The moon is the largest drag on the earth, but not the only one. Any object off earth that doesn't orbit the earth faster than once a day will slow the earth's rotation (except maybe objects on the earth's axis of rotation.) Most of this is due to tidal drag. In addition, stuff that impacts with the earth tends, on average, to slow down the earth.
There is a class of statements, known as tautologies, that are certain.
Looking deeper, it depends on what you mean by "certain", and to what things you attempt to apply the word. I'm certain I was sitting in this chair a minute ago. I won't be certain of the very same thing tomorrow because my memory's not that good.
"Certain", used epistemologically, can refer to an extremely high degree of assuredness that some statement is true. It does not mean that it can never under any condition be shown to be wrong.
Don't fight the concept of certainty too hard, or you'll find you can't be certain that "nothing is ever certain."
More broadly, the purpose of philosophy is to deal with reality. If your philosophy leads you to the belief that true knowledge is impossible, it follows that you'll be clueless about how to act. Such a philosophy has failed, and shows itself invalid.
Alas, this explains the mess of US politics today. Vicious, power-hungry loons squeeze the country in ever more self-destructive directions, and the increasingly-deceived majority only pushes back when the damage happens too obviously, too fast.
Don't try to make your heating system "just big enough." I lived for several years in such a house, where the calculation was slightly in error. Until we made changes, the wintertime experience was frost on the inside of windows and heating bathwater in a teakettle, because the furnace couldn't make enough heat.
In hot, humid areas fans can be less than an ideal solution. There's no screen so fine that a gnat can't get through it.
Technology can improve many situations viewed as social. Population increasing too fast? Free 24 hour television. People crapping in the street? Public toilets and sewers. People racing through residential neighborhoods? Build controlled-access highways that attract fast drivers, modify local streets to make speeding difficult and unpleasant.
With enough money, properly applied technology can help. Sometimes.
Emergency vehicles aren't -- or at least shouldn't be -- built for style. A large road clearance, large suspension travel, and good design is all it takes to pass over a proper speed bump at reasonable velocities.
Speed bumps can be designed to be effective and not harm cars. The common bumps are very abrupt: a foot or two long and a few inches high. At even moderate speed they're hard on cars and passengers. Good bumps might better be described as humps: they're 5 to 20 feet long and only uncomfortable if you exceed their design speed by about 25%. Taken at the design speed, they do no damage.
For those of you who don't live in an area with a climate like LA, you might not recognize that this is pure bullshit. When it's hot in LA, the humidity is very low. I've exercised hard in LA in full sunshine when the temperature was over 100F. I've sat still in the shade in New England with 90F and 92% RH. LA was far more comfortable.
Test the teachers but don't publish the scores in a newspaper. If you are publishing the teachers' scores then publish your kids scores too.
The children's rights are already being violated by being legally forced to be in school. You're going to further violate the rights of minors by privacy invasion?
Teachers are there by choice. Publishing the teacher's scores is reporting their performance to their employer and their customer.
I've found out that in many districts the principals identify the best teachers in the school themselves and assign the worst students to them.
This is not likely to be either a common or a stable situation. Teachers like to teach good pupils. Good teachers, being smarter (generally) are better able to persuade administrators that they should get the better students and teach advanced classes.
Parents also apply pressure. Word gets out who the best teachers are, and the best parents tend to have the best students as their children, and they are the most active in demanding that their children get the best teachers.
We have absolute proof that the price of the home in which students live is the greatest determinant of success in schools.
That's so stupid, it's funny. Sure there'e a trend in that direction, but home price is not the CAUSE of success in schools. Do you think that someone in a coma can do well in school just because they live in an expensive house?
WOW is that ever scary, and in retrospect, I can see cases where what you say is true. Teachers, particularly in the humanities, can easily become the object of worship from their students. It seems that the smoother the teacher is, the more likely he is to instill subservience.
Discipline isn't a problem if kids want to learn. There are two ways to do this. One is to make the learning process entertaining (in my opinion this is difficult or impossible for some subjects.) The other is to dramatically show that learning will make the student's life better, and show it on a daily basis with regard to everything that's being taught. Self interest takes over at that point; every sane person wants his life to be better.
And if it's not going to make your life better, why the hell is it being taught?
Great pay usually requires more than just great performance. It requires entrepreurial activity. There are teachers who get great pay, but you are wearing blinders that prevent you from seeing such teachers. I'll name just one: Tony Robbins.
