The point is that the park would have gotten the same grants had it fit the same concept of being a tourist attraction, but had not been a "religious" artifact. This is the merit of discriminating *against* religion, in which your tax dollars could be compelled to only certain projects falling under a quiet atheist banner, versus non-discrimination, in which your tax dollars are compelled toward anything which falls under specific definitions in law.
It is that one of the requirements to get a job at the park is to hold specific religious beliefs.
This isn't so much a "should the state fund this?" question as it is "should the state prosecute this business for discrimination against a protected class?"
I know the people I grew up with. They handed me ribbons for Cathleen Kennedy Townsend while spewing vitriol about Robert Ehrlich. I know how the issue has grown and evolved over time, and what it was like at the peak of its political and media attention.
Further, "Affirmative Action", when not so severe as it had been at its peak, is still a thing known as "Positive Discrimination", in which favoritism is given to a disadvantaged group. The main theory is that a certain group is not capable of thriving on its own merits, and so certain policies must be taken up to favor that group and, by extension, handicap others.
It's perfectly sane for a black liberal to dislike affirmative action. Affirmative action had, at its peak, been the social institution of "blacks are retards with a propensity for not being as smart as anyone, and so they need us to extend a large amount of help to them to elevate them to the level of a human being rather than a chimpanzee."
I have dealt with many liberal Democrats in my time, some extremely severe ones, who have taken time to explain to me that blacks simply *could* *not* get into college without government aid because there is *no* *way* they'd ever be intelligent enough to pass the entrance exams. I have the greatest understanding for anyone who wishes to excise such views and the people possessing them from their lives.
It really is. There is no "separation of church and state". There is "not making laws banning or establishing the practice of religion."
Making laws to exclude state support of religious functions or state endorsement(!) of religion, including display of religious symbolism in courthouses as appropriated by the staff under the same budget which does indeed allow them to purchase *anything* *else* as discretionary decoration, would be in violation of this whole "Congress shall make no law" thing. Taking action without first making a law, on the other hand, would be a Constitutional crisis of Executive overreach, by which the Executive branch acts unilaterally as an authoritarian arm (i.e. a dictatorship or oligarchy).
The Constitution does not forbid states from making such laws, only Congress (Federal). This is sensible: Maryland doesn't have a "Congress", but rather a "General Assembly" comprised of an Upper and Lower House. A state could set itself up with a friggin' Parliament if it wanted. A state Congress would not be "Congress", because then the state could escape such clauses by not having a congress; instead, it would be "the States".
Lately, there has been the legal position that a more recent Constitutional amendment forbids states from engaging in practices forbidden to the Federal government (the Incorporation argument). This has a strange impact of invalidating state laws entirely, and of twisting the Tenth Amendment. It is only by this argument that one could argue the state has any obligation at all; and, by this argument, the state's obligation is to fund religious projects which fall under the funding guidelines for anything else--such as tourist attractions. In the Incorporation interpretation, it would be patently illegal for the state to *refuse* to fund such a thing based on it being a religious artifact; the baseless assertion of an imaginary separation of church and state, interestingly enough, would also demand that the state not take a stance *against* religion in this way.
Dunno. It says in the paper: Congress shalt make no law establishing state religion or abridging the free practice thereof. It doesn't say states can't do whatever.
On the other hand, it has been fashionable as of late to use an incorporation interpretation of the Constitution to claim that states are bound by Federal law and Federal restrictions, drawing the states under the same rule. Notably, this interpretation means state laws are automatically invalid if the Federal government can't make such a law, and has odd implications for the 10th amendment (that powers not granted to the Federal government nor forbidden to the states fall to the state or people; powers forbidden to the Fed are now also forbidden to the states). Nevertheless, under such interpretation, it would be illegal for the state to deny money to a religious project that otherwise falls under such rules as "reasonable tourism attraction."
This is why deliberate practice, as described by K Anders Ericsson, is so important. Deliberate practice is what makes experts, and summarizes in three simple concepts: goal-oriented behavior; a focus on technique; and constant, immediate feedback.
By deliberate practice, a person is *looking* for their flaws, setting goals to push their competence, and immediately getting burned when they push beyond their abilities. This style of practice aims to draw attention to those behaviors which are incorrect--gaps in knowledge, weakness in skill--so that a person may reconcile these things and improve.
Such practice continuously slims down the level of overconfidence, even as confidence increases. A person is appraised of their shortcomings, but also reduces them, simultaneously becoming more skilled and more aware of the weaknesses in their skill in that area.
One blog I saw was incensed because when solving 7 + 7, instead of just memorizing '14' they wanted the students to break that down into 7 + 3 + 4, recognize 7 + 3 as a group of ten, then add 4.
That's the Friendly Numbers system. You're discarding the consideration that people tend to memorize doubles anyway, hence why they'll gravitate towards 5s (can you count by five? How many consecutive multiples of three can you spout off without pausing?) or doubles. Halving things is a useful skill, and also a common operation when dealing with fractional arithmetic, and so doubles become Friendly Numbers. This is why people don't memorize 6+7 as 13, unless they've played a lot of Tut's Tomb.
Soroban system memorizes the following for Addition and Subtraction: on 5, {(1,4),(2,3)}; on 10, {(1,9),(2,8),(3,7),(4,6),(5,5)}. 5 and 5 on 10 is meaningful enough to optimize out: it's right in the middle, half, and isometric. The others are meaningful and derivable, so can be computed as needed when they're not wholly memorized. Knowing the (2,8) complement and the (3,2) complement helps when playing Tut's Tomb, as you see 5 and 8 and immediately recognize 10+3 (again, we've rediscovered the Friendly Numbers system).
