Yes, that's why I said "want to be fancy." The tech or trade schools were usually called "institutes of technology" but a few years ago they decided to rename themselves polytechnics, which are traditionally engineering focused universities.
I majored in computer science but I also did quite a bit of physics, math, history, English, psych, and music. I certainly appreciated the opportunity, and things I was sure I was taking just for interest sake keep coming in handy.
Hey, we have those! We call them "tech schools" or, if you want to be fancy, polytechnics. They teach things like welding, power engineering, plumbing, electrical, etc. Programs are one or two years, or sometimes shorter.
The real problem is that so many of us are so rich that we can spend four years of our lives "finding ourselves" at university, but we're also so whiney we can't see it as a great triumph of modern civilization but rather complain that the university didn't teach us anything useful in the courses we chose.
Strange that you picked probably the one required of everyone course that shouldn't be made machine gradable.
English 101 is supposed to teach you to read and to write well. It's not (or shouldn't be) a spelling test. Basic English capability is usually tested by an English as a second language or English equivalency test, which are massively standardized, machine gradable, and almost free to administer.
People are crap at statistics. Particularly when they're doing them with their guts.
Strangely enough, it's a characteristic that actually seemed to serve us well in the jungle. Most other animals have it to. Skinner did an experiment when he gave a group of pigeons random reinforcement - they'd get some food at random intervals, completely unrelated to their behaviour.
He ended up with superstitious pigeons that would dance around, weave their heads and do all sorts of crazy things, believing that behaviour was getting them food.
Unless of course you do your degree in something that's actually relevant to what you're going to be doing, and pay attention while you're doing it.
A big part of my PhD ended up being algorithm optimization, which I knew how to do and was halfway good at because I spent six hours every Tuesday in an hour and a half class, hour and a half seminar and three hour lab (whoever scheduled that hated us) taking Computer Science 235 - Algorithms and Optimization.
Lots of people go to university and take whatever interests them, which is great - that's part of what a university education is for. I took music, history and psych too, none of which have turned out to be essential. But you certainly can learn useful things as an undergraduate.
Businesses who regard degrees only as certification of not being an idiot are really looking for responsible high school grads they can train, but are using the degree as a filter.
If you make shit up (i.e. you lie) then people won't listen to you even when you're not making shit up. Throwing in words like "salient" and using semicolons incorrectly doesn't help either.
You might have a good point. I have no idea. I stopped reading when your argument seemed to hinge around us poisoning ourselves with carbon dioxide. At that point you're just another kook.
When I was in grade eight I used to get sick preferentially on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It didn't take my mother long to figure out those were the days I had health class, taught by the evil principle.
Recoverable oil estimates from the Alberta oil sands alone are about 173 billion barrels. That's at $62-$69 per barrel, and it appears to assume a 20% recovery rate. Oil in the spring of 2008 was over $133 / barrel with no appreciable drop in demand, and oil companies using current technology have demonstrated over 60% recovery. It's not unreasonable to speculate that, if we were to keep going on oil, we could get well over half a trillion barrels out at prices not too different from what we've already seen. Maybe much more, with new technology and if prices rise a bit. Again, rises in the price of oil don't seem to slow down consumption much. The total reserve is estimated at more like three trillion barrels. Venezuela also has extensive tar sands. We're not exactly out of conventional oil either.
I couldn't find the amount of oil we've already used, but IIRC it is in the trillion barrel range. If we have managed to change global climate enough to significantly damage ourselves by burning a trillion barrels of oil in a hundred years, it seems there's quite enough left to hurt ourselves with. Another trillion barrels in the next thirty years (if consumption doesn't increase) for example.
At our current consumption rate we've also got an estimated 132 more years of coal. Again, by current estimates, more than enough to hurt ourselves with.
I doubt it's necessary. A good fraction of those houses probably have the free wifi routers that all the (one) DSL providers give out. Most of the rest are undoubtedly bathed in cell phone signals.
But, don't cha know, the wireless internet we have at home isn't the same as that scary wifi they're putting in schools, eh!
No, I'm not. You missed my point. The low power of the wifi is the more relevant factor. If you cranked up your wifi transmitter to ridiculous levels you could potentially cause the reported symptoms, through heating, and they would go away when you went home. If you cranked up an ionizing radiation source enough to cause those symptoms, they wouldn't conveniently go away on the weekend. They'd also get worse and worse.
You're thinking of sudden, short term exposure to very high intensities. In that case there are lots of things that will cook before your brain will.