Most teachers only deal with a few dozen people a year. Many major corporate execs deal with millions of people. Looked at on a per customer basis, the teacher is overpaid. (Yeah, I know it's not an entirely valid basis.) My point is that most teachers have limited reponsibility because they only deal with a limited number of people, and their pay is properly limited for that reason.
Look at it full scale. We may be paying each public school teacher $50,000/year, but there are about 2,000,000 of them (USA). That's $100,000,000,000 dollars per year, and for our money we're getting really poor results. It takes a huge number of CEOs to absorb that much money.
Anyway, it's an invalid comparison. CEOs aren't like teachers, they aren't even like principles, they're like superintendents. Teachers are comparable to production-line workers.
The notion that something as politically charged and requiring the understanding of economics as the wages of teachers, could be honestly evaluated by the New York Times, is laughable.
A kindergarten teacher could, in principle, instill values and promote brain development in a manner that would improve a person's life to the extent of making it proper to pay the teacher $320,000 a year or more. However, such an analysis is deeply defective.
First, it is a static analysis. If such teachers existed, they would be snapped up by the rich and the alert upwardly-mobile, who want to give their children all the possible advantages; those special teachers would be paid appropriately. Others, those who are already teachers and many who are not, would see the amazing wages and learn to perform the same sort of services. They too would garner superb payment. In a few years this amazing state of affairs would be common knowledge, the educational practices of kindergarten teachers would be revolutionized, and hundreds of thousands of new kindergarten teachers would be flooding the market, driving prices most of the way back down. Because, face it, the personal properties required to be a great kindergarten teacher are not rare. This leads me to believe that either great teaching techniques are (a) unknown, (b) not possible, or (c) being actively suppressed.
Remember, price in a free market is determined by both supply and demand. The supply of kindergarten teachers (absent unions and coercive government requirements) is extraordinarily elastic. The pool of people with the ability to become great kindergarten teachers within a year is enormous. The pool of people capable of teaching high school physics is tiny in comparison, and takes much longer to increase.
Second, there is an almost universal misunderstanding of the word "value" in an economic context. Value is not the cost of production. Value is not the amount of good a product can do (although it may be in a different context). Value is what you "willingly" pay for something, including all those issues that at first glance don't affect value, like competition, whether you already have one, or whether you don't have enough money and consider it more important to eat breakfast. Properly understood, "value" must be used with its relation to a goal: [WRONG: education is valuable. RIGHT: education is valuable for dealing with the world.]
If schools actually start paying their best kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year, then yeah, sure, to hell with unions. Until then, however, I view them as a necessary evil.
You've just locked yourself into a vicious circle. Unions deliberately prevent standout teachers from getting paid much more than other teachers at the same level with the same seniority. If one teacher were paid $320,000/yr, the union would demand that all be paid that. If the demand were met, the school system would be bankrupt within a year. Everyone would be fired, administrators and overpaid teachers first. No more school. Furthermore, a union would actively fight a kindergarten teacher "worth" $320,000/yr, because that teacher would make the others look bad, and the others would complain because they'd have to learn something new and give up their own cherished beliefs and the fiction of their own superiority.
If you want superior education for all children, destruction of teacher's unions must come first.
If it hadn't been for those unions, I would not have grown up in a middle-class family, and I'm betting neither would you...
The middle is the middle regardless of its absolute level. You're saying, in effect, that because of unions someone else who would have been middle class is now lower class.
because those gains made by organized labor did things like create the 5-day workweek, and paid vacations, and sick leave.
That's historically and economially ignorant. Shorter days, better wages, and various benefits, are the inevitable result of improved productivity and competition for workers. If the improved productivity weren't there, the improved wages and benefits and working conditions could not be paid for and the company would go broke. No amount of bargaining or legislation can defeat economic reality.
Economically, unions are a drag on the economy, which means that overall, everybody gets less because less is produced. Union leaders aren't producing anything. People attending union meetings aren't doing anything useful at those meetings. Unions promote an adversarial relationship between members and employers, members and customers. Union leaders are constantly plotting against the employers and the country at large (tariffs, etc.).
Historically, unions have gained power through violence, the threat of violence, corruption and ties to organized crime. They have successfully promoted laws that allow unions to violate rights in a manner that no individual could get away with. (Try arresting a striker for trespass or criminal mischief).
A prime characteristic of unions is collectivism and opposition to individualism. They cause wages and advancement to be determined by job title and seniority, rather than productivity and other forms of individual merit.
