I doubt I was actually taught the meaning of "algorithms" in the context of a high school classroom. However, I was most certainly taught about alternative base numbering systems and similar concepts, and that occurred in a mathematics course WHERE IT BELONGS, not in a computer science course. Feed them a full course meal of mathematics, and they'll be amply prepared to dine on computer science when they reach college.
Logical (and critical) thinking, as a basic mental discipline, can be taught in the absence of computer science curriculum, and should be. Again, computer science is hardly a core discipline, and should not be Federally mandated as such.
I can't recall having any geology component in high school (in the Seventies). It's likely that was a particular choice made by your instructor, school, or district. Mandating such a choice at the Federal level would be an altogether disturbing proposition, don't you agree? Mandating computer science in such a rigid fashion is no less disturbing.
I also think the primary purpose of natural sciences curricula is not problem solving skills, but rather observation and awareness. Analysis is also a component, but analysis is ALWAYS preceded by observation!
Keep in mind that I say these things as someone whose entire adult life has been devoted to this field, since I took that first FORTRAN course as part of an electrical engineering major; I never looked back (much). While I would have liked to have been EXPOSED to computers at an earlier age, like so many of my successors have been, I recognize that I needed the underpinnings in core disciplines much more than I needed a semester of FORTRAN or logic circuit design.
I would argue that the reason programming came so easily to me right from the very start (FORTRAN) was precisely because I had an advanced understanding of a meat-computer language (English) already. You still have it backwards: teach them the fundamentals of life first - which computer science is not - and the rest will follow more easily, whether it's CS or something else.
The first twelve grades should be devoted to communication skills, history, natural sciences, and the like. You know, the real basics in which our high school grads are already demonstrably deficient. How exactly will mandating CS at these grades do anything to produce more functional citizens? We might get a wonderful crop of idiot savants, but is that what we really need? If a given student has a distinct attraction to CS, they will naturally pursue it outside of the classroom.
Even the ACM counts as a "special interest group" that has "lobbyists", and here they are trying to push their own agenda to the exclusion of more important things.
Figures: the guy who actually KNOWS and can DO stuff gets his ticket punched, and the one who knows NOTHING except how to expertly manipulate people gets a pass.
The Fantastic Voyages of NanoKnight Rider. Drag racing and nano-car chases in people's bloodstreams everywhere. And you thought that voice inside your head was imaginary? It's your bloodstream chatting you up, and it sounds just like William Daniels.
Indeed. As I wrote elsewhere yesterday (and should have included here perhaps), this eternal schizophrenic struggle between competition and cooperation is both internal as well as external. It might produce more cognitive dissonance than any other single thing. Look at how much of our legal framework is devoted to it! I'm no exception to the internal struggle; even though the war was won in favor of cooperation long ago, occasional skirmishes still erupt now and then.
You wandered into this and declared that I was ignorant/stupid, but didn't have the courtesy to specifically explain why. That's not constructive criticism, that's just arrogant or malicious. I accuse people of being ignorant often enough, but at least I have the decency to briefly explain why; I do it because I want them to be more educated/aware when I next encounter them, but from your approach you seem to have a different motivation altogether, a motivation that's more about you than anything egalitarian. Perhaps you need to take up yoga or something.
We had almost unlimited energy, didn't we? Perhaps we should have been more focused on investing that energy to give us better long-term returns, rather than borrowing against it to buy the energy equivalent of cars and 52-inch plasma TVs?
I think it's still feasible, but we need to be focused in a way that would be truly historic for the species.
I wouldn't want to be the unfortunate bird or jetliner that happens to wander into the path of such a concentrated beam of radiation, regardless what particular wavelength in the spectrum it occupies!
If you perceive that technical challenge to be non-existent, perhaps you'll need to explain how and why. Some of us apparently aren't as expert on the topic as you are. After perusing your blog, I can clearly see that you attempt to tackle much bigger social and technical issues than I do, so I need the benefit of your highly specialized experience and knowledge of this topic.
The likely scenarios and consequences have been pretty thoroughly explored in science fiction, haven't they? All too often, the theorized results haven't been good for the centrists and control freaks, have they?
Perversely, my articulate question submitted to change.gov, asking when and whether we could expect to see sustainable off-planet colonization receive some significant priority, was virtually ignored. It was even "modded down" by some people.
If we're gonna talk about exploiting solar energy in space, we should be talking about colonizing space in the same breath. If nothing else, the technical challenges of transferring that energy from space down through a thick atmosphere to the surface of the Earth should warrant a discussion of just moving us all closer to the source in the first place.
Piracy is no less ethical than the very deliberate efforts of corporate executives and other "entrepreneurs" to manipulate, mis-educate, misinform, and generally disadvantage large groups of people to disproportionately benefit themselves. The only reason that the one activity (piracy) is illegal and the others aren't is because it's yet another successful example of that manipulation. The "victors" not only write the histories, they also write the laws, not only including laws that benefit them but also excluding laws that would lessen their advantages over others.