That to me provides for a deeper understanding and would eventually make working in other bases much easier.
No, it won't. You have to stretch to number theory and explain the extremely abstract concept of base 10 being 0-9, then 9+1 overflows to 0, producing 1 digit in the next left column. The Soroban does part of this implicitly: the decimal place is wholly irrelevant, and the math is isometric regardless of where you place the decimal. Without an explicit and complicated explanation of overflow (it's only easy to grasp because I understand the concept already), it's hard to grasp that a 0-7 system would have 7+1 = 10: 10 looks like binary 10, and so the obvious association is made, and it's read as 12b7.
To implement effective mental arithmetic on hex, octal, and so on, you'd need a new set of complements; such memorization can't be made any easier by any teaching method, as it's already fully simplified. For hex, the center is 8 (half of 16), giving on 8 {(1,7),(2,6),(3,5),(4,4)} and on 16 {(1,15),(2,14),(3,13),(4,12),(5,11),(6,10),(7,9),(8,8)}. The procedures would otherwise be the same, although you'd need to memorize an expanded multiplication table up through 0-f x 0-f for multiplication and division.
The arithmetic prowess of the average Japanese third grader is so great that American media sensationalizes "Flash Anzan" (just Anzan, in Japan) as some kind of magical wonder in which tiny, gifted children perform as human calculators. It's nothing spectacular; it's actually pretty boring. Being aware of how the Japanese perform at math and how well they understand concepts as outlined above, my position on the Common Criteria is that it is a pile of "something must be done; this is something" created by confused politicians who did not put in enough research and decided they must invent something unilaterally from their own malformed education. Rather than structuring and optimizing, they have made much of the curriculum more complicated and slower.
It's notable that serious educators consider memorization a bad thing. Historically, we operated via faculty education: that flexing the brain, like a muscle, would make it stronger. This is wholly false: the brain is not a muscle, and exercising individual mental faculties does not improve them. The study of language does not make the brain stronger at learning language, and the study of math or the drilling of memory does not make the brain better at memorization. These are facts.
Based on the above facts, John Dewey lead a progressive education renaissance to throw out all faculty education and encourage student-focused, experience-based curriculum. Gone are the days of Latin and Greek, of multiplication tables, of rote memo
You have to memorize all the perfect squares and perfect cubes of single-digit numbers. After that, you can find either.
Given that I know the decimal place is arbitrary (thanks to the soroban) and that the method follows a pattern (x^(1/n) find the largest perfect nth root of n digits), I can generalize this in many ways. By memorizing 8 numbers--the perfect exponents of 2 through 9--and operating on sets of n digits, you can compute the nth root of any number. For 4, it would be 4 digits, and all perfect 4th exponents.
For anyone who hasn't put in the effort to perform mental math of third, forth, and fifth roots, it is trivial to use mental multiplication or lattice calculation (Napir's Bones) to quickly write up 0^4 = 0, 1^4 = 1, 2^4 = 16, 3^4 = 81, and so on. With this short list, one may then inscribe upon paper the number, the 4th root operation, and then begin with 4 digits and follow the same algorithm as with the third and second roots. Thus if you really do require the exact fifth root of a number out to 17 decimal places, you can find it with a few seconds of computation and a sheet of papyrus or a stick and some sand.
The ancients did not have the PAO system or even the Mnemonic Major system for which to chunk and retain numbers. Had they, they would have likely used them for scratch pad in mental math, along with a mind palace to compose fifteen or more computation registers of six digits each. Mental math is computed rapidly by using a great number of systems which have been always known to those of any intelligence, and are frequently rediscovered by small children.
The chief mental math system in use today is the Friendly Numbers system. As a child, I would approach problems such as 13 + 22 by first adding the 3 and 2 to get 10 + 25. When given problems such as 13 + 22 + 17 + 19 + 35, I would then see 3 + 7 and 9 + 1, changing 13 to 10 and 22 to 21 in respect, and leaving 10, 21, 20, 20, 35, and thus 10 + 20 + 20 + 30 + 20 and 5 + 1, or 106.
Another historical mental math system is that of the use of the Japanese Soroban, a 4/1 abacus. The Soroban leads the way into Anzan: while the methods of the Soroban dictate how to operate the beads, the beads only represent numerical transformations. The memorization of the complement of 7 and 3 on 10 means that 25 + 37 is equivalent to 25 - 3 + 30 + 10. Thus the first step is to add 2 + 3 to gain 50, and then to add 7 + 5, and instead provide 60 and 5 - 3, which is 2. 62. It is also memorized that 3 and 2 are complements on 5, because the Soroban toggles the 5 bead and then provides the appropriate complement (rather than 5 + 0, it becomes 0 + 2); this is less obvious when dealing with straight decimal.
In short: a person calculating via Anzan--mentally, without manipulating a Soroban--would produce 50, then produce 60 and 2, calculating from left to right. In American schools, addition is by the carry system, in which it is taught by rote: 7 + 5 is the matter of counting 5 more from 7, which is why you see many people COUNT ON THEIR FINGERS WHEN THEY ADD, and you produce 2-carry-1. The same is followed for 2 + 3, plus the carried 1. This is many more operations, and the obvious friendly number systems come about as people memorize multiples of two: 7 + 5 becomes 6 + 6 which is 12; 2 + 3 + 1 becomes 3 + 3 which is 6. Anzan takes this a step further, computing each pair of digit additions by singular atomic computation rather than iterative loops and simplifying operations.
Soroban and Anzan multiplication come down to addition, through route of memorizing all products from 1x1 to 9x9 and performing the multiplication left-to-right and adding into an accumulator. One common method is strikingly similar to lattice multiplication, which tends to require n*m or 2(n*m) single-digit multiplication operations, plus 2(n*m)-1 additions. Mentally, if you recognize all mul
How to build a plow... how to grow wheat... how to build a house... blacksmith...
