I would have if I'd learned Greek and Latin in school. Instead I learned Spanish, and can now converse almost passably with my Hispanic friends, who all speak English fluently.
Let the kids who have no talent for math and no inclination towards math based professions drop it once they have the basics.
The problem with that is you end up magnifying the intellectual disparity between the educated and the uneducated, which is never good. We should be pushing to bring everyone up, not pulling back to give everyone the bare minimum.
Of course, that's sort of the "Star Trek" future where no one is a janitor.
Well, what I mean to get at is that you should teach them the basic skills to create the formal proofs on their own, so they won't even need the book any more.
It's been two years since Calc 2, but when I had to do some tricky trigonometric integration for spherical spaces in my electromagnetics class, I was able to derive most of the trigonometric integrals on my own because I had that skill set. That proved important because my professor is insane and won't let us use integration tables or anything. Plus, it makes you a lot better at the analysis if you can do it on your own, which is what really matters (and is likely the reason my professor seems insane on this point).
Well, no, I wish I knew Latin so I could read classical texts in Latin (not just ancient works, but the centuries of science and history transcribed solely in Latin). It would be great not to be once-removed. Beyond that, yes, Latin is just as useless as Spanish or anything else. My experience with Japanese has given me a little more insight into linguistics, but it has still had little impact.
Man, my humanities courses must have been a total waste, since all I learned was how to figure out what things actually meant, rather than making up things for them to mean.
Some math schoolbook was once printed in which a lector without asking anyone replaced every second instance of "real numbers" with "actual numbers" shortly before print.
That is quite possibly the most awesome thing ever.
If you just want to define anything anyone could ever want as "porango," then "porango" will obviously be the only motivation. That doesn't mean "porango" is actually the same thing as power.
I think it's rather misleading to say something like that, but, hey, who am I to argue with Foucault?
If the purpose of your schools is to provide your people with vocational skills, you end up with people with vocations. If the purpose of your schools is to provide your people with intellectual skills, you end up with intellectuals.
I would much rather have learned Latin than Spanish.
You must be a terrible physicist. As an electrical engineer, I need literary analysis every time I read a technical paper, and I needed composition skills last time I submitted one for publication.
I don't know, we need a lot of that weird volume stuff for electromagnetics. Maybe your mathematics courses were tailored to cover all the basics students at your school needed for higher level courses in more rigorous disciplines. I know that's how they pick what to put in the curriculum at my school.
A knowledge of math does not simply improve your ability to solve math problems. It is not the direct application of mathematics on everyday life that is most beneficial, but the analytical and conceptual skill set gained by learning higher level math. The real benefit is that when you study "literature, history, politics and music," you can actually conceptualize the complex interconnections and processes at work in a truly quantifiable way.
I learned computer programming at a very young age, and today, as an electrical engineering student, I am at a great advantage over my peers because of my ability to conceptualize and understand processes. The core of that is my learned ability with mathematics, both algebraic and algorithmic. It also spills over into my humanities courses, where the method of formalizing concepts central to the field of mathematics vastly improves my ability to synthesize complex texts. Of course, that's partly because nothing is as hard to understand as undocumented code, and partly because I have the mathematical foundation to build and conceptualize systems.
If anything, we need to push mathematics younger and younger, and complement that with computer programming courses. I know my 2 year old son will be getting weekly lessons from me on these subjects when he grows up, without question.
If the rest of the country continues to decline on the international standard of education, I know that at least my children will not.
Well, I work with slightly different "government workers," and I can tell you that if enlisted sailors only wanted money or power, they would get out of the military in a heartbeat, because those who get out always end up with oodles more of both.
And he did say greed was the only emotion. He said the only thing that ever motivated anyone is "power," thus the only emotion you could feel would be greed, otherwise you'd be motivated by, say, love or hate or some such. The existence of such emotions would demonstrate motivations outside of "power."
