An evolutionary approach has the same difficulties in dealing with local optima. There are techniques (like simulated annealing) that transform the nasty optimization problem into a nice (convex, or at least, single optimum) optimization problem such that the global optima of the two problems are identical. Then, the nice, solved optimization problem can be slowly transformed back into the original, nasty problem in such a way that you can find that global minimum.
Whoa there. There is not a TON of oil off our coastline. There is oil in the Eastern Gulf; there are no deposits off the East and West Coasts (at least, according to the US Geological Survey, and I would trust them). The oil contained in the Eastern Gulf is enough to meet America's current consumption for three years, which is not enough time to wean ourselves off our oil teat. That three year figure assumes that a) American consumption holds steady and b) that the oil can be pumped out fast enough. Neither of those assumptions are terribly good ones. Also, the timetable in being able to start getting out of the Eastern Gulf is not the "couple years" you say, but between 5 and 10.
That is not to say there isn't a vast supply of oil in America. There are deposits in North and South Dakota into Montana, as well as a mother lode of oil shale in the Appalachian Basin. However, it is difficult to get usable oil out of either those deposits, which results in higher costs in extraction and therefore higher costs of crude and higher "prices at the pump." Indeed, in 1999, when the Dakota reserve was found, it was dismissed as uneconomical (because oil was ~$10 a barrel). It might be more economical now, but it will always cost more than other crude. Also, there are vast deposits in the Arctic, but it is unclear whether we will be allowed to drill there (Canada might get the rights).
So, we have oil. However, in order to get at most of that oil, it will take the ~20 years you say it will take to get alternative sources like wind, solar, nuclear, etc. to come online. The oil that has already been mapped out will take at least 5 years. By the time we are able to get oil from our reserves, we will be able to consume much less oil, if we start aggressively pursuing alternatives now.
Now, that's not to say we shouldn't extract this oil. If we wean ourselves off oil, and then drill this oil, we can make ourselves a pretty penny and probably have a similarly large influence over geopolitics like OPEC countries now have. However, saying that we should start drilling so we can keep feeding our oil habit is stupid: there is a gap where we are still extraordinarily dependent on foreign oil, and the time it takes for both oil production and alternative energy sources to come fully online is roughly the same. Additionally, due to the costs of extraction from our deposits, we will not see much of a decrease in price. So because both (most of) American oil and alternative energies are a) expensive and b) ~20 years away, we might as well invest in the renewable energy source.
Reviewing my Jr. High textbook, I see that increased production is not possible without a major investment in the form of new equipment because the oil in the ground is harder and more expensive to get out. After Saudi Arabia increased their oil production earlier this summer, production is at current full capacity. Period, full stop. It will take time to substantially increase production (because it is not like turning a tap now as it has been before). It may be possible that production cannot be increased much beyond what it is now because of the difficulties in extraction. Additionally, difficulties = time + money, so even if production is increased significantly, it will cost the oil companies more to move the oil from the ground into useable crude oil, which means higher prices regardless of supply. Supply and demand are not as simple as in your Jr. High textbooks; the same is true about the geology and economies of oil extraction. Maybe if you tried understanding beyond a Jr. High level, you wouldn't come across as arrogant and ignorant.
Politics is also involved...Demand is rapidly outstripping supply, not because of Al Gore, or anybody saying, "Hey! Let's pump less oil." We are pumping as much as possible out of the Earth. The problem is that rednecks shoot their guns from pickup trucks with abominable gas mileage...But seriously, demand is outstripping supply because China and India are rapidly industrializing and are demanding a much larger amount of oil than they used to. It's something like the Malthusian Dilemma (where demand increases exponentially while production increases linearly), except for oil instead of food. Because we can't be saved by the Haber-Bosch process in oil, we are acutely feeling some Malthusian effects.
1) OMG. I made a typo. Twice.
2) I am in the business. What exactly are you? I am a biomedical engineer. I understand body mechanics and physiology. I understand the nuances. But a nice ad hom anyway.