I have texts older than Jesus that tell me how to turn regular people into geniuses. I have access to information I intend to use to fix the school systems by improving the learning process at the level of base theory. I have looked at fast mental math and mathematics teaching curricula which provide people an automatic mental math skill. I've studied philosophy and project management, both with large usefulness and implications in all contexts.
Your world won't get far if you don't understand how to produce governments, what imperatives govern societies--not "thou shalt not steal" and "child pornography is bad", but what makes these things wrong, and why does it fall to society to enforce these things and not to enforce "don't fuck your neighbor's wife"? You won't get very far without people who can learn efficiently, who can compute the mathematics behind engineering largely in their head and on paper, and who can take large initiatives and turn them into well-executed plans. You can't derive or rediscover technology without a firm grasp of the scientific process.
Two thousand years got us here from nailing a carpenter to a tree. Civilization existed for thousands of years prior to that. The Egyptians and Chinese had beer and oil 6000 years ago. The modern era came so unfathomably slow that our calendar is based on less than a third of human history--some estimates put civilized society's beginnings as far back as 13,000 years.
These transmitters are 500,000 watts. I did the math once and figured the transmitter 3 miles from my house would expose people to 2000W of microwave radiation on the ground for several blocks. This would ignite trees and houses, and melt people.
Helicopters aren't legally allowed near the tower.
You can argue from an empirical, scientific standpoint all you want; but common consideration doesn't work that way. People do, in fact, assume that anything and everything that's good for you is beneficial, which is why we had to tell people to stop drinking 2 gallons of fruit juice every day if they didn't want diabeetus.
Except low-carb diets actually work, and extreme no-carb diets seem to work but have side effects. This suggests that the general wisdom of "load yourself up on grains, eat little meat" is not actually healthy.
Sugars and starches absorb immediately as energy. Proteins and fats are useful for structure, but also derivable as energy. Processing protein and fat requires a great deal more effort than processing sugar, which simply hits the blood and triggers insulin, binding it into glycogen.
It's often common wisdom that you can fill whatever hunger you have by eating piles of fruits and vegetables as snacks. Nobody ever says this outright, but they recommend directly to eat fruits and vegetables if hungry between meals. Imagine just sitting at your desk all day, munching Doritos and pretzels; now imagine being healthy by eating an apple, two kiwi fruit, and munching on a two pound bag of cherries. As you observe, people wish to believe fruit is good for you and actively makes you healthier, and so eating a ton of it makes you a ton healthier.
I generally consume mushrooms, bacon, sausage, eggs, and steak as my breakfast foods. This is taken with almond milk with Ovaltine in it, or with fresh squeezed orange juice. My lunch often consists of a sandwich, so there is some grain in my diet. Dinner may have some bread, or a sweet potato, or some such thing. Notably, starch causes food fatigue, while high protein intake helps you function when sleep deprived; mushrooms are rather neutral in either regard. My breakfast is very protein-biased for logical reasons, and I am only shy of pizza because I don't know how to eat pizza (just keep eating until painful...).
Alcohol is harmful to everyone in frequent large quantities, and in combination with tobacco. Oddly, what beneficial properties moderate alcohol consumption does provide are invalidated entirely by tobacco smoking, while the alcohol's negative qualities synergize with the tobacco's and run health problems from each through the roof. This again illustrates why cigarettes are terrible and carry little if any merit.
Many persons not addicted to alcohol are recreational users or social users: they enjoy being drunk or enjoy drinking, or they drink to get drunk as a socialization function, and thus participate in excessive consumption without an active physical addiction. They can stop at any time they choose, but choose not to. An addict has trouble stopping due to psychiatric issues caused by brain chemistry in response to alcohol.
You're not familiar with psychological burn-out or people who simply can't stop learning, are you?
On the nature of addiction: the body gets used to certain physiological states. It is not enough to say the body simply gets used to Opium, becomes more sensitive, builds tolerance, requires more Opium to reach the same baseline, and then, when the Opium is removed, is left all out of whack and craving the drug state to reach normalcy. The body identifies a certain state as normal, and reaches homeostasis; the mind similarly becomes used to this, and dislikes deviations.
It is possible for people to become addicted to physical activity. A person, sedentary on a daily basis, is quite sore if he goes for a run, and will be for some days; similarly, a person with a daily routine of running five miles will be left sore if he stops running for a day or so, as the body demands the strain of running. Such addictions are quite common, although not frequently considered.
In the same way, a person is psychologically conditioned to a certain mental state. Some persons become used to thinking a great deal on things, and become abhorrent of curiosity: if there is a thing not known, they must know it, and put and end to this nagging sensation of not knowing. It is not difficult for a person to become addicted to the labor of education; it is also pathologically dangerous to educate oneself too much in a short time, and psychiatric help is frequently provided for high-stress college students who attempt to do exactly that.
I have a pathological need to know things. I have approximately zero social life, and prefer to learn and understand. I'm like a parasite to other humans: I attach to anyone with knowledge, stimulate them in any way which may reveal something to me, and then become bored with them when they are no longer a useful source of information. I must continue to learn, and I continue to hurt myself when possible by sheer information load. The temporary psychosis caused by such overload is an interesting experience; it often causes a flow in which I increase load ravenously, and then suddenly hit a wall and immediately slump off to play video games or do some other mindless activity while pathologically avoiding any effort of thinking on new information. After a short rest, I am ready for more.
This is probably not altogether rare; but I suspect most who behave in this way don't much talk about it to anyone.
