English is often one of those "default" majors that students choose when they really don't know what they want to do. More than half of all students switch majors once coming to college, remember, and most people coming out would have taken different courses if they were going for the first time. A lot of people don't know what they want to do, and sometimes those people happen to like English.
Also, English majors tend to do reading more than writing, and discussion and analysis of reading. Writing is actually a very small component of an english major, most of the time. (You write papers in almost any field. Though you might do it a little earlier in English.)
At my school, Economics was the strong default major for men, and Psychology, with English as a second, was the strong default major for women.
> Because antibiotics are under threat due to an explosion of antibiotic-resistant bacteria
The antibotics are under threat--more accurately, we are under threat from those bacteria--because of poor medical practices. Not from everyone, of course, but from a tremendous number of people. (And the inefficiencies that have evolved into medicine are ridiculous, but that's another story--though one which makes it harder to rectify the real problems.) There are hundreds of hospitals that aren't strict about things like, for example, having people wash their hands before drawing blood, or, if they're putting on a new set of gloves to do it, not touching non-sterile surfaces until after they've drawn the blood. If you do that (and follow similar rules before starting an IV, etc...), you cut the number of staph infections down to almost nothing--to a tiny fraction of what they are otherwise. Just a few simple procedures...
But there are hospitals where those procedures don't happen. On a regular basis. So staph is hundreds of times more prevalent than it would be if people--people who are supposedly trained--did a few simple things as part of their working habits. I'm thinking of one Canadian hospital where a relative of mine was for a few days, but similar incompetence happens in the states, too. There was a hospital in Hawaii where I know of them managing to break six of a patient's ribs in the days before he died. You need to know which hospitals to go to, and you need to keep your wits about you when you're there.
There should be a modding category for "+1, Apt Nerdy Reference"
Actually, we should be able to tag comments by reference, and then be able to pull up all the Tron (Or Trek, Or BSG, or Buckaroo Banzai) references that have ever appeared on slashdot.
Or maybe we should... erm... go do... you know, productive stuff.
I don't disagree that many good films have been made--but I think that many other good films have not been made, and they could have been. And I think there's been a lot of trash. Highlander 2 comes to mind, though I can't imagine why. =)
B5 was one of the greatest series of all time. Wonderfully written, by someone who knew how to use language in a way that few popular writers ever learn.
Blade Runner raises the specter of a terrible college class where the discussion was largely "But what does it mean that he's wearing shoes? This must be something about man's spiritual divide--no, no his physical divide, his real divide, from the solid earth. Or, when he's on the cement, from society, since it's society that creates the cement."
You'd think it would be sort of a slap in the face to everybody in the audience who'd actually spent four years *working* for their diplomas. Yes, Gates did all this cool stuff, but he didn't actually complete the requirements of a single major, did he? Well, maybe computer science, one would hope, in terms of how much he learned over the years. Still... a slap in the face, really.
Except, of course, that a good set of the kids at Harvard are smart enough to realize that a diploma's just a piece of paper, and I'm sure that the graduating students have already been asked to donate to the school, so they're not all caught up in the illusion that the school's above giving honorary diplomas to rich drop-outs.
"In all fairness to Mr. Mellon, it was a very big check." --Dean (of the college) Martin, Back to School
Science Fiction, hell. Star Wars (And Jaws, was it?) changed the way the production studios looked at film. The amount of money involved got so much bigger suddenly that it overwhelmed the vestigial idea that movies ought to be pieces of art. It's similar to the move in publishing over the last half-century, away from a climate where your goal, when looking at a book, is to decide whether it ought to be published because it's well-written or well-crafted or has an important message, towards a climate where you decide how many dollars it's going to rank in according to a simple formula or two. Does it catch my eye on the first page? Has the author written twenty books in the genre before? Does it have a snappy snyopsis? Will the language hold someone's eye, even if it's not saying anything, because it's snappy enough?
