...alerts for nearly exactly the same thing went on for 2-3 weeks in Boston.
It's not nearly the same thing. You're probably thinking of the impact of Quebec forest fires in May, which drove the Air Quality Index (AQI) to the
Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups range (which is 101-150) in parts of the Boston area. This is nowhere near 500+. (The ranges above 150 are Unhealthy (151-200), Very Unhealthy (201-300), and Hazardous (301-500+).
$299 with a contract is NOT retail. It's subsidized.
You can go into a retail store, and walk out with an iPhone 4 after paying that price. I'm sorry if you want to play word games, but that is retail by any definition EVEN THOUGH it is subsidized.
Since the poster ALREADY stated he "would carry a phone anyway" that rendered the subsidy point moot, since he would BE PAYING FOR PHONE SERVICE ANYWAY. A contract price doesn't factor in if you'd have a contract regardless.
A couple of quick points, since I think your argument is a little flawed. First, I can walk into car dealerships and drive away with a car after paying only hundreds of dollars. That's not retail, because I'm on the hook for years worth of payments afterward. The iPhone is cheaper, but I'm still paying for years.
But you argue that he'll be paying for phone service anyway? Phone service varies a lot in cost, and the post you're replying to quotes a $50 saving from T-Mobile over AT&T. So the paying for phone service anyway costs him an extra $1200 over two years? Not all plans are created equal, and they vary a lot in cost (and phone subsidy).
They are just different metrics. What you're talking about is the quarter turn metric, and this proof is about the face turn metric. There is apparently a position that is known to be a distance 26 quarter turns from solved, so your answer would be at least 26.
No, they've proved that the superflip (the position where all the edge pieces are flipped and the corners and centers are in place) is 20 face turns from solved. Thus before this new work it was already known that the general solution required at least 20 face turns, and this work says that 20 is sufficient. So 20 it is!
I teach math at a decent university, and I could teach a semester's worth of material in one class using PowerPoint. Nobody would learn anything, of course. But speaking as a math teacher, it's really easy to go far too fast using things like PowerPoint.
I teach with a lot of the techniques they're talking about (group activities, hands-on exercises), but I really don't want to use presentation software like PowerPoint. I'm willing to bet a lot that a student that has written down a couple of examples from the board is better off than one who has seen the same example projected on a screen.
Finally, the technology the article mentions include blogs, videoconferencing, and "clickers". I've avoided clickers mostly by teaching in small classes, but I can see their use as instant feedback. But blogs? Do my calculus students really want to read a blog I write?
Thanks for your posts, iluvcapra, they're really excellent and get to the heart of the matter. I think Perelman felt he'd explained enough (in his papers and talks), but you make an eloquent case that he hadn't done so to a reasonable standard.
and you've had a happy lives. the people he describes are 1) smarter than you or 2) had it tough emotionally
1) you don't know me, and 2) I'm sorry for them.
I've worked or studied at a variety of places: large state schools, smaller private schools, and in between. I've worked at one of the top five math departments in the country. I've met a lot of mathematicians, from ordinary to world-class. This is just to give you an idea where I'm coming from.
Why do you think people who are smart or good at math must be emotionally or socially troubled?
The original poster said:
This is a universal affliction among mathematicians I've known.
I'm just trying to provide a different perspective.
A famous Chinese mathematician, Shing-Tung Yao, was accused of promoting the Cao-Zhu article as the real proof, and taking away credit rightfully due to Perelman.
Yau (the mathematician, not Yao the NBA player) is, of course, the chair of the Harvard Math Department. He is a phenomenal mathematician in his own right (Fields medalist, MacArthur genius grant recipient, etc).
I'm roughly familiar with the controversy, and I think it comes down to: what does it mean to prove something? Perelman provided what for most in the field was an outline of a proof, and Cao-Zhu (among others) dotted the is and crossed the ts. Of course Perelman would say it was a complete proof, and supporters of others would say these others provided valuable details. I think Perelman worked out all the details, but he only shared what he felt was necessary.
I'm a mathematician, and I'm afraid I really don't know what you're talking about.
Mathematics is often pictured as a very isolated practice -- a person sitting alone at a desk. But it's surprisingly social, and while there is a fair amount of desk time, there's a lot of interpersonal relationships (as you put it) in the actual doing of math. Asking questions, explaining your results, mentoring students, even teaching classes -- a lot of math involves other people.
