The only way something like this would work is a device that captures waste heat and turns it back into usable energy. BMW made a system like this that took waste heat from the exhaust and put it back into the crank.

Also some of you need to go back to high school (middle school perhaps)

As Richard Dawkins once put it:
“Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.”

As prof. Cox touched on, we don't just need people at college/university, but we need a public that understands the scientific method and thinking. I mean forget higher education for a bit, what we need, is middle school and hell, kindergardens, that teach kids HOW to think, not what to think. You dont need everyone to know the mass of the Higgs or what the Golgi apparatus does, what you need is for everyone to understand what kind of thinking that led to discover such facts, we need humans trained in the art of critical thinking, people with stimulates the brain. If kids have learned nothing else in school by the age of 15, at least they should have learned critical thinking.

The stop signs may be a federal law but only recently have the penalties been increased to LUDICROUS standards.

http://www.jacksonnjonline.com/2009/10/11/passing-a-school-bus-is-against-the-law-in-new-jersey/6996/

>> ^deathcow:

>> ^Darkhand:
>> ^CrushBug:
I think the point that you are missing (for the ones saying that you shouldn't need to stop, or that the stop signs should be replaced with slow signs) is that this kind of law has been this way for about 35+ years. This is NOT a new law, at least in my area.

I'm not sure where you are from but I live in Jersey. This law, or at least the stop signs on buses, were enacted within the past decade at most.
I didn't say kids are dumber these days. I said things like this are making our kids dumber because we're making everything so safe for them nobody learns any life lessons.
Maybe things are different in yoru Area but in my Area there are no Elementary School Buses. The younget you get on a bus is when you're headed into middle school so you are 12 years old. Someone who is 12 years old should know to look both ways before crossing and not cross in front of the bus etc etc etc.

STOP signs on school buses are a Federal Law.... as in the entire USA.. NTSB #131 for the last 21 yrs

>> ^Darkhand:

>> ^CrushBug:
I think the point that you are missing (for the ones saying that you shouldn't need to stop, or that the stop signs should be replaced with slow signs) is that this kind of law has been this way for about 35+ years. This is NOT a new law, at least in my area.

I'm not sure where you are from but I live in Jersey. This law, or at least the stop signs on buses, were enacted within the past decade at most.
I didn't say kids are dumber these days. I said things like this are making our kids dumber because we're making everything so safe for them nobody learns any life lessons.
Maybe things are different in yoru Area but in my Area there are no Elementary School Buses. The younget you get on a bus is when you're headed into middle school so you are 12 years old. Someone who is 12 years old should know to look both ways before crossing and not cross in front of the bus etc etc etc.


STOP signs on school buses are a Federal Law.... as in the entire USA.. NTSB #131 for the last 21 yrs

>> ^CrushBug:

I think the point that you are missing (for the ones saying that you shouldn't need to stop, or that the stop signs should be replaced with slow signs) is that this kind of law has been this way for about 35+ years. This is NOT a new law, at least in my area.


I'm not sure where you are from but I live in Jersey. This law, or at least the stop signs on buses, were enacted within the past decade at most.

I didn't say kids are dumber these days. I said things like this are making our kids dumber because we're making everything so safe for them nobody learns any life lessons.

Maybe things are different in yoru Area but in my Area there are no Elementary School Buses. The younget you get on a bus is when you're headed into middle school so you are 12 years old. Someone who is 12 years old should know to look both ways before crossing and not cross in front of the bus etc etc etc.

I remember this in middle school as being a catalyst for one of my first experiences with LSD25-saw it in the 7th grade, tripped in the eighth-Believe it or not, in Dallas Texas 1979, our science teacher conducted a discussion on the film after as she did each time she presented one. I was one of the kids that raised their hands affirmative if they had either known anyone, or had themselves had any experience with hallucinogens.(That, for all you here who think Texas is full of back-woods hicks bereft of any ideas of, or use for, critical thought).

Hell a tech brained kid in the 90s might have known about Apple, but they were on their way out of near everything. I can recall using them in middle school, around when I was in maybe 6th or 7th grade and even then they were trying to get rid of them when budgeting allowed.

