The values that were preached by Sesame Street and similar programs were conceived with an agenda, the same way that the set of values that any television program displays are a reflection of the will of its creators. As television, even public television, exists primarily as a vehicle for advertising and instilling beliefs in its viewers that are compatible with the goals of its sponsors, even the seemingly universally "good" concepts of sharing and respect preached by Sesame Street and other children's programming become suspect.
Was Sesame Street, or any other programming that preaches universal tolerance and respect truly conceived with the idea that these were concepts that should universally be applied by all people? Or were they conceived with the notion that "These are excellent concepts that that certain groups should be expected to abide by, but not others, depending upon what is advantageous to ourselves and our sponsors"? If the answer is the latter (and as you may have guessed, I feel that it is) then even Sesame Street is no longer a benign good, it is just another weapon in the continual zero-sum game that humanity plays.
The redistribution of mass after the 2004 Indian Ocean undersea earthquake was enough to measurably affect the rate of the Earth's rotation; the Three Gorges Dam project will also have a minute effect due to the concentration of water in the reservoir that's formed.
An interesting aside: the Chernobyl accident occurred while the operators were running a test to see if, during an external power failure, the flywheel action of the steam turbines as they spun down could keep the reactor coolant pumps operating for a minute or two until backup diesel generators came online. It's academic now, but the tests showed that they couldn't.
I've read the link in your sig, and if for some reason you're concerned that there will be a difference in the Middle East policy of the Obama administration, I assure you there won't be.
The great thing about being a technology journalist is that since journalists don't know anything about technology, and techies don't know anything about journalism, one doesn't have to have any skill in either to get the job!
We need to enhance our understanding of every living species (or hive mind colony) on our own planet if we are to be anything more than space traveling, xenophobic rubes when we leave our own planet.
After observing both human and octopus behavior, I believe there's simple common ground we could find with another long distance space-traveling species.
Some of the failings of the Shuttle's design can be placed squarely upon the DOD requirements for the vehicle that hamstrung the engineers. The original plan for the Shuttle was for it to have much smaller wings than the current design - indeed one of the Shuttle's engineers who spoke at an MIT lecture on aeronautical engineering stated that originally the Shuttle was either going to be a straight lifting body (like the X-23), or have a set of straight, narrow auxiliary wings.
However, one of the Defense Department's requirements was that the orbiter have a 1000 mile crossrange, i.e. that in a time of crisis the Shuttle could lift off from Vandenberg AFB, dump a DOD payload (read: spy satellite or orbital bombardment system) into orbit, and return and land at Vandenberg, without waiting for more than one orbit for the Earth to rotate into a more favorable position (or long enough for an enemy to calculate the payload's orbit). Without military support the Shuttle project would go nowhere, so the large delta wings that proved so vulnerable to foam strikes were there to stay.
The MIT lectures concerning this design compromise and many others are available on iTunes U. Another interesting fact is that apparently the lack of sophisticated CAD programs at the time of the Shuttle's design caused the engineers to settle on a less-than-optimal routing scheme for the main engine plumbing: if there were computers that could have calculated a better routing topology the engine system could have been designed as a modular unit that pulled in and out of the orbiter like a giant PCI card, shaving weeks off the turnaround time.
When Burt Rutan's company puts a single kilogram into Earth orbit, I think at that point one might consider the possibility of calling Virgin Galactic the future of space flight. As it stands now Rutan's crafts, as impressive as they are, are essentially high-flying aircraft and are covering territory NASA explored in about 1959.
I believe there may be some fuel storage tanks in the wings of the shuttle, but obviously not for storing SSME fuel as the grandparent poster believed. The fuel storage tanks onboard the orbiter are hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide for the maneuvering thrusters; the hydrazine is also used to power the shuttle's APUs. Among other functions the APUs provide power for the hydraulics that actuate the orbiter's flight controls during descent. You can often see the exhaust from the APU's after a Shuttle landing; the Shuttle sits on the runway and "chuffs" for quite a while before being approached by ground personnel. A great cutaway view of the Orbiter is here: http://www.columbiassacrifice.com/images/tech_overview/hi_res_images/blueprint.htm
Unfortunately, one would have to be pretty darn close to ground zero to get that kind of instant death. The human body can be remarkably resilient to blast overpressure, and only a very small area would be subject to enough radiant flux to actually vaporize a person. A more likely scenario for anyone inside the radius of 5-10 psi overpressure but farther out than a mile or two from ground zero would be death from blood loss due to flying debris, or serious burns, or being trapped and asphyxiated by fires starting in collapsed structures. None of these people would survive for any extended period of time, but their deaths would certainly not be instant or painless.
