Sexual assault doesn't have to be done by adults. Just recently in Arizona there was a Liberian girl raped by a group of young boys. IIRC the oldest boy was ~15. These kids won't choose to be victims, they may not even know if they do become victims.
Those weren't victims, those were rapists, and yes they sure as fuck knew what they were doing when they held the crying girl down and forced themselves on her.
These children are taught not to engage is sexual activity, but then they are told that sex is safe with a condom. So now little Jimmy may be convinced by his teacher/priest/coach that what they are doing is ok because he/she is going to use a condom.
That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard.
You're seriously suggesting that we will teach kids about reproduction, the sex act, contraceptives, STDs... but that they will have literally no idea what rape is?!
What kind of fucking retarded curriculum are you talking about that's going to make a kid think that sex they don't want is "okay" if contraceptives are involved? How does that work? Is what you wrote literally what you think the extent of sex education is?
"Sex is safe and always okay if you use a condom"? That's idiotic. Sex ed is not like that.
I don't know about you, but for one I was taught about "bad touches" long before I was given sex education (which was pretty early) and for two, in my sex-ed class I was told that condoms made you safer from STDs and pregnancy, not sexual assault!
You seriously think a kid who knows nothing about sex, STDs, or contraceptives is going to be less likely to be taken advantage of than one who does? Get a clue!
Or, young children will think it's ok to diddle around with each other because they found contraceptives, and we end up with another girl or boy raped, by children.
Again, how do we get from "practice safe sex, use a condom" to "Forcing people to do things they don't want to do is okay, if condoms are involved!"
leave it to parents to talk about contraceptives and abstinence. Which ever the child's parents prefer.
Yeah and many parents will "prefer" to teach nothing at all. And only the child of such parents could possibly be so naive and ignorant as to have any of the scenarios you suggest actually come to pass. Only the child of such parents could possibly have such a misbegotten notion of what formal sex education actually is to have these "concerns".
I'm not aware of any jurisdictions where two people under the age of consent having sex is statutory.
That's why the "sexting" charges can be so ridiculous. A 15-yr-old girl can screw her 15-yr-old boyfriend, but as soon as she sends him a naughty picture she's suddenly a sex offender.
Next time remember that things that appear insane to you are most likely logical to someone with either more knowledge or a different value set than you.
Haha, and here I thought you were giving an example of the kind of insanely retarded reasoning that could have led to the insanely retarded statement I quoted...
But you're seriously suggesting that sex ed itself could constitute sexual assault... and that this is indicative of "more knowledge"?!
Ha ha ha ha ha! Oh man, that's rich!
There is no set of values where "sex ed promotes the sexual assault of our children" makes a lick of sense. If you think it's immoral to be made to take a class you don't want to, that still doesn't make that class into sexual assault! That has nothing to do with values, that's simply bad reasoning.
1. Kids who receive graphic sex ed will catch the sexy cooties and flaunt their nether regions, thus tempting those with no self control.
That's what I thought when he said it "promotes... sexual assault".
But there's no way I can read it that way when he says "encourages children to engage in sexual behavior... as a victim". That's sexual behavior as in sex, not 'sexual behavior' like flirting that *leads* to being a victim, but actually being victimized.
I remember when my dad gave me "The talk". Most awkward ten minutes of my life, but there is no way I'd have wanted to learn that in school.
If you'd learned it in school, you'd have learned a hell of a lot more than whatever your dad managed to cram into ten minutes.
I'm glad as hell I had a thorough education that wasn't limited to what my dad knew and was willing to say in front of his son. Not that he didn't do it, it's just that class was a) not awkward at all after getting over my own juvenility (if that's a word) and b) VASTLY more informative.
If it was a voluntary program, I doubt there would be so much fuss over this.
Well you doubt wrong. The only thing mandatory is the curriculum of the class, not participation.
"Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender," he wrote.
