Well it wouldn't matter if you weren't texting while doing 70 on the highway!:-)
ok, I am sure the article is about the fonts on the dashboard or something like that but really, the number of drivers I see texting while they are rolling a ton of metal along at high speeds is ridiculous.
>>The amount of beef you need to eat on a daily basis for your protein needs would be a cube (raw) is about 1.5 inches on a side, anything after that is just clogging up your colon and your arteries.
>You're neglecting what it does to my taste buds and the pleasure center of my brain. Again, false economy.
Is this one of the reasons why the USA has big problems with obesity? I am not suggesting you're overweight, but if the general philosophical position on "how much food is enough / too much" is driven by what people desire, what satisfies their 'pleasure center of their brain' , then perhaps this is where the problem lies. Does the USA (and many other places) need to better educate its citizens?
I am not a biologist, so would love to hear from one, but I am guessing that our desire for delicious food is greater than our need - leading to obesity?
I'd beg to differ that you live longer by satisfying your pleasure centers as a primary determinant - health conditions related to obesity prove this to the contrary.
"I'd be happy to go back and take pix if they'd pay for the trip."
- Cost of hotels and airflights around the world will be the small part of the expenses. How much does it cost to ask the Louvre in Paris to close their gallery and reposition the Mona Lisa for you to get a nice shot, then ask the Vatican if they'd close the Sistine Chapel while you take photos, the big galleries in the USA to retrieve their most priceless paintings from the secure vaults and set them up so you can "take pix"?
That I think will be where the costs are... hence probably cheaper when writing art history books to purchase the rights to use an existing high quality image.
Help fund local after school clubs: activities run in your local schools that further education local kids in a more informal environment. Get in contact with a local school and ask them what would help them run a technology / computing after school club. Perhaps they could do with some electronics tools (soldering irons etc) or some raspberry pi's, or basic robot kits.
These activities really help both academically struggling kids to find something they enjoy and catch up with their peers, reduces the chances of them dropping out, and also give gifted pupils the opportunity to push on further. The teachers can be more laid back as these activities are outside the core curriculum and not strictly evaluated so they often encourage the children to try out more experimental activities and emphasise fun and individual learning more than exam passing. And it's a good place for kids to be after school, they also learn a lot of positive social skills.
To be totally selfish, helping local kids to become inspired and enjoy education is better for your neighbourhood as well, and builds future social capacity as well as economic capacity in the area!
Indeed, a bit like the Imperial (non-metric) distance measuring system is meaningless for almost everyone outside the USA. The more common decimal three orders of magnitude system (millimeters, meters, kilometers) makes a lot more sense. But we try to get by.
It's about the combination of both the tech and getting the creative people together in a working environment that allows them to explore interesting and sometimes dead ideas to come up with works of genius.
You're very right that the sound production equipment can probably be pulled together by any western teenager that really wants a fantastic sound studio. But the fact that the vast majority of people just produce low quality rubbish shows that you need to create an environment to produce the kind of ground breaking work that the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used to achieve (tips hat to Delia Derbyshire...).
I guess after all these years maybe some folk in the BBC have realised what an amazing set up they had, and would like to recreate it in some form in the hope more fantastic work will be produced, attract the right sort of people, give them the right sort of working environment etc.
The more national organisations and other countries running successful space operations, the more chance all us geeks have a chance of our dreams to take a tourist package into space come true:-)
More seriously - it's got to be a good thing that India can develop and manage its own space program, bringing its own researchers through and increasing its high tech industrial capacity. More space programs means more cross fertilisation of ideas across programs. Perhaps we are finally getting past the faltering early days and the analogy is now closer to the 1920s and 30s air flight parallel, with an industry maturing?
Have you visited urban India? Lots of short taxi journeys are made in petrol driven autorickshaws: there are thousands of these around, you hop onto them at the train station for a ride a couple of miles away to meet your friend in a cafe. City planners have been struggling with the pollution they kick out. My suspicion is that Tata is targetting these as the vehicles to replace.
