I know that pyramid schemes are evil. How do I know? They were the villain on the old Batman live-action show. Sadly, I can't remember the episode number just now...
The key problem with US high schools IMO is that they exist more as holding pens than centers of education. High school exists largely so that both parents can head off to their jobs and know that their dear teenager isn't doing anything untoward for half of the day. (Which really isn't true if they knew half of what goes on in the shadowey corners of your average public high school, but eh...) Paul Graham has an interesting take on that in his essay on why nerds aren't popular in high school. Me, I was lucky enough to have accelerated programs available which I was able to tap into. I had English teachers who made me write, and write in a grammatically and orthographically correct manner. I had a Calculus teacher who stated at the beginning of the year that students who couldn't keep up would get help, but if they didn't apply themselves, they would likely fail the class and that she wasn't going to shed any tears for them. I had a Chemistry/Physics teacher who loved his work so much that his infectious glee made all the dull terms much more exciting. (The fact that half of his experiments exploded or did something else similarly spectacular didn't hurt either) *shrug* But for most people, high school is indeed pretty useless. The bright kids are bored throughout it. The not-so-bright can make it through without trying because there's always a lower-denominator class and teachers aren't apt to fail a student because that path leads to bad performance reviews and parent lawsuits. Still, every child has an opportunity to receive an education unlike some of the higher test score countries where only the cream of the crop get to stay through high school and therefore be included in the exams.
In a culture of conformity, there are no kids who are "different" and thus teased to the point of shooting their tormentors.
Ah yes... the country of "The nail that sticks out gets hammered" has no kids who are different and therefore shunned. Right. Pull the other one; it's got bells on it.
I would be interested in seeing you cite your sources on your claim that divorce rates are higher among the Christian population. Right now, it's sounds like you're just spreading FUD. Now if you talked about the rate of divorce among non-Catholic Christians versus the Catholic population, I could see where the non-Catholic Christians could come out much higher on the divorce side. *shrug* Heck, for that matter, compare the rate of divorce among couples who practice NFP versus artificial birth control, you'd find that there's a higher rate of divorce in the latter group. Meh... but I'm ranting in in OT manner to an OT comment.
I guess my question is where you got your statistics. Or if, like 70.023% of statistics out there, they were made up on the spot.
In terms of the injecting of the saline solution being effective to relieve Parkinson's, is this related to that one Discover Magazine article which showed that while injection of fetal stem cells into the brain was effective in treating Parkinson's, just sticking the probe in without injecting matter was more effective?
As for the line about how using an anti-morphine substance removed the ability of the placebo to relieve pain, I remember hearing about something like that in a book on self-hypnosis. The chemical works there too. (The anecdote was a bit chilling though... basically they invited an avowed hypnotist to show his pain-blocking ability, let him get into his trance, then injected the morphine blocking material. Instant screaming hypnotist.) It leads to that whole question as to whether pain-killers really relieve pain, or if they just convince the body not to notice the pain.
What, no bizarre segue into the nuns getting vaginally sodomized by the light of IR cameras? You're slipping, man...
For those who think I'm making a non-sequitor, this fellow, or someone with a similar bent, always used to find some way to work in the nuns being sexually assaulted, usually with the item of discussion.
English cast? Isn't this a Japanese movie in Japanese language? ... with dubbing in English. *sigh* And they wonder why the releases do so badly. If I want to hear a ninja drawl in a Texan accent, I can buy one of those badly dubbed kung fu movies.
As someone who finds dubs, especially American Anime dubs, a bit like cleaning their ears with a chainsaw, I'm not convinced dubs are good for sales.
I don't expect this will change anytime soon. While it's mildly incomprehensible to me, apparently large amounts of the US public are not too far from illiterate. They can make their way through newspapers and the like, but as for abstracting content or reading in concert with other activities, those abilities tend to be more lacking. It supposedly has something to do with the way that we educate students in reading around the 4th grade level. *shrug* I wish I had a better cite... I got it out of an educational journal about a year ago.
Personally, I highly prefer the subtitling, if for no other reason than that you get the original voice intonations (not to mention voices appropriate for the nationality and gender of the character!), although I recognize that there have been some good dubbing jobs out there.
Still, in the example that started this whole little digression, for the author to have used the ellipsis in order to remove words would have been downright unethical, on the same order as simply making up the quote in the first place.
*snort* The deliberate misquotation by omission of words is fairly widespread in the media. You're lucky if they add the ellipsis.
.... as well as a working model of Gordon Freeman as the hyper-beardy, ultra-low-polygon 'doctor.mdl'.
