I'm a Latvian going to Reed here on the US West coast, doing physics, and I must say I've never met so many people willing to work so hard before in my life.
The US is a huge country, with an economic middle class that would be considered highly affluent in very many countries of the world, including the one I come from. Despite loans and everything else, it is still much easier for the average American to go to school than it is for people in other countries. As a result, a lot of people go to school in order to have fun and to party, without any real motivation to learn anything. It is not particularly surprising that the majority of students anywhere are not particularly good at studying or science or whatever, but that is only because the majority of people are not _particularly_ good at anything (it's all a distribution curve - and the end of the curve that, say, actually forwards science is very, very far to the right). Elsewhere, the mediocre might get filtered out before college; here it happens later. The end result is similar. The masses do not learn to do genetics or develop new theories of gravity, but ultimately there remain some who do.
It may be true to some extent, however, that studying is less "cool" here in the States than elsewhere. There's good reason for it. Historically, what is "cool" or attractive or whatever has been determined by what indicates you're doing well in life. It was cool and good-looking to be portly once since that indicated a certain level of affluence. Today, that level of affluence is commonplace (though, of course, not ubiquitous) in the US; therefore, chubbiness is no longer the thing (not necessarily so in rural China, though - the Mandarin word "pang" (2nd tone if I remember correctly, though maybe not), fat, still has connotations far more pleasant than those of "fat"). It is the same with education. In a land where you have to work very, very hard for any acceptable standard of living, the smarter you are - the more weapons you have for securing some affluence - the better.
In the US, however, you can work behind a counter in a shop and earn more than, say, a tenured chemistry professor will make in Beijing. Even with higher commodity prices, one can still afford to not work that hard and live "the good life" instead - have fun and play around. Therefore, smarts have lost some of their coolness factor.
It is merely a function of wealth. Progress is driven by need. The more satisfied people feel, the less motivation they have. Here in the US, food and clothing is no longer motivation enough. I am sure the same thing will eventually happen in India.
Does that mark the end of intellectual advancement? Hardly. There's still a lot of us who care for knowledge for knowledge's sake; a lot of us who innovate because to innovate is neat. And there's a lot of us who think that there is more to a good life than eating, drinking, dressing and playing well. Our motivation is now curiosity and a wish to see a brighter future for mankind rather than the need to eat and survive.
Going after a fish with a blowtorch or any other kind of _pointless_ act that results in damage to the environment is certainly not what I was talking about. What bugs me is the environmentalists who value animal above man - the guys who'd rather see a human being suffer than a mouse.
There's certainly nothing moral about animal torture. However, although I'd call it sick, I wouldn't call it immoral.
:) yeah, sorry. I'm working on a bloody stupid old Mac that won't separate paragraphs even when I enter double paragraph breaks between them, as I found out.
Well, I'm sure you can, but you'd have to be trying very, very hard.
Honestly, this is one of the least intelligent posts I've read on slashdot. . .
First of all, the chances of 'contaminating' Europa to any detectable extent are worse than infinitesimal - you're more likely to run Windows for 20 years, play a thousand different games and run a thousand different programs on it and have it crash not once. The worst damage a probe could do would be to remain there as a dead pile of metal. 'Radioactive heater' indeed. Even if a probe had a full-scale nuclear submarine engine and it split completely open, it could only leak some contamination into Europa that would go by unnoticed with the kind of volume that moon has, or splatter stuff on its surface. With the kind of small radiation source a probe could utilize, a person could probably spend days holding it in his/her hands and not get significant adverse effects. Diluted over a volume, it would be completely insignificant.
And, once for all, radioactive heaters CANNOT explode in thermonuclear blasts! Nuclear power plants cannot explode in thermonuclear blasts! There only thing that can happen in either case is the core being opened to the environment in some way, leaking contamination.
But this technical argument is just a small issue compared to the main problem with the post, the kind of greenie sentimentalism I hate just so much. First a statement of how the evil we have contaminated the world's Oceans (hic), which apparently is a mortal sin - humanity, after all, are not allowed to develop and live better if there's danger of hurting a fish, we should all still be starving and drowning in filth as beggars in the Gange - but then it moves on to imply that we're going to be even more evil by _contaminating a moon on which we haven't yet even set foot_! Apparently, we're going to change the state of Europa from the 'right' state of being - defined by its current state - to a 'contaminated' one if we add anything to it. But we don't even know what it's current state is! We've no reason whatsoever to think that Europa would be better or worse off with 'contamination' - you can talk in those terms only where you have intelligent life that can exist better in certain conditions. There _is_ no right way for Europa to be. Morally, it does not exist. We can utilize its resources if it has any and we'll be moral, and we can leave it alone and we'll be moral - only very very dumb.