Another posted has noted 137 miles range - how often do people take 100 mile taxi rides in cities? I think Tata is looking to get the massive and probably lucrative urban local taxi niche with these, sell them to city planners as pollution free (on the street level), clean air in cities. Most passengers are looking for ten to fifteen minute rides a few miles across town in the central areas. Set up refueling stations around all the main stations and transport hubs and you've got the taxi drivers covered: they can do ten to twenty runs then refill a couple of times a day. I can't comment on the practicalities you mention on how you operationalise a compressed air filling station - but Tata is a huge global multinational engineering company, so I'd guess if anybody can they could put resources/PhDs/finance into solving the problem.
I think "engagement" is a key term here: it suggests your personal, intrinsic motivation is the most significant factor. Do you have kids? a significant partner? elderly parents to care for?
For many people their external commitments modify the extent to which they can achieve the commitment that their intrinsic motivation would allow.
In many cases this only means easy compromises like hobbies biting the dust (classic parent situation with hobby artefacts rusting away in garage/loft etc.) but for some people this means having to decide on a more serious level: you might be really engaged in your work but if you have to check that your elderly mother living alone is ok, then work's got to take second place - or some extra planning is required.
(I understand you state "occasional" so perhaps you negotiate these sessions given your other commitments).
You provide a possible explanation - I am sure there's some truth in the belief that students are more discerning now it costs much more to study. However the IOP and others have provided some evidence for their argument so we should at least consider it. Definitely it would be interesting to hear if you've come across research into students' attitudes towards their choice of university courses.
The USA is a very big economic power. The USA can say to the UK "either you give up this one little guy or we can change some esoteric tax tarriff that will mean many of your businesses can't trade so well with us, and therefore put millions of people in your country out of work and crash your economy. Your choice". Little countries have to do what big countries tell them to do or face the consequences.
Welcome to the world of real politics and economic strategy. Maybe David Cameron (UK Prime Minister) hates looking like the US's lapdog but has decided he couldn't look a whole town in the eye and tell them that they are all going to be unemployed for the next ten years because the US company they all work for has decided to move out to Poland/Ireland/Portugal etc. on the US government's advice, and he's had to make that choice.
"Everyone in the software industry who does stuff related to programming computers falls somewhere fairly precise on this political spectrum,"
Conservative to Liberal in US political terms. Hmm, USA!=World. Fail.
Quite apart from the fact that some folk who do stuff relating to programming computers are clearly out and out anarchists if we're to judge on the evidence and I am sure you'd all agree the Open Source people are definitely Evil Commies:-)
The UK having the First Amendment to the United States Constitution would suppose that the United States Constitution applies to the UK. It does not. While some may muse about how much influence the USA has politically over the UK, the UK does have its own legal system. However, it does not have a written constitution.
Am I right that Indian traditional music uses a different set of scales? (for example)
I think the article is focussing on western pop music - by which I think they mean European and North American, plus NZ and Aus?
I'd imagine there are a range of other musical styles and structures out there, including for pop music. Lots of vibrant youth cultures all round the world. In the UK for example we regularly get waves of influence from cultures outside the USA and Europe (e.g. from across Africa and Asian continents). So I'd be suprised if all these musical forms come down to half a dozen chords: bhangra/bollywood sounds very different for a start to my ears. Though I am no musician and I'd welcome being educated!
You note that information is one of the required elements of self-education, and the other key element is practice. I think for many fields a third key element may also be reflection (though you may be implying this within 'practice'?).
Anybody know if astronauts are markedly more susceptible to illnesses like cancer due to greater exposure to radiation outside of the Earth's atmosphere?
Or is the increased exposure in their few days out of the atmosphere pretty insignificant in terms of increasing the chances of cancers etc. developing compared to their various exposures in 60 years plus of living inside the atmosphere?
Great start. I think this should be funded to all publicly funded research, not just science. If the tax payers have paid for it, surely they should be able to read the results of the work they've funded? Not just 'science' (however this is defined).
Don't forget walkways and access to individual plants.
I don't know about how you manage your greenhouse but I am always finding I have to move trays of plants in and out to get access to look after the individual plants. So reduce the area accordingly: these are growing plants to be maintained, not just cans of beans that can be stacked, stored, and pulled out when needed. I'd say quite a lot less than the maximum volume you propose.
"People can do other things to make money. Produce things for sale, even." As long as they don't over price themselves against the other producers that Amazon and the like consumers purchase from, such as manufacturers in China and other Asian countries. So they'll need to keep their wages costs below 10 dollars a day to remain competitive if they wish to sell goods produced by the large Asian manufacturers.