Amiga was the one everyone used to talk about because video games and graphics were the new things coming along for games. Prior to Doom you had Archon, Oregon Trail, Zork, and other text based stuff....that was early and mid 90s. Think I got my first computer around 95, Doom came out in 93. But when stuff came out back then it didn't spread as quickly as it does now since people owning computers was rare and if they did it was 50/50 if they could do much of anything when it came to games.

Never physically encountered an Amiga, but that was the stuff all the "big studios" were using for their video production and what not if you heard about them at all.

Apples were novel, just because having one meant you had a computer. And computers were pretty rare. Consoles were where it was for actually "good" games for a long time, PCs were ungodly expensive.

Well, being as I'm gay, I have a porn addiction, as well as drugs also. One of the best things to happen to me as I got outa high school, a XXX video store opened up not far from me. I still have tons of copied VHS tapes and over 200 gigs of vids on my computer thanks to torrents and flash video down loader for my browser. The upside, I no longer have the need to steal porn mags from my local convenience store like I did when I was in middle school.

>> ^schlub:

Those lines have height so, it's 2D

You've totally ruined this lame, middle school playground level joke, with your hateful obvious logic, and cruel pedantry. You're a monster!

I went to a private high school for a couple of years where both middle school and the upper school watched a gay play. Eleven years ago or so, the word faggot was yelled many times to show abuse thrown towards lgbt people. The kid who was in my class wrote it and played the main roles... ended up on Broadway.

A lot of those kids at that school were the the types of douchebags who ended up at Goldman Sachs but they all gave their respect momentarily. Always surprised me.

Your description of a teacher's job is like me describing my current IT job as such: "Really, all I do is work with the same technology products. I just Read The F'ing Manual and install the stuff."

That would be a pretty ignorant way of looking at my current job.

You have never taught in a public school. First off, a teacher who reads directly out of the textbook day in and day out is a crappy teacher. Even the crappy teachers I worked with didn't just pick up the book and read what was in there, and assign the exercises at the end of the chapter. You also live in this wonderful fantasy world where the students arrive in your classroom, like perfect brain sponges, and they'll just magically hear what you say, or read the textbook, and magically, they overcome their various learning disabilities, weaknesses in various types of intelligence, distractions in life, and just ...

POOF! THEY LEARN AUTOMAGICALLY!

Not to mention a teacher's role is not simply to teach facts and information. A teacher's role is also to help inspire students to want to learn and do more well beyond the classroom. Those are the teachers students remember for the rest of their lives. I can still name you my favorite teachers from elementary, middle, high school, and college. I remember specific lessons from each one that really spoke to me. I became a history teacher because of my high school history teacher, Claire Tilton, who still teaches to this day, and she's still unbelievable at her job, but she's "just a high school teacher" I guess to you.

I wouldn't be where I am today without those teachers. And those teachers did more than just inspire me; I knew probably a dozen or so people who did 180's and loved history after being in Ms. Tilton's class.

It's one thing to know the subject matter; it's a whole other thing to be able to help another human being who is struggling to understand it learn it, or motivate a completely disinterested human into wanting to learn about it. If you think that people who can do this are a dime a dozen, I don't know what to tell you. I think we end up losing a lot of talented teachers who do inspire because society doesn't value education as it should.

>> ^chilaxe:

@heropsycho
You're certainly right on some elements, but I think there are a number of facets to this issue.
We can probably test the difficult of a job by looking at who can and who can't do that job. Most teachers, like Matt Damon's mom standing next to him, probably can't do particularly cognitively complex jobs like that of a $125k per year software engineer. I took a class in the education & child development department of my college, and I was surprised by how easy the subject matter was relative to classes in e.g. the sciences.
She probably teaches the same (or at least similar) middle school or high school subjects every year, and her primary job (AFAIK) is to follow the instructions in the teacher's edition textbook on a relatively simple subject matter that can be understood by teenagers. Her primary job is not to innovate technologically or come up with a new business strategy to outsmart ruthless competitors; it's to follow instructions.
That's a really different job from something like writing 50 page technical specifications documents, and salaries tend to be proportional to the cognitive complexity required, since anyone can do cognitively simple jobs, but only a limited number of people can do cognitively complex jobs.

