Thanks for that, you gave me a chuckle. I agree with you in spririt, but there are a lot of people out there molesting data in order to perform their work function and to get paid. Far more than have any understanding of data structures, algorithms or even basic data normalization. It's unfortunate.
The problem isn't that people that know how to program and to test are writing crappy spreadsheets. The problem is that people that don't know how to program and test, ie. the general non IT tech population is writing spreadsheets because they don't know another way to build these tools and they do it in the only way that they've taught themselves to do. If they knew better they often wouldn't start by clicking the excel icon in the first place.
Arguably Howard Hughes Spruce Goose was a fantastic success. But not from a aeronautical engineering point of view. In fact Howard Hughes did about zero to increase the field of aircraft design, nothing ever worked (at least in time to be useful) and none of his designs ever made it to production.
>You have to know certain facts, you could also ask for what it is good to know where Europe is (the continent), if you don't know anything about the movement of the tectonic plates
We spend 12 years at basic grade school and you don't think there's some time there to learn about basic geology? Most people aren't "interested" in maths and yet have a deeper understanding of it than to know that numbers could be added up if required.
If you're going to have a population that can understand facts and interpret them in such a way that empowers democracy you need to have a population that understands the basis of these facts. Facts taken at face value are not empowering for democracies, they are propaganda for dictatorships and tyrannies. At face value fact "A" can always be replaced with fact "B" for political motives, especially when people have no understanding of either one. If people do not understand the basis of these theories then more intuitive but wrong theories like creation will end up replacing more counter intuitive and complex but correct theories.
Not so long ago it was a "fact" that God sat on the heavenly throne and that dynasties of kings ruled over the population supported by the churches, in what was seen to be a part of perfect heavenly order. It was a fact that Adam and Eve were the first people on Earth and it was a fact that we had eternal souls and it was a fact that you needed the Church to save it. What good does it do to replace one of these facts with any other if the people have no mechanism with which to discriminate between them? The capacity to understand current scientific thought, and indeed to be an active participant in the scientific method is much more important than the capacity to remember facts.
In any case, returning to the theme of the article, having people state "facts" that they have in their head and the certainties to which they believe these facts has more to do with their acceptance of authority than their acceptance and understanding of scientific knowledge. It is a way to measure a populations acceptance of authority though.
By excusing people, the general population, from scientific discourse and a deeper understanding you are effectively moving scientific knowledge from being a process we all have access to and making it a series of facts to be believed. People that beleive that the world is flat will be laughed at, because we can show in a number of ways the Earth is not flat. However not all scientific theories have been verified to the same extent, and people need to retain a little bit of critical thought.
>Not everyone have an interest in science and how theories are formed. But like the ability to read and write,
Not everyone has an interest in reading or writing either, yet we still teach them.
>if you know that the Sun is the centre and not the Earth, you are more likely to support funding for NASA's space exploration,
Is that a fact, theory or hypothesis? Have you tested this?
> Yes, that is what the Big Bang theory is about. That if you go back in time everything did start from a singular point. Then if you go even more back in time you need the Inflation theory and then later the quantum fluctuation theory.
These are mathematical constructs that explain differences between our hypothetical starting at a unified point and the differences from the hypothesis that we observe in reality. Inflation is a way to reconcile theory with observation. You only "need" these things to make the Big Bang theory work. That you "need" inflation to make the Big Bang possible is putting the horse before the cart. Normally theory follows observation, not vice versa as in the case with Inflation.
Indeed the Big Bang theory may still be correct even if the Inflationary theory is proven to be incorrect. Inflation theory is not a fact in the same way that we accept gravity or evolution as a fact, and really still stands to be verified. There are several
>The term Big Bang is a good metaphor, because if you were an observer outside the universe you would
It's a terrible metaphor because you can't be an observer outside the universe. It is also a terrible metaphor because the Big Bang expansion would be not really an expansion at all because everything that exists and that will ever exist is already inside the big bang, and nothing can exist on the outside, so nothing is actually getting bigger relative to starting conditions.
