A "prep" is a period during the day where you grade/phone parents/work on individual education plans for sped students/make new assignments/grade/grade/grade/do endless paperwork for the district/&c. That stuff doesn't just do itself. And damn the teachers for wanting to get that stuff done during their work day and not all night long, amirite?
You show an astonishing lack of knowledge about teaching. This would be analagous to "what is this debug time? You are a computer programmer. You have a degree. You should be able to type it once, and run the program."
Don't degrade the people who really do work their asses of to try to teach kids.
Parapros do a lot of great stuff. But they do get paid half as much for a reason. Professional development, building curriculum, pedagogical training, etc.
No, you aren't right at all!
That sort of I-cannot-work-off-the-clock mentality is indicative of the decreasing quality of the US education system. Teachers used to work their lesson plans at night. I simply do not understand why they can no longer do that. It is a salaried (and not hourly) position.
Many people debug their code at night or work extra hours because they want to get the job done properly. At least I do.
And just to be clear, I'm not degrading the people who work their asses off to teach kids. I'm degrading the ones that don't work very hard and rely on their union protection to keep them from getting laid off.
Re:Auto-save is NOT your friend
on
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
·
· Score: 1
A properly implemented auto-save feature does not overwrite the original document; it saves a secondary copy, to be used only if the system crashes and you need to recover your edits.
This is what MS Office does. Of course, no one here uses MS Office, so that's not much help...
Actually MS Office tries to do that, but more often than not when it crashes (while autosaving) it corrupts both the original document and the autosave backup.
Nothing beats (1) timestamped backups or (2) manually versioning your file name (XXX1.doc,XXX2.doc,XXX3.doc) to preserve your thought evolution. Why? Because sometimes you want to go back to the last code version that you know worked (XXX42.doc).
You don't want to search through hours/days/months of timestamped backups to figure out what version that was. Restore it, and then find out that it was the wrong version.
All of the new autobackup features make it more difficult to manually control your file evolution. It's like they are trying to dumb your computer down into an ipad.
The trouble is that teachers have been trying to replace themselves for years. You know how many "teacher prep" periods the average US teacher gets now? The vast majority of teachers don't "prep" shit during thier several breaks of PE, music, art, computer lab, library time, and various feedings. In these time blocks, "paraprofessionals" (read: everyone caring for and teaching kids who get paid half as much) take over another chunk of the day and the teacher can chill out for some much needed "prep" time.
Ask anyone who has done IT or technical work in a school district. Technology is the coolest buzzword for driving a pedagogy of student idea synthesis or somesuch fucking bullshit. The real deal is all the grant money is in tech, and teachers LOVE another break. So plug the kids in, and tune the teachers out.
People learn best from people. Computers are tools. But the trend is to drop 30 kids off for some babysitware time.
What is this "prep" time?
You are teaching high school students. You have a Masters degree. You should be able to walk in the room, pick the fake chalk up, and start going.
If you put your lesson plan together the night before, or at least looked over it, you'd be good to go. (You did put your lesson plan together, right? You only need to do it once, the first year you teach the course.)
And don't whine at me about working nights or summers. My parents were teachers... Back before "prep time" and days off for parent/teacher conferences.
The cops already lie about your speed or accidentally pull the wrong car over. They then rely on the judge to side with them in traffic court (where there is no written record and you have to pay a court fee no matter what the outcome).
How will driverless cars change anything?
Also, you can still get a ticket for: 1. Not wearing a seatbelt, 2. reckless driving (officer's judgement), 3. not signaling (officer's judgement), 4. driving "too fast for the conditions," (officer's judgement), 5. texting or talking on a cell phone while "driving," 6. having a broken windshield, expired registration tag, etc.
So there will still be plenty of sources for revenue!
Someone willing to steal, traffic narcotics, and kill is off the streets.
As a bonus, we won't have to pay for his legal fees and incarceration.
I honestly don't understand how anyone can feel that this was anything other than a win-win situation. If you're worried about Big Brother, keep in mind that he actually stole the tracking device that lead to his capture.
