Yeah... and most of the people who do no useful work do their no useful work in Powerpoint, the OO analog of which is completely useless, which from an ideological viewpoint is aesthetically pleasing, but from a strategic viewpoint of total takeover is more of a problem than anything with Calc. VP's and sales people use Powerpoint every day...
Yeah, it can. As it turns out those initiatives here are educating all of our kids in math and science and getting off of foreign supplies of oil, both of which have more merit than the MANNED space program, which does not produce much if any science at this point.
Do it anyway...
If you're an adult, and you've already done that much stuff, you'll probably stick out enough that someone will talk to you about stuff, and then recruit you to do something. In all odds you'll end up leading undergrads who are younger than you are, since you've already been in the world.
I was referring more to the masses of 19 year olds, who actually don't know anything, and don't know why it's important to do more than play Halo 3...
Look, the pictures matter, and any professor who things that they don't is just throwing away a learning tool that is one of the main avenues for people understanding the material.
I'm currently taking a course on semiconductor materials and structures. I have the book assigned by the prof - Semiconductor Devices by Kanaan Kano - which is in black and white, with illustrations that to put it charitably are unclear. One of the things that we are supposed to understand in this course is crystalline structures, and how they influence the choice of materials and eventually the band gap of a material. I went back to a modern physics textbook for an explanation of this, which I would guess saved me at least hours in trying to understand the topic, and yes, the illustrations were one of the reasons - trying to visualize a zinc-blend (diamond) structure the first time is not easy. Why sabotage your students?
Aaron Rowe is right on the money. I'm currently an EE bachelors student at City College... graduating in 2 months. I'm 37. This is my second degree - I graduated from the University of Buffalo in '88 with a dual degree in history and polisci.
Now I started at UB for aerospace engineering, and had a teacher in physics 107 (mechanics - i.e., our first course) say "look to the left and right of you. Two of the three of you won't be here in 2 years." He might have been right, but UB didn't even make an attempt to encourage us to stay. Nor did it try to show us what we'd get out of it. Meanwhile my friends were skiing, drinking and getting laid. So I dropped out. Actually, right before I dropped out of engineering, I was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which convinced me to also get a job in a garage, which helped my building skills more than anything I was going to get in engineering in the first 2-3 years. The thing I got from Zen and the Art was, don't bother going to school for something until you know why you're there to learn it.
I went back to school after being a tech consultant for 10 years and making plenty of money, because I wanted to work in renewable energy, and I didn't really care how much of a financial penalty I would pay in doing this. This motivation was enough to survive 3.5 years of bullshit, and I will go so far as to say as almost sabotage, by my school in getting a second degree. This degree is, as far as I'm concerned, just a credential, but a very important one. Some of my clients were probably less than thrilled having their time and attendance oracle db installed by a history major, but I'd been in the industry so long that experience mattered more... certainly no one would have let me do the solar power system on top of a hospital with a history degree.
Some observations based on City College and University of Buffalo:
- I like building things. I am not much better at building things than I was 3 and a half years ago. In fact, to the extent that I am, it's because of my peers. Some of the smartest May '08 EE grads in my school know how to solder, how to program a PIC, how to mill aluminum, how to use a plastic printer, how A/D conversion is done, or how to build a power distribution system for electronics near electric motors, because me and some other older IT guys who are returning engineering undergrads taught them.
- At both schools you were fairly well prevented from doing anything concrete unless someone really liked you. That meant that you'd need to get excellent grades in something where the teacher actually gave a shit about his undergrads, which was not all that often. For people with a true engineering mindset, that means that they could actually disappear from the profession without ever getting the chance to show what they could do, and no one would notice. This was the case with me the first time around. Also, the people getting A's and the real engineers are quite often not the same people.
- The ability to build things is disappearing, and the reasons for this are many. Machinists are hard to come by, and the introductory level courses in high schools are disappearing. My high school had computer labs and no machine shop (granted it was in Manhattan). Getting dirty is considered to be the sign of some McJob peasant, not an engineer, even if you're milling parts out of aluminum for a robot. The practical skills of diagnosing are problem are very related to the ability to design a new system, and these skills are being lost - not just in engineering applications, they're being lost everywhere - cars, healthcare, the IT world - because those skills are expensive and difficult to acquire.
- To add to that, the ability to build new things depends in part in your ability to understand similar things that have already been built... there is no interest in the engineering world in taking any kind of historical or investigative look at what already exists.
- Some of the most interesting and useful knowledge that we get - programming microprocessors, for example
..and it's just the aether. And there's nothing more irresponsible than a spacecraft in the depths of an aether binge, and I knew we'd be getting into that rotten stuff soon.
Terrorist this, terrorist that. They're the flavor of the month. One of the reasons that BushCo is going after Iraq is because to do a lot of this stuff, you need the resources of a state or a very large corporation. Corporations also can't effectively control territory beyond prying eyes as well as a gov't can, so I'd argue that only a country or a country backing up a multinational would be capable of doing the kind of research necessary to do these "bad things".