My experience is business-type people see risk assessment as one of those duh things that doesn't need all this overhead. They then ask for inane, stupid shit, and parrot whatever they heard this week. Middle managers then just go by feel--what gives them the willies is unacceptable, and what they're comfortable about seems acceptable.
This is a sick and dysfunctional atmosphere; as an engineer, I find it appalling that you would build anything--software, business processes, machines--without a strong risk management plan.
If you're installing a TV transmitter, you have a device at 2000 feet that, if broken open and unshielded, produces enough energy to melt people's faces off at ground level 500 meters away from the tower base. This means all installation considerations must involve reflection on how the integrity of the transmitter is protected or put at-risk, and anything which threatens its integrity requires further examination.
If you're installing computer server software, you open yourself up for any number of cyber security risks, and may open yourself up to legal risks. Before building a cluster on a public Web server that uses VMware fencing and thus logs into vSphere on a server farm that also holds HIPPA or SOX regulated data, If you go ahead and do that, knowing that a compromise of the server and a new VMware vulnerability could allow access to or destruction of these legally-protected data, you *personally* could go to prison.
New business processes run the risk of incurring legal liabilities, process slow-downs, costs, or even injury. Business processes include things like operation of a sheet metal producer (how often is it inspected? This temporarily pauses production, and is costly; but going out of tolerance could result in non-uniform sheets or injury to workers), the stocking of shelves (giant double-door refrigerators on the top shelf in a customer aisle?), and so on. Bed, Bath, and Beyond institutes a business process for using a ladder on store shelves, such that another floor employee must check the other side of the shelf; occasionally, the employee operating the ladder will bump the shelf and cause an item to fall, which can and has involved in injury (and death!).
Risk Management is a trivial topic. Kepner-Tregoe Potential Problem/Opportunity Analysis is nothing more than Operational Risk Management in a long-winded manner (what could happen? What is the probability? What is the severity? What should we do about it?). Project Management involves Project Risk Management, which starts with identifying risks (what could go wrong? What could happen that we could take advantage of?), then performing qualitative risk analysis (which of these does our experience tell us is most likely and most important?), then performing quantitative risk analysis on those most important things (how likely, what impact?), and then planning what actions to take. Many business studies follow a similar risk analysis methodology.
None of these things is particularly complex; the complex methodologies are long-winded, redundant expansions of simple, well-established methods. These are things which should be done.
Yes but you're talking about cave man trying to raise chickens to see if it can be done, and Elon Musk is here freaking out about not having BSL-4 infrastructure around the chicken farm because genetically sequenced artificial bacteria that cave man could create one day might get out of control.
Oh, I brew my own beer; but alcohol isn't a plant. It's often derived from plant-derived sugars, but it's an... alcohol...ethanol, specifically, is a poisonous fungal waste product excreted during the fermentation of sugar for energy. Many drugs are synthetic, too (LSD); most are poisons.
Don't like tobacco. Alcohol does good things to me in extremely small quantities; and I tend to reject it in larger quantities (the more I drink, the less I want, and the worse I feel; a small amount, say half an ounce in half an hour, makes me feel fantastic for days). Various synthetic compounds I also enjoy--CDP Choline (semi-synthetic) and various piracetam derivatives in particular, in moderation.
My real addiction is information. I drive myself insane shoving too much in my head. My addiction to knowledge has quantified all human concerns as ideals, which apparently approximates some semblance of human empathy--the labor force is economically important, human suffering is qualifiable (more, less) and can be treated as quantifiable and addressed as a matter of economics, and it is the duty of the strong to protect the weak--but also largely excludes me from participating in general human empathy. I am aware that my attachment to certain individuals is as a factor of their particular uniqueness, and that I see them as collections of things: I can talk to some people in some lines of conversations and gain favorable or insightful responses, and so I adhere myself to these individuals for reasons of productive socialization; when they die, I immediately lose all interest in them.
Most people don't understand just how dangerous nor how safe anything can be. People demonize alcohol and praise intelligence; I have come to understand that intelligence is largely a function of knowledge, as new information is processed by applying existing knowledge, including the knowledge of how to properly and logically assess and remember new information. I have also come to understand that rolling enough new information into my head creates nervous reactions, high amounts of stress, emotional upsets, psychotic episodes, and unrelated vivid dreams as my brain tumbles through its archives trying to rearrange everything and store these new memories effectively while I sleep. Medically, these episodes are a cause for alarm and emergency care: psychological burn-out from excess information load typically leads to self-neglect, and then to suicide.
Knowing all these things and more, I often look at both sides of the aisle and conclude that everyone involved is an idiot. We have persons wishing to immediately legalize marijuana, and persons wishing to make it completely illegal; legalizing it will cause many social and health problems, and so too does keeping it contraband. Each side is convinced all problems are caused by the strategy opposite and that their strategy will cause no problems and alleviate all, and so I see them all as fools. This occurs in general to all debates, from abortion to the death penalty to taxation laws which I actually favor; the concept of the lesser of two evils is apt, but I prefer the concept of progressive elaboration: one wishes to improve the situation, and then return and improve it more.
It's funny though. "Oh, we can make our own!" Yes, waste your money on things you're not an expert at, just to piss off your customers and increase your legal liability exposure (to fraud). Bravo. You really don't seem to understand what outsourcing is for...
Don't forget Chip-and-Pin, where the PIN can be swiped, the Chip can be cloned, you have to remember the pin, and you're liable for fraud (rather than having credit card fraud protection).
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The point is that the park would have gotten the same grants had it fit the same concept of being a tourist attraction, but had not been a "religious" artifact. This is the merit of discriminating *against* religion, in which your tax dollars could be compelled to only certain projects falling under a quiet atheist banner, versus non-discrimination, in which your tax dollars are compelled toward anything which falls under specific definitions in law.