It's hard to estimate the total drain that unions put on the economy, because it's more than just the immediate economic effects of inefficiency, strikes, and foul laws. Unions discourage inovation. Unions discourage hard work, because it makes the lazy look bad. Roughly, unions reduce everybody's effective wages 20% before taxes and have set back progress 15 years over the last century.
Finally, unions increase immoral personal properties: sloth, jealousy, and the use of threats and violence to achieve goals. A person who voluntarily joins a union cannot be fully moral.
To some extent, "back of the envelope" calculations show that light cannot solve the problem. Light that can be made conveniently with semiconductors has a wavelength of about half a micron, which sets a minimum for feature sizes, and chips are already using devices with features an order of magnitude smaller than that. Secondly, light from semiconductors requires a minimum voltage to generate it, and that voltage is about 1 volt. We're already running close to that 1 volt limit, so improvements below 1 volt aren't feasible for light-based logic.
For many years (45?) it's been possible, and in some cases practical, to grind/polish away the substrate. It's possible to make a wafer no thicker than the metal + active elements. "All" that's needed is a practical way to make the actual connections between two or more chips from such wafers. It sounds expersive to me, and if the chips are large, yield will be a severe problem.
Another critical dimension is gate thickness. When you speak of a 16 nm process, you are (generally) talking about the minimum dimension in the XY plane, which is usually reserved for gate length. Gate thickness is a much smaller dimension, and if I recall correctly we're already down to about 4 molecules of thickness. Quantum tunneling is a problem.
I was curious about this, and looked into it (about ten years ago). The results I got implied that an inductor Q better than 2 wasn't possible for normal processing at the transition times of interest, and the cost was poorer layout due to the space the inductor would consume on a metal layer. Overall, there might be a benefit, but it would be small and difficult to design in.
If you're doing serious scientific or engineering computing (SPICE for example), most of the old programs are still available and still run. They run faster on modern hardware.
Several things make modern programs seem slower. One is that expectations have increased; few people remember waiting several seconds for WordStar to respond while it accessed the floppy. Another is eye candy, which is very costly in terms of performance. Another, surprisingly, is better coding: Each time a programmer goes back over old code and fixes an error that only occurs for special inputs, testing for those special inputs takes time.
Another factor is that a modern computer is often very busy. The OS might be spending hours each day doing various sorts of cataloging and backup, so if you're batch processing a few dozen 4000x3000 photos while using realplay, firefox may seem to respond slowly.
Slashdot Mirror
The moon is the largest drag on the earth, but not the only one. Any object off earth that doesn't orbit the earth faster than once a day will slow the earth's rotation (except maybe objects on the earth's axis of rotation.) Most of this is due to tidal drag. In addition, stuff that impacts with the earth tends, on average, to slow down the earth.
There is a class of statements, known as tautologies, that are certain.
Looking deeper, it depends on what you mean by "certain", and to what things you attempt to apply the word. I'm certain I was sitting in this chair a minute ago. I won't be certain of the very same thing tomorrow because my memory's not that good.
"Certain", used epistemologically, can refer to an extremely high degree of assuredness that some statement is true. It does not mean that it can never under any condition be shown to be wrong.
Don't fight the concept of certainty too hard, or you'll find you can't be certain that "nothing is ever certain."
More broadly, the purpose of philosophy is to deal with reality. If your philosophy leads you to the belief that true knowledge is impossible, it follows that you'll be clueless about how to act. Such a philosophy has failed, and shows itself invalid.
Alas, this explains the mess of US politics today. Vicious, power-hungry loons squeeze the country in ever more self-destructive directions, and the increasingly-deceived majority only pushes back when the damage happens too obviously, too fast.
Don't try to make your heating system "just big enough." I lived for several years in such a house, where the calculation was slightly in error. Until we made changes, the wintertime experience was frost on the inside of windows and heating bathwater in a teakettle, because the furnace couldn't make enough heat.
In hot, humid areas fans can be less than an ideal solution. There's no screen so fine that a gnat can't get through it.
PCs had color before Mac.
In general you can't solve social problems with technological means....better highway engineering
Technology can improve many situations viewed as social. Population increasing too fast? Free 24 hour television. People crapping in the street? Public toilets and sewers. People racing through residential neighborhoods? Build controlled-access highways that attract fast drivers, modify local streets to make speeding difficult and unpleasant.
With enough money, properly applied technology can help. Sometimes.
Emergency vehicles aren't -- or at least shouldn't be -- built for style. A large road clearance, large suspension travel, and good design is all it takes to pass over a proper speed bump at reasonable velocities.