Of course some niche producers can charge more, e.g. violin makers, but this is not likely to employ 300 million people.
Why are there too many patents in the USA? because the country is owned by lawyers?
Something doesn't work: find somebody to sue! Not sure if whether to sue? A lawyer will recommend you do! Got an idea which might be worth a couple of dollars, keep you fed for a couple of months? patent it and claim anybody using the idea is putting you out of the equivalent of the GDP of an average European country!
Where do these people get the figures from?
Maybe that's not the case but it looks like it from outside;-)
or perhaps it's the Invisible Hand of the Market that is deciding?;-)
I thought when the "political correctness!" cry is made, it is generally associated with concerns that a centralised government authority has too much power over the citizens.
Interested to hear you use it in the context of 'too much citizen choice, not enough regulation'.
Theresa May is from the Conservative Party, the UK's right wing major political party (I think this means something like Democrat in the USA?). Her party is very pro-USA in terms of where they take their political lead from and want to orient their geo-politics - as opposed to, say, a more pro-centrist/socialist European line. So I don't think it's too surprising that she'll be happy to do the US government a small favour on this one.
Some might say it's going too far to extradite UK citizens who are alleged to have broken a US law while in the UK, others might say it's pragmatic to work for closer ties with the world's largest super power when they come asking a favour (which is within English law: the Extradition Act of 2003).
The reason the Isle of Man is a hub for this kind of activity is because it's a a tax haven. It's not a continent sized country full of engineers, launch facilities and research universities: more like 200 square miles in total. So while it might be the fifth most likely country to put somebody on the moon, this is mostly because it's an attractive place to have your offices.
By this rationale, I guess Monaco, Liechtenstein, Andorra and the Seychelles are more likely to put a man on the moon than the USA, Russia, or China?
Good luck on them and it would be quite fun if the Manx flag did fly on the moon soon, but as far as I can work out their space facilities comprise of one former RAF aircraft hanger. This is not to dismiss they might have several billion dollars salted away in the local offshore banks to spend on Russian hardware and engineering expertise....
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Why this obsession with Columbus? he wasn't the first European in recent historical times to sail to America...
Well it wouldn't matter if you weren't texting while doing 70 on the highway! :-)
ok, I am sure the article is about the fonts on the dashboard or something like that but really, the number of drivers I see texting while they are rolling a ton of metal along at high speeds is ridiculous.
>>The amount of beef you need to eat on a daily basis for your protein needs would be a cube (raw) is about 1.5 inches on a side, anything after that is just clogging up your colon and your arteries.
>You're neglecting what it does to my taste buds and the pleasure center of my brain. Again, false economy.
Is this one of the reasons why the USA has big problems with obesity? I am not suggesting you're overweight, but if the general philosophical position on "how much food is enough / too much" is driven by what people desire, what satisfies their 'pleasure center of their brain' , then perhaps this is where the problem lies. Does the USA (and many other places) need to better educate its citizens?
I am not a biologist, so would love to hear from one, but I am guessing that our desire for delicious food is greater than our need - leading to obesity?
I'd beg to differ that you live longer by satisfying your pleasure centers as a primary determinant - health conditions related to obesity prove this to the contrary.
"I'd be happy to go back and take pix if they'd pay for the trip."
- Cost of hotels and airflights around the world will be the small part of the expenses. How much does it cost to ask the Louvre in Paris to close their gallery and reposition the Mona Lisa for you to get a nice shot, then ask the Vatican if they'd close the Sistine Chapel while you take photos, the big galleries in the USA to retrieve their most priceless paintings from the secure vaults and set them up so you can "take pix"?
That I think will be where the costs are... hence probably cheaper when writing art history books to purchase the rights to use an existing high quality image.
Help fund local after school clubs: activities run in your local schools that further education local kids in a more informal environment. Get in contact with a local school and ask them what would help them run a technology / computing after school club. Perhaps they could do with some electronics tools (soldering irons etc) or some raspberry pi's, or basic robot kits.
These activities really help both academically struggling kids to find something they enjoy and catch up with their peers, reduces the chances of them dropping out, and also give gifted pupils the opportunity to push on further. The teachers can be more laid back as these activities are outside the core curriculum and not strictly evaluated so they often encourage the children to try out more experimental activities and emphasise fun and individual learning more than exam passing. And it's a good place for kids to be after school, they also learn a lot of positive social skills.