Again, there is no morality where there is no intelligent life. Killing fishes by pollution is a bad thing only because it harms people. Even if it is mean to the fish that she be killed, if it should be to feed humanity, let the fish die.
Europa - unless it bears intelligent life, which is unlikely but not impossible - is nothing more than chemicals. By 'polluting' chemicals, you just get new chemicals. You might destroy something useful that way, but that wouldn't be pollution, that would just be a plain old mistake.
Well, of course, on a surface level that question is silly - you do need some social skills to exist in a society - to be able to communicate with people you need to work with and to talk to/become friends with people that you like. But, beyond that, I'm not at all sure trying to force 'social skills' on somebody is a brilliant idea.
It took me quite a while to figure out why I didn't want to talk with most people or 'hang out' at parties or do stuff like that, but, once I did have it figured out, it was obvious. The vast majority of people are neither too smart nor too interesting. They have no ideas of their own, do not know what they're doing with their lives and basically just live along trying to find confirmation in their worth by soliciting the 'respect' and 'friendship' (mostly in the form of alcohol consumption/pointless chatter) of others. If you have your own ideas about the world and some things that you wish to achieve, those people will hold no attraction to you - it is not wrong, but natural. The worst thing one can possibly do is to tell a person who doesn't enjoy such people that s/he is somehow wrong and should be different - it is everyone else that should be different, not those few who actually have dedication to something.
That does not mean a dedicated and/or smart person should live in isolation, by any means. The solution is to find other people who are as hardworking, smart or dedicated. The odds are one will enjoy social interaction with people of one's own intellect and determination. It's sometimes by no means easy to find such people - I'm in what is supposed to be one of the most academic colleges in the whole US, but the number of people that are interesting to me here is by no means overwhelming.
Let me stress this again: do not let the person you're trying to help believe he is wrong merely because he does not find the prospect of talking with the people around him fascinating. Instead, try to nudge him into meeting people of his caliber - is there something like a student science focus group in there, for instance? In Latvia (my home country), some of the most intelligent people I'd ever met I met in a science fiction society, but I've observed US societies are sometimes different, so I'm not sure about that one. Give him intelligent stuff to read - Le Guin comes readily to mind (especially the intelligent YA novelette A Long Way from Anywhere Else, though this could be interpreted as too obviously didactic, or other works) and definitely R. A. Heinlein, perhaps Ayn Rand if he is ready for that kind of reading (The Fountainhead in particular) - her overflowing enthusiasm for individual strength is invaluable. Once he has confidence that he is not somehow crippled by lacking these 'social skills' everyone talks of, he'll develop all the skills he needs.
Of other things mentioned in this thread, I definitely endorse martial arts practice. I started taking aikido at 15 after 15 years of almost no physical activity whatsoever - once I realized I could be quite good at it, it did reams for the physical aspect of my self-confidence. And aikido is really a nice art for a geek - it won't scare you with broken teeth immediately, making it easier to start, but, once you're going, it can be effective and devastating (I've seen some former 'nerds' in aikido that I'd certainly never want to meet in a dark alley. ..)
'nuff ranted.
(I'm the author of the post above the previous one - just created the user) Do you mean to say you operated on a submarine?:) give me more of that bucket story, perhaps? btw, how do cross-connected plants work?:) I'm up for my NRC exam in a few months (for a small TRIGA reactor). ..will be fun:D.
What really irritates me about the Chernobyl accident coverage is the way statistics are blown all out of proportion. It's just so very damaging to an energy source that could be developed far beyond what it is right now if people were actually ready to put money into it. I mean, think about it - the newest commercial plants we have around in the States are what, 20 to 30 years old, built only a few decades after nuclear power was developed even as a theoretical possibility. We're still building new coal plants today and I'm sure we're much more effective about producing power from coal now than we were 70 years ago - if we continued developing nuclear power, there's no guessing where it'd be in a few decades.
Ah well. Waiting for cold fusion to come around. And studying to perhaps help it on its way:). _That _should be a neat energy source.
And to operator-types: hopefully, we'll never have that $1 extra again:D. . .