There are still good films and good books made, but greed has pushed the idea of being "good" rather far from the central idea of the major production houses, to the point where "good" and "bad" become conflated with "popular" and "unpopular." It's all about the money. The most popular actors are generally good, but there are countless incredible actors who never attain that sort of popularity, including some who are far better than some among the popular... because the popular people are part of the formula, and tend to bring in more money, even if their acting is worse than the acting of an unknown. The same applies to writers, and to almost all art where it's a producer/distributor generating the money, and more in it for the money than for the quality of the product. If art and culture really are the metrics we ought to use to measure the output of our civilization--if it wasn't just the Industrial Revolution that mattered, but also the Renaissance--then greed can be a terrible enemy to the quality of our productions.
(Though I'll admit it can also help, at times--the rich artist can grow soft, with no need to change and grow. Look at how comedians change as their success does.)
Well, thank the founding fathers, at any rate. Yes, the world has changed and the powers of the federal government have grown beyond the dreams of Jefferson and Madison and those folk. And Yes, maybe they're a bunch of dead rich white slave-owners. But they weren't nincompoops!
The legal system in this country is pretty messed up, riddled with inefficies and outright injustices. But it still does some things right. =)
That's the first study that came to mind. Granted, it's not necessarily reflective of the quality of someone's education that they choose to spend their time doing something other than reading--but when reading as a whole declines, there's a whole wonderful part of culture that becomes diminished, in a way, by the shrinking community. Not to mention that the potential readers lose out. Other mediums have good stories too, and ones well worth listening to, and things to learn and to enjoy--but reading is at least as important, and in many ways more so in that it stimulates the imagination.
Also, ask a teacher from inner-city schools thirty years ago for their horror stories... and then ask one from inner-city school teachers today.
"Fewer books" is not the right answer. Educational videogames can be a lot of fun--I'm reminded of Rocky's Boots (digital logic for kids) or Fraction Action (Okay, so graphics have improved over the years)--but "Fewer books" is almost always the wrong answer. There are so many incredible books out there--books that are written with beautiful language, books that can be enjoyed and explored.
(On a tangent, schools which assign BAD books to be read are pretty criminal--there's so much good stuff out there the last thing you need to do is assign a book that's going to turn someone off of reading before they've graduated grade school.)
I applaud the use of video games for education--and I have no problem with having video games to play, for children or adults. But how much would we gain by simply having a month each semester, or each year, when all the children at a school were told "No television and no video games." With more books assigned in that period--even if it's a question of asking each student to pick five or ten books out of a hundred choices. Television and video games are more immediately engaging, and maybe you need to starve someone of them for a little while to make them be more willing to try a book. If there's nothing else to do, even the most avid watcher of cartoons might eventually pick up a book and read for a while.
It's called `insurance' or `risk management.' While it's true that insurance companies tend to get cast in a negative light because, well, their accountability and complexities are terrible and they tend to screw people over, the having of insurance is still important. Just because the odds of something occuring are small doesn't mean that you shouldn't plan for the possibility of disaster. We had the dinosaur extinction, and we've had near-earth impacts that have wiped out hundreds of thousands of square miles of life. Planning for the possibility of a disaster before it happens--especially if it's one that doesn't trumpet its impending arrival--can save countless lives at a reduced cost. It's worth it to save civilization.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be smart about it, though. Reasonable standards. Accountability. Intelligent Auditing.
Is a ridiculous waste of time and money that hurts not only the tax payer, but countless businesses that have been scared away from linux when it might have been a better option for their needs, and the businesses that would have supported that choice. Yes, it brought money to Microsoft's pockets, the pockets of lawyers, and the pockets of MS-related consultants and techies, but ultimately it has been a frivolous lawsuit that's cost an inestimable fortune.
SCO should have to pay a lot more than court costs. Maybe the IRS should have a long-term tax penalty for evil.
This is more important than it sounds--the remote and underdeveloped areas of the world that need cell phone penetration more than the developed world does, because the increase in efficiency they create for the local economy is more important when so many people are living at or below sustenance level. (Cell phone usage raises a community's GDP, at least to a point.)