I wasn't trying to make fun of you - I was making up kind of a spoof "thought process" of the folks you mention in the first sentence of your post. Your comment was sort of a vehicle for mine, not a personal attack; I'm sorry if it came off that way.
I hope to someday be able to purchase an internationally-marketed mass produced automobile that speaks to my own sense of individuality. I will perhaps get a GMC Acadia, but with a towhook package, or a Volkswagen Golf with a turbocharged engine instead of normally-aspirated and an iPod dock. I will then most likely get a tribal tattoo. I'm young, tech-savy,cyber-edgy and stickin' it to society's traditional values!
The public school system I went to consisted of a huge number of students who had been groomed for success from an early age. They excelled in math, science, and the humanities - 98% of the graduating class went on to college, many to Ivy League universities, some to MIT, some to Stanford.
A great number of them were also merciless sadists who took great delight in tormenting me and anyone else who was not a member of this huge clique. When they weren't passing tests in computer science with flying colors, they were slamming my face into a locker, or having their inner-city drug contacts come out to the 'burbs to break a kid's ribs for not paying up on time. Parents both actively engaged in the harassment and violence and shielded their children from any consequences through their deep connections and participation with the local school system. As I mentioned above, most of the participants went on to highly-regarded schools; they are now physicians, lawyers, professors, scientists, and engineers.
It has nothing to do with "jock" or "nerd". It finally just comes down to ingroup outgroup politics - there is always an external threat that must be guarded against and punished, or the advantages of the ingroup become meaningless.
they tend to look for different qualities: ability to intelligently carry on a conversation not related to D&D, emotional support, and well, being interesting.
Don't confuse traits girls may look for in a friend with traits they look for in someone they actually want to have sex with.
The difficulty is that human beings are fantastic at self-deception, and often the qualities that a person tells you they're looking for in a mate are not really the qualities they're looking for, but are whatever allows them to think of themselves in a positive light and avoid too much cognitive dissonance. In practice, if the reality of their behavior doesn't fit with their image of themselves, it can always be rationalized later.
In light of the constant state of self-deception that people live in (it's a fantastic evolutionarily strategy), taking advice
from a woman on what she wants in someone to actually have sex with is like asking the Devil for advice on avoiding sin - it will always lead you wrong. If you want to learn, pay attention to the behavior, not the words.
This may have been more of a problem on the European fronts than the Pacific. The key to getting soldiers to kill the enemy is to dehumanize the enemy, and it's harder to dehumanize a European soldier that looks just like an American than an enemy from an inscrutable Asian society. The kinds of atrocities that took place soon after the opening of the Pacific theater quickly showed both sides that giving any quarter or feeling remorse for the enemy was valueless.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki debate, vis a vis American targeting of civilians in warfare is hardly something that "can't be said"; it is something that is and will be debated and discussed ad nauseum in the media and universitiy courses and books and online forums forever, as I suppose it should be. The problem is that I feel having the debate is fine so long as the debate is confined to discussing how or if such actions can be reconciled with the American ideal of ethics that is espoused by its citizens and government. Most often however the discussion devolves into diatribe consisting of essentially "LOOK what THEY have DONE" - neglecting of course that essentially every side in every conflict through history has purposefully targeted civilians. If one accepts that obvious reality but doesn't confine the debate on America's actions within some kind of ideological framework that has not been lived up to, then you're just trying to say that America's immorality in warfare is some how a priori the worst kind of immorality, and there's really nothing left to debate about.
I believe what they mean is that the memristor is "fundamental" in that it provides a symmetrical link between electric charge and magnetic flux. A resistor is the link between current and voltage, a capacitor - voltage and charge, an inductor - current and magnetic flux, and a memristor - magnetic flux and charge. I think. I'm sure someone with a better grounding in electromagnetic physics can clarify this a bit.
Build your porn studio into an appropriate airplane and have it fly parabolic trajectories all day for years before you get to the cost of a day in actual orbit.
Given the maximum 90 seconds or so of weightlessness you get in the Vomit Comet, though, you'd better have male performers who can get a move on, or some talented video editors. Or build a dedicated lesbian porn studio inside a parabolic- trajectory-flying aircraft. I'm calling venture capital firms right now.