Holy fucking shit. That's even crazier than the "promotes the sexualization -- and sexual assault -- of our children" line from the summary. I thought my ears had gone mad at that line. I mean what's the logic -- acknowledging the potential sexuality of our kids means promoting it, which somehow means there will be more pedophiles? But no it's even crazier than that.
I mean he's actually saying that teaching a kid how to use a condom encourages the kid to seek out becoming a rape victim?! HOW?!
Of all the bat-shit crazy things I've heard come out of the "think of the children" crowd, this has got to be the looniest. God, my head hurts.
Hey says it "promotes the sexualization -- and sexual assault -- of our children."
Okay okay I can barely understand the first part. By teaching kids about sex and contraception, you are in a way acknowledging that they are or will be sexual beings, and I guess going from stubbornly and blindly refusing to acknowledge kids' sexuality to acknowledging the possibility could be called "promoting"... In a society as hung up about sex as ours, I can see how that reasoning comes about.
But promotes sexual assault? What. The. Fuck? How does that work? Is there a section in the class about how to be a rape victim? A video about how cool PTSD and group counseling are? Or is it that would-be predators will see the worldly look in the newly-educated kid's eyes and think "Ah, that one's fair game, he's practically asking for it!"
Fuck, nevermind. I don't even want to know what went on inside their head in the course of making the connection between sex ed and sexual assault.
Oh wait, I forgot, what went on was nothing. "Think of the children" means "For heaven's sake, don't think!"
The article didn't directly address the issue, other than the term "period drift" (which they didn't seem to define) which I assume could be such a slowdown, and they can somehow factor it out. However, I wouldn't assume that the loss of energy would be particularly linear or predictable. So I'm still as confused as ever on these "stable pulsar" claims.
Period drift is how much the frequency of your clock signal varies, it's a measure of accuracy, and is a property of all clocks.
A signal that slows down appreciably over the course of billions of years can still be considered extremely stable over human timescales and relative to all but the very best of human-made clocks. A pulsar has period drift of about one part in 10^15 , the very best atomic clocks have drift of one part in 10^17, and the national standard (also based on atomic clocks) is one part in 10^14. Which means the signal would vary by plus/minus one pulse in 10^14 pulses.
Pulse variance... is measured... in terms of time? And how are you measuring time? With a cesium atomic transition clock? Well, then, oddly enough, a cesium clock is clearly more accurate!
Except not all cesium clocks are more accurate than pulsars -- no man-made clock was until the late 90s. How could that be when a cesium clock is "by definition" "perfectly accurate"? Well obviously cus that's not true.:)
You don't need a "standard" time reference to compare two periodic signals to each other. You don't need to know the frequency of the signals to say that they become skewed relative to each other by some fraction of a period every so many cycles.
If you have two cesium clocks, they will diverge. You can measure the rate of that divergence, in terms of the ceisum signals themselves. Ba-da-bing ba-da-boom, you now know the frequency drift of your clock without needing a "perfect" clock to do it.
GPS would not work without atomic clocks. Multiplying even a small error by the speed of light means a big error.
True that, and you have to account for General Relativity too. I didn't notice GPS among the list of applications along with cell phone and tv networks. However it should be noted that the atomic clocks on GPS satellites are good but not better clocks than pulsars.
Most of them are better than your watch, but I've got a textbook on pulsars that's twenty years old and mentions the drifts in their frequency in the first few pages.
Uh yes it's been known that pulsars do in fact have period drift for many years. However for quite some time after their discovery, their drift was vastly smaller than any man-made clock. This is what lead to the common belief that pulsars are the best (known) clocks in the universe, because for at least several decades they were. Man-made clocks have made tremendous improvements however, and now are better than pulsars. Those super-awesome clocks still experience frequency instability, though. It's just on the order of 1 in 10^17 instead of 10^15 like the best pulsars.
Which based on the statement that our clocks have improved "more than an order of magnitude, on average, in each decade", while we have not found pulsars significantly better than those previously known, means that it's possible that when your textbook was written man-made clocks were only just surpassing pulsars or possibly even still behind.