Anyway, I know lots of mathematicians, and I think generally they're pretty happy people.
Knowing emacs, to actually issue that command, you would have to press all those buttons at once.
Well, no. This means "Meta-x" (which for me is esc then x) then type the command butterfly. I guess “Knowing emacs” mean “having heard all the same tired old jokes about that editor I don't use.”
Me? When I went back to grad school (early 90s), I was pleased to find I could use the same old editor I used to use in college (in the mid 80s). I still do all my work in it (used it this afternoon, and on my netbook on the bus in this morning). And version 23 is out!
I wish Guido van Rossum took a hint from Donald Ervin Knuth (a guy whose name is an anagram for "hunt, drink, and love" cannot be all bad...) and TeX and would create a traditional Python with all the excellent features the language had until version 2.5. My suggestion: call it version 2.718281828459045...
Knuth already beat Python to it. Just as TeX's version is asymptotically approaching , so is Metafont's version is approaching e. I think we need more well-known constants.
(I was going to push for the Euler-Mascheroni constant, but that's =0.57721...., so it would have to be something in eternal beta. And all those Google tools are finally losing their beta tags....
It's a good alternate theory, but you're a week off:
On the week ending June 19, Goldman, for instance, was ranked first on the NYSE program trading list. But on the week of June 22, Goldman mysteriously didnâ(TM)t appear on the list of the top 15 firms at all.
So unless the Fourth of July is celebrated in June, I think that's not the issue.
Of course, I'm not checking the volume of trading either, so there could be something to your theory. (Of course, if GS bailed out for a week, wouldn't that lower the volume significantly? Weren't they the number one traders?)
Read about herd immunity. The point is that vaccines only have to be effective most of the time (someone above quotes 95%, so let me use that for the sake of argument). If a large percentage (say, 95%) of a community is immune to a disease, then it becomes difficult for this disease to spread and it dies off. This means if everyone gets vaccinated, then it only has to work for 19 out of every 20 people.
So what Duradin might be saying is: they do work, but not completely, so the vaccine deniers are endangering everyone.
This is really my perspective: Vaccines are a risk. They are a small risk (and not, I believe, from autism). The risk of the disease to the community is greater than the risk of vaccines. By refusing the vaccines, people benefit from others' immunity (and thus from other people facing the risk of vaccines) without sharing any of the cost. That's selfish.
You might argue that it's not the government's place to force these risks on us all. I see it as we the people accepting the communal risks of vaccines as better than the communal risks of disease.
I highly recommend The Shape of Space by Jeff Weeks. (He's a freelance geometer, something he can afford after winning a MacArthur Genius Grant.) I've used this book a couple of times -- once with bright high school kids and once with bright college freshman -- and even if they don't get everything, just a taste is enough.
It builds on Flatland (which someone mentioned above), but has the advantage of being more modern and not sexist. But very quickly you're learning about Klein bottles, connected sums, and all sorts of topology you typically don't see until you're well into your undergraduate (or grad!) program in math. All aimed at high school kids. Very cool stuff.
Oh, and the big punchline at the end: what is the shape of the universe? At least you'll get a good understanding of the possibilities...
It tasted nothing like the candy bars I bought in the store, yet it was the exact same candy-bar machine the store-bought ones came from. It's the shipping and shelf time that ruins it.
I had a college friend who got a job (as an engineer) in an M&M's factory in Georgia. She said that they plan for the shipping and shelf time. Her take was that fresh M&M's tasted awful, but after a few weeks they tasted like, well, M&M's.
Well, to be fair it's a relatively new feature in bash, so perhaps ubuntu is just the first place you've tried that makes bash completion the default.
Here's a blog posting on changing completion to make it smarter, so perhaps you can follow some links and learn how to make the shell do what you want. That's sort of the point...
If they're using it to cut unprofitable sports, then why are they keeping sports like women's water polo? Are you going to tell me that that's profitable?
Of course not. I'm saying that they used Title IX as an excuse to cut sports that they wanted to cut. Yes, Title IX forced them to spend money on women's sports, but it gave them an out to cut men's sports. People would be pissed at administrators if they unilaterally cut wrestling. But if they cut wrestling and said it was because of the feds, then people are pissed at the feds! An easy win!
