And that's why confiscation will never work. I don't think anyone really even KNOWS how many guns exist in American hands... Obviously hundreds of millions of guns. Even if half the people turned theirs in, rounding up the other half would probably take a decade.
And, unfortunately for people who want to do this, that percentage of people who don't comply? They're going to resist. I'm typically always armed, and I'll certainly kill your sons and daughters who come to take my guns. Living in a free country with freedoms that include the 2nd means more to me than my life, so I'll very gladly lay it down along with as many jack-booted thugs as possible before I do. If that makes me a home-grown terrorist, so be it.
It is hard to believe there aren't more people including at least one firearm on this list of necessities. I live and work in the Memphis area, and while I might not be the best prepared person in the event of an emergency even I have a selection of handguns and rifles that would be at the TOP of any list of emergency supplies. You can't get more basic than a simple tool that will allow you to feed your family as well as defend whatever emergency supplies you have gathered.
Is this crowd really so anti-gun that such a basic, life-saving tool would be scratched off the list completely?
You may be trying to cast your net a little wide looking for a single (or even a few) books, articles, and movies that illustrate technology and its impact on our lives, privacy, culture, etc. You might be better off giving them a laundry list of books (I would stick to books for a high school level course) and giving them the opportunity to answer that extremely broad question in the form of a 5 page paper, or something along those lines. Almost none of them are under 200 pages... You're well within "short story / novella" lengths there, and you REALLY need to rethink that, even if it means turning this into an extra credit assignment. Is it possible that you're vastly underestimating the amount of reading time your teenage students have?
You've got a lot of material to potentially choose from, so why not let the students make their own choices? Besides, it makes reading 30 "original" responses that much more interesting when they're not all saying the exact same thing.
Some of my choices would include:
Gibson's Neuromancer
Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties (actually the whole trilogy would be okay here)
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age
Neal Stephenson's Anathem (for the really brave students...)
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and probably Ender's Shadow too
Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch
Tad William's Otherland series, although this is probably too bulky to be feasible
Daniel Keys Moran's Long Run and The Last Dancer
Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein's Starship Troopers
Heinlein's Door into Summer
If you open up your page limit the options are almost endless. If you don't, you'll never find a single work under 200 pages that illustrates the things you want to illustrate. Especially not in fiction.
Here we just sell small rectangular objects. They're called books. They require a little effort on your part, and make no bee-bee-bee-bee-beeps. On your way...
-The Neverending Story
It's obvious that there is nothing we can do to bring a peaceful end to the TSA. Voting didn't work. A widespread campaign of ridicule didn't work. Refusing to fly didn't work, and simply leads to the government propping up at-risk airlines. It is time to try something a little different:
Publicly document the names of people employed by the TSA. Every single one of them, from their administration (John Pistole) all the way down to the nameless, faceless front-line gropers. It won't take long for a document like that to spread in the wild.
That's step one. It becomes unnecessary once the following step starts to gather momentum because these people wear uniforms, drive to work everyday, and are self-identified. They don't wear masks (yet).
Step 2: Make their lives as TSA agents unbearable. Everything from denying them loans and refusing to do business with them personally to stealing their cars and vandalizing their property. Hurt them, hurt their families, hurt them financially. Humiliate them and make them legitimately afraid for their lives and those of their wives, husbands, and children. Socially ostracize them completely or make them targets, whichever your morals and conscience dictates, but start such a campaign of fear that the TSA will never see another willing job applicant.
Make them ashamed and afraid of doing their job, because they should be.
"And it came into Hooch's mind that when both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth." -Orson Scott Card, Red Prophet
There is one prepatory step that will apparently never occur to them: admit they have done wrong, identify the people they have wronged, make it right by giving them full compensation, and document that they have done so.
That's a sucker's bet. These people are PROFESSIONALS. They'll go with the tried-and-true method and round up some scapegoats, of course.
You really are a dense, humorless, asshole, aren't you? I think it's safe to say that most people think life is sacred and important. The fact that lives were in peril wasn't the funny part... the funny part was situational. For instance, if you were severely beaten by a gang of feral comedians, that would (at first blush) be funny. Yes, we are all terribly sad that you had 4 ribs broken and your jaw wired shut--that's not the funny part. It's a fucking riot that a gang of comedians was responsible for randomly beating the shit out of a humorless stick in the mud, though. It would be less funny if you were beaten by accountants.