Speed bumps can be designed to be effective and not harm cars. The common bumps are very abrupt: a foot or two long and a few inches high. At even moderate speed they're hard on cars and passengers. Good bumps might better be described as humps: they're 5 to 20 feet long and only uncomfortable if you exceed their design speed by about 25%. Taken at the design speed, they do no damage.
For those of you who don't live in an area with a climate like LA, you might not recognize that this is pure bullshit. When it's hot in LA, the humidity is very low. I've exercised hard in LA in full sunshine when the temperature was over 100F. I've sat still in the shade in New England with 90F and 92% RH. LA was far more comfortable.
The children's rights are already being violated by being legally forced to be in school. You're going to further violate the rights of minors by privacy invasion?
Teachers are there by choice. Publishing the teacher's scores is reporting their performance to their employer and their customer.
This is not likely to be either a common or a stable situation. Teachers like to teach good pupils. Good teachers, being smarter (generally) are better able to persuade administrators that they should get the better students and teach advanced classes.
Parents also apply pressure. Word gets out who the best teachers are, and the best parents tend to have the best students as their children, and they are the most active in demanding that their children get the best teachers.
That's so stupid, it's funny. Sure there'e a trend in that direction, but home price is not the CAUSE of success in schools. Do you think that someone in a coma can do well in school just because they live in an expensive house?
Idiot
WOW is that ever scary, and in retrospect, I can see cases where what you say is true. Teachers, particularly in the humanities, can easily become the object of worship from their students. It seems that the smoother the teacher is, the more likely he is to instill subservience.
Discipline isn't a problem if kids want to learn. There are two ways to do this. One is to make the learning process entertaining (in my opinion this is difficult or impossible for some subjects.) The other is to dramatically show that learning will make the student's life better, and show it on a daily basis with regard to everything that's being taught. Self interest takes over at that point; every sane person wants his life to be better.
And if it's not going to make your life better, why the hell is it being taught?
Have you ever listened to someone from Boston speak?
Great pay usually requires more than just great performance. It requires entrepreurial activity. There are teachers who get great pay, but you are wearing blinders that prevent you from seeing such teachers. I'll name just one: Tony Robbins.
Most teachers only deal with a few dozen people a year. Many major corporate execs deal with millions of people. Looked at on a per customer basis, the teacher is overpaid. (Yeah, I know it's not an entirely valid basis.) My point is that most teachers have limited reponsibility because they only deal with a limited number of people, and their pay is properly limited for that reason.
Look at it full scale. We may be paying each public school teacher $50,000/year, but there are about 2,000,000 of them (USA). That's $100,000,000,000 dollars per year, and for our money we're getting really poor results. It takes a huge number of CEOs to absorb that much money.
Anyway, it's an invalid comparison. CEOs aren't like teachers, they aren't even like principles, they're like superintendents. Teachers are comparable to production-line workers.
The notion that something as politically charged and requiring the understanding of economics as the wages of teachers, could be honestly evaluated by the New York Times, is laughable.
A kindergarten teacher could, in principle, instill values and promote brain development in a manner that would improve a person's life to the extent of making it proper to pay the teacher $320,000 a year or more. However, such an analysis is deeply defective.
First, it is a static analysis. If such teachers existed, they would be snapped up by the rich and the alert upwardly-mobile, who want to give their children all the possible advantages; those special teachers would be paid appropriately. Others, those who are already teachers and many who are not, would see the amazing wages and learn to perform the same sort of services. They too would garner superb payment. In a few years this amazing state of affairs would be common knowledge, the educational practices of kindergarten teachers would be revolutionized, and hundreds of thousands of new kindergarten teachers would be flooding the market, driving prices most of the way back down. Because, face it, the personal properties required to be a great kindergarten teacher are not rare. This leads me to believe that either great teaching techniques are (a) unknown, (b) not possible, or (c) being actively suppressed.
Remember, price in a free market is determined by both supply and demand. The supply of kindergarten teachers (absent unions and coercive government requirements) is extraordinarily elastic. The pool of people with the ability to become great kindergarten teachers within a year is enormous. The pool of people capable of teaching high school physics is tiny in comparison, and takes much longer to increase.