Men aren't as interested in majors like Women's Studies, Nursing, or Veterinary Science (or Law, as I'm now hearing) as women. So why aren't people yelling about this, and trying to "fix" it?
We're getting there with medicine, too.
The point is that Title IX was enacted at a time when women were discriminated against in higher education. It was not that women "weren't as interested" in majors like law, it's that they were being actively discouraged (or rejected) from doing so. Hence the law.
My apologies for the late reply. I appreciate your response. If I can, I'll respond to only one small piece of your answer, and hope that it goes to all your points.
Title IX has made it so that unprofitable men's sports are all cut, and only the highly profitable/popular ones are kept, which is bad for athletics in general.
Read what you wrote here. Is Title IX really to blame for cutting the unprofitable sports and keeping the profitable ones?
Let me answer for you: No. Absolutely not.
Title IX is the excuse that administrations use to cut the unprofitable sports, but they weren't going to last anyway. They're (what's that word?) unprofitable. Colleges are, alas, businesses.
My apologies for the very late reply. Now I'm at -1, so no one is reading my post anyway...
We'll think what you want. They kept the women's golf and the women's swimming. They certainly don't make any more money than the men's sports did.
Very little athletics makes any money. Big-time athletics brings in a bundle, but very little of college athletics breaks even. Your handle is KUHurdler. Did KU make any money from track and field? Did it break even?
So why spend the money on men's sports rather than women's sports? Because it costs less? Because there's less interest by fans and athletes? These are the traditional arguments, and my response is: how can you have interested athletes and fans if there aren't women's athletics programs?
And yes, I have seen the effects of title IX, and many other forms of quotas and reverse discrimination. Frankly, I don't understand why prejudicialness is the accepted solution to prejudicialness.
What would you do? Declare by fiat that, henceforth, everyone shall be judged on their merits? Title IX came into being in an era when women were actively discriminated against. No, you can't be a physics major. We need that lab spot for a man who won't just quit his job to raise kids. No, you can't play sports because you're a girl. You're too fragile, and besides nobody wants to watch women play basketball (or whatever).
And you can call it "prejudicialness" if you want, but essentially the effect on sports is this: if colleges pay for men's sports, then they must pay for women's sports in roughly the same proportion. Yes, some wrestlers are losing out. But softball players lost out for years.
Here's a question (that I'm honestly looking for an answer to): if Title IX was repealed (as far as sports are concerned, anyway), what would happen to college athletics? Would all those wrestling and golf programs come back? And how much of women's athletics would be maintained?
I just finished a stint at a fine midwestern university (Division III). My take: some women's sports might get cut, but not to reinstate any men's sports. And I would be surprised if much got cut at all...
They'd like to pretend it will be a positive influence and more opportunity for women. But tell that to the men's swimming team, the men's golf team, the men's track team, and the men's wrestling team... and good luck finding them, because those programs were all cut. After all, they had to "create" more opportunities for women.
Two points:
1. All those men's sports weren't cut to create programs for women, they were cut for money. Yes, colleges had to pony up for women's sports. But if you think that they were keeping wrestling, you're dreaming. You may hear people (and administrators) blame Title IX, but it's a cover.
2. Have you looked at the effect of Title IX? In the last 20-30 years women's sports have gone from marginal to mainstream and very athletic.
On the broader topic, it's interesting to read all the comments in the media about how Title IX won't just apply to sports anymore. It wasn't written for sports, but for college education. The application spread to sports as a bastion of still-sanctioned sex discrimination.
Here's my suggestion: how about we just actually give them the same opportunities, and if they don't take them... fine. Remove the male/female checkboxes from the applications. There's no need to create restrictions/quotas.
Here's my suggestion. Go read about what life was like before Title IX. Ask your parents or grandparents. And don't talk sports -- talk about opportunities for women at publicly-funded colleges and universities. There was a need for action and it has helped to change the world (at least this corner of it).
if you're a hardcore UNIX hacker on a Mac you can bring up a Terminal, type "umount/Volumes/SIM_Card" and then try to extract it with a pair of needle-nose pliers.;)
Now, since my liberal friends and foes are always screaming about the alleged erosion of their constitutional rights, and some believe it's necessary to make specious claims, such as comparing George Bush and Hitler, doesn't it concern anyone that this "liberal media group" is "assigning" their staff to "monitor" radio personalities?