3) The equations still have predictive power, or they wouldn't have been published! I read the paper were Mifflin and his group described this equation. At least, I used the paper referenced here: http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/51/2/241. The paper does not give any error estimates for the equations. It does say that the variables account for 70% of the variability of the data, but that does not mean that the equations are 30% wrong. It means that their equations are at most 30% wrong. And for them to be 30% wrong, it means that the variables already accounted for have no predictive power towards any other variables that account for the other 30% of the variability.
4) No, I am extrapolating. There is data there, even though the data is not drawn from the same population.
5) We do not know that he is very abnormal. He has claimed to be abnormal. I am claiming that those claims are bogus. Assume for a minute that he has an REE of 0 kcal/day. As I also stated elsewhere, a 380 lb man walking for an hour requires a lot of energy, depending on how he walks; but on average, he'd burn about 600-700 calories in an hour. 2 hours of circuit training and weights come out to roughly 2400 calories. That's a lot more than his daily caloric intake, even with an REE of zero. I used the REE value initially to illustrate quickly why his claims were fishy. But even if we throw those out, there is still a numerical disagreement. Are you going to try to say that he is burning fewer calories exercising than people think he is because he's overweight? All of those estimates come from understanding biomechanics and biophysics; the equations are much more predictive because they are derived from physical principles.
So let's sum up here. You looked at one part of my claim and then proceeded to "sink to my level" and provide a singularly stunning ad hominem attack. Bravo. I was a complete dick to some stranger on the internet based on cool hard facts and the heady, but oh-so-manly scent of my arrogance. Indeed I did bother to think about how much guff this AC has gotten for his weight, but I wasn't calling him a fatty; I was saying that his numbers don't add up. And I provided evidence, numbers. I didn't call him fat, I called him a liar. I never passed any judgment about his weight. Finally, when you called me on my "ignorance," I stated that regardless of his REE he would be using more energy than he could derive from what he eats. Whoops, why did you forget to talk about that?! As you should have read, I updated my claims with some numbers.
Now, I can dispense with the ad hominem attacks. I don't need them because I won. It was valiant of you to defend an overweight gentleman who claims to be actively trying to change his weight to no avail. I really empathize with the guy. I was a fat kid, and I know it took 3 years and puberty (mmm, testosterone) to slim down to a weight that I liked. But if he is working out like he says he is, and eating like he says he is, then he would not still be 380 lbs with a lot of flab.
His gut would have to be a whole lot better to explain the discrepancy. I mean, his resting metabolic rate is at least twice as much as his daily caloric intake. And he exercises. His gut is not >2x more efficient at nutrient extraction. I don't have the numbers, but I don't think that's even possible (which is true if humans extract more than 50% of the nutrients in their food).
Maybe his gut can convert mass into energy. That would explain it!!! Come on. It's not fracking possible. Everyone here is supposedly geeks/nerds and those people are supposedly scientifically-minded. Science is screaming, "This guy's a phony," just as loudly as Holden Caulfield. You should listen.
Hookay, bub. It seems like I've been playing Whack-a-mole with morons recently.
The quoted value is calculated using the Mufflin equation, which is regarded as among the best in the business (and assuming that the guy was young and short as both of these characteristics lower the caloric need. If he's actually 70 and 6'6", then that number is much higher. Additionally, the Mufflin equation is valid independent of diet. Now, if you look into what the Mufflin equation actually calculates, you will realize that 2700 calories/day is how much the body requires for just existing, doing no physical or mental activity. He goes on to talk about an hour's walk (which amounts to ), and 2 hours of combined aerobic and strength training 5 days a week. The energy required by these activities alone probably gets close to how many calories the guy ingests in a day.
In short, the numbers don't add up. The body's low-calorie adaptations cannot get around the fact that doing all the exercise he claims to be doing requires energy, and it would appear that it requires more energy than he ingests in a day. Ergo, the body would have to derive energy from his fat stores and he would lose the fat.
Your claim that I cannot possibly know the AC is exaggerating without empirical testing is wrong; this is exactly why scientists have bothered to write equations to describe natural processes. Using those equations, anyone can determine that the AC described an impossible situation.
