Mental arithmetic is exactly the kind of thing you don't have to be able to do fast anymore, BECAUSE of technology. Understanding why (and what, more basically) about math is far more important in this era of handheld supercomputers. People for whom it would be useful to be able to do quick arithmetic will naturally develop it.
Someone who knows math isn't going to evaluate 3*27 using 3*2*10 + 7*3 (this involved no insight, just a naieve brute attack), they are going to use 3^(3+1), or estimate it as ~3*30. Drilling arithmetic is no longer very important when computers do it so much better.
Nonsense. My kids keep getting "modern" versions of Monopoly with "Credit Cards" that do all the math for you. And guess what? It is very educational - but not in the intended manner! No one knows any longer how much cash they have. Which is just what real credit cards are like...
But we don't play with these sets any more. Why? Because I can make change with my old paper money set faster than I can with the calculators. And my kids have learned that they can too.
And this is nothing new. I am just old enough to have learned how to use a slide rule. After I did, I spent a few weeks being challenging my friends to races with a calculator doing sequential multiplication and division. I usually won because this is easier to do on a slide rule.
Calculators have their uses, but basic arithmetic is not one of them.
Last year I paid $210,000 in taxes on income of $635,000. Are you saying I didn't pay enough?
Even though I am on minimum wage working here, part time, at McDonalds, I too think you are paying too much tax. I say this because I know that if I work hard enough I will become a millionaire, and I wouldn't want to pay loads of tax if I were^W^W^W when I become rich.
My sarcasm detector just went off, but it looks like the mods missed it again...
What's particularly astonishing, though, is that Mr. Cuccinelli's legal case against Mr. Mann seems unrelated to any of the controversial research the attorney general spends so much time attacking. Mr. Cuccinelli is supposedly investigating whether Mr. Mann committed fraud when the scientist applied for and received a state-funded research grant -- to study what Mr. Mann describes as "the interaction of the land, atmosphere and vegetation in the African savannah." The topic "has nothing to do with climate change or paleoclimate," Mann says. The attorney general appears to argue that, since Mr. Mann listed his controversial papers on his curriculum vitae when he and two other scientists applied for the savannah research grant, he may have committed some kind of fraud.
The attorney general's logic is so tenuous as to leave only one plausible explanation: that he is on a fishing expedition designed to intimidate and suppress honest research and the free exchange of ideas upon which science and academia both depend -- all because he does not like what science says about climate change. "
There is some suggestion that this is test case to see what he can get away with. The last time around, the judge bitch-slapped him so hard, it nearly broke his neck, so now he is trying to see what the judge will tolerate by going after something less directly connected with Mann.
However, I was reading that there is a new class of antibiotics in development, which are based on immune system antigens and, for some reason (anyone know more?) are thought to, because of their mechanism of action, not be susceptible to the same problem of evolving the bacteria to survive them.
I liked what the Russians were working on for a while - Phages. More completely, Bacteriophages. Viruses for bacterias.
No chance of the virus crossing over to affect humans, and a bacterial colony already under assault by the human immune system isn't generally going to last long when it's also 'sick' with a virus. As a bonus, immunity doesn't really happen because the virus adapts right along with the bacteria.
The problem with phages is that they're the opposite of broad-spectrum antibiotics. They're very, very, specific. They'll clear a throat infection right up, but first you need a culture to determine which species of bacteria you have(there's millions/billions of them), then find an effective phage against it.
That can take a week, then you gotta get the phage to the clinic, as most don't have the room for the number of phage samples you'd need.
Then again, if we could just synthesize phages from their genome (viruses are not very complex beasts) then no storage required. Well just the reagents needed to build them. Of course. such a machine would be a powerful weapon...
Brilliant. Let's all rely on nuclear energy, which, if it were the primary replacement for fossil fuels, would run out even faster than oil.
It's nice that France uses nuclear, and it is nominally carbon-neutral, but you cannot solve the climate change problem with nuclear power. Nuclear fuel is hard to make, and the raw materials needed to make it won't even last one human lifetime if we use it at the rate we use fossil fuels.
Where did you get that idea? According to this (which took me all of 1 minute with Google), we have 24,000 years reserves using our current inane reactor designs. If we start allowing breeder reactors (which France does, incidentally) the number goes up by a factor of 20 or so.