Nope.
How do you not get this? What's the problem with a private media watchdog group watching and listening to the media? There is no conflict with anyone's constitutional rights here -- this isn't a government censorship board, it's a private group watching TV and listening to the radio! You could do this from home!
Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.
What's the problem? I urge you to check out their web page. Even if you disagree with them politically (and I'm guessing you do), it's a reasonable read. They're very even-handed. You might not be upset about the same things, but they give detailed context to each of their references and try to be fair. Don Imus had a platform to spout his bile. Why shouldn't he be called on it by some obscure web site?
Oh, wait, I see what your problem is. It's this:
I have to wonder what else they plan to "monitor" if their like-minded compatriots ever regain full political power.
Oh. My. God. Let's not talk about what the Bush administration has done (NSA wiretapping, and who needs habeus corpus?). No, let's smear the Democrats that they might do something if they get back in power.
Yes, yes: that's the point. It's Nice, logical, and predictable, but it's too tall and thin. The point is really that I'm used to 8.5 by 11 paper and A4 looks the wrong size to me.
This is, in the end, the only trouble I have with the metric system. It's designed for clarity and logic, not usability. Somehow 1 foot or 2 feet is "simpler" than 30 cm or 0.6 m. I'd start saying things like "half a meter". This was the whole point of talking about Canada's 355 ml cans of Coke: they're 12 ounce cans. This seems like the right size to me. The metric-based sizes I've seen are all too large (500mL, 1L, 2L) for a single serving. (Yes I know 500mL is only 16.9 ounces. I'm trying to cut back, okay?)
In the end, I think there are really two complaints:
I'm used to one system. Why should I change?
The designed metric system isn't built with people in mind.
A half pound is really easy to wrap your head around. It's around 225 grams (okay, 226.796g), but that's not really person-friendly, is it?
I'm willing to accept that my aversion to A4 paper falls squarely into the first category, but I still don't like it.
I'm glad NASA is finally getting on board, but the transition to metric will take a while for me. I'm fine with km / Celsius / etc (heck! I lived in Canada for a few years), and I could even get used to height and weight in metric, but.
But.
A4 paper is just wrong.
I'm sure, if the good ol' USA goes metric, we'll end up using 21.59 by 27.94 paper (that's 8 and half by 11 using cm instead of in). It's just like Canada and their Coke cans of 355 ml. Why 355 ml? Check your US Coke can: it's 12 fluid ounces...
Slashdot Mirror
...alerts for nearly exactly the same thing went on for 2-3 weeks in Boston.
It's not nearly the same thing. You're probably thinking of the impact of Quebec forest fires in May, which drove the Air Quality Index (AQI) to the Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups range (which is 101-150) in parts of the Boston area. This is nowhere near 500+. (The ranges above 150 are Unhealthy (151-200), Very Unhealthy (201-300), and Hazardous (301-500+).
$299 with a contract is NOT retail. It's subsidized.
You can go into a retail store, and walk out with an iPhone 4 after paying that price. I'm sorry if you want to play word games, but that is retail by any definition EVEN THOUGH it is subsidized.
Since the poster ALREADY stated he "would carry a phone anyway" that rendered the subsidy point moot, since he would BE PAYING FOR PHONE SERVICE ANYWAY. A contract price doesn't factor in if you'd have a contract regardless.
A couple of quick points, since I think your argument is a little flawed. First, I can walk into car dealerships and drive away with a car after paying only hundreds of dollars. That's not retail, because I'm on the hook for years worth of payments afterward. The iPhone is cheaper, but I'm still paying for years.
But you argue that he'll be paying for phone service anyway? Phone service varies a lot in cost, and the post you're replying to quotes a $50 saving from T-Mobile over AT&T. So the paying for phone service anyway costs him an extra $1200 over two years? Not all plans are created equal, and they vary a lot in cost (and phone subsidy).
They are just different metrics. What you're talking about is the quarter turn metric, and this proof is about the face turn metric. There is apparently a position that is known to be a distance 26 quarter turns from solved, so your answer would be at least 26.