Maybe this is what's used for the other games where you get glimpses of Freeman on trams and running into portals?
I could have sworn that the day after Kurtz entered, he had a news post up on the site saying that he'd somehow missed his update due to having labeled it February 29th rather than March 1st. Then again, he could have just been saying that the update was late, not that it wasn't within the "update within the day." ^_^ And I loved the strip where Francis takes up the gauntlet.
Just to follow up on this, I found a.NET program that handles Markov chains and has some very understandable source code. I think that this link should get you there, but if not, look for the "Markov Babbler."
Heck, that's how my town's computer labs ran for years... Admittedly, they eventually got caught at it. (The "computer teacher," a former librarian who knew enough to point out the difference between a tower, a monitor, and a keyboard, never knew the software was pirated. Her students [which included my older brother] had assured her everything was on the up and up) Ah, the days of playing Stickybear on the black diskette with the misspelled handwritten label...
It's actually being changed, which is the news.
This is a group of scientists talking about some of the possibilities, who haven't even submitted their idea, let alone had it approved. I honestly expect M. Kilo will be around for another decade or so.
Sadly, whenever a school's funding becomes dependent on the results of a standardized test, they will teach to the test. It's a matter of survival. In an ideal world, the test would truly cover what a student should know and evaluate their skills in a manner which truly tests comprehension rather than simply spewing out answers. Unfortunately, most tests are decidedly non-comprehensive and generally test your test-taking skills more than your actual knowledge.
As a graduate from a high school in Kentucky where our school was required to get successively higher scores on the KIRIS test due to the Kentucky Education Reform Act, I personally feel that the government shouldn't ever become too intimately involved in how to set up an education. It seems like every time they do, they just cause more trouble.
Doing good searches reminds me of that childhood argument regarding finding a word in a dictionary.
"So, how do I find the spelling of a word?"
"Look it up in the dictionary, starting with the first letter."
"If I knew how to spell it, I wouldn't be looking it up!"
"Googling" for a subject or for a person can be very effective, but you generally have to know a bit about what you're looking for if you wish to be successful in your search. For instance, anyone could put my name into Google and get about 4 (it fluctuates from day to day) references to me on the first page. However, I often don't hold the topmost entry and there are other people more prominently featured. There's a Sean Duggan who does graphic design, also teaching classes and writing books on computer graphics. There's a Sean Duggan who's a Benedictine monk who does jazz piano in Pittsburgh. And then there's me, also listed in some places under computer art, in some places under music and half a dozen other things.
Lucky you, you've got a bona-fide metrologist replying. Admittedly one who specializes in automated calibration of electronic instruments, but we get the basic lectures on dimensional analysis too.
The main reason for platinum-iridium is that it's got a very low thermal expansion coefficient. Basically, it doesn't expand or contract much with change of temperature. However, densisty is also important. Don't ever ask a metrologist that old chestnut about which is heavier, a kilogram of lead or a kilogram of feathers, unless you're willing to sit through a few hours of lecture on buoyancy. Yup, it's not just for water and hot air balloons. A denser object of the same mass will weigh slightly less (assuming uniform shape and all that), as it will be slightly less bouyant in the air.
As for your comment regarding a smaller object being less accurate due to relative scale of dust, a smaller mass is also slightly less prone to the influence of the variability of the gravity constant across the Earth's surface. *wry grin* There are a lot of factors you have to deal with when you start working on the scales we do here. And that's not even getting into the gage blocks (length measurement) which have surfaces so smooth that they form a vacuum when touched together, and will spot weld to each other if left overnight...
Admittedly, timekeeping is an artifact of Sumerian influences and their base 60 counting. But honestly, it's not such a bad thing as it means that a minute or an hour is even divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. For something like time (Or, for that matter, arc measurements), that division is important. I kind of feel the same way about 12 inches in a foot. It's convenient. And honestly, is multiplying by 60 really that difficult? Now admittedly, it gets slightly more messy dividing.
Anyways, this issue has nothing to do with abortion.
On the contrary, it's all coming back to that central question of when life begins, how much we value it, and whether, if we believe a being to be human, it's ethical to kill them to aid others. Yes, stem cells aren't directly related to abortion, but they have the same root ethical quandry.
Although, interestingly enough, when the partial birth abortion (breech birth followed by a pair of scissors and a vacuum to the back of the skull before the baby can get its head out), the media did associate it with stem cells, as the idea of using fetal stem cells to curze Alzheimer's (or was it Parkinsons's?) by direct injections to the brain was in vogue. I suspect somewhere along the line, people got confused about what stem cells were and assumed that the vacuumed neural matter of the baby was equivalent.