I'm thinking more of the gentle warming situation. Yes, your brain has lots of blood vessels. Which go to the rest of your body. Which is also being irradiated and warmed. Of course, you can get the same effect by raising the thermostat a few degrees or sitting close to too many incandescent light bulbs. People who are too warm do tend to have more trouble concentrating. I seriously doubt anybody is showing actual heat stroke symptoms.
Absolutely, the whole thing is ridiculous, but if you're willing to ignore reality, the warmed-by-RF hypothesis is more plausible than the zapped-by-ionizing-radiation one.
"Low intensity" is also easier to explain in a sound bite than "non-ionizing."
There's quite a lot of accessible coal. We've got lots of oil left to in tar sands too. The "oh no, it's running out!" usually refers to easily accessible liquid oil you can pump out of the ground instead of having to mine.
The problem is the unpleasant effects of climate change. You're right. Unfortunately, a sun shade is not a solution - it's a delay tactic. You can't keep blocking out more and more sun because we use it for a few other things besides keeping us warm. Growing food comes to mind.
I'm all for having the cake and eating it too, but putting up a sun shade and continuing to burn fossil fuels the way we do isn't the way to do it.
You could always have it track the surface. If the shade is in geosychronous orbit and always pointed down it's not going to block a lot of sun outside the target area because when the sun is shining at an angle to the surface it's also going to be shining at an angle to the shade.
Hm... put that study together with the other one about Fox News viewers believing things that aren't true and you get... more Republicans than Democrats believe things that aren't true?
So where are all the Republicans anyway? Do they all watch yet another network, or do they just not watch the news?
It sounds like they're using wifi as a shortcut to hook up the lab computers. No need to run a zillion cables, just drop a wireless router in the lab somewhere.
Having once wired my high school with ethernet, it actually sounds like an excellent idea. Even better when you consider that the ceiling tiles in my high school were made with asbestos.
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Yes, that's why I said "want to be fancy." The tech or trade schools were usually called "institutes of technology" but a few years ago they decided to rename themselves polytechnics, which are traditionally engineering focused universities.
I majored in computer science but I also did quite a bit of physics, math, history, English, psych, and music. I certainly appreciated the opportunity, and things I was sure I was taking just for interest sake keep coming in handy.
Hey, we have those! We call them "tech schools" or, if you want to be fancy, polytechnics. They teach things like welding, power engineering, plumbing, electrical, etc. Programs are one or two years, or sometimes shorter.
The real problem is that so many of us are so rich that we can spend four years of our lives "finding ourselves" at university, but we're also so whiney we can't see it as a great triumph of modern civilization but rather complain that the university didn't teach us anything useful in the courses we chose.
Strange that you picked probably the one required of everyone course that shouldn't be made machine gradable.
English 101 is supposed to teach you to read and to write well. It's not (or shouldn't be) a spelling test. Basic English capability is usually tested by an English as a second language or English equivalency test, which are massively standardized, machine gradable, and almost free to administer.
People are crap at statistics. Particularly when they're doing them with their guts.
Strangely enough, it's a characteristic that actually seemed to serve us well in the jungle. Most other animals have it to. Skinner did an experiment when he gave a group of pigeons random reinforcement - they'd get some food at random intervals, completely unrelated to their behaviour.
He ended up with superstitious pigeons that would dance around, weave their heads and do all sorts of crazy things, believing that behaviour was getting them food.
Unless of course you do your degree in something that's actually relevant to what you're going to be doing, and pay attention while you're doing it.
A big part of my PhD ended up being algorithm optimization, which I knew how to do and was halfway good at because I spent six hours every Tuesday in an hour and a half class, hour and a half seminar and three hour lab (whoever scheduled that hated us) taking Computer Science 235 - Algorithms and Optimization.
Lots of people go to university and take whatever interests them, which is great - that's part of what a university education is for. I took music, history and psych too, none of which have turned out to be essential. But you certainly can learn useful things as an undergraduate.
Businesses who regard degrees only as certification of not being an idiot are really looking for responsible high school grads they can train, but are using the degree as a filter.
Yup. It sounded like a bad idea to start with. That sentence destroyed any remaining doubt.
You completely missed the point, didn't you?
If you make shit up (i.e. you lie) then people won't listen to you even when you're not making shit up. Throwing in words like "salient" and using semicolons incorrectly doesn't help either.
You might have a good point. I have no idea. I stopped reading when your argument seemed to hinge around us poisoning ourselves with carbon dioxide. At that point you're just another kook.
When I was in grade eight I used to get sick preferentially on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It didn't take my mother long to figure out those were the days I had health class, taught by the evil principle.