Actually, the caloric content of food is measured by a bomb calorimeter, which simply burns the food until it is completely oxidized. To extract the maximum amount of energy, the body must do the same thing, which is what occurs through the metabolic pathway of glycolysis -> krebs cycle -> electron transport chain for sugars; beta-oxidation -> krebs cycle -> ETC for fats; and protease digestion -> reduction to pyruvate/acetyl CoA -> krebs cycle -> ETC for proteins. These pathways result in the food being broken down into water and carbon dioxide, the same end-products from the bomb calorimeter. In chemistry, the total energy derived from a chemical reaction (or set of chemical reactions) is given by the equation: Delta_Energy = Energy(in bonds of reactants) - Energy(in bonds of products). The body cannot extract more energy than this, and that is exactly what the bomb calorimeter is measuring. The caloric content of foods is based on the total amount of energy that can be derived from a food product.*
Now, if our AC troll friend can derive more energy from food than the bomb calorimeter can, he is, quite literally, Mr. Fusion.
* As such, it follows that people do not actually require 2000 kCal (on average) per day; however, that is how much energy needs to be in the food so that the ~35% efficient catabolic pathways can derive enough useful energy from the food to power the body. 35% efficiency is extremely high (the most efficient internal combustion engines get ~25-30%); it is the result of literally billions of years of evolution because deriving energy from a substrate is a requirement of life, so the whole complicated mess has been around from the beginning. Therefore, Nature has optimized the crap out of it. Unless Mr. Fusion up there has different catabolic pathways than the rest of life on earth there is no way that he could be that more efficient than everyone else.
The minimum caloric needs of your 380 lb corpulence are ~2700 calories/day. Any less than that and your body starts raiding your fat rolls like your raid bakery rolls.
You are full of shit; that may explain your obesity.
Something that only the parent has even mentioned about in this thread is "problem solving." Problem solving is the crux of programming, and focusing on giving him interesting challenges to solve (instead of on what language) will really get him hooked.
I first "programmed" a TI-82 graphing calculator in middle school so that the calculator would basically do all the boring repetitive math assignments doled out like Oliver Twist's dinner. When I got to high school, I took intro computer science classes that were taught in C++. At university, low-level programming classes were taught with Java or Python. The only thing my programming education at various levels had in common was that there was a problem to solve.
Teaching problem solving (regardless of what language it is in, or if it is even in a code language) is fundamental to teaching programming. The other aspect of programming that might interest a teenager is learning how a computer works and how the different parts fit together and integrate to do a job. Teaching him C would then help him understand how a computer works.
Of course future networks will be faster, silly. Because they'll use the new technology (which surprises us) talked about in the article. Sheesh, no need to be so dense.
Backwards. That copy of OS X you get with your MacBook or iPhone is a selling point for the hardware. Apple makes diddly on their software (~$140 million for the release of Leopard and you can bet that sales of iLife and iWork will be less than that...), compared to the ~$2.5 billion they make per quarter on sales of hardware.
Animal torture is disturbing; I would hope that the OP's kids find it disturbing. There are a lot of disturbing things in the world, and so in order to maintain sanity, one has to learn how to deal with unpleasant things that come up in daily existence. I would argue that reading about disturbing things before having to actually experience them is beneficial because it forces the reader to confront and deal with disturbing images/ideas/etc., but while the reader is in a safe place.
I also think that underestimating kids is deleterious to their existence; if you aren't sure they would grasp it, have them read it and talk about it. Even if they still don't grasp it totally now, when they reread it, they will grasp it and marvel about how their perception of the book has changed.
O2binbuzios: So in the same vein, I think you should suggest to your kids the same books you read when you were their age. If you, like me, read Starship Troopers at their age, suggest it to them. The reason you don't remember it being as dark and as political is because you didn't recognize the dark and political parts when you read it as a child; your kids probably won't either.
Most people I talk to say "I put my pictures on Facebook" or (if they had MySpace pages), "I put my pictures on MySpace." Users of both pages know you can only add content to your own page, so saying that you put it on MySpace is equivalent to saying you put it on your MySpace page.
I mean, I know most/.ers wouldn't read Playboy (ha ha), but in 2005, he said that he "looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilization on a 'heavenly CNN.'"