Second, there is an almost universal misunderstanding of the word "value" in an economic context. Value is not the cost of production. Value is not the amount of good a product can do (although it may be in a different context). Value is what you "willingly" pay for something, including all those issues that at first glance don't affect value, like competition, whether you already have one, or whether you don't have enough money and consider it more important to eat breakfast. Properly understood, "value" must be used with its relation to a goal: [WRONG: education is valuable. RIGHT: education is valuable for dealing with the world.]
You've just locked yourself into a vicious circle. Unions deliberately prevent standout teachers from getting paid much more than other teachers at the same level with the same seniority. If one teacher were paid $320,000/yr, the union would demand that all be paid that. If the demand were met, the school system would be bankrupt within a year. Everyone would be fired, administrators and overpaid teachers first. No more school. Furthermore, a union would actively fight a kindergarten teacher "worth" $320,000/yr, because that teacher would make the others look bad, and the others would complain because they'd have to learn something new and give up their own cherished beliefs and the fiction of their own superiority.
If you want superior education for all children, destruction of teacher's unions must come first.
What part of the word "force" do you not understand?
The middle is the middle regardless of its absolute level. You're saying, in effect, that because of unions someone else who would have been middle class is now lower class.
That's historically and economially ignorant. Shorter days, better wages, and various benefits, are the inevitable result of improved productivity and competition for workers. If the improved productivity weren't there, the improved wages and benefits and working conditions could not be paid for and the company would go broke. No amount of bargaining or legislation can defeat economic reality.
Economically, unions are a drag on the economy, which means that overall, everybody gets less because less is produced. Union leaders aren't producing anything. People attending union meetings aren't doing anything useful at those meetings. Unions promote an adversarial relationship between members and employers, members and customers. Union leaders are constantly plotting against the employers and the country at large (tariffs, etc.).
Historically, unions have gained power through violence, the threat of violence, corruption and ties to organized crime. They have successfully promoted laws that allow unions to violate rights in a manner that no individual could get away with. (Try arresting a striker for trespass or criminal mischief).
A prime characteristic of unions is collectivism and opposition to individualism. They cause wages and advancement to be determined by job title and seniority, rather than productivity and other forms of individual merit.
It's hard to estimate the total drain that unions put on the economy, because it's more than just the immediate economic effects of inefficiency, strikes, and foul laws. Unions discourage inovation. Unions discourage hard work, because it makes the lazy look bad. Roughly, unions reduce everybody's effective wages 20% before taxes and have set back progress 15 years over the last century.
Finally, unions increase immoral personal properties: sloth, jealousy, and the use of threats and violence to achieve goals. A person who voluntarily joins a union cannot be fully moral.
To some extent, "back of the envelope" calculations show that light cannot solve the problem. Light that can be made conveniently with semiconductors has a wavelength of about half a micron, which sets a minimum for feature sizes, and chips are already using devices with features an order of magnitude smaller than that. Secondly, light from semiconductors requires a minimum voltage to generate it, and that voltage is about 1 volt. We're already running close to that 1 volt limit, so improvements below 1 volt aren't feasible for light-based logic.
Wavelength is inversely proportional to voltage.
For many years (45?) it's been possible, and in some cases practical, to grind/polish away the substrate. It's possible to make a wafer no thicker than the metal + active elements. "All" that's needed is a practical way to make the actual connections between two or more chips from such wafers. It sounds expersive to me, and if the chips are large, yield will be a severe problem.
Another critical dimension is gate thickness. When you speak of a 16 nm process, you are (generally) talking about the minimum dimension in the XY plane, which is usually reserved for gate length. Gate thickness is a much smaller dimension, and if I recall correctly we're already down to about 4 molecules of thickness. Quantum tunneling is a problem.
I was curious about this, and looked into it (about ten years ago). The results I got implied that an inductor Q better than 2 wasn't possible for normal processing at the transition times of interest, and the cost was poorer layout due to the space the inductor would consume on a metal layer. Overall, there might be a benefit, but it would be small and difficult to design in.
If you're doing serious scientific or engineering computing (SPICE for example), most of the old programs are still available and still run. They run faster on modern hardware.
Several things make modern programs seem slower. One is that expectations have increased; few people remember waiting several seconds for WordStar to respond while it accessed the floppy. Another is eye candy, which is very costly in terms of performance. Another, surprisingly, is better coding: Each time a programmer goes back over old code and fixes an error that only occurs for special inputs, testing for those special inputs takes time.
Another factor is that a modern computer is often very busy. The OS might be spending hours each day doing various sorts of cataloging and backup, so if you're batch processing a few dozen 4000x3000 photos while using realplay, firefox may seem to respond slowly.