This is not an explosion that is blossoming and losing force and cooling through radiation or conduction, because there is nothing for it to radiate or conduct into. The Big Bang is a conceptually difficult idea to grasp, and calling it the Big Bang does not help. This is not at all like an explosion as we might observe on Earth.
>The most obvious evidence of the Big Bang is the cosmic microwave radiation.
Cosmic microwave radiation is there and it also fits with the Big Bang theory, but it also fits with other theories. In any case I am not actually disputing the Big Bang theory, I am suggesting that our certainty of it having happened is much less than 100%, and much less certain than other scientific facts.
> The second evidence is the expanding universe.
Well if you knew much about the Big Bang theory you'd know that this was the first evidence for the theory. The fact that if you have an expanding universe that if you back track everything then you will arrive at a point. If everything started as a point then well it must have expanded from a point. The cosmic microwave radiation background was supporting evidence that came about much later. The evidence being if the background radiation is uniform then perhaps everything did start from a unified point.
However there are still plenty of things that the Big Bang does not explain, like why did gravity suddenly become lumpy? To shelve this theory as complete rather than a work in progress is very very premature. It's also very dismissive of the scientific process and the amount of effort that people put into this topic. And of course there are also other interpretations of universal expansion that do not result in a Big Bang.
>Big Bang theory was proposed by Georges Lemaître in 1927 and is based on the observation of the expanding universe and Einstein's equations and is currently accepted as fact.
No I think you are confused. The expanding universe is an accepted fact, the Big Bang theory is one of the best proposed solutions to explain what might have happened as a consequence of back tracking this expansion. Certainly Inflation theory does not make the Big Bang easier to accept, it is indeed an anomaly, indeed you might say it's a patch over a problem with the Big Bang theory, and if Inflation turns out to be true it might indeed lead to explanations of the expanding
universe that have a non- Big Bang origin.
If you were to say that evolution or the age of the Earth were accepted as a clear fact I would be much more likely to agree with you.
>You can't expect from everyone to have a scientific education, but you can expect from everyone to know agreed upon facts.
I completely disagree with this sentiment. What good is it for someone to know that the Earth is round of flat if they don't know what that means? Who cares if you "know" that the Big Bang explains the first infinitesimally small units of time in the Universe's existence if you don't know anything else about it? To have people parrot back scientific facts is almost as useless as them parroting back religious truths.
A far greater gauge of a populations disposition towards science and indeed truth would be their understanding of said theories and the complications and alternatives.
> Should we also teach flat Earth and Geocentric cosmology?
You're being ridiculous now... We should teach articles as defined by good peer driven research, we should not teach science as a series of factoids to be par
The age of the Earth is a lot more solid in terms of a proposition that other theories that the general public were tested for. The thing that bothers me is that the theories that are less certain are presented as fact where there is probably still a lot we don't know about them.
Of particular note is the Big Bang, and this is problematic for two reasons:
1) There is no conclusive and difinitive evidence that the Big Bang actually happened, it's generally accepted to be our best guess at the moment, but it's nowhere near as agreed upon as say the age of the Earth is. Even theories that support the Big Bang go beyond it to multiple bangs or multiple universes which in a way actually undermines the point of the Big Bang proposal in its effort to describe creation.
2) There never was a "Big Bang". In fact the term was coined by Fred Hoyle to ridicule the notion that the universe was created in an instant from a single point. There can't be a bang or explosion without space to explode into and at the point of creation there was no space except for the point that contained everything. So it should be called something more like the Big Expansion or something like that.
When you have the public dogmatically adhering to either arguing for or against something like the Big Bang we end up in a place which is far away from the inquisitive scientific mind and process that we should be aiming for.
What these surveys should be testing for, rather than a dogmatic belief in theories is to see if the general public is able to describe main scientific theories and perhaps even give some reasonable alternatives. That would give us a much better understanding of the general population's understanding of science than just measuring their ability to parrot factoids that they may have heard once, and have chosen to believe based not on science but their own bias and upbringing.
My biggest problem with surveys like these is that they public are being asked to reply with certainties that are far greater in clarity and definition than any scientist working on these fields would ever propose. And then the ignorant public are laughed at for doubting scientific truth. No cosmologist would ever state they were 100% certain that the big bang happened, and yet we laugh at the public for not being certain either.