No, they've proved that the superflip (the position where all the edge pieces are flipped and the corners and centers are in place) is 20 face turns from solved. Thus before this new work it was already known that the general solution required at least 20 face turns, and this work says that 20 is sufficient. So 20 it is!
I teach math at a decent university, and I could teach a semester's worth of material in one class using PowerPoint. Nobody would learn anything, of course. But speaking as a math teacher, it's really easy to go far too fast using things like PowerPoint.
I teach with a lot of the techniques they're talking about (group activities, hands-on exercises), but I really don't want to use presentation software like PowerPoint. I'm willing to bet a lot that a student that has written down a couple of examples from the board is better off than one who has seen the same example projected on a screen.
Finally, the technology the article mentions include blogs, videoconferencing, and "clickers". I've avoided clickers mostly by teaching in small classes, but I can see their use as instant feedback. But blogs? Do my calculus students really want to read a blog I write?
Thanks for your posts, iluvcapra, they're really excellent and get to the heart of the matter. I think Perelman felt he'd explained enough (in his papers and talks), but you make an eloquent case that he hadn't done so to a reasonable standard.
and you've had a happy lives. the people he describes are 1) smarter than you or 2) had it tough emotionally
1) you don't know me, and 2) I'm sorry for them.
I've worked or studied at a variety of places: large state schools, smaller private schools, and in between. I've worked at one of the top five math departments in the country. I've met a lot of mathematicians, from ordinary to world-class. This is just to give you an idea where I'm coming from.
Why do you think people who are smart or good at math must be emotionally or socially troubled?
The original poster said:
This is a universal affliction among mathematicians I've known.
I'm just trying to provide a different perspective.
A famous Chinese mathematician, Shing-Tung Yao, was accused of promoting the Cao-Zhu article as the real proof, and taking away credit rightfully due to Perelman.
Yau (the mathematician, not Yao the NBA player) is, of course, the chair of the Harvard Math Department. He is a phenomenal mathematician in his own right (Fields medalist, MacArthur genius grant recipient, etc).
I'm roughly familiar with the controversy, and I think it comes down to: what does it mean to prove something? Perelman provided what for most in the field was an outline of a proof, and Cao-Zhu (among others) dotted the is and crossed the ts. Of course Perelman would say it was a complete proof, and supporters of others would say these others provided valuable details. I think Perelman worked out all the details, but he only shared what he felt was necessary.
I'm a mathematician, and I'm afraid I really don't know what you're talking about.
Mathematics is often pictured as a very isolated practice -- a person sitting alone at a desk. But it's surprisingly social, and while there is a fair amount of desk time, there's a lot of interpersonal relationships (as you put it) in the actual doing of math. Asking questions, explaining your results, mentoring students, even teaching classes -- a lot of math involves other people.
Anyway, I know lots of mathematicians, and I think generally they're pretty happy people.
M-x butterfly
Knowing emacs, to actually issue that command, you would have to press all those buttons at once.
Well, no. This means "Meta-x" (which for me is esc then x) then type the command butterfly. I guess “Knowing emacs” mean “having heard all the same tired old jokes about that editor I don't use.”
Me? When I went back to grad school (early 90s), I was pleased to find I could use the same old editor I used to use in college (in the mid 80s). I still do all my work in it (used it this afternoon, and on my netbook on the bus in this morning). And version 23 is out!
I wish Guido van Rossum took a hint from Donald Ervin Knuth (a guy whose name is an anagram for "hunt, drink, and love" cannot be all bad...) and TeX and would create a traditional Python with all the excellent features the language had until version 2.5. My suggestion: call it version 2.718281828459045...
Knuth already beat Python to it. Just as TeX's version is asymptotically approaching , so is Metafont's version is approaching e. I think we need more well-known constants.
(I was going to push for the Euler-Mascheroni constant, but that's =0.57721...., so it would have to be something in eternal beta. And all those Google tools are finally losing their beta tags....
So unless the Fourth of July is celebrated in June, I think that's not the issue.
Of course, I'm not checking the volume of trading either, so there could be something to your theory. (Of course, if GS bailed out for a week, wouldn't that lower the volume significantly? Weren't they the number one traders?)
This ninth-grade argument crap is insightful?