Incidentally, last I'd seen about the Alzheimers/Parkinsons cure, experiments had shown that the results seemed largely a combination of a placebo effect along with that any needles injected directly into the brain did something to stimulate the nerve cells to improve.
There's an article I read, findable at http://slashdot.org/~yerricde/journal/36125, mathematically demonstrating that with the legal ruling that it only takes an 8 note similarity for music to infringe, and given the limited range of what music can be, it's impossible to create a non-infringing song. I had an odd thought a few days though... since every song can be shown (presumably) to have at least an 8-note similarity to a prior piece of music which is in public domain, does this mean no copyright is valid?
Check out Bable. It's more one of those jumbled text generation programs, but it is open source, so you can look at one way to analyze language using Markov chains.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that pyramid schemes are evil. How do I know? They were the villain on the old Batman live-action show. Sadly, I can't remember the episode number just now...
The key problem with US high schools IMO is that they exist more as holding pens than centers of education. High school exists largely so that both parents can head off to their jobs and know that their dear teenager isn't doing anything untoward for half of the day. (Which really isn't true if they knew half of what goes on in the shadowey corners of your average public high school, but eh...) Paul Graham has an interesting take on that in his essay on why nerds aren't popular in high school. Me, I was lucky enough to have accelerated programs available which I was able to tap into. I had English teachers who made me write, and write in a grammatically and orthographically correct manner. I had a Calculus teacher who stated at the beginning of the year that students who couldn't keep up would get help, but if they didn't apply themselves, they would likely fail the class and that she wasn't going to shed any tears for them. I had a Chemistry/Physics teacher who loved his work so much that his infectious glee made all the dull terms much more exciting. (The fact that half of his experiments exploded or did something else similarly spectacular didn't hurt either) *shrug* But for most people, high school is indeed pretty useless. The bright kids are bored throughout it. The not-so-bright can make it through without trying because there's always a lower-denominator class and teachers aren't apt to fail a student because that path leads to bad performance reviews and parent lawsuits. Still, every child has an opportunity to receive an education unlike some of the higher test score countries where only the cream of the crop get to stay through high school and therefore be included in the exams.
In a culture of conformity, there are no kids who are "different" and thus teased to the point of shooting their tormentors.
Ah yes... the country of "The nail that sticks out gets hammered" has no kids who are different and therefore shunned. Right. Pull the other one; it's got bells on it.
I guess my question is where you got your statistics. Or if, like 70.023% of statistics out there, they were made up on the spot.
As for the line about how using an anti-morphine substance removed the ability of the placebo to relieve pain, I remember hearing about something like that in a book on self-hypnosis. The chemical works there too. (The anecdote was a bit chilling though... basically they invited an avowed hypnotist to show his pain-blocking ability, let him get into his trance, then injected the morphine blocking material. Instant screaming hypnotist.) It leads to that whole question as to whether pain-killers really relieve pain, or if they just convince the body not to notice the pain.
For those who think I'm making a non-sequitor, this fellow, or someone with a similar bent, always used to find some way to work in the nuns being sexually assaulted, usually with the item of discussion.
English cast? Isn't this a Japanese movie in Japanese language?
... with dubbing in English. *sigh* And they wonder why the releases do so badly. If I want to hear a ninja drawl in a Texan accent, I can buy one of those badly dubbed kung fu movies.
I don't expect this will change anytime soon. While it's mildly incomprehensible to me, apparently large amounts of the US public are not too far from illiterate. They can make their way through newspapers and the like, but as for abstracting content or reading in concert with other activities, those abilities tend to be more lacking. It supposedly has something to do with the way that we educate students in reading around the 4th grade level. *shrug* I wish I had a better cite... I got it out of an educational journal about a year ago.
Personally, I highly prefer the subtitling, if for no other reason than that you get the original voice intonations (not to mention voices appropriate for the nationality and gender of the character!), although I recognize that there have been some good dubbing jobs out there.
Late follow-up I know, but the standard English unit for mass would be the slug, equivalent to about 14.59 kg or 32.17 lb.
Still, in the example that started this whole little digression, for the author to have used the ellipsis in order to remove words would have been downright unethical, on the same order as simply making up the quote in the first place.
*snort* The deliberate misquotation by omission of words is fairly widespread in the media. You're lucky if they add the ellipsis.
Maybe this is what's used for the other games where you get glimpses of Freeman on trams and running into portals?