Some things to keep in mind about what the theoretical terrorists can do:
- Some of the documents that they found in Afghanistan relating to Al Qaeda's research into nuclear weapons included stuff from the Journal of Irreproducable Results. The pages included a blurb about "Next Issue: Clone your neighbor's wife!"
- Some of the main intellectual lights involved have been trying to figure out how djinns are involved in particle physics because they interpret the Koran a little too literally.
- A leading Pakistani nuclear scientist sympathetic to Al-Qaeda met with them and said basically forget about a nuclear weapon because Pakistan was only able to get them after decades of effort, help from other countries and countless billions of dollars. He suggested they try a dirty bomb instead.
- The two largest terrorist events in the U.S. were created with cellphones and box cutters in NYC and fertilizer in Oklahoma. Not real high tech.
I think the same will follow for other technologies. Nuclear weapons are a fairly well known technology but they still require a lot of infrastructure. Guys living in a cave are probably not going to be innovating in nanotech to the point where they figure out how to make gray goo. These advances are not cooked up by a lone genius working in isolation. If nanotech ever works it will be after years or decades of research by thousands of people. So basically if you trust the other national governments in the world not to want to kill themselves, there isn't much risk. Mutual assured destruction is a proven technology.
Ok, so CFC's last 50 years. The ones produced in 1953 are then leaving the atmosphere now. If we don't add anymore for 10-20 years, the proportion that we produced goes down by 20-40%, right?
Cycles do exist. "A million zillion years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth" things were lots warmer - Antarctica was a nice place. Possibly they were warmer in the middle ages as well. There have been ice ages and in between warming periods, and these have affected sea level, which is why people were able to cross the Bering Straight to get to North America.
Anecdotal evidence that temperatures were warmer in the past doesn't discount that this current rise in temperatures is man made. It is also possible to guess that the last little ice age would have continued longer if there were no man made effects introduced. We don't know yet.
What we do know is that if the current warming trend continues, natural or not, CO2 related or not, there is probably going to be a considerable rise in the sea level, with disastrous consequences for a lot of the planet's population. There is also good evidence that CO2 is higher than it has been historically, including the medieval warming period. Maybe warming is primarily a natural phenomenon, and our CO2 emissions are only making it worse. But it seems unlikely that you'd find scientists with no agenda saying that it will have no impact at all. Given the damage it can do and the difficulty or impossibility of reversing it, the smarter thing to do would be to try to stop producing so much CO2.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... and most of the people who do no useful work do their no useful work in Powerpoint, the OO analog of which is completely useless, which from an ideological viewpoint is aesthetically pleasing, but from a strategic viewpoint of total takeover is more of a problem than anything with Calc. VP's and sales people use Powerpoint every day...
Yeah, it can. As it turns out those initiatives here are educating all of our kids in math and science and getting off of foreign supplies of oil, both of which have more merit than the MANNED space program, which does not produce much if any science at this point.
Do it anyway...
If you're an adult, and you've already done that much stuff, you'll probably stick out enough that someone will talk to you about stuff, and then recruit you to do something. In all odds you'll end up leading undergrads who are younger than you are, since you've already been in the world.
I was referring more to the masses of 19 year olds, who actually don't know anything, and don't know why it's important to do more than play Halo 3...
I'm currently taking a course on semiconductor materials and structures. I have the book assigned by the prof - Semiconductor Devices by Kanaan Kano - which is in black and white, with illustrations that to put it charitably are unclear. One of the things that we are supposed to understand in this course is crystalline structures, and how they influence the choice of materials and eventually the band gap of a material. I went back to a modern physics textbook for an explanation of this, which I would guess saved me at least hours in trying to understand the topic, and yes, the illustrations were one of the reasons - trying to visualize a zinc-blend (diamond) structure the first time is not easy. Why sabotage your students?