Recoverable oil estimates from the Alberta oil sands alone are about 173 billion barrels. That's at $62-$69 per barrel, and it appears to assume a 20% recovery rate. Oil in the spring of 2008 was over $133 / barrel with no appreciable drop in demand, and oil companies using current technology have demonstrated over 60% recovery. It's not unreasonable to speculate that, if we were to keep going on oil, we could get well over half a trillion barrels out at prices not too different from what we've already seen. Maybe much more, with new technology and if prices rise a bit. Again, rises in the price of oil don't seem to slow down consumption much. The total reserve is estimated at more like three trillion barrels. Venezuela also has extensive tar sands. We're not exactly out of conventional oil either.
I couldn't find the amount of oil we've already used, but IIRC it is in the trillion barrel range. If we have managed to change global climate enough to significantly damage ourselves by burning a trillion barrels of oil in a hundred years, it seems there's quite enough left to hurt ourselves with. Another trillion barrels in the next thirty years (if consumption doesn't increase) for example.
At our current consumption rate we've also got an estimated 132 more years of coal. Again, by current estimates, more than enough to hurt ourselves with.
Meh. You can pull teeth. Their brain cells are radioactive! Probably their souls too.
I doubt it's necessary. A good fraction of those houses probably have the free wifi routers that all the (one) DSL providers give out. Most of the rest are undoubtedly bathed in cell phone signals.
But, don't cha know, the wireless internet we have at home isn't the same as that scary wifi they're putting in schools, eh!
No, I'm not. You missed my point. The low power of the wifi is the more relevant factor. If you cranked up your wifi transmitter to ridiculous levels you could potentially cause the reported symptoms, through heating, and they would go away when you went home. If you cranked up an ionizing radiation source enough to cause those symptoms, they wouldn't conveniently go away on the weekend. They'd also get worse and worse.
You're thinking of sudden, short term exposure to very high intensities. In that case there are lots of things that will cook before your brain will.
I'm thinking more of the gentle warming situation. Yes, your brain has lots of blood vessels. Which go to the rest of your body. Which is also being irradiated and warmed. Of course, you can get the same effect by raising the thermostat a few degrees or sitting close to too many incandescent light bulbs. People who are too warm do tend to have more trouble concentrating. I seriously doubt anybody is showing actual heat stroke symptoms.
Absolutely, the whole thing is ridiculous, but if you're willing to ignore reality, the warmed-by-RF hypothesis is more plausible than the zapped-by-ionizing-radiation one.
"Low intensity" is also easier to explain in a sound bite than "non-ionizing."
It's a good gig until someone finally manages to successfully sue a chiropractor for causing an arterial dissection. Then all hell will break loose.
There's quite a lot of accessible coal. We've got lots of oil left to in tar sands too. The "oh no, it's running out!" usually refers to easily accessible liquid oil you can pump out of the ground instead of having to mine.
The problem is the unpleasant effects of climate change. You're right. Unfortunately, a sun shade is not a solution - it's a delay tactic. You can't keep blocking out more and more sun because we use it for a few other things besides keeping us warm. Growing food comes to mind.
I'm all for having the cake and eating it too, but putting up a sun shade and continuing to burn fossil fuels the way we do isn't the way to do it.
You would do better making your point if you stuck to real issues instead of inventing scary sounding but ridiculous ones.
I don't think I'd call that a prime example. A cartoon example, maybe. Children's story example?
"By the end of WW2, we had famous "Kamikaze" bombers. Your history class fucked up here."
I'm not American so I'm curious - what is it you guys learn about the kamikaze?
"It pissed them off, too, because attacking non-combatants is an honorless act of cowardice."
Funny, wherever Japan could realistically strike enemy civilian populations in WWII, they did a pretty brutal job of it.
You could always have it track the surface. If the shade is in geosychronous orbit and always pointed down it's not going to block a lot of sun outside the target area because when the sun is shining at an angle to the surface it's also going to be shining at an angle to the shade.
Not very efficient though.
Hm... put that study together with the other one about Fox News viewers believing things that aren't true and you get... more Republicans than Democrats believe things that aren't true?
So where are all the Republicans anyway? Do they all watch yet another network, or do they just not watch the news?
Must be the nuclear reactors. ;)
Wait, I thought magnetism was good for us? Isn't that how Q-Ray turns industrial waste into attractive and healthful ionizing bracelets?
It sounds like they're using wifi as a shortcut to hook up the lab computers. No need to run a zillion cables, just drop a wireless router in the lab somewhere.
Having once wired my high school with ethernet, it actually sounds like an excellent idea. Even better when you consider that the ceiling tiles in my high school were made with asbestos.