High pressure water has been used to disperse crowds and break up riots for longer than I've been alive. It's very effective and relatively safe, but here in America we've been reluctant to use it because of it's ties to the race riots of the 1960s. So we shun a cheap, effective, and easy to deploy system of crowd control because nobody wants to be seen as a ruthless dictator as they clamp down on the masses, and yet we pursue other less-well-tested methods of doing the exact same thing.
In all seriousness, I think the really far out there geeks (not your average, run of the mill slashdotter, but maybe close!) would make EXCELLENT space travelers. The only real downside is that after years of increasingly disturbing porn, a COMPLETE lack of social interaction (and this is coming from someone who once thought "dressing up" was putting on pants so the drive-through people won't freak out), and the subsequent lack of feedback about their behavior and thoughts, they'll leave a very rough impression on the first person they run into afterward. Alien or cosmonaut.
"Greetings people of earth! We have met with your represenative and found him wholly agreeable with our culture! Where's the women at, bitches?"
Just as an aside:
Condoms don't necessarily prevent exposure to HPV. They reduce the chances, but obviously not all that much (as you said, HPV is a raging epidemic, with something like 90% of sexually active women getting some strain or other eventually). It can be transferred by contact with a lot of surface area that condoms don't cover at all (like the scrotum), and as such doesn't even require actual intercourse to transmit from person to person.
Weapons and training are "VERY expensive?" How about the cost of stolen cargo, is that cheap? The ransom paid for kidnapped crewmembers, how cheap is that?
This whole "anti-gun" argument seems to revolve around the fact that it's hard to dock a merchant ship in international ports if it's armed. It's a bullshit argument. Either change the laws (and any nation that doesn't want to cooperate can find out how nice not having any commerce is), or.... Put the anti-pirate people on a smaller craft that does not enter sovereign waters. Easy solution. Contractors can be hired to escort your ships through danger zones armed to the fucking teeth. Problem solved.
I think I sort of see where you're going, but you're not quite there. For most instruments, the score is only valid when compared to others of the same age / grade. Being a 40 year old with an IQ of 120 is very different than being a 6 year old with an IQ of 120, since they're being compared against two different cohorts.
Also noteworthy is that fluid intelligence (if you're into CHC theory) declines steadily as you move out of your 20s, while crystallized intelligence, or things like your general knowledge base, continues to increase as you experience more of the world. So yeah, on average a 45 year old probably can't solve as many algebra problems in 2 minutes as the average 18 year old, or be able to find Waldo in the images nearly as quickly. But the average 45 year old is going to know much more about the world and will do much better on those knowledge heavy parts of the instrument.
That is a common argument... but just because a test is not "culture free" doesn't mean it's worthless. If we measure the IQ of the son of an immigrant Kalahari bushman and it's, say, 79, that is an important measure despite being "ethnocentric" (and quite frankly not everything that is specific to one culture is bad). It is still useful information when you want to know things like how well the boy will do in an American school system.
Does it mean he's stupid? Not at all... A skill set valued in the desert (let's say, fast reaction time and a concrete approach to problem solving) is simply undervalued in the school system here. Should we redefine the tests to suit his cultural background, where in all likelihood he will score higher, just to assuage whatever bad feelings we have? I think that would be pointless--whereas knowing that the child is NOT using those skills that we value in our society, those skills that tend to go along with good grades and a good job, is a useful thing indeed.
So yeah, if the ultimate goal of IQ tests is to put value judgments on people you're absolutely right. It is not fair to label the kid. But if the goal is to devise teaching interventions to help him succeed in our schools and in our culture it is kind of nice to be able to see where he is deviating from the norm.
It's even more complicated than what you've described. Most modern intelligence tests (WJ-III Cog, WAIS, SB) incorporate WIS (as you've described it, Gc / knowledge) as a component of intelligence. And in actuality that kind of general knowledge has stronger links to general intelligence than just about any other measure on those tests. What it boils down to is that how much you know about the world is a pretty good indicator of intelligence, and by extension, is a pretty good indicator of your _ability_ to thrive.