True ignorance shows itself as certainty, either for or against supposed "scientific" principles. Being uncertain is okay, as long as you are aware of some of the options.
>you build one time that takes an hour or so
What madness is this?? You build the set one time following the instructions because that's what's on the box. Then you destroy it and use its parts in whatever else fantasy mashup constructions you want. That's the true genius of Lego, and it's capacity to educate and inspire kids - giving them a system in which they can build their own ideas.
>The latter does not seem to happen in Egnlish.
Yeah because it is a) written and b) has no central authority on what the language can contain, or has the power to update the language. The written aspect means that it's frozen it its current state apart from the addition of new words which are added more than any other language on the globe and (b) means that nothing can be revised.
By definition if a program is downloaded by a million people and it serves their use case then it's not a shit program. Even if the way it is designed its totally shit awful code spaghetti if the program can do the thing that its users want at the speed they want to do it and it doesn't affect the battery to the point where they stop using it then it's a viable product. Of course there is a ecstatic pinnacle where best practices in coding meet a use case, but the underlying is not as important as meeting the users requirements. Even if I do agree with you that every programmer should at least attempt to write code following best practices.
I don't know that blindly optimising for one set of resources is a good thing. My grandpa would say the same thing when us kids worked in the shed, he would constantly remind us to collect the nails from the timber we were re-purposing, and straighten them and put them into jars because once upon a time in the great depression nails were much more expensive than they were now, and you couldn't go down to the store and get 100 for a dollar, and in any case you didn't have a dollar. In this sense grandpa was really optimised for nail and resource consumption, but perhaps he was not optimised for time consumption. So he was optimising for resources in a time where he would have been a better manager to optimise for time.
When you talk about code optimisation you are always talking about a trade off. In old systems you were forced to optimise for memory and processor time at the expense of time, money, security and memory protection (robustness) optimisation. Now, with far more memory and processor cycles available to us than most programs need we can optimise for other things - example: we can use frameworks and libraries to manage memory so that programs although they don't run as fast as they would if optimised for memory and processor they don't leak memory, and their performance is adequate for their use case. It also takes a lot less time and resources to develop now.
So what I am saying really is when you say something like "99.999% of today's programmers have no fucking clue what code optimisation really means", well the truth is that they do, but that they are optimising for the elements that are the most scarce rather than the elements that are now relatively abundant being memory and cpu time.
The sad part isn't that English doesn't keep original pronunciations, the sad part is because English is a written language we can never bring all of these words into line with each other and rationalise their pronunciations. If English were a spoken language only then all these little glitches would be ironed out very quickly and it would actually start to make sense. But for some reason it has been seen to be 'proper' to freeze English and how it is used at a particular point in time and regard all changes from this point to be illiterate.
The problem with English is that it's stuck halfway into metamorphosing into a different language from its old Germanic roots to what would be a really quite different language. And the reason that it's stuck is because it is written.
So all those things that seem to be nuances or glitches of a complex language such as the silent 'h' in school or the 'e' that hangs on the end of name are actually dead aspects of an older language that were actually once functional -- name was once pronounced nam-eh, just as millions of English as a second language speakers mispronounce it.
But these glitches refuse to go away because now we have things like dictionaries which forever preserve these dead artefacts of forgotten language as though it were a part of our living English. They are kind of like the dead congenital twin still stuck to the living baby.
How naughty is it to lie on your resume? I mean are we talking a faux pas that will get you scowled at and potentially lose your job or are we talking fraud that could land you in prison?
Very hard. Even the SAR aircraft operating out of the nearest airport at Perth only have fuel for a couple of hours loiter time. If you are planning a return leg of a trip to that region of the world it pretty much has to come from Australia.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for that, you gave me a chuckle. I agree with you in spririt, but there are a lot of people out there molesting data in order to perform their work function and to get paid. Far more than have any understanding of data structures, algorithms or even basic data normalization. It's unfortunate.
Working. There are far more people that work with large amounts of data than know how to program.
Oh the horror.