It is that one of the requirements to get a job at the park is to hold specific religious beliefs.
This isn't so much a "should the state fund this?" question as it is "should the state prosecute this business for discrimination against a protected class?"
I know the people I grew up with. They handed me ribbons for Cathleen Kennedy Townsend while spewing vitriol about Robert Ehrlich. I know how the issue has grown and evolved over time, and what it was like at the peak of its political and media attention.
Further, "Affirmative Action", when not so severe as it had been at its peak, is still a thing known as "Positive Discrimination", in which favoritism is given to a disadvantaged group. The main theory is that a certain group is not capable of thriving on its own merits, and so certain policies must be taken up to favor that group and, by extension, handicap others.
So my post falls under "call a spade a shovel".
Dafuck is a commonwealth? I thought that was England.
It's perfectly sane for a black liberal to dislike affirmative action. Affirmative action had, at its peak, been the social institution of "blacks are retards with a propensity for not being as smart as anyone, and so they need us to extend a large amount of help to them to elevate them to the level of a human being rather than a chimpanzee."
I have dealt with many liberal Democrats in my time, some extremely severe ones, who have taken time to explain to me that blacks simply *could* *not* get into college without government aid because there is *no* *way* they'd ever be intelligent enough to pass the entrance exams. I have the greatest understanding for anyone who wishes to excise such views and the people possessing them from their lives.
It really is. There is no "separation of church and state". There is "not making laws banning or establishing the practice of religion."
Making laws to exclude state support of religious functions or state endorsement(!) of religion, including display of religious symbolism in courthouses as appropriated by the staff under the same budget which does indeed allow them to purchase *anything* *else* as discretionary decoration, would be in violation of this whole "Congress shall make no law" thing. Taking action without first making a law, on the other hand, would be a Constitutional crisis of Executive overreach, by which the Executive branch acts unilaterally as an authoritarian arm (i.e. a dictatorship or oligarchy).
The Constitution does not forbid states from making such laws, only Congress (Federal). This is sensible: Maryland doesn't have a "Congress", but rather a "General Assembly" comprised of an Upper and Lower House. A state could set itself up with a friggin' Parliament if it wanted. A state Congress would not be "Congress", because then the state could escape such clauses by not having a congress; instead, it would be "the States".
Lately, there has been the legal position that a more recent Constitutional amendment forbids states from engaging in practices forbidden to the Federal government (the Incorporation argument). This has a strange impact of invalidating state laws entirely, and of twisting the Tenth Amendment. It is only by this argument that one could argue the state has any obligation at all; and, by this argument, the state's obligation is to fund religious projects which fall under the funding guidelines for anything else--such as tourist attractions. In the Incorporation interpretation, it would be patently illegal for the state to *refuse* to fund such a thing based on it being a religious artifact; the baseless assertion of an imaginary separation of church and state, interestingly enough, would also demand that the state not take a stance *against* religion in this way.
Apparently, it is a hard concept to grasp.
Dunno. It says in the paper: Congress shalt make no law establishing state religion or abridging the free practice thereof. It doesn't say states can't do whatever.
On the other hand, it has been fashionable as of late to use an incorporation interpretation of the Constitution to claim that states are bound by Federal law and Federal restrictions, drawing the states under the same rule. Notably, this interpretation means state laws are automatically invalid if the Federal government can't make such a law, and has odd implications for the 10th amendment (that powers not granted to the Federal government nor forbidden to the states fall to the state or people; powers forbidden to the Fed are now also forbidden to the states). Nevertheless, under such interpretation, it would be illegal for the state to deny money to a religious project that otherwise falls under such rules as "reasonable tourism attraction."
This is why deliberate practice, as described by K Anders Ericsson, is so important. Deliberate practice is what makes experts, and summarizes in three simple concepts: goal-oriented behavior; a focus on technique; and constant, immediate feedback.
By deliberate practice, a person is *looking* for their flaws, setting goals to push their competence, and immediately getting burned when they push beyond their abilities. This style of practice aims to draw attention to those behaviors which are incorrect--gaps in knowledge, weakness in skill--so that a person may reconcile these things and improve.
Such practice continuously slims down the level of overconfidence, even as confidence increases. A person is appraised of their shortcomings, but also reduces them, simultaneously becoming more skilled and more aware of the weaknesses in their skill in that area.
One blog I saw was incensed because when solving 7 + 7, instead of just memorizing '14' they wanted the students to break that down into 7 + 3 + 4, recognize 7 + 3 as a group of ten, then add 4.
That's the Friendly Numbers system. You're discarding the consideration that people tend to memorize doubles anyway, hence why they'll gravitate towards 5s (can you count by five? How many consecutive multiples of three can you spout off without pausing?) or doubles. Halving things is a useful skill, and also a common operation when dealing with fractional arithmetic, and so doubles become Friendly Numbers. This is why people don't memorize 6+7 as 13, unless they've played a lot of Tut's Tomb.
Soroban system memorizes the following for Addition and Subtraction: on 5, {(1,4),(2,3)}; on 10, {(1,9),(2,8),(3,7),(4,6),(5,5)}. 5 and 5 on 10 is meaningful enough to optimize out: it's right in the middle, half, and isometric. The others are meaningful and derivable, so can be computed as needed when they're not wholly memorized. Knowing the (2,8) complement and the (3,2) complement helps when playing Tut's Tomb, as you see 5 and 8 and immediately recognize 10+3 (again, we've rediscovered the Friendly Numbers system).
That to me provides for a deeper understanding and would eventually make working in other bases much easier.