It also depends upon the definition of "first contact". Physical contact with an intelligent alien species that has traveled to earth? Communications with an extraterrestrial species? Discovery of any form of extraterrestrial life? I'd need to know the specifics before I'd put money on either side of that bet...
On of my high school teachers described me as a "close encounter of the fourth kind" which he said meant "contact with an alien to the point where it becomes annoying".;-)
Sexual background checks are good in schools to prevent child molesters from teaching, however
Wouldn't that just come up in a normal background check under "criminal history"? You don't need to spend the time and money poking around asking who a teacher has dated or whether they're gay to learn that.
Not sure what you meant by that, but just for the record, homosexuals are not more likely to molest children.
Well, you didn't actually address my point. I was wondering why it would matter if they all die. All you did was give a reason why we should feel bad about it.
What's the difference? If you accept that we "should" feel bad about it, that implies that it "matters" to you.
What I wonder is if "Universal Health Care" (which only provides for 94% of the country) would even be necessary if we didn't have corn subsidies which have made so many people obese and unhealthy. Seems like we are paying twice for a reality that shouldn't have happened in the first place.
That must be why Universal Health Care isn't an important issue in all the industrialised nations that don't have a corn lobby...
On the other hand, success in the scientific fields can be directly correlated with religiosity - those who do the best work and contribute the most to our understanding of the universe are FAR less likely to be religious than their more mediocre counterparts.
Citation, please?
And for a nice example of an anti-religious bigot leading a nasty crusade to discredit a theory that was later vindicated, please see Jesuit physicist George LeMaitre's "primordial atom theory" which is known to this day by Fred Hoyle's derisive epithet, "the big bang theory".
All the interesting gaps in the Star Wars storyline took place between Episode III and Episode IV. We all know Anakin's going to fall to the Dark Side, and there was no need to spend two movies doing it. The unexplored part of the movie timeline is what life is like immediately after he becomes Vader, but before the events of Episode IV.
So, according to you, the interesting stuff in MacBeth is what happens between Banquo's murder and the duel with MacDuff? I mean, it's a tragedy, so why bother with the visit of the witches or the final battle...
Many of my friends who have become parents also don't let their kids out the door, on their bikes or skateboards or whatever, because they're too afraid of terrorists and pedophiles or injury.
It's even weirder than that - other parents will project their phobias on to you and make you feel that if you try to let your kids have the same childhood you had 30-40 years ago, you will get sued/a visit from CPS/other nasty social disapproval. So not everyone may be as you describe, but the zeitgeist IS that way and it puts a lot of pressure on otherwise sane parents.
And just saying "ignore them" doesn't cut it - the threats are quite real. I knew one stay-at-home dad who was from the east coast and was not very emotionally demonstrative. One of his boys managed to fall off something and the EMTs (who the dad called) nearly took the kid away because the dad was not "upset enough".
What will really sell is an electric car that can take a family of 4 with luggage 300 miles and charge in less then 5 minutes, and is comparably priced to current gas models. We also need to deal with the problems with range due to temperature. Meaning, the 3000 miles but be 300 miles MINIMUM under the worst condition.
I think your minimum is too high. We have one car - a 2004 Honda Odessey - and we rarely go more than 220 miles between fueling (in city). Even on long car trips (across the great basin) we rarely get over 300. This is no problem for us. Now I could see it being more of a problem in rural areas, but 80% of the US population lives in urban areas these days so you could get most of the market with a lower target.
R'lyeh is in the south pacific. Pnakoticos is in the Australian desert. Irem is in Saudia Arabia. Unfortunately, the Pentagonally Symmetrical Elder Things named their last surface city 'Can'ned'spham', which is why the Shoggoths ate them.
It just makes my day that this is modded Score: 5, Informative!
Another idea is that all the tards in the states could start using metric instead of that other system you have based on stones and feathers and such.
Heh. I found out recently that the inch is defined in terms of metric units (1in == 2.54cm). So really they are using metric, just with a useless multiplier;-)
"100 bytes?" Why this arbitrary, ugly, sorry-ass excuse of a number? An elegant, round number like 64, 128... hell, even 96 would have been a sensible and far superior choice.
Because then you can't use all the elegant tricks involving cache lines that you were contemplating?
A prime number might have been even better (100 is divisible by 4).
But looking around this idea it seems more likely to me that time is an illusion as far a real dimension is concerned. It strikes me more as an analog to temperature; i.e. it's a statistical like reference. Do we really experience the passing of time or do we really just have a sense of passing of process?