@heropsycho

You're certainly right on some elements, but I think there are a number of facets to this issue.

We can probably test the difficult of a job by looking at who can and who can't do that job. Most teachers, like Matt Damon's mom standing next to him, probably can't do particularly cognitively complex jobs like that of a $125k per year software engineer. I took a class in the education & child development department of my college, and I was surprised by how easy the subject matter was relative to classes in e.g. the sciences.

She probably teaches the same (or at least similar) middle school or high school subjects every year, and her primary job (AFAIK) is to follow the instructions in the teacher's edition textbook on a relatively simple subject matter that can be understood by teenagers. Her primary job is not to innovate technologically or come up with a new business strategy to outsmart ruthless competitors; it's to follow instructions.

That's a really different job from something like writing 50 page technical specifications documents, and salaries tend to be proportional to the cognitive complexity required, since anyone can do cognitively simple jobs, but only a limited number of people can do cognitively complex jobs.

Spoco2 isn't talking about how the kid shouldn't have defended himself, he's talking about how such a horrible situation should never have happened. His apparent resolution is to punish all individuals that contributed to the situation.

But, let's say that you're a kid in school who realizes that the social atmosphere is completely horrible. What do you do? Do you stand on a soapbox and make a momentus Martin-Luther-King-like speech to get everyone to stop treating each other like shit, and to care about each other instead? Outside the box looking in, perhaps you can do something. The teacher who made a long comment on here has obviously figured out very clever ways of doing it by manually adjusting the social environment...at least in their own classroom. But, if you're one of the people stuck inside the problem trying to deal with it, the situation is exponentially more difficult.

In short, it's going to take much more than 'punishing all those involved' to correct the atmosphere; every kid in the school would need to be punished. For any school fight, you still see people forming a circle around the two people watching and commenting. Such is the default nature of things for humans. Back in elementary/middle school, I was pretty low on the totem pole, but I also am guilty of treating other people like shit (those lower than myself), and relishing violence whenever I saw it. If you're going to override the default, it's going to take major torrents of social reprogramming.

Great article, Dft. It did deconstruct some of the faulty premises of the documentary quite well.

I think, by far, the most important factor in success in pre-college education is the family environment (income, parental support, parental pressure to succeed, at-home enforced discipline). This counts far more than teachers. Charter schools or even elite private schools aren't a cure for that (maybe boarding school or military school). The linked article gives an example:

"But contrary to the myth that Guggenheim propounds about “amazing results,” even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees. This sad event was documented by Paul Tough in his laudatory account of Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, Whatever It Takes (2009). Contrary to Guggenheim’s mythology, even the best-funded charters, with the finest services, can’t completely negate the effects of poverty."

I do agree with redsky that teachers do need to be "ranked and rated", even though this would have to be done carefully. But teachers are not the biggest problem with our academic problems. It's ultimately an increasingly anti-intellectual and lazy culture, and the bad parenting that feed into this culture.

I don't know. I am all for legal abortions, women's choice, all that. I think you are ignoring that pro-lifers really do believe that abortion is murder. It's lizard brain, non-thinking, visceral response.

I personally think this topic is not resolvable.

What is stupid is to feel this away about abortion, but then stop all education on how to AVOID pregnancy. That is the place to hammer home on, I think. You don't like abortion? Sure, I can see that. So fund the hell out of birth control.

But we know, ultimately, that we are the rational ones, don't we?

In reply to this comment by braindonut:
'Cept for one major difference. I stopped being a demagogue in middle school.

I wasn't commenting on the viewpoint. I was commenting on the tactic.

We'll keep having this fight until both sides learn to have honest discussions and get down to the real issues and disagreements behind it all. If public discourse can attain a sliver of intellectual honesty, then we all have hope.

>> ^bareboards2:

Here's how controversies work -- this comment works for both sides of the issue.
This is why we will probably be fighting about this the rest of human history....
>> ^braindonut:
Shamefully disgusting.