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a Latvian going to Reed here on the US West coast, doing physics, and I must say I've never met so many people willing to work so hard before in my life.
The US is a huge country, with an economic middle class that would be considered highly affluent in very many countries of the world, including the one I come from. Despite loans and everything else, it is still much easier for the average American to go to school than it is for people in other countries. As a result, a lot of people go to school in order to have fun and to party, without any real motivation to learn anything. It is not particularly surprising that the majority of students anywhere are not particularly good at studying or science or whatever, but that is only because the majority of people are not _particularly_ good at anything (it's all a distribution curve - and the end of the curve that, say, actually forwards science is very, very far to the right). Elsewhere, the mediocre might get filtered out before college; here it happens later. The end result is similar. The masses do not learn to do genetics or develop new theories of gravity, but ultimately there remain some who do.
It may be true to some extent, however, that studying is less "cool" here in the States than elsewhere. There's good reason for it. Historically, what is "cool" or attractive or whatever has been determined by what indicates you're doing well in life. It was cool and good-looking to be portly once since that indicated a certain level of affluence. Today, that level of affluence is commonplace (though, of course, not ubiquitous) in the US; therefore, chubbiness is no longer the thing (not necessarily so in rural China, though - the Mandarin word "pang" (2nd tone if I remember correctly, though maybe not), fat, still has connotations far more pleasant than those of "fat"). It is the same with education. In a land where you have to work very, very hard for any acceptable standard of living, the smarter you are - the more weapons you have for securing some affluence - the better.
In the US, however, you can work behind a counter in a shop and earn more than, say, a tenured chemistry professor will make in Beijing. Even with higher commodity prices, one can still afford to not work that hard and live "the good life" instead - have fun and play around. Therefore, smarts have lost some of their coolness factor.
It is merely a function of wealth. Progress is driven by need. The more satisfied people feel, the less motivation they have. Here in the US, food and clothing is no longer motivation enough. I am sure the same thing will eventually happen in India.
Does that mark the end of intellectual advancement? Hardly. There's still a lot of us who care for knowledge for knowledge's sake; a lot of us who innovate because to innovate is neat. And there's a lot of us who think that there is more to a good life than eating, drinking, dressing and playing well. Our motivation is now curiosity and a wish to see a brighter future for mankind rather than the need to eat and survive.
Going after a fish with a blowtorch or any other kind of _pointless_ act that results in damage to the environment is certainly not what I was talking about. What bugs me is the environmentalists who value animal above man - the guys who'd rather see a human being suffer than a mouse. There's certainly nothing moral about animal torture. However, although I'd call it sick, I wouldn't call it immoral.
:) yeah, sorry. I'm working on a bloody stupid old Mac that won't separate paragraphs even when I enter double paragraph breaks between them, as I found out.
Well, I'm sure you can, but you'd have to be trying very, very hard. Honestly, this is one of the least intelligent posts I've read on slashdot. . . First of all, the chances of 'contaminating' Europa to any detectable extent are worse than infinitesimal - you're more likely to run Windows for 20 years, play a thousand different games and run a thousand different programs on it and have it crash not once. The worst damage a probe could do would be to remain there as a dead pile of metal. 'Radioactive heater' indeed. Even if a probe had a full-scale nuclear submarine engine and it split completely open, it could only leak some contamination into Europa that would go by unnoticed with the kind of volume that moon has, or splatter stuff on its surface. With the kind of small radiation source a probe could utilize, a person could probably spend days holding it in his/her hands and not get significant adverse effects. Diluted over a volume, it would be completely insignificant. And, once for all, radioactive heaters CANNOT explode in thermonuclear blasts! Nuclear power plants cannot explode in thermonuclear blasts! There only thing that can happen in either case is the core being opened to the environment in some way, leaking contamination. But this technical argument is just a small issue compared to the main problem with the post, the kind of greenie sentimentalism I hate just so much. First a statement of how the evil we have contaminated the world's Oceans (hic), which apparently is a mortal sin - humanity, after all, are not allowed to develop and live better if there's danger of hurting a fish, we should all still be starving and drowning in filth as beggars in the Gange - but then it moves on to imply that we're going to be even more evil by _contaminating a moon on which we haven't yet even set foot_! Apparently, we're going to change the state of Europa from the 'right' state of being - defined by its current state - to a 'contaminated' one if we add anything to it. But we don't even know what it's current state is! We've no reason whatsoever to think that Europa would be better or worse off with 'contamination' - you can talk in those terms only where you have intelligent life that can exist better in certain conditions. There _is_ no right way for Europa to be. Morally, it does not exist. We can utilize its resources if it has any and we'll be moral, and we can leave it alone and we'll be moral - only very very dumb. Again, there is no morality where there is no intelligent life. Killing fishes by pollution is a bad thing only because it harms people. Even if it is mean to the fish that she be killed, if it should be to feed humanity, let the fish die. Europa - unless it bears intelligent life, which is unlikely but not impossible - is nothing more than chemicals. By 'polluting' chemicals, you just get new chemicals. You might destroy something useful that way, but that wouldn't be pollution, that would just be a plain old mistake.