This reminds me of a pretty egregious faux-pas in the character customization menus in the recent Fallout game. Basically, amid the extensive options available for tweaking your character, there was initially (right after gender) a "race" option. The options were something like:
1) Caucasian
2) Asian
3) African American
Coming from outside the US, this ranks as one of my top ten "WTF?" moments in video gaming. I knew that Americans were fairly insular, but to define an entire racial group as "XXXican American" struck me a particularly flagrant example of classic American ignorance. To wit; There are black people who have never been to America, whos ancestors have never been to America, and who probably never will go to America so long as they live. Many may not even know where America is. Similarly for "Asian Americans".
The game takes place in the former United States. If you choose your character in the game to be of African descent, and lived in America in a vault for his whole life, then he is an African American. He wasn't just flown in from Kenya. I'd argue that "Caucasian" is the most nonsensical of those options and is mainly a U.S. term now, but of course you're not complaining about that one.
This kind of Americanization of even very basic things is quite frightening sometimes. It's scary to think just how much of the culture, laws, practices and viewpoints in my own country have their origins in a country with a very different mindset and world view.
I was completely outraged to discover that my speedometer is marked in kilometers as well as miles. The U.S. bill of rights was based on the Magna Carta! The manual to my computer power supply was poorly translated! Can you believe it.
It's fantastic how the slightest, somehow-taken-to-be-somehow-biased-against-somebody statement or gesture on the part of a US citizen, organization, or company is a fine opportunity to gather the torches and pitchforks and rail against American ignorance, but when done by basically anyone else it's to be excused as being a cultural thing and of no consequence. I doubt the French or Japanese spend a lot of time sitting around debating if something is going to somehow offend Americans. This "Middle America" you speak of has probably gotten tired of trying to figure out what offends the delicate sensibilities of the rest of the world, which changes approximately every five minutes, and realizes that no matter what they do they're going to be called ignorant Americans forever.
The politics of Middle America seems to end up in my living room whether I like it or not.
It's probably not a good idea to purchase games that are set in America produced by an American company, then. Were you so outraged that you refused to play it?
Slashdot Mirror
That, or BoingBoing.
The values that were preached by Sesame Street and similar programs were conceived with an agenda, the same way that the set of values that any television program displays are a reflection of the will of its creators. As television, even public television, exists primarily as a vehicle for advertising and instilling beliefs in its viewers that are compatible with the goals of its sponsors, even the seemingly universally "good" concepts of sharing and respect preached by Sesame Street and other children's programming become suspect.
Was Sesame Street, or any other programming that preaches universal tolerance and respect truly conceived with the idea that these were concepts that should universally be applied by all people? Or were they conceived with the notion that "These are excellent concepts that that certain groups should be expected to abide by, but not others, depending upon what is advantageous to ourselves and our sponsors"? If the answer is the latter (and as you may have guessed, I feel that it is) then even Sesame Street is no longer a benign good, it is just another weapon in the continual zero-sum game that humanity plays.
The redistribution of mass after the 2004 Indian Ocean undersea earthquake was enough to measurably affect the rate of the Earth's rotation; the Three Gorges Dam project will also have a minute effect due to the concentration of water in the reservoir that's formed.
An interesting aside: the Chernobyl accident occurred while the operators were running a test to see if, during an external power failure, the flywheel action of the steam turbines as they spun down could keep the reactor coolant pumps operating for a minute or two until backup diesel generators came online. It's academic now, but the tests showed that they couldn't.
I've read the link in your sig, and if for some reason you're concerned that there will be a difference in the Middle East policy of the Obama administration, I assure you there won't be.
The great thing about being a technology journalist is that since journalists don't know anything about technology, and techies don't know anything about journalism, one doesn't have to have any skill in either to get the job!
We need to enhance our understanding of every living species (or hive mind colony) on our own planet if we are to be anything more than space traveling, xenophobic rubes when we leave our own planet.
After observing both human and octopus behavior, I believe there's simple common ground we could find with another long distance space-traveling species.
We're both going to be really hungry.
Unfortunately I had to stop using Ubuntu because the only thing I could get my 2 HP inkjets to do under the OS was print blank pages extremely slowly.
Some of the failings of the Shuttle's design can be placed squarely upon the DOD requirements for the vehicle that hamstrung the engineers. The original plan for the Shuttle was for it to have much smaller wings than the current design - indeed one of the Shuttle's engineers who spoke at an MIT lecture on aeronautical engineering stated that originally the Shuttle was either going to be a straight lifting body (like the X-23), or have a set of straight, narrow auxiliary wings.