TLDR; Just say no to spreadsheets
... for complex software engineering projects. It's okay for 99% of the stuff that regular people use it for.
Perl no good for people that don't program.
The problem isn't that people that know how to program and to test are writing crappy spreadsheets. The problem is that people that don't know how to program and test, ie. the general non IT tech population is writing spreadsheets because they don't know another way to build these tools and they do it in the only way that they've taught themselves to do. If they knew better they often wouldn't start by clicking the excel icon in the first place.
Arguably Howard Hughes Spruce Goose was a fantastic success. But not from a aeronautical engineering point of view. In fact Howard Hughes did about zero to increase the field of aircraft design, nothing ever worked (at least in time to be useful) and none of his designs ever made it to production.
Well a button would be more reliable than a key as it's essentially the same thing with less moving parts.
>You have to know certain facts, you could also ask for what it is good to know where Europe is (the continent), if you don't know anything about the movement of the tectonic plates
We spend 12 years at basic grade school and you don't think there's some time there to learn about basic geology? Most people aren't "interested" in maths and yet have a deeper understanding of it than to know that numbers could be added up if required.
If you're going to have a population that can understand facts and interpret them in such a way that empowers democracy you need to have a population that understands the basis of these facts. Facts taken at face value are not empowering for democracies, they are propaganda for dictatorships and tyrannies. At face value fact "A" can always be replaced with fact "B" for political motives, especially when people have no understanding of either one. If people do not understand the basis of these theories then more intuitive but wrong theories like creation will end up replacing more counter intuitive and complex but correct theories.
Not so long ago it was a "fact" that God sat on the heavenly throne and that dynasties of kings ruled over the population supported by the churches, in what was seen to be a part of perfect heavenly order. It was a fact that Adam and Eve were the first people on Earth and it was a fact that we had eternal souls and it was a fact that you needed the Church to save it. What good does it do to replace one of these facts with any other if the people have no mechanism with which to discriminate between them? The capacity to understand current scientific thought, and indeed to be an active participant in the scientific method is much more important than the capacity to remember facts.
In any case, returning to the theme of the article, having people state "facts" that they have in their head and the certainties to which they believe these facts has more to do with their acceptance of authority than their acceptance and understanding of scientific knowledge. It is a way to measure a populations acceptance of authority though.
By excusing people, the general population, from scientific discourse and a deeper understanding you are effectively moving scientific knowledge from being a process we all have access to and making it a series of facts to be believed. People that beleive that the world is flat will be laughed at, because we can show in a number of ways the Earth is not flat. However not all scientific theories have been verified to the same extent, and people need to retain a little bit of critical thought.
>Not everyone have an interest in science and how theories are formed. But like the ability to read and write,
Not everyone has an interest in reading or writing either, yet we still teach them.
>if you know that the Sun is the centre and not the Earth, you are more likely to support funding for NASA's space exploration,
Is that a fact, theory or hypothesis? Have you tested this?
> Yes, that is what the Big Bang theory is about. That if you go back in time everything did start from a singular point. Then if you go even more back in time you need the Inflation theory and then later the quantum fluctuation theory.
These are mathematical constructs that explain differences between our hypothetical starting at a unified point and the differences from the hypothesis that we observe in reality. Inflation is a way to reconcile theory with observation. You only "need" these things to make the Big Bang theory work. That you "need" inflation to make the Big Bang possible is putting the horse before the cart. Normally theory follows observation, not vice versa as in the case with Inflation.
Indeed the Big Bang theory may still be correct even if the Inflationary theory is proven to be incorrect. Inflation theory is not a fact in the same way that we accept gravity or evolution as a fact, and really still stands to be verified. There are several
>The term Big Bang is a good metaphor, because if you were an observer outside the universe you would It's a terrible metaphor because you can't be an observer outside the universe. It is also a terrible metaphor because the Big Bang expansion would be not really an expansion at all because everything that exists and that will ever exist is already inside the big bang, and nothing can exist on the outside, so nothing is actually getting bigger relative to starting conditions.
This is not an explosion that is blossoming and losing force and cooling through radiation or conduction, because there is nothing for it to radiate or conduct into. The Big Bang is a conceptually difficult idea to grasp, and calling it the Big Bang does not help. This is not at all like an explosion as we might observe on Earth.