True Pearl Harbor was a military target, but on the other side of the math, it was a surprise attack. 911 wasn't a surprise attack--it was the second attempt to destroy the same target by an enemy. (Though it still shocked the world.)
I suppose the conclusion is that neither was a particularly honorable move. Most attacks aren't.
>... maybe the US Congress should read the bill before they pass it into law.
Tee-hee! That was modded funny!
Seriously, though, it doesn't mean anything unless you actually test them on the meaning of the bill as you'd test a student. The equivalent law in the New York State Assembly used to require (as of a few years ago--I don't know if it still does) that the bill phsyically sit on the assemblyperson's desk for two days before it's passed. So they'd print out hundreds of copies of hundreds of pages of law that nobody actually read, and leave them sitting on the desks in Albany.
> he (she) need only get the necessary background to qualify to teach physics.
The requirements go down when there's a shortage, of course, so this isn't as hard as it sounds. Of course, to be honest, with the exception of a few particular courses--some AP stuff, advanced language stuff, and I suppose music--an intelligent person should be able to teach any high school course. (Based on the difficulty of high school courses at my school in the late 90s, and given at least a week or two of lead-time.) High school classes disseminate information at a rate which is much slower than the rate at which a reasonably intelligent person can learn.
That doesn't mean being a good teacher is easy--it isn't. It also isn't strongly encouraged or supported by the system, in most cases. One guy I met taught at a school where, one day, the students beat up a cop in front of the school. At the same school that fellow had had to physically pull a male student off the leg of a female teacher--a leg the student was humping. Someone else I know couldn't be reviewed for her teaching evaluation purposes the days the evaluator came because the students were too out-of-control--despite her best efforts, and this isn't someone who would be a bad teacher. Someone else I know had a team of students lie about being allowed out of class, and the parents came in furious about the idea of the students being written up for it... and the principal was upset, too, but didn't know how to properly interact with the (clueless) disciplinarian involved with the school. A student who was tutored by my sister for a while got a note on one of her essays saying her work was "Much mo better" from her teacher.
It's not a question of money. It's a question of worldview. What are our responsibilities in every day? How do we demand responsibility of ourselves and our teachers and our children in a way that teaches the children, but lets them explore?
It's called "satire." (And parody, of course.) I haven't liked it historically--although I do remember a fun article in a british pamphlet from a while back about duelling. "Please, sir, show up at half-past ten in front of the convenience store so that we might stick swords in each other." Something like that... In any event, Colbert is the more recent example. The Colbert Report satirizes O'Reilly, and O'Reilly would certainly shut Colbert down if he could. Satire and Parody is one of the few parts of the constitution that has actually remained pretty powerful--that particular application of free speech laws. This is something that the U.S. does right.
On the one hand, peer review and editing (things which closed journals often provide) are important. The classic example is the law journal where a misplaced comma cost millions, but it's also important in scientific journals where someone should be asking "does this sentence make sense?"
On the other hand, why the hell should it cost anything for someone to read the research that their taxpayer dollars are funding? And why should there be gatekeepers of knowledge, or perceived knowledge? My grandfather had a paper that was rejected from the New England Journal of Medicine because he'd done the research before one of the editors, who came out with his own substantially similar paper later. Information should not be subjected to politics--especially information that saves lives. Restricting information increases corruption.
It's a ridiculous analogy because the speed limit is one of the most flagrant examples of idiotic instutitional untruths perpetrated in this country. At least, in most states, the posted speed limit isn't the limit, it's the limit minus ten. 55mph means 65mph, 65 mph means 75mph, and 75mph means no federal funding for your road.
Spatial memory is probably like the rest of the brain--exercising it helps. How frequently do these depressed folk explore new areas? As in, new physical locations? Compare that to a control group.