So yeah this probably is not NEW news, but it's probably going to be news to a lot of people who had the (previously correct) idea that pulsars were better than the best man-made clocks. And no you shouldn't have assumed man-made clocks were better based simply on the existence of frequency instability in pulsars.
You need to trust something as the "absolute truth" before you can start saying that something is off-the-standard, because its off THAT standard that you chose already.
Aside from there being no privileged reference frame to say has the "absolute true time", this has nothing to do really with saying that it's exactly 4:20pm exactly when it should be 4:20pm.
The measure they're talking about is how much variance there is in the frequency of the pulses over time, and you can measure that without any 'standard' to compare to -- you're actually comparing the signal to itself.
As long as GPS, Cell phone networks, and TV channels are within a split second of each other, I'm fine.
They could all claim exactly the same time as each other, but if the method they use to track time is "x many events in a second", then if the event in question does not have a stable period then you'll eventually have to add/subtract a second from the GPS, cell phone, etc time.
But yeah, for the majority of practical purposes you don't need timing precision equal to that of a pulsar, much less better.
We already knew of anaerobic monocellular life, so hypothetically life could arise on a planet without oxygen. The only thing this changes is that it means we could hypothetically also find multicellular life on such a planet. I don't think existing theory said such life was impossible, meaning it was already a hypothetical possibility, so now it's no longer hypothetical on earth, and somewhat less hypothetical for alien worlds.
Which is still pretty cool. I myself previously assumed that we'd find multicellular life only on planets with oxygen from either geologic sources or as a result of microorganisms producing it. Still I'm hardly surprised that a short article on oceanic biology doesn't cover every tangentially related field of science that I'm interested in.:)
What passes for pedantry on/. has really gone down hill over the years in my crotchety old opinion. It's gone from nitpicking the usage of words that actually have highly specific technical definitions that it actually makes sense to be pedantic about, to trying to find the stupidest way to fail to understand everyday English sentences.
I think there's room and need for a little factual balance.
And you did a fantastic job of failing to provide any.
Saying the plane is a "disaster waiting to happen" is wrong, stupid, and yes, an insult to the designers for implying they'd make something that some random/.er can see in two seconds is going to be brought out of the air by rain.
Oh lol right, you're Ancient Hacker, the guy who trolls by claiming to be a 'hacker' who is nearly universally wrong on every technical subject.
I honestly don't know the details but I think the types of orbitals for a given element are predictable from QM, but that no there is no formula for determining the chemical behavior that results. These elements especially have a large number of electrons in the valence shell and some of the orbital types are mostly understood through theory because the only elements we know that have them are so short lived.
Dudes always seemed to just do a once-over with what I assume was a radiation detector in a van driving around base, and then break for vodka around noon.
Ah, so the same procedure as their Nuclear Waste Disposal Safety Inspectors.
Most of my questions are based on the apparent fact that for any given number of protons in the nucleus, there is exactly one element with that amount.
That's the definition of an element, yes.
If that were true, it would seem that given the number of protons, you would be able to deduce certain properties about the element (if there was only one possible configuration of electrons for a given number of protons).
There is one set of possible electron orbitals, yes, but the problem is that with large elements like this the number of orbitals is very large and their behavior is non-obvious. You can't just look at element 117 and say that oh, the outer-most shell (the one that matters most with regards to chemical behavior) is one electron short of being full in the non-ionized element, so it's going to behave like Florine. There's a lot more going on in this element.
You have a good idea of some properties in general but not all and not in specific. Like, you could probably guess that this element would like to form a single bond, but how strong would it be? How readily does it ionize? Blah blah blah nevermind you're right.
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Sexual assault doesn't have to be done by adults. Just recently in Arizona there was a Liberian girl raped by a group of young boys. IIRC the oldest boy was ~15. These kids won't choose to be victims, they may not even know if they do become victims.
Those weren't victims, those were rapists, and yes they sure as fuck knew what they were doing when they held the crying girl down and forced themselves on her.