That's only true if you aren't willing to admit that maybe people are sometimes motivated by things other than power. If you are, maybe you should consider getting a job you actually care about. You might find you could be a lot happier, if a little less wealthy and powerful. If you do care about your job, well, it seems you aren't motivated by power after all.
Now that we have millions of patents, companies patent first and look for prior art later. The patent office can't keep up with that, and, as often noted here on Slashdot, grant patents to things with numerous examples of prior art.
Sure, those who hold the prior art can take the company to court, but most people lack the wealth to last very long in court against a major corporation. Even if they could afford a trial, they might not win if the judge for some reason doesn't see their prior art as good enough.
Seems this system leaves a lot of room for the wealthy to abuse the poor. Heck, if I was a giant company, I'd spend all day reading hack-a-day for ideas to steal.
Lastly, it's not obvious that that gene is there and does whatever. That's why they had to spend millions to figure it out, devising a new way to impact whatever that gene impacts. If it was obvious, it wouldn't cost millions of dollars to figure out.
Gosh, don't let the psychologists hear this, they'll all be out of jobs!
Oh, wait, maybe human behavior is more complex than that... That would explain why anyone would be interested in investing time in a search engine/web browser/OS not corrupted by a. money and b. power.
That's unfair to the inventor. The vast majority of new technologies often seem totally obvious in retrospect, but were unheard of before hand. You can't draw the line there, that definition is not explicit enough.
IT's impossible to create something new. All you can do is tie together preexisting systems. The only argument can be whether tying them together makes it something new, which I don't agree with. It's just a discovery that some configuration of things performs a given function.
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I would have if I'd learned Greek and Latin in school. Instead I learned Spanish, and can now converse almost passably with my Hispanic friends, who all speak English fluently.
Let the kids who have no talent for math and no inclination towards math based professions drop it once they have the basics.
The problem with that is you end up magnifying the intellectual disparity between the educated and the uneducated, which is never good. We should be pushing to bring everyone up, not pulling back to give everyone the bare minimum.
Of course, that's sort of the "Star Trek" future where no one is a janitor.
Well, what I mean to get at is that you should teach them the basic skills to create the formal proofs on their own, so they won't even need the book any more.
It's been two years since Calc 2, but when I had to do some tricky trigonometric integration for spherical spaces in my electromagnetics class, I was able to derive most of the trigonometric integrals on my own because I had that skill set. That proved important because my professor is insane and won't let us use integration tables or anything. Plus, it makes you a lot better at the analysis if you can do it on your own, which is what really matters (and is likely the reason my professor seems insane on this point).
Well, no, I wish I knew Latin so I could read classical texts in Latin (not just ancient works, but the centuries of science and history transcribed solely in Latin). It would be great not to be once-removed. Beyond that, yes, Latin is just as useless as Spanish or anything else. My experience with Japanese has given me a little more insight into linguistics, but it has still had little impact.
Man, my humanities courses must have been a total waste, since all I learned was how to figure out what things actually meant, rather than making up things for them to mean.
German is less useful than Latin. German folk can learn English, but Plato never will.
Some math schoolbook was once printed in which a lector without asking anyone replaced every second instance of "real numbers" with "actual numbers" shortly before print.
That is quite possibly the most awesome thing ever.
If you just want to define anything anyone could ever want as "porango," then "porango" will obviously be the only motivation. That doesn't mean "porango" is actually the same thing as power.
I think it's rather misleading to say something like that, but, hey, who am I to argue with Foucault?
If the purpose of your schools is to provide your people with vocational skills, you end up with people with vocations. If the purpose of your schools is to provide your people with intellectual skills, you end up with intellectuals.
I would much rather have learned Latin than Spanish.
Trim calculus and formal proofs down to the fundamental theory.
Yes, get rid of the actual derivations, because memorizing without understanding is obviously better than actually learning anything.
You must be a terrible physicist. As an electrical engineer, I need literary analysis every time I read a technical paper, and I needed composition skills last time I submitted one for publication.