>The most obvious evidence of the Big Bang is the cosmic microwave radiation.
Cosmic microwave radiation is there and it also fits with the Big Bang theory, but it also fits with other theories. In any case I am not actually disputing the Big Bang theory, I am suggesting that our certainty of it having happened is much less than 100%, and much less certain than other scientific facts.
> The second evidence is the expanding universe. Well if you knew much about the Big Bang theory you'd know that this was the first evidence for the theory. The fact that if you have an expanding universe that if you back track everything then you will arrive at a point. If everything started as a point then well it must have expanded from a point. The cosmic microwave radiation background was supporting evidence that came about much later. The evidence being if the background radiation is uniform then perhaps everything did start from a unified point.
However there are still plenty of things that the Big Bang does not explain, like why did gravity suddenly become lumpy? To shelve this theory as complete rather than a work in progress is very very premature. It's also very dismissive of the scientific process and the amount of effort that people put into this topic. And of course there are also other interpretations of universal expansion that do not result in a Big Bang.
>Big Bang theory was proposed by Georges Lemaître in 1927 and is based on the observation of the expanding universe and Einstein's equations and is currently accepted as fact.
No I think you are confused. The expanding universe is an accepted fact, the Big Bang theory is one of the best proposed solutions to explain what might have happened as a consequence of back tracking this expansion. Certainly Inflation theory does not make the Big Bang easier to accept, it is indeed an anomaly, indeed you might say it's a patch over a problem with the Big Bang theory, and if Inflation turns out to be true it might indeed lead to explanations of the expanding universe that have a non- Big Bang origin.
If you were to say that evolution or the age of the Earth were accepted as a clear fact I would be much more likely to agree with you.
>You can't expect from everyone to have a scientific education, but you can expect from everyone to know agreed upon facts.
I completely disagree with this sentiment. What good is it for someone to know that the Earth is round of flat if they don't know what that means? Who cares if you "know" that the Big Bang explains the first infinitesimally small units of time in the Universe's existence if you don't know anything else about it? To have people parrot back scientific facts is almost as useless as them parroting back religious truths.
A far greater gauge of a populations disposition towards science and indeed truth would be their understanding of said theories and the complications and alternatives. > Should we also teach flat Earth and Geocentric cosmology? You're being ridiculous now... We should teach articles as defined by good peer driven research, we should not teach science as a series of factoids to be par
The age of the Earth is a lot more solid in terms of a proposition that other theories that the general public were tested for. The thing that bothers me is that the theories that are less certain are presented as fact where there is probably still a lot we don't know about them.
Of particular note is the Big Bang, and this is problematic for two reasons:
1) There is no conclusive and difinitive evidence that the Big Bang actually happened, it's generally accepted to be our best guess at the moment, but it's nowhere near as agreed upon as say the age of the Earth is. Even theories that support the Big Bang go beyond it to multiple bangs or multiple universes which in a way actually undermines the point of the Big Bang proposal in its effort to describe creation.
2) There never was a "Big Bang". In fact the term was coined by Fred Hoyle to ridicule the notion that the universe was created in an instant from a single point. There can't be a bang or explosion without space to explode into and at the point of creation there was no space except for the point that contained everything. So it should be called something more like the Big Expansion or something like that.
When you have the public dogmatically adhering to either arguing for or against something like the Big Bang we end up in a place which is far away from the inquisitive scientific mind and process that we should be aiming for.
What these surveys should be testing for, rather than a dogmatic belief in theories is to see if the general public is able to describe main scientific theories and perhaps even give some reasonable alternatives. That would give us a much better understanding of the general population's understanding of science than just measuring their ability to parrot factoids that they may have heard once, and have chosen to believe based not on science but their own bias and upbringing.
My biggest problem with surveys like these is that they public are being asked to reply with certainties that are far greater in clarity and definition than any scientist working on these fields would ever propose. And then the ignorant public are laughed at for doubting scientific truth. No cosmologist would ever state they were 100% certain that the big bang happened, and yet we laugh at the public for not being certain either. True ignorance shows itself as certainty, either for or against supposed "scientific" principles. Being uncertain is okay, as long as you are aware of some of the options.
