It's unprofessional, like having a visible tattoo or refusing to ever bathe. You will NOT get hired for any job that requires a college degree (or many that don't), and people will not take you seriously in other contexts as well. Anyone with any amount of social acumen, as you put it, would not need to be told this. You're supposed to know this stuff, based on the fact that you live in society and pay SOME attention to how it works. (That's assuming you live here, in the Midwest. More on that point in a moment.)
Realistically, if you want people in society -- including prospective employers -- to respect you, then you have to have some measure of respect for the cultural requirements of the society you live in. The details do vary from culture to culture. In Japan, for example, there is no significant negative social stigma associated with alcohol, but heaven forfend you should ever tell your boss what you actually think about anything at all (UNLESS you are stoned out of your mind, in which case then it's fine). So maybe where you live it's different. I don't know, because I don't know where you live.
But yes, in some parts of the world being associated with drunken revelry is viewed as highly unprofessional and will definitely put a serious damper on your career plans, among other things.
> Africa has the world's fastest-growing middle class
Translation for people who didn't major in math: Africa has almost no middle class.
When something is really really small, even the tiniest amount of growth appears quite large when expressed as a percentage. It's like when I say that the game my friends and I invented is the fastest-growing game in the world, because two nights ago there were only two of us playing it, but last night we had a party and played it with eight of our friends, so it experienced 400% growth in a single night, which if we extrapolate it out (assuming we maintain the same growth rate) would be hundreds of thousands of percent growth per annum.
Now, Africa's middle class isn't quite _that_ small. In fact, I believe there are more than eight people in the middle class in Nigeria alone. Nonetheless, Africa's middle class is excruciatingly small compared to the middle class on any other inhabited continent you care to name.