I don't know, we need a lot of that weird volume stuff for electromagnetics. Maybe your mathematics courses were tailored to cover all the basics students at your school needed for higher level courses in more rigorous disciplines. I know that's how they pick what to put in the curriculum at my school.
A knowledge of math does not simply improve your ability to solve math problems. It is not the direct application of mathematics on everyday life that is most beneficial, but the analytical and conceptual skill set gained by learning higher level math. The real benefit is that when you study "literature, history, politics and music," you can actually conceptualize the complex interconnections and processes at work in a truly quantifiable way.
I learned computer programming at a very young age, and today, as an electrical engineering student, I am at a great advantage over my peers because of my ability to conceptualize and understand processes. The core of that is my learned ability with mathematics, both algebraic and algorithmic. It also spills over into my humanities courses, where the method of formalizing concepts central to the field of mathematics vastly improves my ability to synthesize complex texts. Of course, that's partly because nothing is as hard to understand as undocumented code, and partly because I have the mathematical foundation to build and conceptualize systems.
If anything, we need to push mathematics younger and younger, and complement that with computer programming courses. I know my 2 year old son will be getting weekly lessons from me on these subjects when he grows up, without question.
If the rest of the country continues to decline on the international standard of education, I know that at least my children will not.
Well, I work with slightly different "government workers," and I can tell you that if enlisted sailors only wanted money or power, they would get out of the military in a heartbeat, because those who get out always end up with oodles more of both.
And he did say greed was the only emotion. He said the only thing that ever motivated anyone is "power," thus the only emotion you could feel would be greed, otherwise you'd be motivated by, say, love or hate or some such. The existence of such emotions would demonstrate motivations outside of "power."
That's only true if you aren't willing to admit that maybe people are sometimes motivated by things other than power. If you are, maybe you should consider getting a job you actually care about. You might find you could be a lot happier, if a little less wealthy and powerful. If you do care about your job, well, it seems you aren't motivated by power after all.
I think that both Newton and Einstein would fall in the category of people who would never want a patent.
So why have patents at all?
Now that we have millions of patents, companies patent first and look for prior art later. The patent office can't keep up with that, and, as often noted here on Slashdot, grant patents to things with numerous examples of prior art.
Sure, those who hold the prior art can take the company to court, but most people lack the wealth to last very long in court against a major corporation. Even if they could afford a trial, they might not win if the judge for some reason doesn't see their prior art as good enough.
Seems this system leaves a lot of room for the wealthy to abuse the poor. Heck, if I was a giant company, I'd spend all day reading hack-a-day for ideas to steal.
Lastly, it's not obvious that that gene is there and does whatever. That's why they had to spend millions to figure it out, devising a new way to impact whatever that gene impacts. If it was obvious, it wouldn't cost millions of dollars to figure out.
If you fall in the camp that progress is a function of the times and not of individuals, than your system would grant no patents to anyone.
Your rule seems like a good one. It's too bad we don't follow it.
I'm just saying that it seems rather narrow-minded to assume that the only emotion anyone anywhere will ever feel is greed.
Thank god that was a typo! I was afraid you were living in my attic!
So sayeth Maslow.
Did that configuration exist before you tied the component systems together?
How exactly do you propose we test this?
Exactly. There are 2 motivators for people :
a. money
b. power
Gosh, don't let the psychologists hear this, they'll all be out of jobs!
Oh, wait, maybe human behavior is more complex than that... That would explain why anyone would be interested in investing time in a search engine/web browser/OS not corrupted by a. money and b. power.
That's unfair to the inventor. The vast majority of new technologies often seem totally obvious in retrospect, but were unheard of before hand. You can't draw the line there, that definition is not explicit enough.
IT's impossible to create something new. All you can do is tie together preexisting systems. The only argument can be whether tying them together makes it something new, which I don't agree with. It's just a discovery that some configuration of things performs a given function.