The freezer I am currently using is not new. I don't know the date of manufacture or purchase because I'm living in an apartment and didn't buy the fridge, but from looking at it, it's old. Regardless, this same experience works in a non-frost free freezer. When in college, I had a small refrigerator made by Amana and still sold by Best Buy with a little compartment for making ice. The ice compartment was surrounded by the cooling element. I would make ice in the fridge, but due to the wide availability of cool drinks on campus, I would not use it often. Oftentimes, I would not use the fridge-made ice for months. Now, the fridge was not frost-free because after having the thing continuously plugged in for 8 months, the cooling element looked like Old Man Winter... It was covered in frost. Even so, when I would go to get my ice cubes, they would be a lot smaller than the size of the tray.
H2O ice does sublimate. Here's an easy way to prove it. All you need is a freezer and an ice cube tray.
1. Fill ice cube tray with water (liquid, H2O water) and put it in freezer.
2. Go back in a day and mark the level of the ice in the tray.
3. Return later (preferably at least a week) and marvel at how the ice is below the level marked.
4. ???
5. Profit.
The ice was in the freezer the whole time, so it didn't melt (assuming the freezer was set correctly and continuously powered). Therefore, the solid water lost must have changed to water vapor.
A very good conclusion figuring that the 9800GX2 is a mature product while the GT200 was an engineering sample and running on pre-beta drivers....The sarcasm...it burns my eyes...
Being born via C-section (short for Caesarian Section) still entitles you to saying you were "born of a human mother." You just didn't have the pleasure of sliding headfirst through a vagina as distended as Goatse Man's anus.
Yeah, that was kinda exactly my point. So if the idea of God originated in a human, then some human, at some point, "knew" God existed without being told, "God exists! You better believe in him."
Slashdot Mirror
An evolutionary approach has the same difficulties in dealing with local optima. There are techniques (like simulated annealing) that transform the nasty optimization problem into a nice (convex, or at least, single optimum) optimization problem such that the global optima of the two problems are identical. Then, the nice, solved optimization problem can be slowly transformed back into the original, nasty problem in such a way that you can find that global minimum.
Tomorrow Never Dies...
The Cult of Stupid spreads far beyond computers, sadly. Nobody wants to be a nerd seem like they know anything.
There, FTFY.
Whoa there. There is not a TON of oil off our coastline. There is oil in the Eastern Gulf; there are no deposits off the East and West Coasts (at least, according to the US Geological Survey, and I would trust them). The oil contained in the Eastern Gulf is enough to meet America's current consumption for three years, which is not enough time to wean ourselves off our oil teat. That three year figure assumes that a) American consumption holds steady and b) that the oil can be pumped out fast enough. Neither of those assumptions are terribly good ones. Also, the timetable in being able to start getting out of the Eastern Gulf is not the "couple years" you say, but between 5 and 10.
That is not to say there isn't a vast supply of oil in America. There are deposits in North and South Dakota into Montana, as well as a mother lode of oil shale in the Appalachian Basin. However, it is difficult to get usable oil out of either those deposits, which results in higher costs in extraction and therefore higher costs of crude and higher "prices at the pump." Indeed, in 1999, when the Dakota reserve was found, it was dismissed as uneconomical (because oil was ~$10 a barrel). It might be more economical now, but it will always cost more than other crude. Also, there are vast deposits in the Arctic, but it is unclear whether we will be allowed to drill there (Canada might get the rights).
So, we have oil. However, in order to get at most of that oil, it will take the ~20 years you say it will take to get alternative sources like wind, solar, nuclear, etc. to come online. The oil that has already been mapped out will take at least 5 years. By the time we are able to get oil from our reserves, we will be able to consume much less oil, if we start aggressively pursuing alternatives now.
Now, that's not to say we shouldn't extract this oil. If we wean ourselves off oil, and then drill this oil, we can make ourselves a pretty penny and probably have a similarly large influence over geopolitics like OPEC countries now have. However, saying that we should start drilling so we can keep feeding our oil habit is stupid: there is a gap where we are still extraordinarily dependent on foreign oil, and the time it takes for both oil production and alternative energy sources to come fully online is roughly the same. Additionally, due to the costs of extraction from our deposits, we will not see much of a decrease in price. So because both (most of) American oil and alternative energies are a) expensive and b) ~20 years away, we might as well invest in the renewable energy source.