To be totally selfish, helping local kids to become inspired and enjoy education is better for your neighbourhood as well, and builds future social capacity as well as economic capacity in the area!
Indeed, a bit like the Imperial (non-metric) distance measuring system is meaningless for almost everyone outside the USA. The more common decimal three orders of magnitude system (millimeters, meters, kilometers) makes a lot more sense. But we try to get by.
It's about the combination of both the tech and getting the creative people together in a working environment that allows them to explore interesting and sometimes dead ideas to come up with works of genius.
You're very right that the sound production equipment can probably be pulled together by any western teenager that really wants a fantastic sound studio. But the fact that the vast majority of people just produce low quality rubbish shows that you need to create an environment to produce the kind of ground breaking work that the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used to achieve (tips hat to Delia Derbyshire...).
I guess after all these years maybe some folk in the BBC have realised what an amazing set up they had, and would like to recreate it in some form in the hope more fantastic work will be produced, attract the right sort of people, give them the right sort of working environment etc.
The more national organisations and other countries running successful space operations, the more chance all us geeks have a chance of our dreams to take a tourist package into space come true :-)
More seriously - it's got to be a good thing that India can develop and manage its own space program, bringing its own researchers through and increasing its high tech industrial capacity. More space programs means more cross fertilisation of ideas across programs. Perhaps we are finally getting past the faltering early days and the analogy is now closer to the 1920s and 30s air flight parallel, with an industry maturing?
Have you visited urban India? Lots of short taxi journeys are made in petrol driven autorickshaws: there are thousands of these around, you hop onto them at the train station for a ride a couple of miles away to meet your friend in a cafe. City planners have been struggling with the pollution they kick out. My suspicion is that Tata is targetting these as the vehicles to replace.
Another posted has noted 137 miles range - how often do people take 100 mile taxi rides in cities? I think Tata is looking to get the massive and probably lucrative urban local taxi niche with these, sell them to city planners as pollution free (on the street level), clean air in cities. Most passengers are looking for ten to fifteen minute rides a few miles across town in the central areas. Set up refueling stations around all the main stations and transport hubs and you've got the taxi drivers covered: they can do ten to twenty runs then refill a couple of times a day. I can't comment on the practicalities you mention on how you operationalise a compressed air filling station - but Tata is a huge global multinational engineering company, so I'd guess if anybody can they could put resources/PhDs/finance into solving the problem.
How about Norway or Sweden?
I think "engagement" is a key term here: it suggests your personal, intrinsic motivation is the most significant factor. Do you have kids? a significant partner? elderly parents to care for?
For many people their external commitments modify the extent to which they can achieve the commitment that their intrinsic motivation would allow.
In many cases this only means easy compromises like hobbies biting the dust (classic parent situation with hobby artefacts rusting away in garage/loft etc.) but for some people this means having to decide on a more serious level: you might be really engaged in your work but if you have to check that your elderly mother living alone is ok, then work's got to take second place - or some extra planning is required.
(I understand you state "occasional" so perhaps you negotiate these sessions given your other commitments).
You provide a possible explanation - I am sure there's some truth in the belief that students are more discerning now it costs much more to study. However the IOP and others have provided some evidence for their argument so we should at least consider it. Definitely it would be interesting to hear if you've come across research into students' attitudes towards their choice of university courses.
The USA is a very big economic power. The USA can say to the UK "either you give up this one little guy or we can change some esoteric tax tarriff that will mean many of your businesses can't trade so well with us, and therefore put millions of people in your country out of work and crash your economy. Your choice". Little countries have to do what big countries tell them to do or face the consequences.
Welcome to the world of real politics and economic strategy. Maybe David Cameron (UK Prime Minister) hates looking like the US's lapdog but has decided he couldn't look a whole town in the eye and tell them that they are all going to be unemployed for the next ten years because the US company they all work for has decided to move out to Poland/Ireland/Portugal etc. on the US government's advice, and he's had to make that choice.
"Everyone in the software industry who does stuff related to programming computers falls somewhere fairly precise on this political spectrum,"
Conservative to Liberal in US political terms. Hmm, USA!=World. Fail.