However, one of the Defense Department's requirements was that the orbiter have a 1000 mile crossrange, i.e. that in a time of crisis the Shuttle could lift off from Vandenberg AFB, dump a DOD payload (read: spy satellite or orbital bombardment system) into orbit, and return and land at Vandenberg, without waiting for more than one orbit for the Earth to rotate into a more favorable position (or long enough for an enemy to calculate the payload's orbit). Without military support the Shuttle project would go nowhere, so the large delta wings that proved so vulnerable to foam strikes were there to stay.
The MIT lectures concerning this design compromise and many others are available on iTunes U. Another interesting fact is that apparently the lack of sophisticated CAD programs at the time of the Shuttle's design caused the engineers to settle on a less-than-optimal routing scheme for the main engine plumbing: if there were computers that could have calculated a better routing topology the engine system could have been designed as a modular unit that pulled in and out of the orbiter like a giant PCI card, shaving weeks off the turnaround time.
When Burt Rutan's company puts a single kilogram into Earth orbit, I think at that point one might consider the possibility of calling Virgin Galactic the future of space flight. As it stands now Rutan's crafts, as impressive as they are, are essentially high-flying aircraft and are covering territory NASA explored in about 1959.
Endeavour wasn't delivered until 1991 - it's still a spry teenager!
I believe there may be some fuel storage tanks in the wings of the shuttle, but obviously not for storing SSME fuel as the grandparent poster believed. The fuel storage tanks onboard the orbiter are hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide for the maneuvering thrusters; the hydrazine is also used to power the shuttle's APUs. Among other functions the APUs provide power for the hydraulics that actuate the orbiter's flight controls during descent. You can often see the exhaust from the APU's after a Shuttle landing; the Shuttle sits on the runway and "chuffs" for quite a while before being approached by ground personnel. A great cutaway view of the Orbiter is here: http://www.columbiassacrifice.com/images/tech_overview/hi_res_images/blueprint.htm
Unfortunately, one would have to be pretty darn close to ground zero to get that kind of instant death. The human body can be remarkably resilient to blast overpressure, and only a very small area would be subject to enough radiant flux to actually vaporize a person. A more likely scenario for anyone inside the radius of 5-10 psi overpressure but farther out than a mile or two from ground zero would be death from blood loss due to flying debris, or serious burns, or being trapped and asphyxiated by fires starting in collapsed structures. None of these people would survive for any extended period of time, but their deaths would certainly not be instant or painless.
Markov chain text generator. http://www.doctornerve.org/nerve/pages/interact/mrkvform.shtml
I suppose "German Invasion of Poland" always sounds better than "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Joint German-Soviet Invasion of Poland in 1939."
I wasn't trying to make fun of you - I was making up kind of a spoof "thought process" of the folks you mention in the first sentence of your post. Your comment was sort of a vehicle for mine, not a personal attack; I'm sorry if it came off that way.
I hope to someday be able to purchase an internationally-marketed mass produced automobile that speaks to my own sense of individuality. I will perhaps get a GMC Acadia, but with a towhook package, or a Volkswagen Golf with a turbocharged engine instead of normally-aspirated and an iPod dock. I will then most likely get a tribal tattoo. I'm young, tech-savy,cyber-edgy and stickin' it to society's traditional values!
I'd like to use this as a bedtime story for people going to have an MRI the next day.
God's design team tried to tell him the same thing after he insisted on creating man, and that worked out OK, didn't it?
The public school system I went to consisted of a huge number of students who had been groomed for success from an early age. They excelled in math, science, and the humanities - 98% of the graduating class went on to college, many to Ivy League universities, some to MIT, some to Stanford.
A great number of them were also merciless sadists who took great delight in tormenting me and anyone else who was not a member of this huge clique. When they weren't passing tests in computer science with flying colors, they were slamming my face into a locker, or having their inner-city drug contacts come out to the 'burbs to break a kid's ribs for not paying up on time. Parents both actively engaged in the harassment and violence and shielded their children from any consequences through their deep connections and participation with the local school system. As I mentioned above, most of the participants went on to highly-regarded schools; they are now physicians, lawyers, professors, scientists, and engineers.
It has nothing to do with "jock" or "nerd". It finally just comes down to ingroup outgroup politics - there is always an external threat that must be guarded against and punished, or the advantages of the ingroup become meaningless.
they tend to look for different qualities: ability to intelligently carry on a conversation not related to D&D, emotional support, and well, being interesting.
Don't confuse traits girls may look for in a friend with traits they look for in someone they actually want to have sex with.