Then how does time "flow"? An illusion you say? Well, the state of your brain that produces that illusion is present at all times (that you exist anyway). So why is now preferred?
I suspect that the fact that time looks like a "dimension" is just a mathematical accident and that time (or maybe causality itself) is more fundamental than that. Some guy at the Perimeter Institute apparently managed to derive a lot of GR/SM from a few assumptions, one of which was causality - but none of which were space-time.
In this view of things, time travel is nonsense because the past is not real - only the present is (and the future is just statistical).
You mean the poor farmer in Bangladesh will experience the same hardship from sea level rise than a Miami millionaire? One loses his livelihood and the other has to move his yacht pier up 3 feet - yes, that seems about the same.
Yes, the 2.8mm/year rate of sea level rise is sure to take away the livelihood of that farmer in Bangladesh... he should start running now, or else he may never escape!!!!!
You don't realize the absurdity of your extremist appeals to emotion BECAUSE YOU DONT EVEN KNOW THE FACTS OF THE VERY SHIT YOUR ARE SUPPORTING.
No, you don't know the facts of the "shit" you are supporting. To start with, Bangaldeshi farmers can't start running because they live in one of the most densely populated areas on earth and the national boundaries there have been drawn in the 20th century to stop traditional migrations. And while 2.8mm/y may sound like nothing, try to remember that a) it has been going on for decades, b) that projection is probably too low and c) it is already causing serious problems in low-lying island nations such as Tuvalu and the Maldives as well as in Bangladesh itself.
So get your head out of your fat Western ass and start paying attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Mental arithmetic is exactly the kind of thing you don't have to be able to do fast anymore, BECAUSE of technology. Understanding why (and what, more basically) about math is far more important in this era of handheld supercomputers. People for whom it would be useful to be able to do quick arithmetic will naturally develop it.
Someone who knows math isn't going to evaluate 3*27 using 3*2*10 + 7*3 (this involved no insight, just a naieve brute attack), they are going to use 3^(3+1), or estimate it as ~3*30. Drilling arithmetic is no longer very important when computers do it so much better.
Nonsense. My kids keep getting "modern" versions of Monopoly with "Credit Cards" that do all the math for you. And guess what? It is very educational - but not in the intended manner! No one knows any longer how much cash they have. Which is just what real credit cards are like...
But we don't play with these sets any more. Why? Because I can make change with my old paper money set faster than I can with the calculators. And my kids have learned that they can too.
And this is nothing new. I am just old enough to have learned how to use a slide rule. After I did, I spent a few weeks being challenging my friends to races with a calculator doing sequential multiplication and division. I usually won because this is easier to do on a slide rule.
Calculators have their uses, but basic arithmetic is not one of them.
Last year I paid $210,000 in taxes on income of $635,000. Are you saying I didn't pay enough?
Even though I am on minimum wage working here, part time, at McDonalds, I too think you are paying too much tax. I say this because I know that if I work hard enough I will become a millionaire, and I wouldn't want to pay loads of tax if I were^W^W^W when I become rich.
My sarcasm detector just went off, but it looks like the mods missed it again...
Washington Post: "Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to embarrass Virginia":
What's particularly astonishing, though, is that Mr. Cuccinelli's legal case against Mr. Mann seems unrelated to any of the controversial research the attorney general spends so much time attacking. Mr. Cuccinelli is supposedly investigating whether Mr. Mann committed fraud when the scientist applied for and received a state-funded research grant -- to study what Mr. Mann describes as "the interaction of the land, atmosphere and vegetation in the African savannah." The topic "has nothing to do with climate change or paleoclimate," Mann says. The attorney general appears to argue that, since Mr. Mann listed his controversial papers on his curriculum vitae when he and two other scientists applied for the savannah research grant, he may have committed some kind of fraud.
The attorney general's logic is so tenuous as to leave only one plausible explanation: that he is on a fishing expedition designed to intimidate and suppress honest research and the free exchange of ideas upon which science and academia both depend -- all because he does not like what science says about climate change. "
There is some suggestion that this is test case to see what he can get away with. The last time around, the judge bitch-slapped him so hard, it nearly broke his neck, so now he is trying to see what the judge will tolerate by going after something less directly connected with Mann.