No, it won't. You have to stretch to number theory and explain the extremely abstract concept of base 10 being 0-9, then 9+1 overflows to 0, producing 1 digit in the next left column. The Soroban does part of this implicitly: the decimal place is wholly irrelevant, and the math is isometric regardless of where you place the decimal. Without an explicit and complicated explanation of overflow (it's only easy to grasp because I understand the concept already), it's hard to grasp that a 0-7 system would have 7+1 = 10: 10 looks like binary 10, and so the obvious association is made, and it's read as 12b7.
To implement effective mental arithmetic on hex, octal, and so on, you'd need a new set of complements; such memorization can't be made any easier by any teaching method, as it's already fully simplified. For hex, the center is 8 (half of 16), giving on 8 {(1,7),(2,6),(3,5),(4,4)} and on 16 {(1,15),(2,14),(3,13),(4,12),(5,11),(6,10),(7,9),(8,8)}. The procedures would otherwise be the same, although you'd need to memorize an expanded multiplication table up through 0-f x 0-f for multiplication and division.
The arithmetic prowess of the average Japanese third grader is so great that American media sensationalizes "Flash Anzan" (just Anzan, in Japan) as some kind of magical wonder in which tiny, gifted children perform as human calculators. It's nothing spectacular; it's actually pretty boring. Being aware of how the Japanese perform at math and how well they understand concepts as outlined above, my position on the Common Criteria is that it is a pile of "something must be done; this is something" created by confused politicians who did not put in enough research and decided they must invent something unilaterally from their own malformed education. Rather than structuring and optimizing, they have made much of the curriculum more complicated and slower.
It's notable that serious educators consider memorization a bad thing. Historically, we operated via faculty education: that flexing the brain, like a muscle, would make it stronger. This is wholly false: the brain is not a muscle, and exercising individual mental faculties does not improve them. The study of language does not make the brain stronger at learning language, and the study of math or the drilling of memory does not make the brain better at memorization. These are facts.
Based on the above facts, John Dewey lead a progressive education renaissance to throw out all faculty education and encourage student-focused, experience-based curriculum. Gone are the days of Latin and Greek, of multiplication tables, of rote memo
I'm looking around at the world today thinking, "Yeah, people have forgotten how to work the rest out."
Yes and what skills do you suppose are required to support thinkers?
You have to memorize all the perfect squares and perfect cubes of single-digit numbers. After that, you can find either.
Given that I know the decimal place is arbitrary (thanks to the soroban) and that the method follows a pattern (x^(1/n) find the largest perfect nth root of n digits), I can generalize this in many ways. By memorizing 8 numbers--the perfect exponents of 2 through 9--and operating on sets of n digits, you can compute the nth root of any number. For 4, it would be 4 digits, and all perfect 4th exponents.
For anyone who hasn't put in the effort to perform mental math of third, forth, and fifth roots, it is trivial to use mental multiplication or lattice calculation (Napir's Bones) to quickly write up 0^4 = 0, 1^4 = 1, 2^4 = 16, 3^4 = 81, and so on. With this short list, one may then inscribe upon paper the number, the 4th root operation, and then begin with 4 digits and follow the same algorithm as with the third and second roots. Thus if you really do require the exact fifth root of a number out to 17 decimal places, you can find it with a few seconds of computation and a sheet of papyrus or a stick and some sand.
The ancients did not have the PAO system or even the Mnemonic Major system for which to chunk and retain numbers. Had they, they would have likely used them for scratch pad in mental math, along with a mind palace to compose fifteen or more computation registers of six digits each. Mental math is computed rapidly by using a great number of systems which have been always known to those of any intelligence, and are frequently rediscovered by small children.
The chief mental math system in use today is the Friendly Numbers system. As a child, I would approach problems such as 13 + 22 by first adding the 3 and 2 to get 10 + 25. When given problems such as 13 + 22 + 17 + 19 + 35, I would then see 3 + 7 and 9 + 1, changing 13 to 10 and 22 to 21 in respect, and leaving 10, 21, 20, 20, 35, and thus 10 + 20 + 20 + 30 + 20 and 5 + 1, or 106.
Another historical mental math system is that of the use of the Japanese Soroban, a 4/1 abacus. The Soroban leads the way into Anzan: while the methods of the Soroban dictate how to operate the beads, the beads only represent numerical transformations. The memorization of the complement of 7 and 3 on 10 means that 25 + 37 is equivalent to 25 - 3 + 30 + 10. Thus the first step is to add 2 + 3 to gain 50, and then to add 7 + 5, and instead provide 60 and 5 - 3, which is 2. 62. It is also memorized that 3 and 2 are complements on 5, because the Soroban toggles the 5 bead and then provides the appropriate complement (rather than 5 + 0, it becomes 0 + 2); this is less obvious when dealing with straight decimal.
In short: a person calculating via Anzan--mentally, without manipulating a Soroban--would produce 50, then produce 60 and 2, calculating from left to right. In American schools, addition is by the carry system, in which it is taught by rote: 7 + 5 is the matter of counting 5 more from 7, which is why you see many people COUNT ON THEIR FINGERS WHEN THEY ADD, and you produce 2-carry-1. The same is followed for 2 + 3, plus the carried 1. This is many more operations, and the obvious friendly number systems come about as people memorize multiples of two: 7 + 5 becomes 6 + 6 which is 12; 2 + 3 + 1 becomes 3 + 3 which is 6. Anzan takes this a step further, computing each pair of digit additions by singular atomic computation rather than iterative loops and simplifying operations.