Wolves which range hundreds of miles are kept in captivity by humans in small areas (dogs), and they live far longer with humans than in the wild.
Dogs get taken out for walkies at least once per day, or they start to go crazy and become unhealthy. Captive orcas never have the equivalent. It's the equivalent of a dog getting all it's exercise by walking round and round the coffee table. I wouldn't expect such a dog to have the same lifespan as a dog that's been out for walks.
Along those lines, if I let my dog off leash to run in the woods for a while, she comes back to me at the end of the day. I assume that means that she is happier to live with me than to live alone in the woods.
Why not let the captive orca's have a free swim every week or so and see if they come back?
I haven't had much trouble ripping discs that were pressed in the 80s (and acquired from used CD stores with who knows how many previous owners), but I'm starting to get nervous about not having flac rips of most of my discs.
Don't worry so much! The music industry has your back. For a small fee (equivalent to the current price of the media), they will provide you with the media that was lost.
Nothing pisses a team off faster than a young, new engineer coming in and writing code in a new language that no one else knows. No one can proof it. No one can compile it. No one understands why the new guy needs to be different. No one wants to rewrite the old programs (which have been working fine for 30+ years) in the new language.
They teach engineers C++, Java, and Fortran in school. C++ and Java so that they can learn programming and Fortran so that they can actually keep a job.
Why not put solar panels on the car roof, hood, and trunk?
Sure, you have less surface area, but unlike the garage, they would always be within reach of the car and charging it. Those 5 and 6 series BMW's are nice and wide too!
Plus, if you like black cars, it would look cool.
And no whining about engineering or cost, BMW doesn't compromise on either of those fronts!
If the actual poll results are true, it suggest Ukraine is not that divided fundamentally at all, and that a small group of pro-Russian agitators lead by Russian military personnel out of uniform are creating this civil war.
Wait... you need poll results to draw that conclusion?
Every material has an energy density limit, at which point it will breakdown or ionize.
And given that no material is completely transparent to any wavelength, once you produce enough energy density, every material will ionize and place an upper limit on laser propagation.
Maybe it is just me, but why does the article look like it is written for 8-year olds? From the layout to the writing and includes errors that show the writer is not really an amateur astronomer. For example they used an image to show "piggyback" mount. Well, they took an image from a webpage that is titled Questar telescope piggyback mount, only from that article they took the image WITHOUT the piggyback mount! There are better articles about Isaac Roberts, the ones I had read were better. But of course it wouldn't be/. tradition if the summary linked the best ones!
It's not just you. That "medium.com" website does what Powerpoint did for presentations.
The media format makes anything look good, until someone with an operable brain actually reads it.
I find that most of the articles written that way (like the presentations in Powerpoint) are also 2-10 times too long for the content.
Regarding the article content, I would argue that the invention of the lens, the telescope, the equatorial mount, the film camera, and the CCD chip are of equal or larger importance than developing piggybacking. Piggybacking is not a particularly novel concept if you have a camera and an equatorial mount. It's about as novel as resting your rifle (or iPhone) on a still surface when you shoot a deer 200 yards away (or take a picture at night). The development of each of those other items was groundbreaking and required actual insight and effort.
The postmaster General is right, those 400 junk mailers are paying for the entire system. That letter you send once a year for $.50 doesn't even come close to paying the billions those junk mailers pay that provides the money the USPS needs to have 100K employees and a fleet of vehicles and planes that would dwarf some governments.
So wait... why do I have to pay the 50 cents then if my money is irrelevant to their business model?
I can't honestly believe that you are justifying the junk mail as the sole reason that the USPS can stay solvent. Where do you think the money to print that junk mail comes from? The mail fairy? No, it comes from you and I!
We pay mark-ups on the products that are advertised. We pay more for paper due to the demand from the junk mail suppliers. We pay to recycle that shit (and there is a lot of it) every week. We breathe the pollutants caused by its creation. I could keep going, but you get the point.
It's just another hidden tax on the private citizen that is forced onto us by a corporation who is bribing a government organization.
Frankly, I would rather pay more for mail and not have these companies spam me and waste paper.
Also, would I really pay more for mail if the junk mail went away? A postal carrier could then carry more mail per truck and deliver that mail more quickly. There would be less sorting at the post office as well since 99% of it is junk mail. This would translate to less postal workers and less retirement costs.
Hell, maybe my mail-woman wouldn't be a total bitch all the time too, if she didn't have to sort though all the junk mail every day!
Anyone who knows how to properly split wood is already doing what this funny looking axe does with their wrists.
1. Buy a basic splitting axe. This is the one with the wide ramped head. 2. Learn to twist the axe head during impact to split the wood more effectively. 3. Look like a man.
I mean, come on, if you want the modern version of the axe to make it easier to split wood, buy a Sawzall.
That weakling got Osama, has Iran giving up it's highly enriched Uranium to lift the sanctions, and cut a deal that got Syria to give up their chemical weapons. There are other measures of strength than blowing shit up. Diplomacy works.
Now, as a dirty lib, I do believe he is a weak president on the homefront. Dude hasn't even TRIED to fulfill his campaign promises and keeps trying to cut deals with the Republicans who clearly aren't going to give him squadoo even though he gives them 90% of what they wanted anyway. Sigh....
If you're going to hate on Obama, hate on him for real reasons. His foreign policy had strengthened us, not weakened us. Bush is the one that took us from having the whole world supporting us to having everyone revile us. Again....
Seriously? Are you that naive?
1. The US Military and Intelligence Services got Osama. All Obama did was say: "OK" and a day later "I gave the order to kill Osama..."
2. Do you really think that Iran doesn't have other sites that inspectors have not yet found? Also, they can still make more because they didn't give up the capability!
3. Do you really think that Syria gave up all its chemical weapons?
What seems to be missing from this article: Mark Steyn, a conservative talk show host, called Mann a fraud. So, Mann is suing Steyn for defamation. As his defense, Steyn is trying to prove that the data was manipulated and cherry picked. Therefore, proving that Steyn's comments were justified. So, Steyn requested the data under the FIOA, since Mann's work was publicly funded.
But Mann - the scientist who warns us that global warming is real and dangerous based on a computer model - refuses to give out the computer code and data that he used to form his assertions. To me, this doesn't sound very scientific or very honest.
This highlights one of the problems with current science.
Early on (1960's) scientist used to include their code at the end of their paper, for all to evaluate. Today, predictive codes are significantly more complex and have grown into a real cash cow for the scientist, if they catch on. Thus, they are no longer distributed for free because the scientist wants to keep the code internal to their group to maintain funding.
This creates a real problem from a peer-review perspective because you can never really figure out what the code is doing or if it has been fudged. At best, you get a few half-ass validation efforts that are published in some crappy journal. After that, the authors just refer to that crappy article as proof that their code work perfectly and feel they never have to justify its accuracy again. (The editors feel that way too!)
For highly controversial and groundbreaking studies, I would argue that all the data and code needs to be clearly laid out after acceptance of the paper. The data needs to be available for people to analyze on their own. The code needs to be available for a more rigorous peer review. I understand that that may pose a hardship on the scientist for future studies as it gives away their "edge," but he has clearly reaped tremendous press over his paper so maybe it balances out.
My personal opinion (aside from what I think of global warming) is that the fact that Mann is unwilling to release his code or data supporting his famous paper probably indicates that he is at least a little bit worried that the code is wrong or some data was cherry picked. That's not really a very good stance for an academic who is making a groundbreaking argument.
I used to live across the street from police & fire stations. I can sleep through anything. A few years ago, searching for ever louder and more earth-shaking alarm clocks, I got to thinking about that. For tens of thousands of years mankind has not had alarm clocks. We relied on the Sun and Daylight to wake us up. So I went down to the local megamart and bought a digital outlet timer. You know, the sort of thing you use to turn your lights on automatically while you're out of town. Hooked up a power strip to it, and plugged in a bunch of $5 floor lamps. Nothing like a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Lamps.
Every morning at exactly 6:55 the digital timer turns on and my room is brightened by 5,000+ lumens of light. It's a nice way to wake up. Very gentle. You come out of sleep slowly rather than abruptly.
What if your significant other doesn't want to wake up at the same time that you do?
Wow, I am so sick of Californians stroking themselves. There are 49 other states in the country filled with people equivalently valuable to those in Cali. Try to keep that in mind.
They Bay Area is one of the few economically active places in the USA, that's why housing is expensive there.
If you want cheap housing, go to an economically dying area, like Detroit; or a place with no regulations such that chemicals leak into your house or explode in your face, like Texas.
The Bay area is boxed in by water, limiting available space and it has a high-population density. The land is also scenically desirable. So yeah, rent is going to be high.
Other cities in the US and across the world have the same issues, but don't resort to socialist approaches such as rent control or have the same sense of entitlement (for better or worse). They just let capitalism work things out.
Amazingly enough, they are also able to restrain themselves from insulting other states when expressing any displeasure online. Amazing!
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you parent were really poor teachers...
Apparently, your so was your spelling teacher!
A "prep" is a period during the day where you grade/phone parents/work on individual education plans for sped students/make new assignments/grade/grade/grade/do endless paperwork for the district/&c. That stuff doesn't just do itself. And damn the teachers for wanting to get that stuff done during their work day and not all night long, amirite?
You show an astonishing lack of knowledge about teaching. This would be analagous to "what is this debug time? You are a computer programmer. You have a degree. You should be able to type it once, and run the program."
Don't degrade the people who really do work their asses of to try to teach kids.
Parapros do a lot of great stuff. But they do get paid half as much for a reason. Professional development, building curriculum, pedagogical training, etc.
No, you aren't right at all!
That sort of I-cannot-work-off-the-clock mentality is indicative of the decreasing quality of the US education system. Teachers used to work their lesson plans at night. I simply do not understand why they can no longer do that. It is a salaried (and not hourly) position.
Many people debug their code at night or work extra hours because they want to get the job done properly. At least I do.
And just to be clear, I'm not degrading the people who work their asses off to teach kids. I'm degrading the ones that don't work very hard and rely on their union protection to keep them from getting laid off.
A properly implemented auto-save feature does not overwrite the original document; it saves a secondary copy, to be used only if the system crashes and you need to recover your edits.
This is what MS Office does. Of course, no one here uses MS Office, so that's not much help...
Actually MS Office tries to do that, but more often than not when it crashes (while autosaving) it corrupts both the original document and the autosave backup.
Nothing beats (1) timestamped backups or (2) manually versioning your file name (XXX1.doc,XXX2.doc,XXX3.doc) to preserve your thought evolution. Why? Because sometimes you want to go back to the last code version that you know worked (XXX42.doc).
You don't want to search through hours/days/months of timestamped backups to figure out what version that was. Restore it, and then find out that it was the wrong version.
All of the new autobackup features make it more difficult to manually control your file evolution. It's like they are trying to dumb your computer down into an ipad.
No.
A good teacher beats babysitware any day.
The trouble is that teachers have been trying to replace themselves for years. You know how many "teacher prep" periods the average US teacher gets now? The vast majority of teachers don't "prep" shit during thier several breaks of PE, music, art, computer lab, library time, and various feedings. In these time blocks, "paraprofessionals" (read: everyone caring for and teaching kids who get paid half as much) take over another chunk of the day and the teacher can chill out for some much needed "prep" time.
Ask anyone who has done IT or technical work in a school district. Technology is the coolest buzzword for driving a pedagogy of student idea synthesis or somesuch fucking bullshit. The real deal is all the grant money is in tech, and teachers LOVE another break. So plug the kids in, and tune the teachers out.
People learn best from people. Computers are tools. But the trend is to drop 30 kids off for some babysitware time.
What is this "prep" time?
You are teaching high school students. You have a Masters degree. You should be able to walk in the room, pick the fake chalk up, and start going.
If you put your lesson plan together the night before, or at least looked over it, you'd be good to go. (You did put your lesson plan together, right? You only need to do it once, the first year you teach the course.)
And don't whine at me about working nights or summers. My parents were teachers... Back before "prep time" and days off for parent/teacher conferences.
The cops already lie about your speed or accidentally pull the wrong car over. They then rely on the judge to side with them in traffic court (where there is no written record and you have to pay a court fee no matter what the outcome).
How will driverless cars change anything?
Also, you can still get a ticket for:
1. Not wearing a seatbelt,
2. reckless driving (officer's judgement),
3. not signaling (officer's judgement),
4. driving "too fast for the conditions," (officer's judgement),
5. texting or talking on a cell phone while "driving,"
6. having a broken windshield, expired registration tag, etc.
So there will still be plenty of sources for revenue!
Seriously, I wouldn't rule Thunderbolt out yet.
It's taken how many iterations for someone to design a symmetrical cable?
Sure, Apple got there first, but it still took decades!
We clearly are not working with the best or the brightest on either side!
Someone willing to steal, traffic narcotics, and kill is off the streets.
As a bonus, we won't have to pay for his legal fees and incarceration.
I honestly don't understand how anyone can feel that this was anything other than a win-win situation. If you're worried about Big Brother, keep in mind that he actually stole the tracking device that lead to his capture.
Blackfish, Blackfish, Blackfish. Can anyone sum up some of the points of this movie instead of just saying watch it?
Sure we could! But you'll have to check out the documentary called Blackfish, currently on Netflix.
Also, I will need you to properly file your coversheet on your TPS report after you watch Blackfish on Netflix. Yeah.... That'd be great.
Wolves which range hundreds of miles are kept in captivity by humans in small areas (dogs), and they live far longer with humans than in the wild.
Dogs get taken out for walkies at least once per day, or they start to go crazy and become unhealthy. Captive orcas never have the equivalent. It's the equivalent of a dog getting all it's exercise by walking round and round the coffee table. I wouldn't expect such a dog to have the same lifespan as a dog that's been out for walks.
Along those lines, if I let my dog off leash to run in the woods for a while, she comes back to me at the end of the day. I assume that means that she is happier to live with me than to live alone in the woods.
Why not let the captive orca's have a free swim every week or so and see if they come back?
I haven't had much trouble ripping discs that were pressed in the 80s (and acquired from used CD stores with who knows how many previous owners), but I'm starting to get nervous about not having flac rips of most of my discs.
Don't worry so much! The music industry has your back. For a small fee (equivalent to the current price of the media), they will provide you with the media that was lost.
EM emissions in what is effectively a huge Faraday cage? I don't think so.
Faraday cages don't just switch off EM fields; they only attenuate them AND they have different responses to different frequencies.
If you have a sensitive enough detector, enough power, or a weak enough cage, you can detect transmissions though the cage.
You should restrain yourself from over-confidently sounding off on topics that you are not an expert on, less you propagate your ignorance to others.
A: Legacy code.
and
B. Legacy scientists.
Nothing pisses a team off faster than a young, new engineer coming in and writing code in a new language that no one else knows. No one can proof it. No one can compile it. No one understands why the new guy needs to be different. No one wants to rewrite the old programs (which have been working fine for 30+ years) in the new language.
They teach engineers C++, Java, and Fortran in school. C++ and Java so that they can learn programming and Fortran so that they can actually keep a job.
Why not put solar panels on the car roof, hood, and trunk?
Sure, you have less surface area, but unlike the garage, they would always be within reach of the car and charging it. Those 5 and 6 series BMW's are nice and wide too!
Plus, if you like black cars, it would look cool.
And no whining about engineering or cost, BMW doesn't compromise on either of those fronts!
Why treat the waste when you can just bury it?
Nothing could go wrong when pumping large amounts of solvents into the ground at high pressure!
We should dump our nuclear waste in the same way! It'll be great!
Wait a second...
If the actual poll results are true, it suggest Ukraine is not that divided fundamentally at all, and that a small group of pro-Russian agitators lead by Russian military personnel out of uniform are creating this civil war.
Wait... you need poll results to draw that conclusion?
The article reads as somewhat naive to me.
Every material has an energy density limit, at which point it will breakdown or ionize.
And given that no material is completely transparent to any wavelength, once you produce enough energy density, every material will ionize and place an upper limit on laser propagation.
Maybe it is just me, but why does the article look like it is written for 8-year olds? From the layout to the writing and includes errors that show the writer is not really an amateur astronomer. For example they used an image to show "piggyback" mount. Well, they took an image from a webpage that is titled Questar telescope piggyback mount, only from that article they took the image WITHOUT the piggyback mount! There are better articles about Isaac Roberts, the ones I had read were better. /. tradition if the summary linked the best ones!
But of course it wouldn't be
It's not just you. That "medium.com" website does what Powerpoint did for presentations.
The media format makes anything look good, until someone with an operable brain actually reads it.
I find that most of the articles written that way (like the presentations in Powerpoint) are also 2-10 times too long for the content.
Regarding the article content, I would argue that the invention of the lens, the telescope, the equatorial mount, the film camera, and the CCD chip are of equal or larger importance than developing piggybacking. Piggybacking is not a particularly novel concept if you have a camera and an equatorial mount. It's about as novel as resting your rifle (or iPhone) on a still surface when you shoot a deer 200 yards away (or take a picture at night). The development of each of those other items was groundbreaking and required actual insight and effort.
The postmaster General is right, those 400 junk mailers are paying for the entire system. That letter you send once a year for $.50 doesn't even come close to paying the billions those junk mailers pay that provides the money the USPS needs to have 100K employees and a fleet of vehicles and planes that would dwarf some governments.
So wait... why do I have to pay the 50 cents then if my money is irrelevant to their business model?
I can't honestly believe that you are justifying the junk mail as the sole reason that the USPS can stay solvent. Where do you think the money to print that junk mail comes from? The mail fairy? No, it comes from you and I!
We pay mark-ups on the products that are advertised. We pay more for paper due to the demand from the junk mail suppliers. We pay to recycle that shit (and there is a lot of it) every week. We breathe the pollutants caused by its creation. I could keep going, but you get the point.
It's just another hidden tax on the private citizen that is forced onto us by a corporation who is bribing a government organization.
Frankly, I would rather pay more for mail and not have these companies spam me and waste paper.
Also, would I really pay more for mail if the junk mail went away? A postal carrier could then carry more mail per truck and deliver that mail more quickly. There would be less sorting at the post office as well since 99% of it is junk mail. This would translate to less postal workers and less retirement costs.
Hell, maybe my mail-woman wouldn't be a total bitch all the time too, if she didn't have to sort though all the junk mail every day!
Exciting!
Anyone who knows how to properly split wood is already doing what this funny looking axe does with their wrists.
1. Buy a basic splitting axe. This is the one with the wide ramped head.
2. Learn to twist the axe head during impact to split the wood more effectively.
3. Look like a man.
I mean, come on, if you want the modern version of the axe to make it easier to split wood, buy a Sawzall.
That weakling got Osama, has Iran giving up it's highly enriched Uranium to lift the sanctions, and cut a deal that got Syria to give up their chemical weapons. There are other measures of strength than blowing shit up. Diplomacy works.
Now, as a dirty lib, I do believe he is a weak president on the homefront. Dude hasn't even TRIED to fulfill his campaign promises and keeps trying to cut deals with the Republicans who clearly aren't going to give him squadoo even though he gives them 90% of what they wanted anyway. Sigh....