A scientist, even a proponent of the Big Bang theory should never say "Yep, that's what happened".
I thought going to the pub was a Scottish martial art.
>you build one time that takes an hour or so What madness is this?? You build the set one time following the instructions because that's what's on the box. Then you destroy it and use its parts in whatever else fantasy mashup constructions you want. That's the true genius of Lego, and it's capacity to educate and inspire kids - giving them a system in which they can build their own ideas.
The Sumerians had tablets and writing a thousand years before Moses wrote his do's and don'ts.
>The latter does not seem to happen in Egnlish. Yeah because it is a) written and b) has no central authority on what the language can contain, or has the power to update the language. The written aspect means that it's frozen it its current state apart from the addition of new words which are added more than any other language on the globe and (b) means that nothing can be revised.
I remember the SX-64. Even back then the screen was just too small to actually be useful. Oh and it was so big and heavy!
By definition if a program is downloaded by a million people and it serves their use case then it's not a shit program. Even if the way it is designed its totally shit awful code spaghetti if the program can do the thing that its users want at the speed they want to do it and it doesn't affect the battery to the point where they stop using it then it's a viable product. Of course there is a ecstatic pinnacle where best practices in coding meet a use case, but the underlying is not as important as meeting the users requirements. Even if I do agree with you that every programmer should at least attempt to write code following best practices.
I don't know that blindly optimising for one set of resources is a good thing. My grandpa would say the same thing when us kids worked in the shed, he would constantly remind us to collect the nails from the timber we were re-purposing, and straighten them and put them into jars because once upon a time in the great depression nails were much more expensive than they were now, and you couldn't go down to the store and get 100 for a dollar, and in any case you didn't have a dollar. In this sense grandpa was really optimised for nail and resource consumption, but perhaps he was not optimised for time consumption. So he was optimising for resources in a time where he would have been a better manager to optimise for time.
When you talk about code optimisation you are always talking about a trade off. In old systems you were forced to optimise for memory and processor time at the expense of time, money, security and memory protection (robustness) optimisation. Now, with far more memory and processor cycles available to us than most programs need we can optimise for other things - example: we can use frameworks and libraries to manage memory so that programs although they don't run as fast as they would if optimised for memory and processor they don't leak memory, and their performance is adequate for their use case. It also takes a lot less time and resources to develop now.
So what I am saying really is when you say something like "99.999% of today's programmers have no fucking clue what code optimisation really means", well the truth is that they do, but that they are optimising for the elements that are the most scarce rather than the elements that are now relatively abundant being memory and cpu time.
Germansdon'thavelongwordstheyjustdon'tlikeusingspaces, much.
The sad part isn't that English doesn't keep original pronunciations, the sad part is because English is a written language we can never bring all of these words into line with each other and rationalise their pronunciations. If English were a spoken language only then all these little glitches would be ironed out very quickly and it would actually start to make sense. But for some reason it has been seen to be 'proper' to freeze English and how it is used at a particular point in time and regard all changes from this point to be illiterate.
The problem with English is that it's stuck halfway into metamorphosing into a different language from its old Germanic roots to what would be a really quite different language. And the reason that it's stuck is because it is written. So all those things that seem to be nuances or glitches of a complex language such as the silent 'h' in school or the 'e' that hangs on the end of name are actually dead aspects of an older language that were actually once functional -- name was once pronounced nam-eh, just as millions of English as a second language speakers mispronounce it. But these glitches refuse to go away because now we have things like dictionaries which forever preserve these dead artefacts of forgotten language as though it were a part of our living English. They are kind of like the dead congenital twin still stuck to the living baby.
How naughty is it to lie on your resume? I mean are we talking a faux pas that will get you scowled at and potentially lose your job or are we talking fraud that could land you in prison?
Very hard. Even the SAR aircraft operating out of the nearest airport at Perth only have fuel for a couple of hours loiter time. If you are planning a return leg of a trip to that region of the world it pretty much has to come from Australia.