Reviewing my Jr. High textbook, I see that increased production is not possible without a major investment in the form of new equipment because the oil in the ground is harder and more expensive to get out. After Saudi Arabia increased their oil production earlier this summer, production is at current full capacity. Period, full stop. It will take time to substantially increase production (because it is not like turning a tap now as it has been before). It may be possible that production cannot be increased much beyond what it is now because of the difficulties in extraction. Additionally, difficulties = time + money, so even if production is increased significantly, it will cost the oil companies more to move the oil from the ground into useable crude oil, which means higher prices regardless of supply. Supply and demand are not as simple as in your Jr. High textbooks; the same is true about the geology and economies of oil extraction. Maybe if you tried understanding beyond a Jr. High level, you wouldn't come across as arrogant and ignorant.
Politics is also involved...Demand is rapidly outstripping supply, not because of Al Gore, or anybody saying, "Hey! Let's pump less oil." We are pumping as much as possible out of the Earth. The problem is that rednecks shoot their guns from pickup trucks with abominable gas mileage...But seriously, demand is outstripping supply because China and India are rapidly industrializing and are demanding a much larger amount of oil than they used to. It's something like the Malthusian Dilemma (where demand increases exponentially while production increases linearly), except for oil instead of food. Because we can't be saved by the Haber-Bosch process in oil, we are acutely feeling some Malthusian effects.
1) OMG. I made a typo. Twice.
2) I am in the business. What exactly are you? I am a biomedical engineer. I understand body mechanics and physiology. I understand the nuances. But a nice ad hom anyway.
3) The equations still have predictive power, or they wouldn't have been published! I read the paper were Mifflin and his group described this equation. At least, I used the paper referenced here: http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/51/2/241. The paper does not give any error estimates for the equations. It does say that the variables account for 70% of the variability of the data, but that does not mean that the equations are 30% wrong. It means that their equations are at most 30% wrong. And for them to be 30% wrong, it means that the variables already accounted for have no predictive power towards any other variables that account for the other 30% of the variability.
4) No, I am extrapolating. There is data there, even though the data is not drawn from the same population.
5) We do not know that he is very abnormal. He has claimed to be abnormal. I am claiming that those claims are bogus. Assume for a minute that he has an REE of 0 kcal/day. As I also stated elsewhere, a 380 lb man walking for an hour requires a lot of energy, depending on how he walks; but on average, he'd burn about 600-700 calories in an hour. 2 hours of circuit training and weights come out to roughly 2400 calories. That's a lot more than his daily caloric intake, even with an REE of zero. I used the REE value initially to illustrate quickly why his claims were fishy. But even if we throw those out, there is still a numerical disagreement. Are you going to try to say that he is burning fewer calories exercising than people think he is because he's overweight? All of those estimates come from understanding biomechanics and biophysics; the equations are much more predictive because they are derived from physical principles.
So let's sum up here. You looked at one part of my claim and then proceeded to "sink to my level" and provide a singularly stunning ad hominem attack. Bravo. I was a complete dick to some stranger on the internet based on cool hard facts and the heady, but oh-so-manly scent of my arrogance. Indeed I did bother to think about how much guff this AC has gotten for his weight, but I wasn't calling him a fatty; I was saying that his numbers don't add up. And I provided evidence, numbers. I didn't call him fat, I called him a liar. I never passed any judgment about his weight. Finally, when you called me on my "ignorance," I stated that regardless of his REE he would be using more energy than he could derive from what he eats. Whoops, why did you forget to talk about that?! As you should have read, I updated my claims with some numbers.
Now, I can dispense with the ad hominem attacks. I don't need them because I won. It was valiant of you to defend an overweight gentleman who claims to be actively trying to change his weight to no avail. I really empathize with the guy. I was a fat kid, and I know it took 3 years and puberty (mmm, testosterone) to slim down to a weight that I liked. But if he is working out like he says he is, and eating like he says he is, then he would not still be 380 lbs with a lot of flab.