However, I was reading that there is a new class of antibiotics in development, which are based on immune system antigens and, for some reason (anyone know more?) are thought to, because of their mechanism of action, not be susceptible to the same problem of evolving the bacteria to survive them.
I liked what the Russians were working on for a while - Phages. More completely, Bacteriophages. Viruses for bacterias.
No chance of the virus crossing over to affect humans, and a bacterial colony already under assault by the human immune system isn't generally going to last long when it's also 'sick' with a virus. As a bonus, immunity doesn't really happen because the virus adapts right along with the bacteria.
The problem with phages is that they're the opposite of broad-spectrum antibiotics. They're very, very, specific. They'll clear a throat infection right up, but first you need a culture to determine which species of bacteria you have(there's millions/billions of them), then find an effective phage against it.
That can take a week, then you gotta get the phage to the clinic, as most don't have the room for the number of phage samples you'd need.
Then again, if we could just synthesize phages from their genome (viruses are not very complex beasts) then no storage required. Well just the reagents needed to build them. Of course. such a machine would be a powerful weapon...
Brilliant. Let's all rely on nuclear energy, which, if it were the primary replacement for fossil fuels, would run out even faster than oil.
It's nice that France uses nuclear, and it is nominally carbon-neutral, but you cannot solve the climate change problem with nuclear power. Nuclear fuel is hard to make, and the raw materials needed to make it won't even last one human lifetime if we use it at the rate we use fossil fuels.
Where did you get that idea? According to this (which took me all of 1 minute with Google), we have 24,000 years reserves using our current inane reactor designs. If we start allowing breeder reactors (which France does, incidentally) the number goes up by a factor of 20 or so.
I think tall, short-armed women or short, long-armed women would look kind of odd.
Exactly - the second group would have a similar ratio to chimpanzees. Not sure what the first group would look like but probably any quadruped.
It also depends upon the definition of "first contact". Physical contact with an intelligent alien species that has traveled to earth? Communications with an extraterrestrial species? Discovery of any form of extraterrestrial life? I'd need to know the specifics before I'd put money on either side of that bet...
On of my high school teachers described me as a "close encounter of the fourth kind" which he said meant "contact with an alien to the point where it becomes annoying". ;-)
Sexual background checks are good in schools to prevent child molesters from teaching, however
Wouldn't that just come up in a normal background check under "criminal history"? You don't need to spend the time and money poking around asking who a teacher has dated or whether they're gay to learn that.
Not sure what you meant by that, but just for the record, homosexuals are not more likely to molest children.
Also thanks for acting like a pretentious prick.
I didn't read it that way. Why did you?
Well, you didn't actually address my point. I was wondering why it would matter if they all die. All you did was give a reason why we should feel bad about it.
What's the difference? If you accept that we "should" feel bad about it, that implies that it "matters" to you.
What I wonder is if "Universal Health Care" (which only provides for 94% of the country) would even be necessary if we didn't have corn subsidies which have made so many people obese and unhealthy. Seems like we are paying twice for a reality that shouldn't have happened in the first place.
That must be why Universal Health Care isn't an important issue in all the industrialised nations that don't have a corn lobby...
that "Supernova Shrapnel" would be an excellent name for a rock band?
I'm sure that Dave Barry has...
On the other hand, success in the scientific fields can be directly correlated with religiosity - those who do the best work and contribute the most to our understanding of the universe are FAR less likely to be religious than their more mediocre counterparts.
Citation, please?
And for a nice example of an anti-religious bigot leading a nasty crusade to discredit a theory that was later vindicated, please see Jesuit physicist George LeMaitre's "primordial atom theory" which is known to this day by Fred Hoyle's derisive epithet, "the big bang theory".
All the interesting gaps in the Star Wars storyline took place between Episode III and Episode IV. We all know Anakin's going to fall to the Dark Side, and there was no need to spend two movies doing it. The unexplored part of the movie timeline is what life is like immediately after he becomes Vader, but before the events of Episode IV.
So, according to you, the interesting stuff in MacBeth is what happens between Banquo's murder and the duel with MacDuff? I mean, it's a tragedy, so why bother with the visit of the witches or the final battle...
Many of my friends who have become parents also don't let their kids out the door, on their bikes or skateboards or whatever, because they're too afraid of terrorists and pedophiles or injury.