If you're going to hate on Obama, hate on him for real reasons. His foreign policy had strengthened us, not weakened us. Bush is the one that took us from having the whole world supporting us to having everyone revile us. Again....
Seriously? Are you that naive?
1. The US Military and Intelligence Services got Osama. All Obama did was say: "OK" and a day later "I gave the order to kill Osama..."
2. Do you really think that Iran doesn't have other sites that inspectors have not yet found? Also, they can still make more because they didn't give up the capability!
3. Do you really think that Syria gave up all its chemical weapons?
What seems to be missing from this article: Mark Steyn, a conservative talk show host, called Mann a fraud. So, Mann is suing Steyn for defamation. As his defense, Steyn is trying to prove that the data was manipulated and cherry picked. Therefore, proving that Steyn's comments were justified. So, Steyn requested the data under the FIOA, since Mann's work was publicly funded.
But Mann - the scientist who warns us that global warming is real and dangerous based on a computer model - refuses to give out the computer code and data that he used to form his assertions. To me, this doesn't sound very scientific or very honest.
This highlights one of the problems with current science.
Early on (1960's) scientist used to include their code at the end of their paper, for all to evaluate. Today, predictive codes are significantly more complex and have grown into a real cash cow for the scientist, if they catch on. Thus, they are no longer distributed for free because the scientist wants to keep the code internal to their group to maintain funding.
This creates a real problem from a peer-review perspective because you can never really figure out what the code is doing or if it has been fudged. At best, you get a few half-ass validation efforts that are published in some crappy journal. After that, the authors just refer to that crappy article as proof that their code work perfectly and feel they never have to justify its accuracy again. (The editors feel that way too!)
For highly controversial and groundbreaking studies, I would argue that all the data and code needs to be clearly laid out after acceptance of the paper. The data needs to be available for people to analyze on their own. The code needs to be available for a more rigorous peer review. I understand that that may pose a hardship on the scientist for future studies as it gives away their "edge," but he has clearly reaped tremendous press over his paper so maybe it balances out.
My personal opinion (aside from what I think of global warming) is that the fact that Mann is unwilling to release his code or data supporting his famous paper probably indicates that he is at least a little bit worried that the code is wrong or some data was cherry picked. That's not really a very good stance for an academic who is making a groundbreaking argument.
Alarm Clock? Really?
I used to live across the street from police & fire stations. I can sleep through anything. A few years ago, searching for ever louder and more earth-shaking alarm clocks, I got to thinking about that. For tens of thousands of years mankind has not had alarm clocks. We relied on the Sun and Daylight to wake us up. So I went down to the local megamart and bought a digital outlet timer. You know, the sort of thing you use to turn your lights on automatically while you're out of town. Hooked up a power strip to it, and plugged in a bunch of $5 floor lamps. Nothing like a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Lamps.
Every morning at exactly 6:55 the digital timer turns on and my room is brightened by 5,000+ lumens of light. It's a nice way to wake up. Very gentle. You come out of sleep slowly rather than abruptly.
What if your significant other doesn't want to wake up at the same time that you do?
Wow, I am so sick of Californians stroking themselves. There are 49 other states in the country filled with people equivalently valuable to those in Cali. Try to keep that in mind.
They Bay Area is one of the few economically active places in the USA, that's why housing is expensive there.
If you want cheap housing, go to an economically dying area, like Detroit; or a place with no regulations such that chemicals leak into your house or explode in your face, like Texas.
The Bay area is boxed in by water, limiting available space and it has a high-population density. The land is also scenically desirable. So yeah, rent is going to be high.
Other cities in the US and across the world have the same issues, but don't resort to socialist approaches such as rent control or have the same sense of entitlement (for better or worse). They just let capitalism work things out.
Amazingly enough, they are also able to restrain themselves from insulting other states when expressing any displeasure online. Amazing!
Is it because of her advanced medical degree? Her first hand knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry?
Uh, duh! She has large fake breasts (medical experience), is attractive, was in Playboy and has 1.14 Million twitter followers.
Obviously she is someone that we should listen to!