The difficulty is that human beings are fantastic at self-deception, and often the qualities that a person tells you they're looking for in a mate are not really the qualities they're looking for, but are whatever allows them to think of themselves in a positive light and avoid too much cognitive dissonance. In practice, if the reality of their behavior doesn't fit with their image of themselves, it can always be rationalized later.
In light of the constant state of self-deception that people live in (it's a fantastic evolutionarily strategy), taking advice from a woman on what she wants in someone to actually have sex with is like asking the Devil for advice on avoiding sin - it will always lead you wrong. If you want to learn, pay attention to the behavior, not the words.
This may have been more of a problem on the European fronts than the Pacific. The key to getting soldiers to kill the enemy is to dehumanize the enemy, and it's harder to dehumanize a European soldier that looks just like an American than an enemy from an inscrutable Asian society. The kinds of atrocities that took place soon after the opening of the Pacific theater quickly showed both sides that giving any quarter or feeling remorse for the enemy was valueless.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki debate, vis a vis American targeting of civilians in warfare is hardly something that "can't be said"; it is something that is and will be debated and discussed ad nauseum in the media and universitiy courses and books and online forums forever, as I suppose it should be. The problem is that I feel having the debate is fine so long as the debate is confined to discussing how or if such actions can be reconciled with the American ideal of ethics that is espoused by its citizens and government. Most often however the discussion devolves into diatribe consisting of essentially "LOOK what THEY have DONE" - neglecting of course that essentially every side in every conflict through history has purposefully targeted civilians. If one accepts that obvious reality but doesn't confine the debate on America's actions within some kind of ideological framework that has not been lived up to, then you're just trying to say that America's immorality in warfare is some how a priori the worst kind of immorality, and there's really nothing left to debate about.
I believe what they mean is that the memristor is "fundamental" in that it provides a symmetrical link between electric charge and magnetic flux. A resistor is the link between current and voltage, a capacitor - voltage and charge, an inductor - current and magnetic flux, and a memristor - magnetic flux and charge. I think. I'm sure someone with a better grounding in electromagnetic physics can clarify this a bit.
Build your porn studio into an appropriate airplane and have it fly parabolic trajectories all day for years before you get to the cost of a day in actual orbit.
Given the maximum 90 seconds or so of weightlessness you get in the Vomit Comet, though, you'd better have male performers who can get a move on, or some talented video editors. Or build a dedicated lesbian porn studio inside a parabolic- trajectory-flying aircraft. I'm calling venture capital firms right now.
This reminds me of a pretty egregious faux-pas in the character customization menus in the recent Fallout game. Basically, amid the extensive options available for tweaking your character, there was initially (right after gender) a "race" option. The options were something like:
1) Caucasian 2) Asian 3) African American
Coming from outside the US, this ranks as one of my top ten "WTF?" moments in video gaming. I knew that Americans were fairly insular, but to define an entire racial group as "XXXican American" struck me a particularly flagrant example of classic American ignorance. To wit; There are black people who have never been to America, whos ancestors have never been to America, and who probably never will go to America so long as they live. Many may not even know where America is. Similarly for "Asian Americans".
The game takes place in the former United States. If you choose your character in the game to be of African descent, and lived in America in a vault for his whole life, then he is an African American. He wasn't just flown in from Kenya. I'd argue that "Caucasian" is the most nonsensical of those options and is mainly a U.S. term now, but of course you're not complaining about that one.
This kind of Americanization of even very basic things is quite frightening sometimes. It's scary to think just how much of the culture, laws, practices and viewpoints in my own country have their origins in a country with a very different mindset and world view.
I was completely outraged to discover that my speedometer is marked in kilometers as well as miles. The U.S. bill of rights was based on the Magna Carta! The manual to my computer power supply was poorly translated! Can you believe it.
It's fantastic how the slightest, somehow-taken-to-be-somehow-biased-against-somebody statement or gesture on the part of a US citizen, organization, or company is a fine opportunity to gather the torches and pitchforks and rail against American ignorance, but when done by basically anyone else it's to be excused as being a cultural thing and of no consequence. I doubt the French or Japanese spend a lot of time sitting around debating if something is going to somehow offend Americans. This "Middle America" you speak of has probably gotten tired of trying to figure out what offends the delicate sensibilities of the rest of the world, which changes approximately every five minutes, and realizes that no matter what they do they're going to be called ignorant Americans forever.
The politics of Middle America seems to end up in my living room whether I like it or not.
It's probably not a good idea to purchase games that are set in America produced by an American company, then. Were you so outraged that you refused to play it?