These children are taught not to engage is sexual activity, but then they are told that sex is safe with a condom. So now little Jimmy may be convinced by his teacher/priest/coach that what they are doing is ok because he/she is going to use a condom.
That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard.
You're seriously suggesting that we will teach kids about reproduction, the sex act, contraceptives, STDs... but that they will have literally no idea what rape is?!
What kind of fucking retarded curriculum are you talking about that's going to make a kid think that sex they don't want is "okay" if contraceptives are involved? How does that work? Is what you wrote literally what you think the extent of sex education is?
"Sex is safe and always okay if you use a condom"? That's idiotic. Sex ed is not like that.
I don't know about you, but for one I was taught about "bad touches" long before I was given sex education (which was pretty early) and for two, in my sex-ed class I was told that condoms made you safer from STDs and pregnancy, not sexual assault!
You seriously think a kid who knows nothing about sex, STDs, or contraceptives is going to be less likely to be taken advantage of than one who does? Get a clue!
Or, young children will think it's ok to diddle around with each other because they found contraceptives, and we end up with another girl or boy raped, by children.
Again, how do we get from "practice safe sex, use a condom" to "Forcing people to do things they don't want to do is okay, if condoms are involved!"
leave it to parents to talk about contraceptives and abstinence. Which ever the child's parents prefer.
Yeah and many parents will "prefer" to teach nothing at all. And only the child of such parents could possibly be so naive and ignorant as to have any of the scenarios you suggest actually come to pass. Only the child of such parents could possibly have such a misbegotten notion of what formal sex education actually is to have these "concerns".
I'm not aware of any jurisdictions where two people under the age of consent having sex is statutory.
That's why the "sexting" charges can be so ridiculous. A 15-yr-old girl can screw her 15-yr-old boyfriend, but as soon as she sends him a naughty picture she's suddenly a sex offender.
Next time remember that things that appear insane to you are most likely logical to someone with either more knowledge or a different value set than you.
Haha, and here I thought you were giving an example of the kind of insanely retarded reasoning that could have led to the insanely retarded statement I quoted...
But you're seriously suggesting that sex ed itself could constitute sexual assault... and that this is indicative of "more knowledge"?!
Ha ha ha ha ha! Oh man, that's rich!
There is no set of values where "sex ed promotes the sexual assault of our children" makes a lick of sense. If you think it's immoral to be made to take a class you don't want to, that still doesn't make that class into sexual assault! That has nothing to do with values, that's simply bad reasoning.
1. Kids who receive graphic sex ed will catch the sexy cooties and flaunt their nether regions, thus tempting those with no self control.
That's what I thought when he said it "promotes... sexual assault".
But there's no way I can read it that way when he says "encourages children to engage in sexual behavior... as a victim". That's sexual behavior as in sex, not 'sexual behavior' like flirting that *leads* to being a victim, but actually being victimized.
Anyway, obviously #3 is the real answer.
Only if their partner is over the age of consent.
I guess their could be a jurisdiction where that isn't the case, but most laws at least manage to be that sane.
I remember when my dad gave me "The talk". Most awkward ten minutes of my life, but there is no way I'd have wanted to learn that in school.
If you'd learned it in school, you'd have learned a hell of a lot more than whatever your dad managed to cram into ten minutes.
I'm glad as hell I had a thorough education that wasn't limited to what my dad knew and was willing to say in front of his son. Not that he didn't do it, it's just that class was a) not awkward at all after getting over my own juvenility (if that's a word) and b) VASTLY more informative.
If it was a voluntary program, I doubt there would be so much fuss over this.
Well you doubt wrong. The only thing mandatory is the curriculum of the class, not participation.
"Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender," he wrote.
Holy fucking shit. That's even crazier than the "promotes the sexualization -- and sexual assault -- of our children" line from the summary. I thought my ears had gone mad at that line. I mean what's the logic -- acknowledging the potential sexuality of our kids means promoting it, which somehow means there will be more pedophiles? But no it's even crazier than that.