Aaron Rowe is right on the money. I'm currently an EE bachelors student at City College... graduating in 2 months. I'm 37. This is my second degree - I graduated from the University of Buffalo in '88 with a dual degree in history and polisci. Now I started at UB for aerospace engineering, and had a teacher in physics 107 (mechanics - i.e., our first course) say "look to the left and right of you. Two of the three of you won't be here in 2 years." He might have been right, but UB didn't even make an attempt to encourage us to stay. Nor did it try to show us what we'd get out of it. Meanwhile my friends were skiing, drinking and getting laid. So I dropped out. Actually, right before I dropped out of engineering, I was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which convinced me to also get a job in a garage, which helped my building skills more than anything I was going to get in engineering in the first 2-3 years. The thing I got from Zen and the Art was, don't bother going to school for something until you know why you're there to learn it. I went back to school after being a tech consultant for 10 years and making plenty of money, because I wanted to work in renewable energy, and I didn't really care how much of a financial penalty I would pay in doing this. This motivation was enough to survive 3.5 years of bullshit, and I will go so far as to say as almost sabotage, by my school in getting a second degree. This degree is, as far as I'm concerned, just a credential, but a very important one. Some of my clients were probably less than thrilled having their time and attendance oracle db installed by a history major, but I'd been in the industry so long that experience mattered more... certainly no one would have let me do the solar power system on top of a hospital with a history degree. Some observations based on City College and University of Buffalo: - I like building things. I am not much better at building things than I was 3 and a half years ago. In fact, to the extent that I am, it's because of my peers. Some of the smartest May '08 EE grads in my school know how to solder, how to program a PIC, how to mill aluminum, how to use a plastic printer, how A/D conversion is done, or how to build a power distribution system for electronics near electric motors, because me and some other older IT guys who are returning engineering undergrads taught them. - At both schools you were fairly well prevented from doing anything concrete unless someone really liked you. That meant that you'd need to get excellent grades in something where the teacher actually gave a shit about his undergrads, which was not all that often. For people with a true engineering mindset, that means that they could actually disappear from the profession without ever getting the chance to show what they could do, and no one would notice. This was the case with me the first time around. Also, the people getting A's and the real engineers are quite often not the same people. - The ability to build things is disappearing, and the reasons for this are many. Machinists are hard to come by, and the introductory level courses in high schools are disappearing. My high school had computer labs and no machine shop (granted it was in Manhattan). Getting dirty is considered to be the sign of some McJob peasant, not an engineer, even if you're milling parts out of aluminum for a robot. The practical skills of diagnosing are problem are very related to the ability to design a new system, and these skills are being lost - not just in engineering applications, they're being lost everywhere - cars, healthcare, the IT world - because those skills are expensive and difficult to acquire. - To add to that, the ability to build new things depends in part in your ability to understand similar things that have already been built... there is no interest in the engineering world in taking any kind of historical or investigative look at what already exists. - Some of the most interesting and useful knowledge that we get - programming microprocessors, for example
..and it's just the aether. And there's nothing more irresponsible than a spacecraft in the depths of an aether binge, and I knew we'd be getting into that rotten stuff soon.
Terrorist this, terrorist that. They're the flavor of the month. One of the reasons that BushCo is going after Iraq is because to do a lot of this stuff, you need the resources of a state or a very large corporation. Corporations also can't effectively control territory beyond prying eyes as well as a gov't can, so I'd argue that only a country or a country backing up a multinational would be capable of doing the kind of research necessary to do these "bad things". Some things to keep in mind about what the theoretical terrorists can do: - Some of the documents that they found in Afghanistan relating to Al Qaeda's research into nuclear weapons included stuff from the Journal of Irreproducable Results. The pages included a blurb about "Next Issue: Clone your neighbor's wife!" - Some of the main intellectual lights involved have been trying to figure out how djinns are involved in particle physics because they interpret the Koran a little too literally. - A leading Pakistani nuclear scientist sympathetic to Al-Qaeda met with them and said basically forget about a nuclear weapon because Pakistan was only able to get them after decades of effort, help from other countries and countless billions of dollars. He suggested they try a dirty bomb instead. - The two largest terrorist events in the U.S. were created with cellphones and box cutters in NYC and fertilizer in Oklahoma. Not real high tech. I think the same will follow for other technologies. Nuclear weapons are a fairly well known technology but they still require a lot of infrastructure. Guys living in a cave are probably not going to be innovating in nanotech to the point where they figure out how to make gray goo. These advances are not cooked up by a lone genius working in isolation. If nanotech ever works it will be after years or decades of research by thousands of people. So basically if you trust the other national governments in the world not to want to kill themselves, there isn't much risk. Mutual assured destruction is a proven technology.
Ok, so CFC's last 50 years. The ones produced in 1953 are then leaving the atmosphere now. If we don't add anymore for 10-20 years, the proportion that we produced goes down by 20-40%, right? Cycles do exist. "A million zillion years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth" things were lots warmer - Antarctica was a nice place. Possibly they were warmer in the middle ages as well. There have been ice ages and in between warming periods, and these have affected sea level, which is why people were able to cross the Bering Straight to get to North America. Anecdotal evidence that temperatures were warmer in the past doesn't discount that this current rise in temperatures is man made. It is also possible to guess that the last little ice age would have continued longer if there were no man made effects introduced. We don't know yet. What we do know is that if the current warming trend continues, natural or not, CO2 related or not, there is probably going to be a considerable rise in the sea level, with disastrous consequences for a lot of the planet's population. There is also good evidence that CO2 is higher than it has been historically, including the medieval warming period. Maybe warming is primarily a natural phenomenon, and our CO2 emissions are only making it worse. But it seems unlikely that you'd find scientists with no agenda saying that it will have no impact at all. Given the damage it can do and the difficulty or impossibility of reversing it, the smarter thing to do would be to try to stop producing so much CO2.