The Chinese market took a bit of a nosedive (around 9%) after (1) profit-taking from a record-high the day before when their market reached a psychologically nice place, and (2) the rumor that they were going to start charging capital-gains tax, which we go here. China's place in the world market is important enough that that triggered a worldwide economic hiccup that wiped out most of this year's economic gains worldwide.
Other contributors were low durable goods orders and Greenspan's warning on monday of a recession as early as the end of the year.
What respectable child wouldn't be trying to drive by that age? If a child is curious, he plays with machines like cars. This is what *car keys* are for.
And yes, society has grown quite stupid in terms of responsibility. Blame the lawyers. Liability costs our society billions, maybe trillion of dollars every year--and those are dollars that never get reported, that never make it into a cost assessment, because they're things like "you can't climb a ladder if you're not trained" and "you can't give first aid to your student if you're not a nurse" and "we can't have overnight stays at the health center because liability costs too much money."
Parents complain about the "violence" in The Last Unicorn. A good guy threatens to kill a bad guy (Well, he threatens to turn all his toenails growing inwards, too,) and the parents complain because their kids can get suspended or arrested today for a "death threat" in school. Guns in E.T. were digitally replaced by walkie-talkies... and didn't you hear, Greedo shot first?
Guess what? Kids still throw things at each other. They're SUPPOSED to. Pine Cones? Snow cones? If it's not a rock (or rock-like), sure, it's fair game.
Yes, the rocket thing was a mistaken assumption that I corrected in a reply to my own post when I discovered it.
However, I did say "a move against" those satellites, not necessarily meaning they need be blown up. Blinding them temporarily could also work, and would be less provocative.
Slashdot Mirror
Um... No.
English is often one of those "default" majors that students choose when they really don't know what they want to do. More than half of all students switch majors once coming to college, remember, and most people coming out would have taken different courses if they were going for the first time. A lot of people don't know what they want to do, and sometimes those people happen to like English.
Also, English majors tend to do reading more than writing, and discussion and analysis of reading. Writing is actually a very small component of an english major, most of the time. (You write papers in almost any field. Though you might do it a little earlier in English.)
At my school, Economics was the strong default major for men, and Psychology, with English as a second, was the strong default major for women.
The constitution forbids us from being a king. Or at least it forbids us from kinging ourselves, so we'd be terrible at... er... one-player checkers.
n ited_States_Constitution#Section_9:_Limits_on_Cong ress
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_U
> Because antibiotics are under threat due to an explosion of antibiotic-resistant bacteria
The antibotics are under threat--more accurately, we are under threat from those bacteria--because of poor medical practices. Not from everyone, of course, but from a tremendous number of people. (And the inefficiencies that have evolved into medicine are ridiculous, but that's another story--though one which makes it harder to rectify the real problems.) There are hundreds of hospitals that aren't strict about things like, for example, having people wash their hands before drawing blood, or, if they're putting on a new set of gloves to do it, not touching non-sterile surfaces until after they've drawn the blood. If you do that (and follow similar rules before starting an IV, etc...), you cut the number of staph infections down to almost nothing--to a tiny fraction of what they are otherwise. Just a few simple procedures...
But there are hospitals where those procedures don't happen. On a regular basis. So staph is hundreds of times more prevalent than it would be if people--people who are supposedly trained--did a few simple things as part of their working habits. I'm thinking of one Canadian hospital where a relative of mine was for a few days, but similar incompetence happens in the states, too. There was a hospital in Hawaii where I know of them managing to break six of a patient's ribs in the days before he died. You need to know which hospitals to go to, and you need to keep your wits about you when you're there.
Erm... Well, that was a bit of a rant. =)
The guitar shown in the link is a 10 micron Fender guitar; the playable guitar referenced by the article is 50 micron Gibson Flying V.
Now all we need is a 90 micron guitarist. Quick, where do we find a Lillipution orchestra?
There should be a modding category for "+1, Apt Nerdy Reference"
Actually, we should be able to tag comments by reference, and then be able to pull up all the Tron (Or Trek, Or BSG, or Buckaroo Banzai) references that have ever appeared on slashdot.