So yes, IQ is an aggregate measure of lots of diverse qualities, but WIS is definitely one of them. And it happens to be one of the best.
Personally I always liked Heinlein's take on what a man should be able to do... It's very similar to Wechsler's definition of intelligence, only described in example behaviors:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Heinlein, Time Enough For Love
Yes, now just tell us your password so that we can add that karma to your account... We have an automatic system for it but it's on the fritz. You know. Sunspots.
"broadband saturation" is a meaningless unit of measurement without some carefully defined terms. Personally, I'd rather see them not use it, and instead use some form of [price / speed] measurement to determine the overall health of our nation's internet service.
Just as a side note, a friend just moved into a wealthy suburban neighborhood here (near Memphis, TN). The only options available for internet access are Bellsouth DSL: $20/mo for 768k down / 128 up, or $34/mo for 1.5m down / 768 up. Or Comcast, which no matter how you slice it seems to run about 60 bucks just for the ISP, although the speed is much better. Do you have any idea how much it makes my blood boil to hear about our nation's "broadband saturation" in the same string of comments with other people claiming to get 10Mbps down/up for cheap?
Don't forget US v. Salerno. The "perceived evil" stipulation. Because Christ knows, down here in the south a black man that rapes a white woman won't be perceived as any more evil than a white man that does it. White, wealthy tech guys won't be perceived as any more evil than the beer swilling schleps in the jury box. Yeah, we're all equal in the eyes of the law, seriously! We are! And the judges can tell for sure how evil you are when using preventive detention as a punishment. They're not doing anything wrong! They're just living in their own little la-la land of assumptions and gut-reactions and intuition that makes the whole thing a sham.
Perceived evil... what a bunch of fucking nutcases. The entire criminal justice system in the US needs to be reworked from the ground up, and many of the people currently in positions of power need to be digging ditches somewhere in the southwest. Small but deep ditches. With a nice man with a gun behind them.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's why confiscation will never work. I don't think anyone really even KNOWS how many guns exist in American hands... Obviously hundreds of millions of guns. Even if half the people turned theirs in, rounding up the other half would probably take a decade.
And, unfortunately for people who want to do this, that percentage of people who don't comply? They're going to resist. I'm typically always armed, and I'll certainly kill your sons and daughters who come to take my guns. Living in a free country with freedoms that include the 2nd means more to me than my life, so I'll very gladly lay it down along with as many jack-booted thugs as possible before I do. If that makes me a home-grown terrorist, so be it.
It is hard to believe there aren't more people including at least one firearm on this list of necessities. I live and work in the Memphis area, and while I might not be the best prepared person in the event of an emergency even I have a selection of handguns and rifles that would be at the TOP of any list of emergency supplies. You can't get more basic than a simple tool that will allow you to feed your family as well as defend whatever emergency supplies you have gathered.
Is this crowd really so anti-gun that such a basic, life-saving tool would be scratched off the list completely?
You may be trying to cast your net a little wide looking for a single (or even a few) books, articles, and movies that illustrate technology and its impact on our lives, privacy, culture, etc. You might be better off giving them a laundry list of books (I would stick to books for a high school level course) and giving them the opportunity to answer that extremely broad question in the form of a 5 page paper, or something along those lines. Almost none of them are under 200 pages... You're well within "short story / novella" lengths there, and you REALLY need to rethink that, even if it means turning this into an extra credit assignment. Is it possible that you're vastly underestimating the amount of reading time your teenage students have?
You've got a lot of material to potentially choose from, so why not let the students make their own choices? Besides, it makes reading 30 "original" responses that much more interesting when they're not all saying the exact same thing.
Some of my choices would include:
Gibson's Neuromancer
Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties (actually the whole trilogy would be okay here)
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age
Neal Stephenson's Anathem (for the really brave students...)
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and probably Ender's Shadow too
Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch
Tad William's Otherland series, although this is probably too bulky to be feasible
Daniel Keys Moran's Long Run and The Last Dancer
Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein's Starship Troopers
Heinlein's Door into Summer
If you open up your page limit the options are almost endless. If you don't, you'll never find a single work under 200 pages that illustrates the things you want to illustrate. Especially not in fiction.