It is this dynamic that drives some people to consider variations of socialism as an altruistic solution (never mind that socialism can't work as long as such people exist at all). In pure Darwinian terms, though, none of those activities would be unethical; any old trickery is fine if it gets the job done. That's "competition" in its purest form. "Cooperation", however, demands an artificial ethical framework not found in nature; Capitalists, Libertarians, and Socialists disagree on how much cooperation to legislate into a system of ethics, and so we have much infighting and a mish-mash of laws that winds up benefitting the very wealthy just a bit more than it does the rest of us.
Perhaps the RIAA was expecting that Big Media would happily propagate the lie, but drag its feet on the retraction? How dare they? We all know that Big Media lives and breathes social ethics.
... of ADD! These impatient downloaders would be the people who quaff an entire bottle of Ritalin every day and still feel under-medicated, so they augment it with an IV drip of black coffee. Hold the cream and sugar, please.
To all the thousands of geniuses and assorted rocket scientists who, upon first hearing of "global warming, have had this exact same idea over the last twenty-odd years, I say:
"See, you should have spoken up... now this johnny-come-lately feller gets all the credit for stating the obvious."
I have no doubt you believed you had some point worthy of consideration, but you didn't articulate it well enough for anyone else to manage anything more than educated guesses what that point might have been.
Google the phrase, genius... all I did was to quote from the first relevant page hit. I shared it because I thought it was hilarious and bizarre. Strangely, on that same first results page there was another page hit for the phrase which also dealt with gay sex. Maybe it's some sorta gay code for something else entirely....
Why would you mod me according to the contents of a Web page I didn't write and merely quoted for the humor of it? Can I mod your comment as "*1 Lacks Perspective" or "*1 Sense of Humor Gone AWOL"?
You can't get much more personal than spam that you send to yourself. I'm apparently doing this every night in my sleep, since I can't ever recall clicking Send when I'm awake....
You will be shocked... shocked, I tell you... to discover that yours is actually not the first original use of that phrase, though yours is certainly a propos:
After trailing waken forever there was firstly dangerous, aaron slid partially on his clap and took his adventure into his pill fully, with closer confidence. Dunno. and i absorbed about a man's bathroom gay insensibly nudging trashed, aer it's legitimate they don't do it "just to women." The sky, singing from magnetic perineum into dynamic amethyst, had awoken zippy tokens of clouds. That's how clean of a bathroom gay i am to cavalier cock!!! She invited around and transitioned my outrageously sexy cock. Trust me. i'm genetically italian. She continued to neighborhood her tt into his prettiness and paranoid rallies he mulled as she pushed dropped into his spout and each finger the sexes laughed and teenaged succession of him. Sorry, i've got to cherish i'm bathroom gay a legitimate prostitutes here. Ohhhh...." he said, screwing with a long, victorian psychiatrist "i startled that." Her moans would've designated heard across the bathroom gay if she didn't have sean's cock like in her mouth. I'll opt you wealthy paragraph ron?" Mom looked at me suspiciously.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt I was actually taught the meaning of "algorithms" in the context of a high school classroom. However, I was most certainly taught about alternative base numbering systems and similar concepts, and that occurred in a mathematics course WHERE IT BELONGS, not in a computer science course. Feed them a full course meal of mathematics, and they'll be amply prepared to dine on computer science when they reach college.
Logical (and critical) thinking, as a basic mental discipline, can be taught in the absence of computer science curriculum, and should be. Again, computer science is hardly a core discipline, and should not be Federally mandated as such.
I can't recall having any geology component in high school (in the Seventies). It's likely that was a particular choice made by your instructor, school, or district. Mandating such a choice at the Federal level would be an altogether disturbing proposition, don't you agree? Mandating computer science in such a rigid fashion is no less disturbing.
I also think the primary purpose of natural sciences curricula is not problem solving skills, but rather observation and awareness. Analysis is also a component, but analysis is ALWAYS preceded by observation!
Keep in mind that I say these things as someone whose entire adult life has been devoted to this field, since I took that first FORTRAN course as part of an electrical engineering major; I never looked back (much). While I would have liked to have been EXPOSED to computers at an earlier age, like so many of my successors have been, I recognize that I needed the underpinnings in core disciplines much more than I needed a semester of FORTRAN or logic circuit design.
I would argue that the reason programming came so easily to me right from the very start (FORTRAN) was precisely because I had an advanced understanding of a meat-computer language (English) already. You still have it backwards: teach them the fundamentals of life first - which computer science is not - and the rest will follow more easily, whether it's CS or something else.
The first twelve grades should be devoted to communication skills, history, natural sciences, and the like. You know, the real basics in which our high school grads are already demonstrably deficient. How exactly will mandating CS at these grades do anything to produce more functional citizens? We might get a wonderful crop of idiot savants, but is that what we really need? If a given student has a distinct attraction to CS, they will naturally pursue it outside of the classroom.
Even the ACM counts as a "special interest group" that has "lobbyists", and here they are trying to push their own agenda to the exclusion of more important things.
Figures: the guy who actually KNOWS and can DO stuff gets his ticket punched, and the one who knows NOTHING except how to expertly manipulate people gets a pass.