Or maybe we should... erm... go do... you know, productive stuff.
I'm conflicted.
I don't disagree that many good films have been made--but I think that many other good films have not been made, and they could have been. And I think there's been a lot of trash. Highlander 2 comes to mind, though I can't imagine why. =)
B5 was one of the greatest series of all time. Wonderfully written, by someone who knew how to use language in a way that few popular writers ever learn.
Blade Runner raises the specter of a terrible college class where the discussion was largely "But what does it mean that he's wearing shoes? This must be something about man's spiritual divide--no, no his physical divide, his real divide, from the solid earth. Or, when he's on the cement, from society, since it's society that creates the cement."
You'd think it would be sort of a slap in the face to everybody in the audience who'd actually spent four years *working* for their diplomas. Yes, Gates did all this cool stuff, but he didn't actually complete the requirements of a single major, did he? Well, maybe computer science, one would hope, in terms of how much he learned over the years. Still... a slap in the face, really.
Except, of course, that a good set of the kids at Harvard are smart enough to realize that a diploma's just a piece of paper, and I'm sure that the graduating students have already been asked to donate to the school, so they're not all caught up in the illusion that the school's above giving honorary diplomas to rich drop-outs.
"In all fairness to Mr. Mellon, it was a very big check." --Dean (of the college) Martin, Back to School
Science Fiction, hell. Star Wars (And Jaws, was it?) changed the way the production studios looked at film. The amount of money involved got so much bigger suddenly that it overwhelmed the vestigial idea that movies ought to be pieces of art. It's similar to the move in publishing over the last half-century, away from a climate where your goal, when looking at a book, is to decide whether it ought to be published because it's well-written or well-crafted or has an important message, towards a climate where you decide how many dollars it's going to rank in according to a simple formula or two. Does it catch my eye on the first page? Has the author written twenty books in the genre before? Does it have a snappy snyopsis? Will the language hold someone's eye, even if it's not saying anything, because it's snappy enough?
There are still good films and good books made, but greed has pushed the idea of being "good" rather far from the central idea of the major production houses, to the point where "good" and "bad" become conflated with "popular" and "unpopular." It's all about the money. The most popular actors are generally good, but there are countless incredible actors who never attain that sort of popularity, including some who are far better than some among the popular... because the popular people are part of the formula, and tend to bring in more money, even if their acting is worse than the acting of an unknown. The same applies to writers, and to almost all art where it's a producer/distributor generating the money, and more in it for the money than for the quality of the product. If art and culture really are the metrics we ought to use to measure the output of our civilization--if it wasn't just the Industrial Revolution that mattered, but also the Renaissance--then greed can be a terrible enemy to the quality of our productions.
(Though I'll admit it can also help, at times--the rich artist can grow soft, with no need to change and grow. Look at how comedians change as their success does.)
Well, thank the founding fathers, at any rate. Yes, the world has changed and the powers of the federal government have grown beyond the dreams of Jefferson and Madison and those folk. And Yes, maybe they're a bunch of dead rich white slave-owners. But they weren't nincompoops!
The legal system in this country is pretty messed up, riddled with inefficies and outright injustices. But it still does some things right. =)
> Their set of cross-references is so complex that Groklaw readers graphed the claims to make what little sense of them they could.
*deadpans* Honestly, that doesn't mean much--Groklaw readers will graph anything.
*clicks on link*
Oh, now. See, it's only about nine references deep. (Unless you get caught in an infinite loop between documents 27 and 187.)
National Endowment for the Arts Report: Reading At Risk
That's the first study that came to mind. Granted, it's not necessarily reflective of the quality of someone's education that they choose to spend their time doing something other than reading--but when reading as a whole declines, there's a whole wonderful part of culture that becomes diminished, in a way, by the shrinking community. Not to mention that the potential readers lose out. Other mediums have good stories too, and ones well worth listening to, and things to learn and to enjoy--but reading is at least as important, and in many ways more so in that it stimulates the imagination.