Here we just sell small rectangular objects. They're called books. They require a little effort on your part, and make no bee-bee-bee-bee-beeps. On your way ...
-The Neverending Story
at least 90 minutes of well-known stars in a world of explosions, car chases, gun fights, etc doing what they're doing for no particular reason.
You're in luck, dkleinsc. The Expendables 2 comes out next month.
Shiras' Children of the Atom is a whole lot of fun, although I didn't stumble onto it until I was in college.
It's obvious that there is nothing we can do to bring a peaceful end to the TSA. Voting didn't work. A widespread campaign of ridicule didn't work. Refusing to fly didn't work, and simply leads to the government propping up at-risk airlines. It is time to try something a little different:
Publicly document the names of people employed by the TSA. Every single one of them, from their administration (John Pistole) all the way down to the nameless, faceless front-line gropers. It won't take long for a document like that to spread in the wild.
That's step one. It becomes unnecessary once the following step starts to gather momentum because these people wear uniforms, drive to work everyday, and are self-identified. They don't wear masks (yet).
Step 2: Make their lives as TSA agents unbearable. Everything from denying them loans and refusing to do business with them personally to stealing their cars and vandalizing their property. Hurt them, hurt their families, hurt them financially. Humiliate them and make them legitimately afraid for their lives and those of their wives, husbands, and children. Socially ostracize them completely or make them targets, whichever your morals and conscience dictates, but start such a campaign of fear that the TSA will never see another willing job applicant.
Make them ashamed and afraid of doing their job, because they should be.
"And it came into Hooch's mind that when both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth." -Orson Scott Card, Red Prophet
Very nice reference. Dan is amazing.
In the words of Bill Hicks, "you're not a human until you're in my phone book."
There is one prepatory step that will apparently never occur to them: admit they have done wrong, identify the people they have wronged, make it right by giving them full compensation, and document that they have done so.
That's a sucker's bet. These people are PROFESSIONALS. They'll go with the tried-and-true method and round up some scapegoats, of course.
You really are a dense, humorless, asshole, aren't you? I think it's safe to say that most people think life is sacred and important. The fact that lives were in peril wasn't the funny part... the funny part was situational. For instance, if you were severely beaten by a gang of feral comedians, that would (at first blush) be funny. Yes, we are all terribly sad that you had 4 ribs broken and your jaw wired shut--that's not the funny part. It's a fucking riot that a gang of comedians was responsible for randomly beating the shit out of a humorless stick in the mud, though. It would be less funny if you were beaten by accountants.
High pressure water has been used to disperse crowds and break up riots for longer than I've been alive. It's very effective and relatively safe, but here in America we've been reluctant to use it because of it's ties to the race riots of the 1960s. So we shun a cheap, effective, and easy to deploy system of crowd control because nobody wants to be seen as a ruthless dictator as they clamp down on the masses, and yet we pursue other less-well-tested methods of doing the exact same thing.
Does no one else see the irony?
In all seriousness, I think the really far out there geeks (not your average, run of the mill slashdotter, but maybe close!) would make EXCELLENT space travelers. The only real downside is that after years of increasingly disturbing porn, a COMPLETE lack of social interaction (and this is coming from someone who once thought "dressing up" was putting on pants so the drive-through people won't freak out), and the subsequent lack of feedback about their behavior and thoughts, they'll leave a very rough impression on the first person they run into afterward. Alien or cosmonaut.
"Greetings people of earth! We have met with your represenative and found him wholly agreeable with our culture! Where's the women at, bitches?"
Oh, shi---
Just as an aside: Condoms don't necessarily prevent exposure to HPV. They reduce the chances, but obviously not all that much (as you said, HPV is a raging epidemic, with something like 90% of sexually active women getting some strain or other eventually). It can be transferred by contact with a lot of surface area that condoms don't cover at all (like the scrotum), and as such doesn't even require actual intercourse to transmit from person to person.
Weapons and training are "VERY expensive?" How about the cost of stolen cargo, is that cheap? The ransom paid for kidnapped crewmembers, how cheap is that?