I mean he's actually saying that teaching a kid how to use a condom encourages the kid to seek out becoming a rape victim?! HOW?!
Of all the bat-shit crazy things I've heard come out of the "think of the children" crowd, this has got to be the looniest. God, my head hurts.
Hey says it "promotes the sexualization -- and sexual assault -- of our children."
Okay okay I can barely understand the first part. By teaching kids about sex and contraception, you are in a way acknowledging that they are or will be sexual beings, and I guess going from stubbornly and blindly refusing to acknowledge kids' sexuality to acknowledging the possibility could be called "promoting"... In a society as hung up about sex as ours, I can see how that reasoning comes about.
But promotes sexual assault? What. The. Fuck? How does that work? Is there a section in the class about how to be a rape victim? A video about how cool PTSD and group counseling are? Or is it that would-be predators will see the worldly look in the newly-educated kid's eyes and think "Ah, that one's fair game, he's practically asking for it!"
Fuck, nevermind. I don't even want to know what went on inside their head in the course of making the connection between sex ed and sexual assault.
Oh wait, I forgot, what went on was nothing. "Think of the children" means "For heaven's sake, don't think!"
The article didn't directly address the issue, other than the term "period drift" (which they didn't seem to define) which I assume could be such a slowdown, and they can somehow factor it out. However, I wouldn't assume that the loss of energy would be particularly linear or predictable. So I'm still as confused as ever on these "stable pulsar" claims.
Period drift is how much the frequency of your clock signal varies, it's a measure of accuracy, and is a property of all clocks.
A signal that slows down appreciably over the course of billions of years can still be considered extremely stable over human timescales and relative to all but the very best of human-made clocks. A pulsar has period drift of about one part in 10^15 , the very best atomic clocks have drift of one part in 10^17, and the national standard (also based on atomic clocks) is one part in 10^14. Which means the signal would vary by plus/minus one pulse in 10^14 pulses.
Pulse variance... is measured... in terms of time? And how are you measuring time? With a cesium atomic transition clock? Well, then, oddly enough, a cesium clock is clearly more accurate!
Except not all cesium clocks are more accurate than pulsars -- no man-made clock was until the late 90s. How could that be when a cesium clock is "by definition" "perfectly accurate"? Well obviously cus that's not true. :)
You don't need a "standard" time reference to compare two periodic signals to each other. You don't need to know the frequency of the signals to say that they become skewed relative to each other by some fraction of a period every so many cycles.
If you have two cesium clocks, they will diverge. You can measure the rate of that divergence, in terms of the ceisum signals themselves. Ba-da-bing ba-da-boom, you now know the frequency drift of your clock without needing a "perfect" clock to do it.
And then Religion says "All that shows is that you can put different faces on Religion, which is still Religion, therefore I win!"
Religion then goes off to have a pint at the local pub.
GPS would not work without atomic clocks. Multiplying even a small error by the speed of light means a big error.
True that, and you have to account for General Relativity too. I didn't notice GPS among the list of applications along with cell phone and tv networks. However it should be noted that the atomic clocks on GPS satellites are good but not better clocks than pulsars.
Most of them are better than your watch, but I've got a textbook on pulsars that's twenty years old and mentions the drifts in their frequency in the first few pages.
Uh yes it's been known that pulsars do in fact have period drift for many years. However for quite some time after their discovery, their drift was vastly smaller than any man-made clock. This is what lead to the common belief that pulsars are the best (known) clocks in the universe, because for at least several decades they were. Man-made clocks have made tremendous improvements however, and now are better than pulsars. Those super-awesome clocks still experience frequency instability, though. It's just on the order of 1 in 10^17 instead of 10^15 like the best pulsars.
Which based on the statement that our clocks have improved "more than an order of magnitude, on average, in each decade", while we have not found pulsars significantly better than those previously known, means that it's possible that when your textbook was written man-made clocks were only just surpassing pulsars or possibly even still behind.