Read about herd immunity. The point is that vaccines only have to be effective most of the time (someone above quotes 95%, so let me use that for the sake of argument). If a large percentage (say, 95%) of a community is immune to a disease, then it becomes difficult for this disease to spread and it dies off. This means if everyone gets vaccinated, then it only has to work for 19 out of every 20 people.
So what Duradin might be saying is: they do work, but not completely, so the vaccine deniers are endangering everyone.
This is really my perspective: Vaccines are a risk. They are a small risk (and not, I believe, from autism). The risk of the disease to the community is greater than the risk of vaccines. By refusing the vaccines, people benefit from others' immunity (and thus from other people facing the risk of vaccines) without sharing any of the cost. That's selfish.
You might argue that it's not the government's place to force these risks on us all. I see it as we the people accepting the communal risks of vaccines as better than the communal risks of disease.
I highly recommend The Shape of Space by Jeff Weeks. (He's a freelance geometer, something he can afford after winning a MacArthur Genius Grant.) I've used this book a couple of times -- once with bright high school kids and once with bright college freshman -- and even if they don't get everything, just a taste is enough.
It builds on Flatland (which someone mentioned above), but has the advantage of being more modern and not sexist. But very quickly you're learning about Klein bottles, connected sums, and all sorts of topology you typically don't see until you're well into your undergraduate (or grad!) program in math. All aimed at high school kids. Very cool stuff.
Oh, and the big punchline at the end: what is the shape of the universe? At least you'll get a good understanding of the possibilities...
Here's a taste for you from a page related to the book.
It tasted nothing like the candy bars I bought in the store, yet it was the exact same candy-bar machine the store-bought ones came from. It's the shipping and shelf time that ruins it.
I had a college friend who got a job (as an engineer) in an M&M's factory in Georgia. She said that they plan for the shipping and shelf time. Her take was that fresh M&M's tasted awful, but after a few weeks they tasted like, well, M&M's.
(You can use your * or find business to replace filename in the above.)
This is the sed-is-underrated department, after all.
Well, to be fair it's a relatively new feature in bash, so perhaps ubuntu is just the first place you've tried that makes bash completion the default. Here's a blog posting on changing completion to make it smarter, so perhaps you can follow some links and learn how to make the shell do what you want. That's sort of the point...
If they're using it to cut unprofitable sports, then why are they keeping sports like women's water polo? Are you going to tell me that that's profitable?
Of course not. I'm saying that they used Title IX as an excuse to cut sports that they wanted to cut. Yes, Title IX forced them to spend money on women's sports, but it gave them an out to cut men's sports. People would be pissed at administrators if they unilaterally cut wrestling. But if they cut wrestling and said it was because of the feds, then people are pissed at the feds! An easy win!
Men aren't as interested in majors like Women's Studies, Nursing, or Veterinary Science (or Law, as I'm now hearing) as women. So why aren't people yelling about this, and trying to "fix" it?
We're getting there with medicine, too.
The point is that Title IX was enacted at a time when women were discriminated against in higher education. It was not that women "weren't as interested" in majors like law, it's that they were being actively discouraged (or rejected) from doing so. Hence the law.
Title IX has made it so that unprofitable men's sports are all cut, and only the highly profitable/popular ones are kept, which is bad for athletics in general.
Read what you wrote here. Is Title IX really to blame for cutting the unprofitable sports and keeping the profitable ones?
Let me answer for you: No. Absolutely not.
Title IX is the excuse that administrations use to cut the unprofitable sports, but they weren't going to last anyway. They're (what's that word?) unprofitable. Colleges are, alas, businesses.
We'll think what you want. They kept the women's golf and the women's swimming. They certainly don't make any more money than the men's sports did.
Very little athletics makes any money. Big-time athletics brings in a bundle, but very little of college athletics breaks even. Your handle is KUHurdler. Did KU make any money from track and field? Did it break even?
So why spend the money on men's sports rather than women's sports? Because it costs less? Because there's less interest by fans and athletes? These are the traditional arguments, and my response is: how can you have interested athletes and fans if there aren't women's athletics programs?
And yes, I have seen the effects of title IX, and many other forms of quotas and reverse discrimination. Frankly, I don't understand why prejudicialness is the accepted solution to prejudicialness.