Aww Guhd. . .what happened to the formatting. . .was double-spacing it too. . .have to learn to preview before submitting, I guess.
Well, of course, on a surface level that question is silly - you do need some social skills to exist in a society - to be able to communicate with people you need to work with and to talk to/become friends with people that you like. But, beyond that, I'm not at all sure trying to force 'social skills' on somebody is a brilliant idea. It took me quite a while to figure out why I didn't want to talk with most people or 'hang out' at parties or do stuff like that, but, once I did have it figured out, it was obvious. The vast majority of people are neither too smart nor too interesting. They have no ideas of their own, do not know what they're doing with their lives and basically just live along trying to find confirmation in their worth by soliciting the 'respect' and 'friendship' (mostly in the form of alcohol consumption/pointless chatter) of others. If you have your own ideas about the world and some things that you wish to achieve, those people will hold no attraction to you - it is not wrong, but natural. The worst thing one can possibly do is to tell a person who doesn't enjoy such people that s/he is somehow wrong and should be different - it is everyone else that should be different, not those few who actually have dedication to something. That does not mean a dedicated and/or smart person should live in isolation, by any means. The solution is to find other people who are as hardworking, smart or dedicated. The odds are one will enjoy social interaction with people of one's own intellect and determination. It's sometimes by no means easy to find such people - I'm in what is supposed to be one of the most academic colleges in the whole US, but the number of people that are interesting to me here is by no means overwhelming. Let me stress this again: do not let the person you're trying to help believe he is wrong merely because he does not find the prospect of talking with the people around him fascinating. Instead, try to nudge him into meeting people of his caliber - is there something like a student science focus group in there, for instance? In Latvia (my home country), some of the most intelligent people I'd ever met I met in a science fiction society, but I've observed US societies are sometimes different, so I'm not sure about that one. Give him intelligent stuff to read - Le Guin comes readily to mind (especially the intelligent YA novelette A Long Way from Anywhere Else, though this could be interpreted as too obviously didactic, or other works) and definitely R. A. Heinlein, perhaps Ayn Rand if he is ready for that kind of reading (The Fountainhead in particular) - her overflowing enthusiasm for individual strength is invaluable. Once he has confidence that he is not somehow crippled by lacking these 'social skills' everyone talks of, he'll develop all the skills he needs. Of other things mentioned in this thread, I definitely endorse martial arts practice. I started taking aikido at 15 after 15 years of almost no physical activity whatsoever - once I realized I could be quite good at it, it did reams for the physical aspect of my self-confidence. And aikido is really a nice art for a geek - it won't scare you with broken teeth immediately, making it easier to start, but, once you're going, it can be effective and devastating (I've seen some former 'nerds' in aikido that I'd certainly never want to meet in a dark alley. . .)
'nuff ranted.
(I'm the author of the post above the previous one - just created the user) Do you mean to say you operated on a submarine? :) give me more of that bucket story, perhaps? btw, how do cross-connected plants work? :) I'm up for my NRC exam in a few months (for a small TRIGA reactor). . .will be fun :D.
:). _That _should be a neat energy source.
:D. . .
What really irritates me about the Chernobyl accident coverage is the way statistics are blown all out of proportion. It's just so very damaging to an energy source that could be developed far beyond what it is right now if people were actually ready to put money into it. I mean, think about it - the newest commercial plants we have around in the States are what, 20 to 30 years old, built only a few decades after nuclear power was developed even as a theoretical possibility. We're still building new coal plants today and I'm sure we're much more effective about producing power from coal now than we were 70 years ago - if we continued developing nuclear power, there's no guessing where it'd be in a few decades.
Ah well. Waiting for cold fusion to come around. And studying to perhaps help it on its way
And to operator-types: hopefully, we'll never have that $1 extra again