Soroban and Anzan multiplication come down to addition, through route of memorizing all products from 1x1 to 9x9 and performing the multiplication left-to-right and adding into an accumulator. One common method is strikingly similar to lattice multiplication, which tends to require n*m or 2(n*m) single-digit multiplication operations, plus 2(n*m)-1 additions. Mentally, if you recognize all mul
How to build a plow... how to grow wheat... how to build a house... blacksmith...
I have texts older than Jesus that tell me how to turn regular people into geniuses. I have access to information I intend to use to fix the school systems by improving the learning process at the level of base theory. I have looked at fast mental math and mathematics teaching curricula which provide people an automatic mental math skill. I've studied philosophy and project management, both with large usefulness and implications in all contexts.
Your world won't get far if you don't understand how to produce governments, what imperatives govern societies--not "thou shalt not steal" and "child pornography is bad", but what makes these things wrong, and why does it fall to society to enforce these things and not to enforce "don't fuck your neighbor's wife"? You won't get very far without people who can learn efficiently, who can compute the mathematics behind engineering largely in their head and on paper, and who can take large initiatives and turn them into well-executed plans. You can't derive or rediscover technology without a firm grasp of the scientific process.
Two thousand years got us here from nailing a carpenter to a tree. Civilization existed for thousands of years prior to that. The Egyptians and Chinese had beer and oil 6000 years ago. The modern era came so unfathomably slow that our calendar is based on less than a third of human history--some estimates put civilized society's beginnings as far back as 13,000 years.
They had plows and oil 6000 years ago.
4fort2, 2fort5, Volcano.
These transmitters are 500,000 watts. I did the math once and figured the transmitter 3 miles from my house would expose people to 2000W of microwave radiation on the ground for several blocks. This would ignite trees and houses, and melt people.
Helicopters aren't legally allowed near the tower.
You can argue from an empirical, scientific standpoint all you want; but common consideration doesn't work that way. People do, in fact, assume that anything and everything that's good for you is beneficial, which is why we had to tell people to stop drinking 2 gallons of fruit juice every day if they didn't want diabeetus.
Except low-carb diets actually work, and extreme no-carb diets seem to work but have side effects. This suggests that the general wisdom of "load yourself up on grains, eat little meat" is not actually healthy.
Sugars and starches absorb immediately as energy. Proteins and fats are useful for structure, but also derivable as energy. Processing protein and fat requires a great deal more effort than processing sugar, which simply hits the blood and triggers insulin, binding it into glycogen.
It's often common wisdom that you can fill whatever hunger you have by eating piles of fruits and vegetables as snacks. Nobody ever says this outright, but they recommend directly to eat fruits and vegetables if hungry between meals. Imagine just sitting at your desk all day, munching Doritos and pretzels; now imagine being healthy by eating an apple, two kiwi fruit, and munching on a two pound bag of cherries. As you observe, people wish to believe fruit is good for you and actively makes you healthier, and so eating a ton of it makes you a ton healthier.
I generally consume mushrooms, bacon, sausage, eggs, and steak as my breakfast foods. This is taken with almond milk with Ovaltine in it, or with fresh squeezed orange juice. My lunch often consists of a sandwich, so there is some grain in my diet. Dinner may have some bread, or a sweet potato, or some such thing. Notably, starch causes food fatigue, while high protein intake helps you function when sleep deprived; mushrooms are rather neutral in either regard. My breakfast is very protein-biased for logical reasons, and I am only shy of pizza because I don't know how to eat pizza (just keep eating until painful...).
There are no conservatives in America.
Alcohol is harmful to everyone in frequent large quantities, and in combination with tobacco. Oddly, what beneficial properties moderate alcohol consumption does provide are invalidated entirely by tobacco smoking, while the alcohol's negative qualities synergize with the tobacco's and run health problems from each through the roof. This again illustrates why cigarettes are terrible and carry little if any merit.
Many persons not addicted to alcohol are recreational users or social users: they enjoy being drunk or enjoy drinking, or they drink to get drunk as a socialization function, and thus participate in excessive consumption without an active physical addiction. They can stop at any time they choose, but choose not to. An addict has trouble stopping due to psychiatric issues caused by brain chemistry in response to alcohol.
You're not familiar with psychological burn-out or people who simply can't stop learning, are you?
On the nature of addiction: the body gets used to certain physiological states. It is not enough to say the body simply gets used to Opium, becomes more sensitive, builds tolerance, requires more Opium to reach the same baseline, and then, when the Opium is removed, is left all out of whack and craving the drug state to reach normalcy. The body identifies a certain state as normal, and reaches homeostasis; the mind similarly becomes used to this, and dislikes deviations.
It is possible for people to become addicted to physical activity. A person, sedentary on a daily basis, is quite sore if he goes for a run, and will be for some days; similarly, a person with a daily routine of running five miles will be left sore if he stops running for a day or so, as the body demands the strain of running. Such addictions are quite common, although not frequently considered.
In the same way, a person is psychologically conditioned to a certain mental state. Some persons become used to thinking a great deal on things, and become abhorrent of curiosity: if there is a thing not known, they must know it, and put and end to this nagging sensation of not knowing. It is not difficult for a person to become addicted to the labor of education; it is also pathologically dangerous to educate oneself too much in a short time, and psychiatric help is frequently provided for high-stress college students who attempt to do exactly that.
I have a pathological need to know things. I have approximately zero social life, and prefer to learn and understand. I'm like a parasite to other humans: I attach to anyone with knowledge, stimulate them in any way which may reveal something to me, and then become bored with them when they are no longer a useful source of information. I must continue to learn, and I continue to hurt myself when possible by sheer information load. The temporary psychosis caused by such overload is an interesting experience; it often causes a flow in which I increase load ravenously, and then suddenly hit a wall and immediately slump off to play video games or do some other mindless activity while pathologically avoiding any effort of thinking on new information. After a short rest, I am ready for more.