His gut would have to be a whole lot better to explain the discrepancy. I mean, his resting metabolic rate is at least twice as much as his daily caloric intake. And he exercises. His gut is not >2x more efficient at nutrient extraction. I don't have the numbers, but I don't think that's even possible (which is true if humans extract more than 50% of the nutrients in their food).
Maybe his gut can convert mass into energy. That would explain it!!! Come on. It's not fracking possible. Everyone here is supposedly geeks/nerds and those people are supposedly scientifically-minded. Science is screaming, "This guy's a phony," just as loudly as Holden Caulfield. You should listen.
Hookay, bub. It seems like I've been playing Whack-a-mole with morons recently.
The quoted value is calculated using the Mufflin equation, which is regarded as among the best in the business (and assuming that the guy was young and short as both of these characteristics lower the caloric need. If he's actually 70 and 6'6", then that number is much higher. Additionally, the Mufflin equation is valid independent of diet. Now, if you look into what the Mufflin equation actually calculates, you will realize that 2700 calories/day is how much the body requires for just existing, doing no physical or mental activity. He goes on to talk about an hour's walk (which amounts to ), and 2 hours of combined aerobic and strength training 5 days a week. The energy required by these activities alone probably gets close to how many calories the guy ingests in a day.
In short, the numbers don't add up. The body's low-calorie adaptations cannot get around the fact that doing all the exercise he claims to be doing requires energy, and it would appear that it requires more energy than he ingests in a day. Ergo, the body would have to derive energy from his fat stores and he would lose the fat.
Your claim that I cannot possibly know the AC is exaggerating without empirical testing is wrong; this is exactly why scientists have bothered to write equations to describe natural processes. Using those equations, anyone can determine that the AC described an impossible situation.
Actually, the caloric content of food is measured by a bomb calorimeter, which simply burns the food until it is completely oxidized. To extract the maximum amount of energy, the body must do the same thing, which is what occurs through the metabolic pathway of glycolysis -> krebs cycle -> electron transport chain for sugars; beta-oxidation -> krebs cycle -> ETC for fats; and protease digestion -> reduction to pyruvate/acetyl CoA -> krebs cycle -> ETC for proteins. These pathways result in the food being broken down into water and carbon dioxide, the same end-products from the bomb calorimeter. In chemistry, the total energy derived from a chemical reaction (or set of chemical reactions) is given by the equation: Delta_Energy = Energy(in bonds of reactants) - Energy(in bonds of products). The body cannot extract more energy than this, and that is exactly what the bomb calorimeter is measuring. The caloric content of foods is based on the total amount of energy that can be derived from a food product.*
Now, if our AC troll friend can derive more energy from food than the bomb calorimeter can, he is, quite literally, Mr. Fusion.
* As such, it follows that people do not actually require 2000 kCal (on average) per day; however, that is how much energy needs to be in the food so that the ~35% efficient catabolic pathways can derive enough useful energy from the food to power the body. 35% efficiency is extremely high (the most efficient internal combustion engines get ~25-30%); it is the result of literally billions of years of evolution because deriving energy from a substrate is a requirement of life, so the whole complicated mess has been around from the beginning. Therefore, Nature has optimized the crap out of it. Unless Mr. Fusion up there has different catabolic pathways than the rest of life on earth there is no way that he could be that more efficient than everyone else.
Unpossible, AC Troll! Your lies are laid bare.
The minimum caloric needs of your 380 lb corpulence are ~2700 calories/day. Any less than that and your body starts raiding your fat rolls like your raid bakery rolls.
You are full of shit; that may explain your obesity.
Something that only the parent has even mentioned about in this thread is "problem solving." Problem solving is the crux of programming, and focusing on giving him interesting challenges to solve (instead of on what language) will really get him hooked.
I first "programmed" a TI-82 graphing calculator in middle school so that the calculator would basically do all the boring repetitive math assignments doled out like Oliver Twist's dinner. When I got to high school, I took intro computer science classes that were taught in C++. At university, low-level programming classes were taught with Java or Python. The only thing my programming education at various levels had in common was that there was a problem to solve.