What would you do? Declare by fiat that, henceforth, everyone shall be judged on their merits? Title IX came into being in an era when women were actively discriminated against. No, you can't be a physics major. We need that lab spot for a man who won't just quit his job to raise kids. No, you can't play sports because you're a girl. You're too fragile, and besides nobody wants to watch women play basketball (or whatever).
And you can call it "prejudicialness" if you want, but essentially the effect on sports is this: if colleges pay for men's sports, then they must pay for women's sports in roughly the same proportion. Yes, some wrestlers are losing out. But softball players lost out for years.
Here's a question (that I'm honestly looking for an answer to): if Title IX was repealed (as far as sports are concerned, anyway), what would happen to college athletics? Would all those wrestling and golf programs come back? And how much of women's athletics would be maintained?
I just finished a stint at a fine midwestern university (Division III). My take: some women's sports might get cut, but not to reinstate any men's sports. And I would be surprised if much got cut at all...
They'd like to pretend it will be a positive influence and more opportunity for women. But tell that to the men's swimming team, the men's golf team, the men's track team, and the men's wrestling team... and good luck finding them, because those programs were all cut. After all, they had to "create" more opportunities for women.
Two points:
1. All those men's sports weren't cut to create programs for women, they were cut for money. Yes, colleges had to pony up for women's sports. But if you think that they were keeping wrestling, you're dreaming. You may hear people (and administrators) blame Title IX, but it's a cover.
2. Have you looked at the effect of Title IX? In the last 20-30 years women's sports have gone from marginal to mainstream and very athletic. On the broader topic, it's interesting to read all the comments in the media about how Title IX won't just apply to sports anymore. It wasn't written for sports, but for college education. The application spread to sports as a bastion of still-sanctioned sex discrimination.
Here's my suggestion: how about we just actually give them the same opportunities, and if they don't take them... fine. Remove the male/female checkboxes from the applications. There's no need to create restrictions/quotas.
Here's my suggestion. Go read about what life was like before Title IX. Ask your parents or grandparents. And don't talk sports -- talk about opportunities for women at publicly-funded colleges and universities. There was a need for action and it has helped to change the world (at least this corner of it).
How do you not get this? What's the problem with a private media watchdog group watching and listening to the media? There is no conflict with anyone's constitutional rights here -- this isn't a government censorship board, it's a private group watching TV and listening to the radio! You could do this from home!
You really should check out their web page. From the About Us section:
What's the problem? I urge you to check out their web page. Even if you disagree with them politically (and I'm guessing you do), it's a reasonable read. They're very even-handed. You might not be upset about the same things, but they give detailed context to each of their references and try to be fair. Don Imus had a platform to spout his bile. Why shouldn't he be called on it by some obscure web site?Oh, wait, I see what your problem is. It's this:
Oh. My. God. Let's not talk about what the Bush administration has done (NSA wiretapping, and who needs habeus corpus?). No, let's smear the Democrats that they might do something if they get back in power.This is, in the end, the only trouble I have with the metric system. It's designed for clarity and logic, not usability. Somehow 1 foot or 2 feet is "simpler" than 30 cm or 0.6 m. I'd start saying things like "half a meter". This was the whole point of talking about Canada's 355 ml cans of Coke: they're 12 ounce cans. This seems like the right size to me. The metric-based sizes I've seen are all too large (500mL, 1L, 2L) for a single serving. (Yes I know 500mL is only 16.9 ounces. I'm trying to cut back, okay?)
In the end, I think there are really two complaints:
- I'm used to one system. Why should I change?
- The designed metric system isn't built with people in mind.
A half pound is really easy to wrap your head around. It's around 225 grams (okay, 226.796g), but that's not really person-friendly, is it?I'm willing to accept that my aversion to A4 paper falls squarely into the first category, but I still don't like it.
I'm glad NASA is finally getting on board, but the transition to metric will take a while for me. I'm fine with km / Celsius / etc (heck! I lived in Canada for a few years), and I could even get used to height and weight in metric, but.
But.
A4 paper is just wrong.
I'm sure, if the good ol' USA goes metric, we'll end up using 21.59 by 27.94 paper (that's 8 and half by 11 using cm instead of in). It's just like Canada and their Coke cans of 355 ml. Why 355 ml? Check your US Coke can: it's 12 fluid ounces...