Also, ask a teacher from inner-city schools thirty years ago for their horror stories... and then ask one from inner-city school teachers today.
"Fewer books" is not the right answer. Educational videogames can be a lot of fun--I'm reminded of Rocky's Boots (digital logic for kids) or Fraction Action (Okay, so graphics have improved over the years)--but "Fewer books" is almost always the wrong answer. There are so many incredible books out there--books that are written with beautiful language, books that can be enjoyed and explored.
(On a tangent, schools which assign BAD books to be read are pretty criminal--there's so much good stuff out there the last thing you need to do is assign a book that's going to turn someone off of reading before they've graduated grade school.)
I applaud the use of video games for education--and I have no problem with having video games to play, for children or adults. But how much would we gain by simply having a month each semester, or each year, when all the children at a school were told "No television and no video games." With more books assigned in that period--even if it's a question of asking each student to pick five or ten books out of a hundred choices. Television and video games are more immediately engaging, and maybe you need to starve someone of them for a little while to make them be more willing to try a book. If there's nothing else to do, even the most avid watcher of cartoons might eventually pick up a book and read for a while.
It's called `insurance' or `risk management.' While it's true that insurance companies tend to get cast in a negative light because, well, their accountability and complexities are terrible and they tend to screw people over, the having of insurance is still important. Just because the odds of something occuring are small doesn't mean that you shouldn't plan for the possibility of disaster. We had the dinosaur extinction, and we've had near-earth impacts that have wiped out hundreds of thousands of square miles of life. Planning for the possibility of a disaster before it happens--especially if it's one that doesn't trumpet its impending arrival--can save countless lives at a reduced cost. It's worth it to save civilization.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be smart about it, though. Reasonable standards. Accountability. Intelligent Auditing.
Is a ridiculous waste of time and money that hurts not only the tax payer, but countless businesses that have been scared away from linux when it might have been a better option for their needs, and the businesses that would have supported that choice. Yes, it brought money to Microsoft's pockets, the pockets of lawyers, and the pockets of MS-related consultants and techies, but ultimately it has been a frivolous lawsuit that's cost an inestimable fortune.
SCO should have to pay a lot more than court costs. Maybe the IRS should have a long-term tax penalty for evil.
This is more important than it sounds--the remote and underdeveloped areas of the world that need cell phone penetration more than the developed world does, because the increase in efficiency they create for the local economy is more important when so many people are living at or below sustenance level. (Cell phone usage raises a community's GDP, at least to a point.)
True Pearl Harbor was a military target, but on the other side of the math, it was a surprise attack. 911 wasn't a surprise attack--it was the second attempt to destroy the same target by an enemy. (Though it still shocked the world.)
I suppose the conclusion is that neither was a particularly honorable move. Most attacks aren't.
> ... maybe the US Congress should read the bill before they pass it into law.
Tee-hee! That was modded funny!
Seriously, though, it doesn't mean anything unless you actually test them on the meaning of the bill as you'd test a student. The equivalent law in the New York State Assembly used to require (as of a few years ago--I don't know if it still does) that the bill phsyically sit on the assemblyperson's desk for two days before it's passed. So they'd print out hundreds of copies of hundreds of pages of law that nobody actually read, and leave them sitting on the desks in Albany.
(One stray thought let to another. =))
> he (she) need only get the necessary background to qualify to teach physics.
The requirements go down when there's a shortage, of course, so this isn't as hard as it sounds. Of course, to be honest, with the exception of a few particular courses--some AP stuff, advanced language stuff, and I suppose music--an intelligent person should be able to teach any high school course. (Based on the difficulty of high school courses at my school in the late 90s, and given at least a week or two of lead-time.) High school classes disseminate information at a rate which is much slower than the rate at which a reasonably intelligent person can learn.