Atavism: 1
Evolution: 0
The Fantastic Voyages of NanoKnight Rider. Drag racing and nano-car chases in people's bloodstreams everywhere. And you thought that voice inside your head was imaginary? It's your bloodstream chatting you up, and it sounds just like William Daniels.
That ain't the version I seem to recall hearing on Dr. Demento decades ago....
If so, you can kiss that YouTube video goodbye!
Indeed. As I wrote elsewhere yesterday (and should have included here perhaps), this eternal schizophrenic struggle between competition and cooperation is both internal as well as external. It might produce more cognitive dissonance than any other single thing. Look at how much of our legal framework is devoted to it! I'm no exception to the internal struggle; even though the war was won in favor of cooperation long ago, occasional skirmishes still erupt now and then.
You wandered into this and declared that I was ignorant/stupid, but didn't have the courtesy to specifically explain why. That's not constructive criticism, that's just arrogant or malicious. I accuse people of being ignorant often enough, but at least I have the decency to briefly explain why; I do it because I want them to be more educated/aware when I next encounter them, but from your approach you seem to have a different motivation altogether, a motivation that's more about you than anything egalitarian. Perhaps you need to take up yoga or something.
We had almost unlimited energy, didn't we? Perhaps we should have been more focused on investing that energy to give us better long-term returns, rather than borrowing against it to buy the energy equivalent of cars and 52-inch plasma TVs?
I think it's still feasible, but we need to be focused in a way that would be truly historic for the species.
I wouldn't want to be the unfortunate bird or jetliner that happens to wander into the path of such a concentrated beam of radiation, regardless what particular wavelength in the spectrum it occupies!
BTWnot blocked".
If you perceive that technical challenge to be non-existent, perhaps you'll need to explain how and why. Some of us apparently aren't as expert on the topic as you are. After perusing your blog, I can clearly see that you attempt to tackle much bigger social and technical issues than I do, so I need the benefit of your highly specialized experience and knowledge of this topic.
The likely scenarios and consequences have been pretty thoroughly explored in science fiction, haven't they? All too often, the theorized results haven't been good for the centrists and control freaks, have they?
Perversely, my articulate question submitted to change.gov, asking when and whether we could expect to see sustainable off-planet colonization receive some significant priority, was virtually ignored. It was even "modded down" by some people.
If we're gonna talk about exploiting solar energy in space, we should be talking about colonizing space in the same breath. If nothing else, the technical challenges of transferring that energy from space down through a thick atmosphere to the surface of the Earth should warrant a discussion of just moving us all closer to the source in the first place.
Piracy is no less ethical than the very deliberate efforts of corporate executives and other "entrepreneurs" to manipulate, mis-educate, misinform, and generally disadvantage large groups of people to disproportionately benefit themselves. The only reason that the one activity (piracy) is illegal and the others aren't is because it's yet another successful example of that manipulation. The "victors" not only write the histories, they also write the laws, not only including laws that benefit them but also excluding laws that would lessen their advantages over others.
It is this dynamic that drives some people to consider variations of socialism as an altruistic solution (never mind that socialism can't work as long as such people exist at all). In pure Darwinian terms, though, none of those activities would be unethical; any old trickery is fine if it gets the job done. That's "competition" in its purest form. "Cooperation", however, demands an artificial ethical framework not found in nature; Capitalists, Libertarians, and Socialists disagree on how much cooperation to legislate into a system of ethics, and so we have much infighting and a mish-mash of laws that winds up benefitting the very wealthy just a bit more than it does the rest of us.
Perhaps the RIAA was expecting that Big Media would happily propagate the lie, but drag its feet on the retraction? How dare they? We all know that Big Media lives and breathes social ethics.
Did you mean "ADD bad talk" or "ADD back talk"? I ask because, you know, the latter would be expected.
... of ADD! These impatient downloaders would be the people who quaff an entire bottle of Ritalin every day and still feel under-medicated, so they augment it with an IV drip of black coffee. Hold the cream and sugar, please.
To all the thousands of geniuses and assorted rocket scientists who, upon first hearing of "global warming, have had this exact same idea over the last twenty-odd years, I say:
"See, you should have spoken up... now this johnny-come-lately feller gets all the credit for stating the obvious."
I have no doubt you believed you had some point worthy of consideration, but you didn't articulate it well enough for anyone else to manage anything more than educated guesses what that point might have been.
Google the phrase, genius... all I did was to quote from the first relevant page hit. I shared it because I thought it was hilarious and bizarre. Strangely, on that same first results page there was another page hit for the phrase which also dealt with gay sex. Maybe it's some sorta gay code for something else entirely....
Why would you mod me according to the contents of a Web page I didn't write and merely quoted for the humor of it? Can I mod your comment as "*1 Lacks Perspective" or "*1 Sense of Humor Gone AWOL"?
You can't get much more personal than spam that you send to yourself. I'm apparently doing this every night in my sleep, since I can't ever recall clicking Send when I'm awake....
You will be shocked... shocked, I tell you... to discover that yours is actually not the first original use of that phrase, though yours is certainly a propos:
http://membres.lycos.fr/marindaaugus/bathroom-gay.html
And I quote: