No actual space travel, just the heartwarming story of how the guy with the life-threatening cardiac defect subverted screening procedures in order to endanger the entire mission, and all his crewmates, on a months-long journey to some other planet in the solar system.
It's a triumph of the human spirit, or something.
That's a misunderstanding of the story. Vincent likely didn't have a heart condition. He got discriminated his entire life because his genetic profile said his DNA indicated he had a 99% probability of developing a fatal heart condition. He could be the 1 person in 100 with that DNA marker who never develops said heart condition, but in their society nobody was willing to give him a chance.
What he did was legitimately endure GATTACA's physical tests, spend an entire childhood swimming out farther and farther away from shore with his brother, and beat his life expectancy of 30.2 years. Everything indicating he had no health problems.
Voice activated systems in newer radio systems would seem to offer an advantage over older car radios of keeping the drivers eyes on the road. (Indeed, tuning an older radio was used as a baseline task in these tests.) But according to Mehler, problems arise when the system needs clarification of what the driver wants
It's the clarification that is the problem, not that it is voice activated (i.e. user experience).
I think it's also important to compare apples to apples. Before navigation systems, what did I use to get someplace I don't know where to get to? A map and/or written directions. Sure, I went over it before I ever got in a car to drive, but as I progress in the route, you often have to double check stuff. Then you find yourself glancing over the map and the piece of paper, grabbing everything when you come to a stop sign or red light, etc. Basically, you're just as distracted.
Navigation is distracting. Navigation now is less distracting. Both in the past and now, if you have a passenger you should let them navigate / be in charge of messing with the gps.
So to express a minority opinion (practicing Christian here), I think the Right Thing from a Christian point of view is to let the Satanists put up their monument and invite them over for a picnic.
As someone who has no religious beliefs, I salute you. I would join you in said picnic, and shake your hand.
These guys are just making a point about the value of separation between Church and State. If anyone ever tried to actually take your religious freedoms away, I would protest at your side and help you to defend it.
Do you think this action will do anything to change anyones mind?
The purpose isn't to change their mind on religious issues. I don't care what they believe in, and nobody should. That's a personal decision. The purpose is to change their mind on the wisdom of laws that allow the mixing of religion and government. I do think this will change their mind on that issue, because they're going to prevent a satanic monument from erected. Then they can continue worshiping in their homes, their churches, and other private property. I fully support and defend their right to do so.
Would Gandhi have done this? Martin Luther King?
Actually, I think that's exactly the type of thing they would have done if they believed in the cause (and I'm pretty sure Martin Luther King wouldn't believe in the cause, considering he was the son of a Baptist minister and a minister himself). The method, however, is right up their alley. It's a non-violent protest against an unjust law.
Did the gym coach tell you how it was being marked? Because, if he did, then you had a clear success criteria, and you failed to follow instructions.
Fascinating.
Why did you go to college? Why were you in class? A lot of people answer that question by saying, "to get a degree." That's not right though, because there are cheaper ways of getting "a degree." You can buy one for much cheaper than college tuition, and for much less work.
So the next justification is that you can't use the degree you buy from a non-accredited university to get a job. Why not? Because employers expect that the degree means you have learned a minimum set of per-requisites they require in their employees. In fact, you're often asked to provide an official transcript, which shows the grades you got in specific classes they may deem relevant for the position you're applying for. With this in mind, would someone who was told how they were being graded really have a clear success criteria?
They'd have a way to achieve a high grade in the course, but that's not success. If I achieve a high grade in the course, but the grade does not correlate to my understanding of the material the class is supposed to cover, the professor failed my success criteria, by giving me a transcript that means nothing to the employers. When I go to an interview fresh out of college I'm being judged by degree, by my grades, and by comparison from other candidates who may have come to the same school, and taken the same classes. If an idiot classmate I had interviews first for a job I'm interested in demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the subject matter in an interview, despite having a despite having a degree in the field and a high gpa, then he may have cost me the ability to even get an interview at that location. Now the employer is thinking, "that university sucks for that degree, that guy's grades didn't mean shit. I'm not going to waste my time with this next guy."
But no one is claiming that the universities are deceiving candidates - they're just requiring quantity, not quality.
Which is deceptive to me, because I pay the university with the understanding they will train me in the field of my choice, and evaluate me fairly with regards to the knowledge that i've gained. Anything else, and I'm just throwing money away.
Similarly, a professor who is capable of writing a few quality papers is far more valuable than one who can write hundreds of low quality ones. The universities make their standards clear, but they're not selecting for what they're supposed to, and it's leading to lower quality of education.
Last I followed the statistics, there were more people killed in plane crashes intending to jump out of the plane, than who died after having jumped out.
Hah. I don't know if that's true, but wouldn't surprise me that much. Every time I put my seat belt on the way up I make the realization that if something were to happen to the plane in the first 1,000 ft, not only would I not be able to jump out, but I wouldn't exactly be secured in place for that emergency landing. I'd be getting thrown around in a ~1 ft radius.
I'll gladly include those deaths among skydiving risks. Skydivers are badly strapped in, the entire time they're on the plane is essentially the take-off, which is the most dangerous part of air travel, and there are things like the previous accident in which two planes with skydivers collided. You wouldn't be likely to see planes in close formation most times you fly, but if you're skydiving you might, if you're involved in big formations where not everybody fits in a single plane. So the type of flying increases the risk. Even including all of that, deaths are proportionally pretty rare.
Is that supposed to be a disparaging remark? It just comes across as, "I have poor attention span."
None of it relevant.
At least one paragraph was relevant to the very next point you're trying to make:
The biggest difference is that when skydiving, doing one thing wrong one time is likely to result in serious injury or death, while you can do many, many things horribly, horribly wrong multiple times while driving and not actually get in a wreck.
As I tried to explain in my "wall of text", I do many, many things wrong multiple times while skydiving every time I dive. Students are even worse. Like I said, there's only way to learn skydiving, and that's to dive. And nobody is going to be perfect without lots and lots of practice. Mistakes happen, and they happen often.
And if you do, there are a lot of safety systems which can reduce or prevent injury, whereas with skydiving you're pretty much toast.
The most common skydiving injury is a sprained ankle. There's lots of technology and lots of safety features built in to our rigs to help reduce and prevent injury as well. Things like the three-ring system to help you get rid of a malfunctioning canopy, the RSL to help automatically deploy your reserve if you can't locate the handle after you do a cutaway, the AAD to deploy your reserve if you're still in freefall at a low enough altitude, in case you're unconscious or otherwise can't get to your handles...
There are also things likes helmets, which lots of people joke aren't helpful to skydivers, but the truth it, it's actually been helpful to me. Most injuries are going to happen under a good canopy, lots of them due to mistakes while landing. I've personally had a landing in which, after my feet hit the ground, I didn't exactly do a good PLF, and ended up with my head on the ground. I could have gotten hurt had I not been wearing it. Also made a really bad mistake exiting a Cessna 172 once, and saw the wheel come within an inch of my face. I didn't hit my head or helmet, but if I had, helmet would have been nice.
The point is, people like me make tons of mistakes all the time, and they don't all end in us becoming "pretty much toast."
Until a valid comparison is defined and agreed upon, argument is moot.
Chances of dying per dive vs. chances of dying per mile driven is a perfectly good comparison. You just don't want facts to get in the way of your perception of the sport. You don't know anything about it, but you want to claim the first mistake you make once is going to get you killed. Buddy, if that were the case I'd be seeing so many deaths at the dropzone every weekend, it's not even funny. Instead I see people with scraped knees, sprained ankles, or completely fine and getting chewed out by the DZ personnel for doing something stupid that placed them and/or others in danger. You know, kind of like I hear people telling me all the stories of how the other moron driver cut them off on the way to work today and they barely avoided an accident.
I ever said that skydiving was over dangerous, but I still disagree with your statistics.
Well, the implication I took from the way you worded it was, "this guy chooses to do this inherently dangerous activity, so we can assume he brought the same attitude of disregard to danger to every aspect of his life." I meant to point out that skydiving isn't as risky as most people assume, and therefore some very cautious people participate in the activity. I count myself in that group, I am in no way an adrenaline junkie. If that's not what you meant by it, I apologize for the misunderstanding.
All of those dives were either done by seasoned professionals, or in the company of them, and I would bet that most were done simply by the professionals themselves.
Well, I would agree most jumps were performed by seasoned divers, but it's very far from all, even when you exclude the tandem dives which I assume is what you mean when you say "in the company of [seasoned professionals]". You've got to start somewhere. I described myself as a n00b licensed diver for a reason. I have 50 jumps under my belt, and I'm very far from a pro. My landings need a lot of work, both in terms of accuracy and ability to land softly. I've never been in an emergency situation, so I don't have the experience that would allow me to handle one as quickly and smoothly as the seasoned guys. When I encounter my first malfunction, I'll have to rely on the training that I've received on the ground, and hope I execute emergency procedures promptly and correctly. I'm having difficulties maintaining the same fall rate as other people in my diving group, and tend to sink in relation to them the moment I start performing maneuvers (which can increase risk of a collision if they lose track of my location, or I lose track of theirs). There are lots of little things I'm not particularly proficient at, and therefore I stay away from diving with large groups and really doing anything I believe is currently outside my skill level.
In fact, there's really no other way to learn how to skydive other than skydiving. Tandems are fun, but if you want to get licensed you go through ground training, then you get on a plane, and you jump with your own parachute. There are different training methods, but they all involve you landing your own parachute. Under static line, you get out of the plane by yourself, attached to a line that will automatically deploy your main. Then you land the chute by yourself with radio instructions. Under AFF, you get freefall time together with other instructors who are holding on to you, but not attached to you in any way. Once you open up, you're on your own, landing with radio assistance. There's also a chance you'll find yourself separated from your instructors and will have to deploy without them, and you're trained for that possibility. You'll also be trained for the possibility the radio doesn't work.
Even with all of that inexperience, student deaths make for a very small proportion of those ~20 deaths a year. Most deaths are actually from people with thousands of jumps, because they're jumping highly loaded, high-performance parachutes, performing higher risk maneuvers such as swoop landings. If we're going back to the driving analogy, it's like saying that your race car drivers are under more risk driving at a race than the average driver is driving to work. The race car driver is much more experienced, and more highly proficient at driving, but he's also doing more dangerous things and taking additional risks.
Most drivers are horrible at driving, and most crashes involve really bad drivers.
I'm not sure why you would assume there isn't a similar spectrum of people skydiving. There are some people who skip on gear checks before they go out to dive, others that rush through putting their gear on and get inside the plane before they're finished strapping up. There are tons of people who downsize t
Probably not that ironic, he probably took stupid risks in the rest of his life as well, including how he set up those jacks.
Hello. Newly licensed n00b skydiver here.
Non-skydivers tend to overestimate the risks associated with skydiving. It's certainly an activity that deserves respect. You can't ignore procedures, and you must pay attention to what you're doing. The same thing can be said for lots of things people do every day, such as driving a car. Get distracted by something that places your attention somewhere other than the road, and you can get you and others killed.
Last year there were an estimated 3.1 million jumps in the US. Total number of fatalities was 19. I'm finding it kind of hard to get statistics on the number of deaths due to slipping jacks, but I wouldn't at all be surprised to find that the risk is comparable, if not higher. Or you can drive for ~1500 miles (not all at once), and you've just matched the death risk for one skydive.
Isn't there an armoured plate under the Tesla battery pack? Hitting a piece of metal at highway speeds might be dangerous in more immediately hazardous ways in another vehicle.
Holy shit, did you really just ignore the entire point the GP made in an extremely well thought-out post?
We shouldn't be asking, "are gas cars just as risky or more under the same conditions?" Maybe they are, but who the hell cares? The point is that even if every single other car out there would have killed all occupants inside and exploded taking out dozens of bystanders given the same accident while all the Model S did was catch on fire...there's still an opportunity here to see if Tesla can make improvements that would also prevent it from catching on fire.
I own a Model S, and I'm not worried about driving it. The thing isn't spontaneously combusting, it's catching on fire given very specific high-speed accident conditions where debris actually pierces through a quarter-inch plate and into the battery. Also, every owner has had ample time to get out of the car, and nobody has been hurt. It's an exceedingly safe car. That said, I don't see anything wrong with an investigation into the matter which would lead to further safety improvements. Maybe the answer is that they need a half-inch plate, I don't know. There is, however, no question that completely independent from the safety of other cars, we shouldn't ignore the opportunity to make any car safer than it is currently.
As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.
You can't save enough energy to compensate. Population in the 1960's, 3 billion. Population in 2000, 6 billion. Population now, 7 billion. Assuming we all cut our energy usage by half, which is outright insane, give it another 30 years and we're right back here. Except quality of life is much worse, because we're all using half the energy. That's if you don't count the effect of developing nations using more energy as they join the first world. You don't even need to rely on the population growth.
The real question is why do you oppose nuclear energy? Even if it's not wind turbine clean, it's cleaner than most energy used now, so it's a step in the right direction.
Here's the real plausible and sustainable plan of lowering total energy usage. Ignore individual energy usage. Individually, we should be double, tripling, quadrupling energy usage. After all, the goal for any individual is to live the most comfortable and fulfilling life he can. So, what do you do if you want to save the Earth? Just have less kids. You don't even need to have zero kids. Have 1. You're contributing to negative population growth which makes you not only carbon neutral but actually better than neutral, and once everyone starts doing so (and they will as global standards of living rises, as it's something that happens naturally to educated individuals with a high standard of living), population will go down, and total energy usage will drop even as individual energy usage skyrockets. Everyone's happy. In the meantime, we move to cleaner energy to support the population we have now.
This is one of those stories where non-Americans sit back and watch, gobsmacked, as American/.ers rant on about gun-ownership, utterly unaware of what barking lunatics they all sound like.
It's ok. We watch rants from anti-gun people all the time and are utterly amazed they believe that making guns illegal will somehow solve the human problem of people who are just fucking nuts. As if it were completely impossible to go on a killing spree with any other easily accessible tools, such as a car. How many pedestrians do you think someone could take out before they were stopped?
I don't own a gun. I don't really have a desire to own a gun. However, when I see a news story about someone just opening fire on other people for no reason I don't think, "if only gun ownership were illegal, this guy clearly wouldn't have been able to acquire one illegally, or start randomly stabbing people in the throat in a crowded location, or veer his vehicle off the road at 50 mph into a group of unsuspecting pedestrians, or built home-made explosives." I think, "holy shit, what the hell would make someone WANT to hurt other innocent people out of the blue?" Because that's the real problem. Can you picture yourself randomly killing a bunch of people? I sure can't put myself in that scenario, and it's not because I don't know where to get a gun.
But hey, I must just be a barking lunatic because I just don't think most people want to hurt anyone else, whether they have the means to or not, and therefore don't think it's right for us to infringe on the freedoms of all those good people. Sorry about not being as enlightened as you are.
Glass's display provides an image like 25-inch screen at 8 feet of distance somewhere above and to the right of your eyeline. It's not a heads-up display. It's more like having an iPhone glued to the corner of the sun visor.
So what you're saying is that it's perfectly fine?
Taking your eyes off the road in front of you is not only ok, it's required for safe driving. You have to check mirrors, you have to turn your head to check your blind spot when changing lanes. All while moving forward. Listening to GPS instructions and glancing above and to the right to confirm a map at periodic interviews isn't dangerous at all. If you're watching youtube videos on it, that's a different story.
I'm sure that when he got into office after promising to repeal or reform the patriot act, the NSA and other people sat him down and told him the way it is, and that was that.
Never attribute to a conspiracy that which can adequately be explained by a lying politician.
During Obama's campaign, I was happy to see him campaigning against the violations of our civil rights that the patriot act represented. Then he voted to give retroactive telecom immunity to the warrantless wiretapping debacle. I then realized he was just saying what he needed to say to get the anti-Bush votes, but if he won, it would be more of the same.
Also note his statement regarding supporting the bill: "It says that Obama will try to get the immunity provision removed, but failing that will vote for the overhauled wiretapping bill anyway." It's exactly like how he signed the NDAA, which allows for the military to indefinitely detain American citizens in the United States without charging them with a crime. He signed it "with reservations", but signed it anyway. He seems to like to enable unacceptable government policy while simultaneously disagreeing with it. He's pretty much just getting what he wants without completely losing the liberal base by claiming he doesn't really want it.
It's not really a democrat vs. republican issue. It's a politician issue. Unless the public starts paying attention to this crap and stops voting in people whose rhetoric does not match their voting record, and starts voting out people who have a record of voting for legislation which violates our civil rights, there's no solving it. People just vote for red vs blue, and it's going to eventually deteriorate to how the Drazi from Babylon 5 behave regarding green vs. purple. It's a system that rewards politicians for saying which color they associate themselves with, but what they actually do doesn't matter.
I agree completely. I started watching it, planning on just seeing the beginning of the episode to get a feel for it, but I couldn't stop until the end.
As you said, some of the actors are a bit off in their mannerisms, but the writing so perfectly caught the feel of TOS that it didn't matter. Everyone had a moment or two in which they channeled the original actors, simply as a result of their lines capturing the very essence of the show. The production is top-notch. The set looks exactly like the original Enterprise, the music you expect to hear pops up at exactly the right moments, and the trademark TOS close-ups happen when you expect them to. I thought it was a nice touch they continued a story from the original show, with the same guest actor even.
The only thing I wish they hadn't done were the TNG references. Don't get me wrong, I love TNG, but a holodeck and ship's counselor on the 1701 don't make any sense considering we don't see either in the TOS movies. It's just too early. In fact, TNG made a point to have Starfleet personnel be impressed with the holodeck technology on the Galaxy class, so I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be fairly new then.
You're referring to the fact that both groups like to stick to their values? I may not agree with one of them but they both have a very good record of not switching sides in the middle of a debate.
You say that as if it's a virtue. People willing to change their stance when presented with evidence their stance is incorrect are to be valued, not shunned. Willingness to concede a point in a debate is virtuous. The alternative, sticking to your guns no matter what, is a character flaw.
That's why Republicans can get away with trying to shut down the government, especially when they come from districts full of people who favor their opposition. At least, some Republicans will think they can get away with it.
Think they can get away with it is right, but I personally don't think they can. The next election will tell, but I expect Democrats to take a ton of seats, for better or for worse, depending on your political beliefs.
Having actually had to calculate intercept orbits without benefit of a computer to do the heavy lifting, I assure you that it would not have improved the movie. Takes about half an hour, assuming that all of your information is accurate.
I've never *had* to do such a thing, but I've attempted to do it for fun while playing with Orbiter (and messed it up somewhere along the line, because it didn't really get me to the orbit I wanted). I'm aware of the amount of work involved at least. The benefit of a movie is that you don't have to show them working through the calculation for half an hour. The tension would be in finding ways to get the accurate information they needed, and then you could time-warp the calculation away.
Part of the gimmick (and it was a gimmick) of Gravity, is that the entire movie takes place in zero-G. If they had other characters in it, such as mission control on Earth trying to figure out how to regain communications, or people in the ISS or Chinese station before they bailed, they could easily cut to those other characters while the main ones perform the computation.
This is why nobody ever invites Neil deGrasse Tyson to the movies. It was a great movie. If your biggest quibble is that they made navigation line of sight to avoid tedious scenes full of calculating orbital mechanics, you're a killjoy.
The "cool kids" are overrated. The drama of having to calculate orbital mechanics by yourself without NASA would be far more interesting than watching the astronaut who crashed the Soyuz landing in the simulator multiple times struggle to remember which button to press to disconnect from the space station, but be inexplicably fantastic at manually firing thrusters just right to avoid colliding to said station while tethered to it by a tangled parachute all the while going through rapid rotations induced by collision with a debris field. Then we get to watch the actual landing procedure that she consistently failed in the simulation be performed entirely automated by the computers of a Chinese capsule that supposedly uses the exact same procedure as the Soyuz. Which apparently involves pressing all of 1 button, and works even if you mistakenly press a few wrong ones by mistake first. It'll just beep at you if you do that. This completely automated, flawless landing will happen even though the capsules computers are shown bugging up and catching on fire during re-entry.
I think it's pretty sad that what passes for "scientific accuracy" is that there was no sound in space, while completely ignoring the more important things like the ability to see the ISS from Hubble and to match orbits with it relatively quickly via the thrusters of the MMU. Then when you bring into question the scientific plausibility of the debris field that is responsible for the disaster in the movie, you're said to be "nitpicking" said "scientifically accurate" movie.
I had more fun watching Armageddon. At least it didn't pretend to be anything other than action movie in space, which is all Gravity really was.
What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief, but grouse incessantly about flowing hair?
It's not a problem of suspension of disbelief, it's a problem with lazy writing. As a writer, you may define your world however you want to, and I'll accept it, but you cannot violate your rules. You want to write about an alien who can fly when he's in a planet orbiting a yellow sun? If those are your rules, that's fine, I'll accept them. I know nothing about this alien species of yours other than what you've told me, I'm willing to accept their biological structure makes use of some physics that's unknown to us. However, when this alien saves a human who fell from the top of a skyscraper by catching them 2 meters off the ground, you didn't explain how that's any better than hitting ground. You want to write about humans who are trapped in a virtual world by sentient AIs and don't know it, and how liberated humans are able to enter this world and hack it just enough to perform feats which seem impossible? That's alright, that's your setting. However, when one of those humans starts performing those impossible feats in the real world, you failed to explain how that would work.
In a way, the more detached you are from reality, the more difficult it is to screw up. If you're writing about a world of hobbits, orcs, elves, dragons, and dwarves, there's very little you can possibly do that's going to make me question it. Everything you do in that setting I take as simply additional information that I didn't know about that world. The only way you can screw that up is by contradicting whatever you've established before. If you tell me all dwarves are all short, and then introduce a dwarf character that happens to be taller than an elf, you better have an explanation. In the very same way that you should have an explanation for why a woman floating in zero-g doesn't have free-floating hair.
I'm not sure what country you went to school in, but in the US we use frogs that are already dead and soaked in preservatives. Kids don't kill their own frogs, and surely don't cut them open alive to watch their living hearts beat.
For that particular dissection, I was in a school in Sao Paulo, Brazil. That said, it was an American school, so I figured the curriculum wouldn't deviate that much from the norm here. And I wasn't wrong, read on.
The "norm" just happens to deviate a great deal between different schools in different parts of the country. A quick search brought me a curriculum resource for middle school teachers with a page on dissection. The relevant quote you should be looking for is, "It is recommended that you get a preserved frog. If you use a living frog, you will have to put it in a bottle or jar and drop a cotton ball of chloroform to put it into deep sleep." That was the procedure followed at my school, and the page seems to confirm that it does happen in the US, it wasn't particular to my school. You're just thinking, "that's not how I did it, so no other school could have possibly done it differently."
That said, most of the results from my web search were pages talking about how evil and unnecessary dissection is, how we need to move to more humane education, a bunch of PETA and "anti-vivisection society" pages...well, I'm guessing the dissection of frogs, especially live ones, have become a rare occurrence now. So here I am trying to use it as an example of why we shouldn't be fighting the cockroach rights battle, but the battle has actually been going on with the very examples I'm trying to use to explain why it's alright. And I'm on the losing side, with a lot of school opting for "virtual" dissection on ipads.
Your claim about being 9 does not match any school in the US either
Hey, look! Pictures of a frog dissection in a US elementary school in third grade! So they still do that, at least. Did you even bother doing a search before deciding to call me a liar? Or did you, once again, decide that whatever education experience you had when growing up was the exact same everyone else had?
In this case you are talking about something other than mutilation for effect. Dissecting to educate is not the same thing as ripping something open to attach wires and make it work.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I'm pretty sure we're not going to find common ground if we disagree on the educational value of the kit.
Do you really believe that dissecting a frog is the same thing as mutilation of a simulated living creature? Be honest, I see a very large difference myself and would like to understand someone that claims that it's the same thing.
Uh...the frog is alive when you dissect it, not dead. And you're cutting it up. You get to see its heart beating, the lungs moving. I don't see how it's different at all.
Even claiming that they are similar I find a very bizarre method of thinking. Further, dissecting frogs is not done by children, but by teenagers. There is a very large developmental difference between the two.
When I did it in school, it was third grade and I was 9.
You then compare an amputation to mutilation, which again is very very odd in my opinion for numerous reasons. Starting with the fact that a kid seeing an amputee is not the person performing the amputation. We would not subject a child to performing an amputation because it has known traumatic effects on that person in addition to the recipient.
My point is that it's not the action that is bad or good, but the motivation. If you cut the limb of the cockroach just to watch it suffer and hop around without a limb, that's very bad. That's the action to which there's all that correlation with later violent crimes that you're talking about. If you perform surgery on an anesthetized cockroach in order to learn about it, that's not bad. Because you're trying to minimize the suffering, and you're doing something to learn about it. And it absolutely is necessary to perform the action in order to learn it, the same way the a kid will learn a lot more doing the dissection of the frog himself than watching a video of it.
I'm honestly not disagreeing with you on the problem of dissensitization. I agree with you completely that there's a correlation between kids who enjoy inflicting pain in animals and sociopathic behavior. It's just that, in my opinion, it's not the action that causes the dissensitization, it's the motivation behind it. My mother grew up in a farm and watched as her mother snapped the necks of chickens as a 5 year-old. She was forced to do it herself when she got older. It's a gruesome action, but this didn't dissensitize her. In fact, she turned vegetarian for ethical reasons, because she saw too many animals she bonded with being killed for food. The reason the action itself didn't teach her to lose empathy is because they weren't killing to cause suffering, they were going after a quick death with minimized suffering for the purpose of eating it. It didn't encourage the enjoyment of pain in the animals, it discouraged it by enforcing correct procedure. The fact that the kit includes a procedure that minimizes the pain of the cockroach by numbing it eliminates that problem.
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No actual space travel, just the heartwarming story of how the guy with the life-threatening cardiac defect subverted screening procedures in order to endanger the entire mission, and all his crewmates, on a months-long journey to some other planet in the solar system. It's a triumph of the human spirit, or something.
That's a misunderstanding of the story. Vincent likely didn't have a heart condition. He got discriminated his entire life because his genetic profile said his DNA indicated he had a 99% probability of developing a fatal heart condition. He could be the 1 person in 100 with that DNA marker who never develops said heart condition, but in their society nobody was willing to give him a chance.
What he did was legitimately endure GATTACA's physical tests, spend an entire childhood swimming out farther and farther away from shore with his brother, and beat his life expectancy of 30.2 years. Everything indicating he had no health problems.
Voice activated systems in newer radio systems would seem to offer an advantage over older car radios of keeping the drivers eyes on the road. (Indeed, tuning an older radio was used as a baseline task in these tests.) But according to Mehler, problems arise when the system needs clarification of what the driver wants
It's the clarification that is the problem, not that it is voice activated (i.e. user experience).
I think it's also important to compare apples to apples. Before navigation systems, what did I use to get someplace I don't know where to get to? A map and/or written directions. Sure, I went over it before I ever got in a car to drive, but as I progress in the route, you often have to double check stuff. Then you find yourself glancing over the map and the piece of paper, grabbing everything when you come to a stop sign or red light, etc. Basically, you're just as distracted.
Navigation is distracting. Navigation now is less distracting. Both in the past and now, if you have a passenger you should let them navigate / be in charge of messing with the gps.
So to express a minority opinion (practicing Christian here), I think the Right Thing from a Christian point of view is to let the Satanists put up their monument and invite them over for a picnic.
As someone who has no religious beliefs, I salute you. I would join you in said picnic, and shake your hand.
These guys are just making a point about the value of separation between Church and State. If anyone ever tried to actually take your religious freedoms away, I would protest at your side and help you to defend it.
Do you think this action will do anything to change anyones mind?
The purpose isn't to change their mind on religious issues. I don't care what they believe in, and nobody should. That's a personal decision. The purpose is to change their mind on the wisdom of laws that allow the mixing of religion and government. I do think this will change their mind on that issue, because they're going to prevent a satanic monument from erected. Then they can continue worshiping in their homes, their churches, and other private property. I fully support and defend their right to do so.
Would Gandhi have done this? Martin Luther King?
Actually, I think that's exactly the type of thing they would have done if they believed in the cause (and I'm pretty sure Martin Luther King wouldn't believe in the cause, considering he was the son of a Baptist minister and a minister himself). The method, however, is right up their alley. It's a non-violent protest against an unjust law.
Did the gym coach tell you how it was being marked? Because, if he did, then you had a clear success criteria, and you failed to follow instructions.
Fascinating.
Why did you go to college? Why were you in class? A lot of people answer that question by saying, "to get a degree." That's not right though, because there are cheaper ways of getting "a degree." You can buy one for much cheaper than college tuition, and for much less work.
So the next justification is that you can't use the degree you buy from a non-accredited university to get a job. Why not? Because employers expect that the degree means you have learned a minimum set of per-requisites they require in their employees. In fact, you're often asked to provide an official transcript, which shows the grades you got in specific classes they may deem relevant for the position you're applying for. With this in mind, would someone who was told how they were being graded really have a clear success criteria?
They'd have a way to achieve a high grade in the course, but that's not success. If I achieve a high grade in the course, but the grade does not correlate to my understanding of the material the class is supposed to cover, the professor failed my success criteria, by giving me a transcript that means nothing to the employers. When I go to an interview fresh out of college I'm being judged by degree, by my grades, and by comparison from other candidates who may have come to the same school, and taken the same classes. If an idiot classmate I had interviews first for a job I'm interested in demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the subject matter in an interview, despite having a despite having a degree in the field and a high gpa, then he may have cost me the ability to even get an interview at that location. Now the employer is thinking, "that university sucks for that degree, that guy's grades didn't mean shit. I'm not going to waste my time with this next guy."
But no one is claiming that the universities are deceiving candidates - they're just requiring quantity, not quality.
Which is deceptive to me, because I pay the university with the understanding they will train me in the field of my choice, and evaluate me fairly with regards to the knowledge that i've gained. Anything else, and I'm just throwing money away.
Similarly, a professor who is capable of writing a few quality papers is far more valuable than one who can write hundreds of low quality ones. The universities make their standards clear, but they're not selecting for what they're supposed to, and it's leading to lower quality of education.
Last I followed the statistics, there were more people killed in plane crashes intending to jump out of the plane, than who died after having jumped out.
Hah. I don't know if that's true, but wouldn't surprise me that much. Every time I put my seat belt on the way up I make the realization that if something were to happen to the plane in the first 1,000 ft, not only would I not be able to jump out, but I wouldn't exactly be secured in place for that emergency landing. I'd be getting thrown around in a ~1 ft radius.
I'll gladly include those deaths among skydiving risks. Skydivers are badly strapped in, the entire time they're on the plane is essentially the take-off, which is the most dangerous part of air travel, and there are things like the previous accident in which two planes with skydivers collided. You wouldn't be likely to see planes in close formation most times you fly, but if you're skydiving you might, if you're involved in big formations where not everybody fits in a single plane. So the type of flying increases the risk. Even including all of that, deaths are proportionally pretty rare.
Nice wall of text.
Is that supposed to be a disparaging remark? It just comes across as, "I have poor attention span."
None of it relevant.
At least one paragraph was relevant to the very next point you're trying to make:
The biggest difference is that when skydiving, doing one thing wrong one time is likely to result in serious injury or death, while you can do many, many things horribly, horribly wrong multiple times while driving and not actually get in a wreck.
As I tried to explain in my "wall of text", I do many, many things wrong multiple times while skydiving every time I dive. Students are even worse. Like I said, there's only way to learn skydiving, and that's to dive. And nobody is going to be perfect without lots and lots of practice. Mistakes happen, and they happen often.
And if you do, there are a lot of safety systems which can reduce or prevent injury, whereas with skydiving you're pretty much toast.
The most common skydiving injury is a sprained ankle. There's lots of technology and lots of safety features built in to our rigs to help reduce and prevent injury as well. Things like the three-ring system to help you get rid of a malfunctioning canopy, the RSL to help automatically deploy your reserve if you can't locate the handle after you do a cutaway, the AAD to deploy your reserve if you're still in freefall at a low enough altitude, in case you're unconscious or otherwise can't get to your handles...
There are also things likes helmets, which lots of people joke aren't helpful to skydivers, but the truth it, it's actually been helpful to me. Most injuries are going to happen under a good canopy, lots of them due to mistakes while landing. I've personally had a landing in which, after my feet hit the ground, I didn't exactly do a good PLF, and ended up with my head on the ground. I could have gotten hurt had I not been wearing it. Also made a really bad mistake exiting a Cessna 172 once, and saw the wheel come within an inch of my face. I didn't hit my head or helmet, but if I had, helmet would have been nice.
The point is, people like me make tons of mistakes all the time, and they don't all end in us becoming "pretty much toast."
Until a valid comparison is defined and agreed upon, argument is moot.
Chances of dying per dive vs. chances of dying per mile driven is a perfectly good comparison. You just don't want facts to get in the way of your perception of the sport. You don't know anything about it, but you want to claim the first mistake you make once is going to get you killed. Buddy, if that were the case I'd be seeing so many deaths at the dropzone every weekend, it's not even funny. Instead I see people with scraped knees, sprained ankles, or completely fine and getting chewed out by the DZ personnel for doing something stupid that placed them and/or others in danger. You know, kind of like I hear people telling me all the stories of how the other moron driver cut them off on the way to work today and they barely avoided an accident.
I ever said that skydiving was over dangerous, but I still disagree with your statistics.
Well, the implication I took from the way you worded it was, "this guy chooses to do this inherently dangerous activity, so we can assume he brought the same attitude of disregard to danger to every aspect of his life." I meant to point out that skydiving isn't as risky as most people assume, and therefore some very cautious people participate in the activity. I count myself in that group, I am in no way an adrenaline junkie. If that's not what you meant by it, I apologize for the misunderstanding.
All of those dives were either done by seasoned professionals, or in the company of them, and I would bet that most were done simply by the professionals themselves.
Well, I would agree most jumps were performed by seasoned divers, but it's very far from all, even when you exclude the tandem dives which I assume is what you mean when you say "in the company of [seasoned professionals]". You've got to start somewhere. I described myself as a n00b licensed diver for a reason. I have 50 jumps under my belt, and I'm very far from a pro. My landings need a lot of work, both in terms of accuracy and ability to land softly. I've never been in an emergency situation, so I don't have the experience that would allow me to handle one as quickly and smoothly as the seasoned guys. When I encounter my first malfunction, I'll have to rely on the training that I've received on the ground, and hope I execute emergency procedures promptly and correctly. I'm having difficulties maintaining the same fall rate as other people in my diving group, and tend to sink in relation to them the moment I start performing maneuvers (which can increase risk of a collision if they lose track of my location, or I lose track of theirs). There are lots of little things I'm not particularly proficient at, and therefore I stay away from diving with large groups and really doing anything I believe is currently outside my skill level.
In fact, there's really no other way to learn how to skydive other than skydiving. Tandems are fun, but if you want to get licensed you go through ground training, then you get on a plane, and you jump with your own parachute. There are different training methods, but they all involve you landing your own parachute. Under static line, you get out of the plane by yourself, attached to a line that will automatically deploy your main. Then you land the chute by yourself with radio instructions. Under AFF, you get freefall time together with other instructors who are holding on to you, but not attached to you in any way. Once you open up, you're on your own, landing with radio assistance. There's also a chance you'll find yourself separated from your instructors and will have to deploy without them, and you're trained for that possibility. You'll also be trained for the possibility the radio doesn't work.
Even with all of that inexperience, student deaths make for a very small proportion of those ~20 deaths a year. Most deaths are actually from people with thousands of jumps, because they're jumping highly loaded, high-performance parachutes, performing higher risk maneuvers such as swoop landings. If we're going back to the driving analogy, it's like saying that your race car drivers are under more risk driving at a race than the average driver is driving to work. The race car driver is much more experienced, and more highly proficient at driving, but he's also doing more dangerous things and taking additional risks.
Most drivers are horrible at driving, and most crashes involve really bad drivers.
I'm not sure why you would assume there isn't a similar spectrum of people skydiving. There are some people who skip on gear checks before they go out to dive, others that rush through putting their gear on and get inside the plane before they're finished strapping up. There are tons of people who downsize t
Probably not that ironic, he probably took stupid risks in the rest of his life as well, including how he set up those jacks.
Hello. Newly licensed n00b skydiver here.
Non-skydivers tend to overestimate the risks associated with skydiving. It's certainly an activity that deserves respect. You can't ignore procedures, and you must pay attention to what you're doing. The same thing can be said for lots of things people do every day, such as driving a car. Get distracted by something that places your attention somewhere other than the road, and you can get you and others killed.
Last year there were an estimated 3.1 million jumps in the US. Total number of fatalities was 19. I'm finding it kind of hard to get statistics on the number of deaths due to slipping jacks, but I wouldn't at all be surprised to find that the risk is comparable, if not higher. Or you can drive for ~1500 miles (not all at once), and you've just matched the death risk for one skydive.
Isn't there an armoured plate under the Tesla battery pack? Hitting a piece of metal at highway speeds might be dangerous in more immediately hazardous ways in another vehicle.
Holy shit, did you really just ignore the entire point the GP made in an extremely well thought-out post?
We shouldn't be asking, "are gas cars just as risky or more under the same conditions?" Maybe they are, but who the hell cares? The point is that even if every single other car out there would have killed all occupants inside and exploded taking out dozens of bystanders given the same accident while all the Model S did was catch on fire...there's still an opportunity here to see if Tesla can make improvements that would also prevent it from catching on fire.
I own a Model S, and I'm not worried about driving it. The thing isn't spontaneously combusting, it's catching on fire given very specific high-speed accident conditions where debris actually pierces through a quarter-inch plate and into the battery. Also, every owner has had ample time to get out of the car, and nobody has been hurt. It's an exceedingly safe car. That said, I don't see anything wrong with an investigation into the matter which would lead to further safety improvements. Maybe the answer is that they need a half-inch plate, I don't know. There is, however, no question that completely independent from the safety of other cars, we shouldn't ignore the opportunity to make any car safer than it is currently.
As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.
You can't save enough energy to compensate. Population in the 1960's, 3 billion. Population in 2000, 6 billion. Population now, 7 billion. Assuming we all cut our energy usage by half, which is outright insane, give it another 30 years and we're right back here. Except quality of life is much worse, because we're all using half the energy. That's if you don't count the effect of developing nations using more energy as they join the first world. You don't even need to rely on the population growth.
The real question is why do you oppose nuclear energy? Even if it's not wind turbine clean, it's cleaner than most energy used now, so it's a step in the right direction.
Here's the real plausible and sustainable plan of lowering total energy usage. Ignore individual energy usage. Individually, we should be double, tripling, quadrupling energy usage. After all, the goal for any individual is to live the most comfortable and fulfilling life he can. So, what do you do if you want to save the Earth? Just have less kids. You don't even need to have zero kids. Have 1. You're contributing to negative population growth which makes you not only carbon neutral but actually better than neutral, and once everyone starts doing so (and they will as global standards of living rises, as it's something that happens naturally to educated individuals with a high standard of living), population will go down, and total energy usage will drop even as individual energy usage skyrockets. Everyone's happy. In the meantime, we move to cleaner energy to support the population we have now.
This is one of those stories where non-Americans sit back and watch, gobsmacked, as American /.ers rant on about gun-ownership, utterly unaware of what barking lunatics they all sound like.
It's ok. We watch rants from anti-gun people all the time and are utterly amazed they believe that making guns illegal will somehow solve the human problem of people who are just fucking nuts. As if it were completely impossible to go on a killing spree with any other easily accessible tools, such as a car. How many pedestrians do you think someone could take out before they were stopped?
I don't own a gun. I don't really have a desire to own a gun. However, when I see a news story about someone just opening fire on other people for no reason I don't think, "if only gun ownership were illegal, this guy clearly wouldn't have been able to acquire one illegally, or start randomly stabbing people in the throat in a crowded location, or veer his vehicle off the road at 50 mph into a group of unsuspecting pedestrians, or built home-made explosives." I think, "holy shit, what the hell would make someone WANT to hurt other innocent people out of the blue?" Because that's the real problem. Can you picture yourself randomly killing a bunch of people? I sure can't put myself in that scenario, and it's not because I don't know where to get a gun.
But hey, I must just be a barking lunatic because I just don't think most people want to hurt anyone else, whether they have the means to or not, and therefore don't think it's right for us to infringe on the freedoms of all those good people. Sorry about not being as enlightened as you are.
240v
Voltage is not power. 240 V at what amperage?
It's fine within certain constraints. It has a finite but nonzero impact upon your attention that must be evaluated.
I will certainly agree with that, no arguments from me.
ugh...intervals
Glass's display provides an image like 25-inch screen at 8 feet of distance somewhere above and to the right of your eyeline. It's not a heads-up display. It's more like having an iPhone glued to the corner of the sun visor.
So what you're saying is that it's perfectly fine?
Taking your eyes off the road in front of you is not only ok, it's required for safe driving. You have to check mirrors, you have to turn your head to check your blind spot when changing lanes. All while moving forward. Listening to GPS instructions and glancing above and to the right to confirm a map at periodic interviews isn't dangerous at all. If you're watching youtube videos on it, that's a different story.
I'm sure that when he got into office after promising to repeal or reform the patriot act, the NSA and other people sat him down and told him the way it is, and that was that.
Never attribute to a conspiracy that which can adequately be explained by a lying politician.
During Obama's campaign, I was happy to see him campaigning against the violations of our civil rights that the patriot act represented. Then he voted to give retroactive telecom immunity to the warrantless wiretapping debacle. I then realized he was just saying what he needed to say to get the anti-Bush votes, but if he won, it would be more of the same.
Also note his statement regarding supporting the bill: "It says that Obama will try to get the immunity provision removed, but failing that will vote for the overhauled wiretapping bill anyway." It's exactly like how he signed the NDAA, which allows for the military to indefinitely detain American citizens in the United States without charging them with a crime. He signed it "with reservations", but signed it anyway. He seems to like to enable unacceptable government policy while simultaneously disagreeing with it. He's pretty much just getting what he wants without completely losing the liberal base by claiming he doesn't really want it.
It's not really a democrat vs. republican issue. It's a politician issue. Unless the public starts paying attention to this crap and stops voting in people whose rhetoric does not match their voting record, and starts voting out people who have a record of voting for legislation which violates our civil rights, there's no solving it. People just vote for red vs blue, and it's going to eventually deteriorate to how the Drazi from Babylon 5 behave regarding green vs. purple. It's a system that rewards politicians for saying which color they associate themselves with, but what they actually do doesn't matter.
I agree completely. I started watching it, planning on just seeing the beginning of the episode to get a feel for it, but I couldn't stop until the end.
As you said, some of the actors are a bit off in their mannerisms, but the writing so perfectly caught the feel of TOS that it didn't matter. Everyone had a moment or two in which they channeled the original actors, simply as a result of their lines capturing the very essence of the show. The production is top-notch. The set looks exactly like the original Enterprise, the music you expect to hear pops up at exactly the right moments, and the trademark TOS close-ups happen when you expect them to. I thought it was a nice touch they continued a story from the original show, with the same guest actor even.
The only thing I wish they hadn't done were the TNG references. Don't get me wrong, I love TNG, but a holodeck and ship's counselor on the 1701 don't make any sense considering we don't see either in the TOS movies. It's just too early. In fact, TNG made a point to have Starfleet personnel be impressed with the holodeck technology on the Galaxy class, so I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be fairly new then.
You're referring to the fact that both groups like to stick to their values? I may not agree with one of them but they both have a very good record of not switching sides in the middle of a debate.
You say that as if it's a virtue. People willing to change their stance when presented with evidence their stance is incorrect are to be valued, not shunned. Willingness to concede a point in a debate is virtuous. The alternative, sticking to your guns no matter what, is a character flaw.
That's why Republicans can get away with trying to shut down the government, especially when they come from districts full of people who favor their opposition. At least, some Republicans will think they can get away with it.
Think they can get away with it is right, but I personally don't think they can. The next election will tell, but I expect Democrats to take a ton of seats, for better or for worse, depending on your political beliefs.
Having actually had to calculate intercept orbits without benefit of a computer to do the heavy lifting, I assure you that it would not have improved the movie. Takes about half an hour, assuming that all of your information is accurate.
I've never *had* to do such a thing, but I've attempted to do it for fun while playing with Orbiter (and messed it up somewhere along the line, because it didn't really get me to the orbit I wanted). I'm aware of the amount of work involved at least. The benefit of a movie is that you don't have to show them working through the calculation for half an hour. The tension would be in finding ways to get the accurate information they needed, and then you could time-warp the calculation away.
Part of the gimmick (and it was a gimmick) of Gravity, is that the entire movie takes place in zero-G. If they had other characters in it, such as mission control on Earth trying to figure out how to regain communications, or people in the ISS or Chinese station before they bailed, they could easily cut to those other characters while the main ones perform the computation.
This is why nobody ever invites Neil deGrasse Tyson to the movies. It was a great movie. If your biggest quibble is that they made navigation line of sight to avoid tedious scenes full of calculating orbital mechanics, you're a killjoy.
The "cool kids" are overrated. The drama of having to calculate orbital mechanics by yourself without NASA would be far more interesting than watching the astronaut who crashed the Soyuz landing in the simulator multiple times struggle to remember which button to press to disconnect from the space station, but be inexplicably fantastic at manually firing thrusters just right to avoid colliding to said station while tethered to it by a tangled parachute all the while going through rapid rotations induced by collision with a debris field. Then we get to watch the actual landing procedure that she consistently failed in the simulation be performed entirely automated by the computers of a Chinese capsule that supposedly uses the exact same procedure as the Soyuz. Which apparently involves pressing all of 1 button, and works even if you mistakenly press a few wrong ones by mistake first. It'll just beep at you if you do that. This completely automated, flawless landing will happen even though the capsules computers are shown bugging up and catching on fire during re-entry.
I think it's pretty sad that what passes for "scientific accuracy" is that there was no sound in space, while completely ignoring the more important things like the ability to see the ISS from Hubble and to match orbits with it relatively quickly via the thrusters of the MMU. Then when you bring into question the scientific plausibility of the debris field that is responsible for the disaster in the movie, you're said to be "nitpicking" said "scientifically accurate" movie.
I had more fun watching Armageddon. At least it didn't pretend to be anything other than action movie in space, which is all Gravity really was.
What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief, but grouse incessantly about flowing hair?
It's not a problem of suspension of disbelief, it's a problem with lazy writing. As a writer, you may define your world however you want to, and I'll accept it, but you cannot violate your rules. You want to write about an alien who can fly when he's in a planet orbiting a yellow sun? If those are your rules, that's fine, I'll accept them. I know nothing about this alien species of yours other than what you've told me, I'm willing to accept their biological structure makes use of some physics that's unknown to us. However, when this alien saves a human who fell from the top of a skyscraper by catching them 2 meters off the ground, you didn't explain how that's any better than hitting ground. You want to write about humans who are trapped in a virtual world by sentient AIs and don't know it, and how liberated humans are able to enter this world and hack it just enough to perform feats which seem impossible? That's alright, that's your setting. However, when one of those humans starts performing those impossible feats in the real world, you failed to explain how that would work.
In a way, the more detached you are from reality, the more difficult it is to screw up. If you're writing about a world of hobbits, orcs, elves, dragons, and dwarves, there's very little you can possibly do that's going to make me question it. Everything you do in that setting I take as simply additional information that I didn't know about that world. The only way you can screw that up is by contradicting whatever you've established before. If you tell me all dwarves are all short, and then introduce a dwarf character that happens to be taller than an elf, you better have an explanation. In the very same way that you should have an explanation for why a woman floating in zero-g doesn't have free-floating hair.
I'm not sure what country you went to school in, but in the US we use frogs that are already dead and soaked in preservatives. Kids don't kill their own frogs, and surely don't cut them open alive to watch their living hearts beat.
For that particular dissection, I was in a school in Sao Paulo, Brazil. That said, it was an American school, so I figured the curriculum wouldn't deviate that much from the norm here. And I wasn't wrong, read on.
The "norm" just happens to deviate a great deal between different schools in different parts of the country. A quick search brought me a curriculum resource for middle school teachers with a page on dissection. The relevant quote you should be looking for is, "It is recommended that you get a preserved frog. If you use a living frog, you will have to put it in a bottle or jar and drop a cotton ball of chloroform to put it into deep sleep." That was the procedure followed at my school, and the page seems to confirm that it does happen in the US, it wasn't particular to my school. You're just thinking, "that's not how I did it, so no other school could have possibly done it differently."
That said, most of the results from my web search were pages talking about how evil and unnecessary dissection is, how we need to move to more humane education, a bunch of PETA and "anti-vivisection society" pages...well, I'm guessing the dissection of frogs, especially live ones, have become a rare occurrence now. So here I am trying to use it as an example of why we shouldn't be fighting the cockroach rights battle, but the battle has actually been going on with the very examples I'm trying to use to explain why it's alright. And I'm on the losing side, with a lot of school opting for "virtual" dissection on ipads.
Your claim about being 9 does not match any school in the US either
Hey, look! Pictures of a frog dissection in a US elementary school in third grade! So they still do that, at least. Did you even bother doing a search before deciding to call me a liar? Or did you, once again, decide that whatever education experience you had when growing up was the exact same everyone else had?
In this case you are talking about something other than mutilation for effect. Dissecting to educate is not the same thing as ripping something open to attach wires and make it work.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I'm pretty sure we're not going to find common ground if we disagree on the educational value of the kit.
Do you really believe that dissecting a frog is the same thing as mutilation of a simulated living creature? Be honest, I see a very large difference myself and would like to understand someone that claims that it's the same thing.
Uh...the frog is alive when you dissect it, not dead. And you're cutting it up. You get to see its heart beating, the lungs moving. I don't see how it's different at all.
Even claiming that they are similar I find a very bizarre method of thinking. Further, dissecting frogs is not done by children, but by teenagers. There is a very large developmental difference between the two.
When I did it in school, it was third grade and I was 9.
You then compare an amputation to mutilation, which again is very very odd in my opinion for numerous reasons. Starting with the fact that a kid seeing an amputee is not the person performing the amputation. We would not subject a child to performing an amputation because it has known traumatic effects on that person in addition to the recipient.
My point is that it's not the action that is bad or good, but the motivation. If you cut the limb of the cockroach just to watch it suffer and hop around without a limb, that's very bad. That's the action to which there's all that correlation with later violent crimes that you're talking about. If you perform surgery on an anesthetized cockroach in order to learn about it, that's not bad. Because you're trying to minimize the suffering, and you're doing something to learn about it. And it absolutely is necessary to perform the action in order to learn it, the same way the a kid will learn a lot more doing the dissection of the frog himself than watching a video of it.
I'm honestly not disagreeing with you on the problem of dissensitization. I agree with you completely that there's a correlation between kids who enjoy inflicting pain in animals and sociopathic behavior. It's just that, in my opinion, it's not the action that causes the dissensitization, it's the motivation behind it. My mother grew up in a farm and watched as her mother snapped the necks of chickens as a 5 year-old. She was forced to do it herself when she got older. It's a gruesome action, but this didn't dissensitize her. In fact, she turned vegetarian for ethical reasons, because she saw too many animals she bonded with being killed for food. The reason the action itself didn't teach her to lose empathy is because they weren't killing to cause suffering, they were going after a quick death with minimized suffering for the purpose of eating it. It didn't encourage the enjoyment of pain in the animals, it discouraged it by enforcing correct procedure. The fact that the kit includes a procedure that minimizes the pain of the cockroach by numbing it eliminates that problem.