So yeah this probably is not NEW news, but it's probably going to be news to a lot of people who had the (previously correct) idea that pulsars were better than the best man-made clocks. And no you shouldn't have assumed man-made clocks were better based simply on the existence of frequency instability in pulsars.
You need to trust something as the "absolute truth" before you can start saying that something is off-the-standard, because its off THAT standard that you chose already.
Aside from there being no privileged reference frame to say has the "absolute true time", this has nothing to do really with saying that it's exactly 4:20pm exactly when it should be 4:20pm.
The measure they're talking about is how much variance there is in the frequency of the pulses over time, and you can measure that without any 'standard' to compare to -- you're actually comparing the signal to itself.
As long as GPS, Cell phone networks, and TV channels are within a split second of each other, I'm fine.
They could all claim exactly the same time as each other, but if the method they use to track time is "x many events in a second", then if the event in question does not have a stable period then you'll eventually have to add/subtract a second from the GPS, cell phone, etc time.
But yeah, for the majority of practical purposes you don't need timing precision equal to that of a pulsar, much less better.
We already knew of anaerobic monocellular life, so hypothetically life could arise on a planet without oxygen. The only thing this changes is that it means we could hypothetically also find multicellular life on such a planet. I don't think existing theory said such life was impossible, meaning it was already a hypothetical possibility, so now it's no longer hypothetical on earth, and somewhat less hypothetical for alien worlds.
Which is still pretty cool. I myself previously assumed that we'd find multicellular life only on planets with oxygen from either geologic sources or as a result of microorganisms producing it. Still I'm hardly surprised that a short article on oceanic biology doesn't cover every tangentially related field of science that I'm interested in. :)
Pedantic? You bet.
No, not really.
What passes for pedantry on /. has really gone down hill over the years in my crotchety old opinion. It's gone from nitpicking the usage of words that actually have highly specific technical definitions that it actually makes sense to be pedantic about, to trying to find the stupidest way to fail to understand everyday English sentences.
I think there's room and need for a little factual balance.
And you did a fantastic job of failing to provide any.
Saying the plane is a "disaster waiting to happen" is wrong, stupid, and yes, an insult to the designers for implying they'd make something that some random /.er can see in two seconds is going to be brought out of the air by rain.
Oh lol right, you're Ancient Hacker, the guy who trolls by claiming to be a 'hacker' who is nearly universally wrong on every technical subject.
Fake or not, Apollo 13 didn't land on the moon. (Yes, I know, whoosh....)
In space there's no air to go 'whoosh', so this just further proves our whole space program is a sham!
I thought it was hilarious myself. It was a wink from the director to us nerds. It told me not to take the movie so seriously. :P
I honestly don't know the details but I think the types of orbitals for a given element are predictable from QM, but that no there is no formula for determining the chemical behavior that results. These elements especially have a large number of electrons in the valence shell and some of the orbital types are mostly understood through theory because the only elements we know that have them are so short lived.
Okay, you win the "most horrific pun-based response" award, hands down.
Dudes always seemed to just do a once-over with what I assume was a radiation detector in a van driving around base, and then break for vodka around noon.
Ah, so the same procedure as their Nuclear Waste Disposal Safety Inspectors.
Most of my questions are based on the apparent fact that for any given number of protons in the nucleus, there is exactly one element with that amount.
That's the definition of an element, yes.
If that were true, it would seem that given the number of protons, you would be able to deduce certain properties about the element (if there was only one possible configuration of electrons for a given number of protons).
There is one set of possible electron orbitals, yes, but the problem is that with large elements like this the number of orbitals is very large and their behavior is non-obvious. You can't just look at element 117 and say that oh, the outer-most shell (the one that matters most with regards to chemical behavior) is one electron short of being full in the non-ionized element, so it's going to behave like Florine. There's a lot more going on in this element.
No stupid it's more complicated than that, that's why lead doesn't act like carbon. DER DUH DER.
You have a good idea of some properties in general but not all and not in specific. Like, you could probably guess that this element would like to form a single bond, but how strong would it be? How readily does it ionize? Blah blah blah nevermind you're right.