This is probably not altogether rare; but I suspect most who behave in this way don't much talk about it to anyone.
My experience is business-type people see risk assessment as one of those duh things that doesn't need all this overhead. They then ask for inane, stupid shit, and parrot whatever they heard this week. Middle managers then just go by feel--what gives them the willies is unacceptable, and what they're comfortable about seems acceptable.
This is a sick and dysfunctional atmosphere; as an engineer, I find it appalling that you would build anything--software, business processes, machines--without a strong risk management plan.
If you're installing a TV transmitter, you have a device at 2000 feet that, if broken open and unshielded, produces enough energy to melt people's faces off at ground level 500 meters away from the tower base. This means all installation considerations must involve reflection on how the integrity of the transmitter is protected or put at-risk, and anything which threatens its integrity requires further examination.
If you're installing computer server software, you open yourself up for any number of cyber security risks, and may open yourself up to legal risks. Before building a cluster on a public Web server that uses VMware fencing and thus logs into vSphere on a server farm that also holds HIPPA or SOX regulated data, If you go ahead and do that, knowing that a compromise of the server and a new VMware vulnerability could allow access to or destruction of these legally-protected data, you *personally* could go to prison.
New business processes run the risk of incurring legal liabilities, process slow-downs, costs, or even injury. Business processes include things like operation of a sheet metal producer (how often is it inspected? This temporarily pauses production, and is costly; but going out of tolerance could result in non-uniform sheets or injury to workers), the stocking of shelves (giant double-door refrigerators on the top shelf in a customer aisle?), and so on. Bed, Bath, and Beyond institutes a business process for using a ladder on store shelves, such that another floor employee must check the other side of the shelf; occasionally, the employee operating the ladder will bump the shelf and cause an item to fall, which can and has involved in injury (and death!).
Risk Management is a trivial topic. Kepner-Tregoe Potential Problem/Opportunity Analysis is nothing more than Operational Risk Management in a long-winded manner (what could happen? What is the probability? What is the severity? What should we do about it?). Project Management involves Project Risk Management, which starts with identifying risks (what could go wrong? What could happen that we could take advantage of?), then performing qualitative risk analysis (which of these does our experience tell us is most likely and most important?), then performing quantitative risk analysis on those most important things (how likely, what impact?), and then planning what actions to take. Many business studies follow a similar risk analysis methodology.
None of these things is particularly complex; the complex methodologies are long-winded, redundant expansions of simple, well-established methods. These are things which should be done.
Yes but you're talking about cave man trying to raise chickens to see if it can be done, and Elon Musk is here freaking out about not having BSL-4 infrastructure around the chicken farm because genetically sequenced artificial bacteria that cave man could create one day might get out of control.
Oh, I brew my own beer; but alcohol isn't a plant. It's often derived from plant-derived sugars, but it's an ... alcohol...ethanol, specifically, is a poisonous fungal waste product excreted during the fermentation of sugar for energy. Many drugs are synthetic, too (LSD); most are poisons.
Don't like tobacco. Alcohol does good things to me in extremely small quantities; and I tend to reject it in larger quantities (the more I drink, the less I want, and the worse I feel; a small amount, say half an ounce in half an hour, makes me feel fantastic for days). Various synthetic compounds I also enjoy--CDP Choline (semi-synthetic) and various piracetam derivatives in particular, in moderation.
My real addiction is information. I drive myself insane shoving too much in my head. My addiction to knowledge has quantified all human concerns as ideals, which apparently approximates some semblance of human empathy--the labor force is economically important, human suffering is qualifiable (more, less) and can be treated as quantifiable and addressed as a matter of economics, and it is the duty of the strong to protect the weak--but also largely excludes me from participating in general human empathy. I am aware that my attachment to certain individuals is as a factor of their particular uniqueness, and that I see them as collections of things: I can talk to some people in some lines of conversations and gain favorable or insightful responses, and so I adhere myself to these individuals for reasons of productive socialization; when they die, I immediately lose all interest in them.
Most people don't understand just how dangerous nor how safe anything can be. People demonize alcohol and praise intelligence; I have come to understand that intelligence is largely a function of knowledge, as new information is processed by applying existing knowledge, including the knowledge of how to properly and logically assess and remember new information. I have also come to understand that rolling enough new information into my head creates nervous reactions, high amounts of stress, emotional upsets, psychotic episodes, and unrelated vivid dreams as my brain tumbles through its archives trying to rearrange everything and store these new memories effectively while I sleep. Medically, these episodes are a cause for alarm and emergency care: psychological burn-out from excess information load typically leads to self-neglect, and then to suicide.
Knowing all these things and more, I often look at both sides of the aisle and conclude that everyone involved is an idiot. We have persons wishing to immediately legalize marijuana, and persons wishing to make it completely illegal; legalizing it will cause many social and health problems, and so too does keeping it contraband. Each side is convinced all problems are caused by the strategy opposite and that their strategy will cause no problems and alleviate all, and so I see them all as fools. This occurs in general to all debates, from abortion to the death penalty to taxation laws which I actually favor; the concept of the lesser of two evils is apt, but I prefer the concept of progressive elaboration: one wishes to improve the situation, and then return and improve it more.
It's funny though. "Oh, we can make our own!" Yes, waste your money on things you're not an expert at, just to piss off your customers and increase your legal liability exposure (to fraud). Bravo. You really don't seem to understand what outsourcing is for...
Don't forget Chip-and-Pin, where the PIN can be swiped, the Chip can be cloned, you have to remember the pin, and you're liable for fraud (rather than having credit card fraud protection).