That doesn't mean being a good teacher is easy--it isn't. It also isn't strongly encouraged or supported by the system, in most cases. One guy I met taught at a school where, one day, the students beat up a cop in front of the school. At the same school that fellow had had to physically pull a male student off the leg of a female teacher--a leg the student was humping. Someone else I know couldn't be reviewed for her teaching evaluation purposes the days the evaluator came because the students were too out-of-control--despite her best efforts, and this isn't someone who would be a bad teacher. Someone else I know had a team of students lie about being allowed out of class, and the parents came in furious about the idea of the students being written up for it... and the principal was upset, too, but didn't know how to properly interact with the (clueless) disciplinarian involved with the school. A student who was tutored by my sister for a while got a note on one of her essays saying her work was "Much mo better" from her teacher.
It's not a question of money. It's a question of worldview. What are our responsibilities in every day? How do we demand responsibility of ourselves and our teachers and our children in a way that teaches the children, but lets them explore?
It's called "satire." (And parody, of course.) I haven't liked it historically--although I do remember a fun article in a british pamphlet from a while back about duelling. "Please, sir, show up at half-past ten in front of the convenience store so that we might stick swords in each other." Something like that... In any event, Colbert is the more recent example. The Colbert Report satirizes O'Reilly, and O'Reilly would certainly shut Colbert down if he could. Satire and Parody is one of the few parts of the constitution that has actually remained pretty powerful--that particular application of free speech laws. This is something that the U.S. does right.
On the one hand, peer review and editing (things which closed journals often provide) are important. The classic example is the law journal where a misplaced comma cost millions, but it's also important in scientific journals where someone should be asking "does this sentence make sense?"
On the other hand, why the hell should it cost anything for someone to read the research that their taxpayer dollars are funding? And why should there be gatekeepers of knowledge, or perceived knowledge? My grandfather had a paper that was rejected from the New England Journal of Medicine because he'd done the research before one of the editors, who came out with his own substantially similar paper later. Information should not be subjected to politics--especially information that saves lives. Restricting information increases corruption.
It's a ridiculous analogy because the speed limit is one of the most flagrant examples of idiotic instutitional untruths perpetrated in this country. At least, in most states, the posted speed limit isn't the limit, it's the limit minus ten. 55mph means 65mph, 65 mph means 75mph, and 75mph means no federal funding for your road.
Spatial memory is probably like the rest of the brain--exercising it helps. How frequently do these depressed folk explore new areas? As in, new physical locations? Compare that to a control group.
The Chinese market took a bit of a nosedive (around 9%) after (1) profit-taking from a record-high the day before when their market reached a psychologically nice place, and (2) the rumor that they were going to start charging capital-gains tax, which we go here. China's place in the world market is important enough that that triggered a worldwide economic hiccup that wiped out most of this year's economic gains worldwide.
Other contributors were low durable goods orders and Greenspan's warning on monday of a recession as early as the end of the year.
What respectable child wouldn't be trying to drive by that age? If a child is curious, he plays with machines like cars. This is what *car keys* are for.
And yes, society has grown quite stupid in terms of responsibility. Blame the lawyers. Liability costs our society billions, maybe trillion of dollars every year--and those are dollars that never get reported, that never make it into a cost assessment, because they're things like "you can't climb a ladder if you're not trained" and "you can't give first aid to your student if you're not a nurse" and "we can't have overnight stays at the health center because liability costs too much money."
Parents complain about the "violence" in The Last Unicorn. A good guy threatens to kill a bad guy (Well, he threatens to turn all his toenails growing inwards, too,) and the parents complain because their kids can get suspended or arrested today for a "death threat" in school. Guns in E.T. were digitally replaced by walkie-talkies... and didn't you hear, Greedo shot first?
Guess what? Kids still throw things at each other. They're SUPPOSED to. Pine Cones? Snow cones? If it's not a rock (or rock-like), sure, it's fair game.
Yes, the rocket thing was a mistaken assumption that I corrected in a reply to my own post when I discovered it.
However, I did say "a move against" those satellites, not necessarily meaning they need be blown up. Blinding them temporarily could also work, and would be less provocative.