Quite apart from the fact that some folk who do stuff relating to programming computers are clearly out and out anarchists if we're to judge on the evidence and I am sure you'd all agree the Open Source people are definitely Evil Commies :-)
The UK having the First Amendment to the United States Constitution would suppose that the United States Constitution applies to the UK. It does not. While some may muse about how much influence the USA has politically over the UK, the UK does have its own legal system. However, it does not have a written constitution.
Am I right that Indian traditional music uses a different set of scales? (for example)
I think the article is focussing on western pop music - by which I think they mean European and North American, plus NZ and Aus?
I'd imagine there are a range of other musical styles and structures out there, including for pop music. Lots of vibrant youth cultures all round the world. In the UK for example we regularly get waves of influence from cultures outside the USA and Europe (e.g. from across Africa and Asian continents). So I'd be suprised if all these musical forms come down to half a dozen chords: bhangra/bollywood sounds very different for a start to my ears. Though I am no musician and I'd welcome being educated!
You note that information is one of the required elements of self-education, and the other key element is practice. I think for many fields a third key element may also be reflection (though you may be implying this within 'practice'?).
An awful shame when somebody dies that young.
Anybody know if astronauts are markedly more susceptible to illnesses like cancer due to greater exposure to radiation outside of the Earth's atmosphere?
Or is the increased exposure in their few days out of the atmosphere pretty insignificant in terms of increasing the chances of cancers etc. developing compared to their various exposures in 60 years plus of living inside the atmosphere?
Great start. I think this should be funded to all publicly funded research, not just science. If the tax payers have paid for it, surely they should be able to read the results of the work they've funded? Not just 'science' (however this is defined).
Don't forget walkways and access to individual plants.
I don't know about how you manage your greenhouse but I am always finding I have to move trays of plants in and out to get access to look after the individual plants. So reduce the area accordingly: these are growing plants to be maintained, not just cans of beans that can be stacked, stored, and pulled out when needed. I'd say quite a lot less than the maximum volume you propose.
"People can do other things to make money. Produce things for sale, even."
As long as they don't over price themselves against the other producers that Amazon and the like consumers purchase from, such as manufacturers in China and other Asian countries. So they'll need to keep their wages costs below 10 dollars a day to remain competitive if they wish to sell goods produced by the large Asian manufacturers.
Of course some niche producers can charge more, e.g. violin makers, but this is not likely to employ 300 million people.
Why are there too many patents in the USA? because the country is owned by lawyers?
Something doesn't work: find somebody to sue! Not sure if whether to sue? A lawyer will recommend you do! Got an idea which might be worth a couple of dollars, keep you fed for a couple of months? patent it and claim anybody using the idea is putting you out of the equivalent of the GDP of an average European country!
Where do these people get the figures from?
Maybe that's not the case but it looks like it from outside ;-)
or perhaps it's the Invisible Hand of the Market that is deciding? ;-)
I thought when the "political correctness!" cry is made, it is generally associated with concerns that a centralised government authority has too much power over the citizens.
Interested to hear you use it in the context of 'too much citizen choice, not enough regulation'.
Theresa May is from the Conservative Party, the UK's right wing major political party (I think this means something like Democrat in the USA?). Her party is very pro-USA in terms of where they take their political lead from and want to orient their geo-politics - as opposed to, say, a more pro-centrist/socialist European line. So I don't think it's too surprising that she'll be happy to do the US government a small favour on this one.
Some might say it's going too far to extradite UK citizens who are alleged to have broken a US law while in the UK, others might say it's pragmatic to work for closer ties with the world's largest super power when they come asking a favour (which is within English law: the Extradition Act of 2003).
The reason the Isle of Man is a hub for this kind of activity is because it's a a tax haven. It's not a continent sized country full of engineers, launch facilities and research universities: more like 200 square miles in total. So while it might be the fifth most likely country to put somebody on the moon, this is mostly because it's an attractive place to have your offices.
By this rationale, I guess Monaco, Liechtenstein, Andorra and the Seychelles are more likely to put a man on the moon than the USA, Russia, or China?
Good luck on them and it would be quite fun if the Manx flag did fly on the moon soon, but as far as I can work out their space facilities comprise of one former RAF aircraft hanger. This is not to dismiss they might have several billion dollars salted away in the local offshore banks to spend on Russian hardware and engineering expertise....