It's even weirder than that - other parents will project their phobias on to you and make you feel that if you try to let your kids have the same childhood you had 30-40 years ago, you will get sued/a visit from CPS/other nasty social disapproval. So not everyone may be as you describe, but the zeitgeist IS that way and it puts a lot of pressure on otherwise sane parents.
And just saying "ignore them" doesn't cut it - the threats are quite real. I knew one stay-at-home dad who was from the east coast and was not very emotionally demonstrative. One of his boys managed to fall off something and the EMTs (who the dad called) nearly took the kid away because the dad was not "upset enough".
I disagree. What I see is that our civilization behaves like biology does not exists.
There is a quote that I thought was from Illuminatus! that goes:
There are two rules of human behavior. Rule 1 is "Humans are primates" and rule 2 is "Most humans don't know rule 1."
but I can't seem to track it down.
Q: What's gray and comes in quarts?
What will really sell is an electric car that can take a family of 4 with luggage 300 miles and charge in less then 5 minutes, and is comparably priced to current gas models. We also need to deal with the problems with range due to temperature. Meaning, the 3000 miles but be 300 miles MINIMUM under the worst condition.
I think your minimum is too high. We have one car - a 2004 Honda Odessey - and we rarely go more than 220 miles between fueling (in city). Even on long car trips (across the great basin) we rarely get over 300. This is no problem for us. Now I could see it being more of a problem in rural areas, but 80% of the US population lives in urban areas these days so you could get most of the market with a lower target.
R'lyeh is in the south pacific. Pnakoticos is in the Australian desert. Irem is in Saudia Arabia. Unfortunately, the Pentagonally Symmetrical Elder Things named their last surface city 'Can'ned'spham', which is why the Shoggoths ate them.
It just makes my day that this is modded Score: 5, Informative!
Not hard, and yes: winged micro-sharks with lasers. Genentech is working on them right now.
Informative? WTF!
Another idea is that all the tards in the states could start using metric instead of that other system you have based on stones and feathers and such.
Heh. I found out recently that the inch is defined in terms of metric units (1in == 2.54cm). So really they are using metric, just with a useless multiplier ;-)
In the 1TB benchmark, records are 100 bytes long.
"100 bytes?" Why this arbitrary, ugly, sorry-ass excuse of a number? An elegant, round number like 64, 128... hell, even 96 would have been a sensible and far superior choice.
Because then you can't use all the elegant tricks involving cache lines that you were contemplating?
A prime number might have been even better (100 is divisible by 4).
Oh well, that's what happens when you have large scale fire mitigation in populated forests.
No, that's what happens when we warm the climate so much the beetle larvae don't get killed by winter frosts.
But looking around this idea it seems more likely to me that time is an illusion as far a real dimension is concerned. It strikes me more as an analog to temperature; i.e. it's a statistical like reference. Do we really experience the passing of time or do we really just have a sense of passing of process?
Then how does time "flow"? An illusion you say? Well, the state of your brain that produces that illusion is present at all times (that you exist anyway). So why is now preferred?
I suspect that the fact that time looks like a "dimension" is just a mathematical accident and that time (or maybe causality itself) is more fundamental than that. Some guy at the Perimeter Institute apparently managed to derive a lot of GR/SM from a few assumptions, one of which was causality - but none of which were space-time.
In this view of things, time travel is nonsense because the past is not real - only the present is (and the future is just statistical).
You mean the poor farmer in Bangladesh will experience the same hardship from sea level rise than a Miami millionaire? One loses his livelihood and the other has to move his yacht pier up 3 feet - yes, that seems about the same.
Yes, the 2.8mm/year rate of sea level rise is sure to take away the livelihood of that farmer in Bangladesh... he should start running now, or else he may never escape!!!!!
You don't realize the absurdity of your extremist appeals to emotion BECAUSE YOU DONT EVEN KNOW THE FACTS OF THE VERY SHIT YOUR ARE SUPPORTING.
No, you don't know the facts of the "shit" you are supporting. To start with, Bangaldeshi farmers can't start running because they live in one of the most densely populated areas on earth and the national boundaries there have been drawn in the 20th century to stop traditional migrations. And while 2.8mm/y may sound like nothing, try to remember that a) it has been going on for decades, b) that projection is probably too low and c) it is already causing serious problems in low-lying island nations such as Tuvalu and the Maldives as well as in Bangladesh itself.
So get your head out of your fat Western ass and start paying attention.