I could have sworn that the day after Kurtz entered, he had a news post up on the site saying that he'd somehow missed his update due to having labeled it February 29th rather than March 1st. Then again, he could have just been saying that the update was late, not that it wasn't within the "update within the day." ^_^ And I loved the strip where Francis takes up the gauntlet.
Just to follow up on this, I found a .NET program that handles Markov chains and has some very understandable source code. I think that this link should get you there, but if not, look for the "Markov Babbler."
Correct. I misstated it the first time.
Heck, that's how my town's computer labs ran for years... Admittedly, they eventually got caught at it. (The "computer teacher," a former librarian who knew enough to point out the difference between a tower, a monitor, and a keyboard, never knew the software was pirated. Her students [which included my older brother] had assured her everything was on the up and up) Ah, the days of playing Stickybear on the black diskette with the misspelled handwritten label...
(n/t)
It's actually being changed, which is the news.
This is a group of scientists talking about some of the possibilities, who haven't even submitted their idea, let alone had it approved. I honestly expect M. Kilo will be around for another decade or so.
As a graduate from a high school in Kentucky where our school was required to get successively higher scores on the KIRIS test due to the Kentucky Education Reform Act, I personally feel that the government shouldn't ever become too intimately involved in how to set up an education. It seems like every time they do, they just cause more trouble.
"So, how do I find the spelling of a word?"
"Look it up in the dictionary, starting with the first letter."
"If I knew how to spell it, I wouldn't be looking it up!"
"Googling" for a subject or for a person can be very effective, but you generally have to know a bit about what you're looking for if you wish to be successful in your search. For instance, anyone could put my name into Google and get about 4 (it fluctuates from day to day) references to me on the first page. However, I often don't hold the topmost entry and there are other people more prominently featured. There's a Sean Duggan who does graphic design, also teaching classes and writing books on computer graphics. There's a Sean Duggan who's a Benedictine monk who does jazz piano in Pittsburgh. And then there's me, also listed in some places under computer art, in some places under music and half a dozen other things.
The main reason for platinum-iridium is that it's got a very low thermal expansion coefficient. Basically, it doesn't expand or contract much with change of temperature. However, densisty is also important. Don't ever ask a metrologist that old chestnut about which is heavier, a kilogram of lead or a kilogram of feathers, unless you're willing to sit through a few hours of lecture on buoyancy. Yup, it's not just for water and hot air balloons. A denser object of the same mass will weigh slightly less (assuming uniform shape and all that), as it will be slightly less bouyant in the air.
As for your comment regarding a smaller object being less accurate due to relative scale of dust, a smaller mass is also slightly less prone to the influence of the variability of the gravity constant across the Earth's surface. *wry grin* There are a lot of factors you have to deal with when you start working on the scales we do here. And that's not even getting into the gage blocks (length measurement) which have surfaces so smooth that they form a vacuum when touched together, and will spot weld to each other if left overnight...
Admittedly, timekeeping is an artifact of Sumerian influences and their base 60 counting. But honestly, it's not such a bad thing as it means that a minute or an hour is even divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. For something like time (Or, for that matter, arc measurements), that division is important. I kind of feel the same way about 12 inches in a foot. It's convenient. And honestly, is multiplying by 60 really that difficult? Now admittedly, it gets slightly more messy dividing.
On the contrary, it's all coming back to that central question of when life begins, how much we value it, and whether, if we believe a being to be human, it's ethical to kill them to aid others. Yes, stem cells aren't directly related to abortion, but they have the same root ethical quandry.
Although, interestingly enough, when the partial birth abortion (breech birth followed by a pair of scissors and a vacuum to the back of the skull before the baby can get its head out), the media did associate it with stem cells, as the idea of using fetal stem cells to curze Alzheimer's (or was it Parkinsons's?) by direct injections to the brain was in vogue. I suspect somewhere along the line, people got confused about what stem cells were and assumed that the vacuumed neural matter of the baby was equivalent.
Incidentally, last I'd seen about the Alzheimers/Parkinsons cure, experiments had shown that the results seemed largely a combination of a placebo effect along with that any needles injected directly into the brain did something to stimulate the nerve cells to improve.
There's an article I read, findable at http://slashdot.org/~yerricde/journal/36125, mathematically demonstrating that with the legal ruling that it only takes an 8 note similarity for music to infringe, and given the limited range of what music can be, it's impossible to create a non-infringing song. I had an odd thought a few days though... since every song can be shown (presumably) to have at least an 8-note similarity to a prior piece of music which is in public domain, does this mean no copyright is valid?
It apparently runs if buggily according to this report.
Check out Bable. It's more one of those jumbled text generation programs, but it is open source, so you can look at one way to analyze language using Markov chains.