Teaching problem solving (regardless of what language it is in, or if it is even in a code language) is fundamental to teaching programming. The other aspect of programming that might interest a teenager is learning how a computer works and how the different parts fit together and integrate to do a job. Teaching him C would then help him understand how a computer works.
Of course future networks will be faster, silly. Because they'll use the new technology (which surprises us) talked about in the article. Sheesh, no need to be so dense.
Backwards. That copy of OS X you get with your MacBook or iPhone is a selling point for the hardware. Apple makes diddly on their software (~$140 million for the release of Leopard and you can bet that sales of iLife and iWork will be less than that...), compared to the ~$2.5 billion they make per quarter on sales of hardware.
Animal torture is disturbing; I would hope that the OP's kids find it disturbing. There are a lot of disturbing things in the world, and so in order to maintain sanity, one has to learn how to deal with unpleasant things that come up in daily existence. I would argue that reading about disturbing things before having to actually experience them is beneficial because it forces the reader to confront and deal with disturbing images/ideas/etc., but while the reader is in a safe place.
I also think that underestimating kids is deleterious to their existence; if you aren't sure they would grasp it, have them read it and talk about it. Even if they still don't grasp it totally now, when they reread it, they will grasp it and marvel about how their perception of the book has changed.
O2binbuzios: So in the same vein, I think you should suggest to your kids the same books you read when you were their age. If you, like me, read Starship Troopers at their age, suggest it to them. The reason you don't remember it being as dark and as political is because you didn't recognize the dark and political parts when you read it as a child; your kids probably won't either.
Seriously, is an IP address too much to ask?
Article should be modded +1 Ironic because the links necessitate the use of DNS...at the very least, the DNS checker should have been a straight IP.
WTF?
Most people I talk to say "I put my pictures on Facebook" or (if they had MySpace pages), "I put my pictures on MySpace." Users of both pages know you can only add content to your own page, so saying that you put it on MySpace is equivalent to saying you put it on your MySpace page.
Just my 2 cents.
I mean, I know most /.ers wouldn't read Playboy (ha ha), but in 2005, he said that he "looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilization on a 'heavenly CNN.'"
Mod George Carlin down.
The freezer I am currently using is not new. I don't know the date of manufacture or purchase because I'm living in an apartment and didn't buy the fridge, but from looking at it, it's old. Regardless, this same experience works in a non-frost free freezer. When in college, I had a small refrigerator made by Amana and still sold by Best Buy with a little compartment for making ice. The ice compartment was surrounded by the cooling element. I would make ice in the fridge, but due to the wide availability of cool drinks on campus, I would not use it often. Oftentimes, I would not use the fridge-made ice for months. Now, the fridge was not frost-free because after having the thing continuously plugged in for 8 months, the cooling element looked like Old Man Winter... It was covered in frost. Even so, when I would go to get my ice cubes, they would be a lot smaller than the size of the tray.
H2O ice does sublimate. Here's an easy way to prove it. All you need is a freezer and an ice cube tray.
1. Fill ice cube tray with water (liquid, H2O water) and put it in freezer.
2. Go back in a day and mark the level of the ice in the tray.
3. Return later (preferably at least a week) and marvel at how the ice is below the level marked.
4. ???
5. Profit.
The ice was in the freezer the whole time, so it didn't melt (assuming the freezer was set correctly and continuously powered). Therefore, the solid water lost must have changed to water vapor.
A very good conclusion figuring that the 9800GX2 is a mature product while the GT200 was an engineering sample and running on pre-beta drivers. ...The sarcasm...it burns my eyes...
Being born via C-section (short for Caesarian Section) still entitles you to saying you were "born of a human mother." You just didn't have the pleasure of sliding headfirst through a vagina as distended as Goatse Man's anus.
That was Jack Thompson. Which is, say it with me now kids, irony.
What if you had no concept of God...that's what greywolf was hinting at.
Yeah, that was kinda exactly my point. So if the idea of God originated in a human, then some human, at some point, "knew" God existed without being told, "God exists! You better believe in him."
Then how did the idea of God come to exist in the first place?
...Unless aliens whispered a really funny joke in Adam's ear one day...;-)