This whole "anti-gun" argument seems to revolve around the fact that it's hard to dock a merchant ship in international ports if it's armed. It's a bullshit argument. Either change the laws (and any nation that doesn't want to cooperate can find out how nice not having any commerce is), or.... Put the anti-pirate people on a smaller craft that does not enter sovereign waters. Easy solution. Contractors can be hired to escort your ships through danger zones armed to the fucking teeth. Problem solved.
Dr. Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal!
Dr. Peter Venkman: That's bad. Okay. All right, important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
I think I sort of see where you're going, but you're not quite there. For most instruments, the score is only valid when compared to others of the same age / grade. Being a 40 year old with an IQ of 120 is very different than being a 6 year old with an IQ of 120, since they're being compared against two different cohorts.
Also noteworthy is that fluid intelligence (if you're into CHC theory) declines steadily as you move out of your 20s, while crystallized intelligence, or things like your general knowledge base, continues to increase as you experience more of the world. So yeah, on average a 45 year old probably can't solve as many algebra problems in 2 minutes as the average 18 year old, or be able to find Waldo in the images nearly as quickly. But the average 45 year old is going to know much more about the world and will do much better on those knowledge heavy parts of the instrument.
That is a common argument... but just because a test is not "culture free" doesn't mean it's worthless. If we measure the IQ of the son of an immigrant Kalahari bushman and it's, say, 79, that is an important measure despite being "ethnocentric" (and quite frankly not everything that is specific to one culture is bad). It is still useful information when you want to know things like how well the boy will do in an American school system.
Does it mean he's stupid? Not at all... A skill set valued in the desert (let's say, fast reaction time and a concrete approach to problem solving) is simply undervalued in the school system here. Should we redefine the tests to suit his cultural background, where in all likelihood he will score higher, just to assuage whatever bad feelings we have? I think that would be pointless--whereas knowing that the child is NOT using those skills that we value in our society, those skills that tend to go along with good grades and a good job, is a useful thing indeed.
So yeah, if the ultimate goal of IQ tests is to put value judgments on people you're absolutely right. It is not fair to label the kid. But if the goal is to devise teaching interventions to help him succeed in our schools and in our culture it is kind of nice to be able to see where he is deviating from the norm.
So yes, IQ is an aggregate measure of lots of diverse qualities, but WIS is definitely one of them. And it happens to be one of the best.
Personally I always liked Heinlein's take on what a man should be able to do... It's very similar to Wechsler's definition of intelligence, only described in example behaviors:
Yes, now just tell us your password so that we can add that karma to your account... We have an automatic system for it but it's on the fritz. You know. Sunspots.
"broadband saturation" is a meaningless unit of measurement without some carefully defined terms. Personally, I'd rather see them not use it, and instead use some form of [price / speed] measurement to determine the overall health of our nation's internet service.
Just as a side note, a friend just moved into a wealthy suburban neighborhood here (near Memphis, TN). The only options available for internet access are Bellsouth DSL: $20/mo for 768k down / 128 up, or $34/mo for 1.5m down / 768 up. Or Comcast, which no matter how you slice it seems to run about 60 bucks just for the ISP, although the speed is much better. Do you have any idea how much it makes my blood boil to hear about our nation's "broadband saturation" in the same string of comments with other people claiming to get 10Mbps down/up for cheap?
Don't forget US v. Salerno. The "perceived evil" stipulation. Because Christ knows, down here in the south a black man that rapes a white woman won't be perceived as any more evil than a white man that does it. White, wealthy tech guys won't be perceived as any more evil than the beer swilling schleps in the jury box. Yeah, we're all equal in the eyes of the law, seriously! We are! And the judges can tell for sure how evil you are when using preventive detention as a punishment. They're not doing anything wrong! They're just living in their own little la-la land of assumptions and gut-reactions and intuition that makes the whole thing a sham.
Perceived evil... what a bunch of fucking nutcases. The entire criminal justice system in the US needs to be reworked from the ground up, and many of the people currently in positions of power need to be digging ditches somewhere in the southwest. Small but deep ditches. With a nice man with a gun behind them.
Old SCARY Joke!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examination_Day
INCORRECT: The image was enhanced using Adobeî Photoshopî software.
CORRECT: SHOOP DA WHOOP!!!