dgordon

I knew this would be more complaining about "privilege" when I saw the two gratuitous uses of "fucking" in the first paragraph. I see the two together all the time.

Income distributions are almost always skewed to the right (mean > median), since you can't make less than $0 a year, but you can make millions or more in a year, and the mean is never much more than $50,000.

You say that like it's a bad thing. ;-)

You probably can, at least in principle. The SAT is effectively an IQ test (it correlates as well with IQ tests as they correlate with each other) and you can definitely study for that. The difference is that there aren't Stanford-Binet prep classes (at least I don't think so.)

>But the trouble, the reality, is that most students can't do >what she suggests, using our minds for creativity, and not >rote work. There really is a difference in intelligence, and >the sad truth is that for most students school is exactly >right.

I disagree. I don't think we're that smart, and I don't (usually) think the rest of the world is that dumb. Besides, is memorizing soon-to-be-forgotten dates and listening to other students butcher Shakespeare in a uniform monotone exactly right for most students? Is doing the same math over and over again, boring those who get it and failing to bring understanding to those who don't, exactly right?

More people need to be able to find their way to meaningful work (not necessarily creative work.) I claim that the public school system hinders this process.

> The good news is that the really intelligent rise above it and succeed anyway.

Probably only if you circularly define the really intelligent as those who succeed. This definitely doesn't work if you use IQ.

I agree that "recognize it for what it is and be grateful for it" is the right reaction to having had an opportunity that a lot of people didn't have, but it's much different from the attitude of this and similar articles.

Good luck with that project -- if you find even one kid like that or anywhere close, you'll have done a lot of good.

Well put. To use an example that's well-known here, this is like pretending that Bill Gates only became Bill Gates because he had rich parents and got access to a computer at 14 years old in the late 1960s, and that his great intelligence and willingness to work harder than most people have even considered working at developing his ability were irrelevant or incidental.

The implication that if you're white, male, middle-class or up, etc., then you're only where you are because of unfair advantage and should be considered an "oppressor" is everywhere in this sort of so-called discourse. Look to the Soviet Union or Khmer Cambodia for what this ideology, empowered and taken to an extreme with some slightly different axioms, can lead to.

By the way, thanks for teaching me a word -- "subaltern." I was disappointed to see that it's mostly an identity-politics buzzword, but I'm sure I'll find a use for it.

And that incredibly low standard is also how the FDA set the "recommended daily allowance." Similar things are true for most other vitamins and minerals, as I recall.

Also, D2 causes overdose effects pretty easily, but you can take big multiples of the "RDA" in D3 (I think 10,000 IU/day for months for vitamin D deficiency has been mentioned) for quite a while without overdosing.

According to Solzhenitsyn a quarter of the population of Leningrad were arrested in and around 1937. Apparently this turned out to be a conservative estimate.

If this is so, your numbers cannot be correct.

And yes, the Holodomor counts too.

Actually, the US still leads the world in manufacturing output (for the moment...projections seem to suggest China will take first next year -- http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/dailybriefing/2010_06_21/... ) But even a close second is still a long way from what the popular myth that "we don't make anything here anymore" would suggest.

>A key insight in ethics is that truly ethical decisions almost always go against the person making the decision.

What? Which theory of ethics are you using? I don't agree with this at all.

I would hope most students learn a lot more than basic calculus in four years of college.

I thought that was the parent's point -- Western medicine has done superb work for acute diseases and injuries, but doesn't have solutions yet, and may not even have the right approach, for chronic ones.

"Just saying. The 20s are ment to have fun, get laid, drink booze, write some code, then go out again. You wont be 20some again, it is a once in a lifetime opportunity to enjoy life (and start something at the same time)."

And for those of us that have no interest in several of these things that are allegedly essential to "enjoying life" in one's 20s?

The scarier fact to me is that in the 2009 budget, the deficit was actually bigger than the total so-called discretionary spending.

That means that a deficit would still exist for 2009 even if the only government spending were for interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal "entitlement" programs.

I believe that's generally referred to as bad.

No it isn't, at least not when the article was written, and I can't see why that would have changed in the past 30 years. The article discusses how it's basically impossible to sell a diamond for anything near "market value" (as far as that term makes sense in the context of a global near-monopoly) and how a lot of places won't pay cash for diamonds at all.

Sorry to hear you ran into that. It sounds like a terrible environment to try to learn chess in.

But you can get quite good without spending much time at all studying openings. I hate studying openings, and I'm definitely better than most of the people who cram openings. Learn how to play chess well -- what you wanted to do anyway -- and learn just enough of the opening to get to a playable middlegame position (playing less-aggressive openings makes this much easier, and allows you to figure it out based on general principles), and skill, not memorization, will make the difference.

(Just in case you, or anyone else reading, were thinking of taking it up again.)

P.S. I wouldn't want to play the Caro-Kann either. ;-)

The halting problem seems kind of important. Also, at least two of Hilbert's problems -- the continuum hypothesis and solving general Diophantine equations -- turned out to be undecidable (the latter because it reduces to the halting problem.)

Edit: Er, actually, the Diophantine equation question would be uncomputable (like the halting problem), not undecidable. The ideas are closely related, though.

"If you don't die within a short time from eating wheat (without treatment) due to an IgE antibody surge, you aren't allergic -- full stop."

What? With all due respect, this is a ridiculous definition of "allergic" and not at all the standard one. Are all the people with, say, pollen allergies not really allergic if all they get is a runny nose? I feel lousy when I eat anything containing cow's milk, and I have high IgE antibody levels for it, but I don't die. Nonetheless, that is an allergy.

I'm well aware of the difference between an allergy and an intolerance, as I thought I made clear by mentioning gluten intolerance as well as wheat allergy.

Dangerous Grains makes and cites plenty of references to the published literature, so it's hardly your average pop-sci book. A major point of it was that celiac disease is only one way in which gluten intolerance, that is, inability to properly digest gluten, can manifest.

Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier.

"Instead of "teach[ing] children to respect the diversity of ideas that is fundamental to the American system," and "that our Constitution is a living reality, not parchment preserved under glass," the Court today "teach[es] youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes." The young men and women of Hazelwood East expected a civics lesson, but not the one the Court teaches them today." --Justice William J. Brennan, in dissent on said case

Celiac disease makes up a tiny fraction of the cases of gluten intolerance, which as much as 20% of the population of, say, the USA may have. (Source: Dangerous Grains, by James Braly and Ron Hoggan) Then add in actual wheat allergies. That's a lot of people.

So yes, people can have allergies to all sorts of things. I've been there (long story; currently it's only cow's milk I have to avoid) and it's not fun.

Agreed, and good for him for doing this, and for taking an interest in politics in general. Shame about the socialism, though -- I might even say his article's epigraph gives the lie to his views. But by any reasonable test, he is a better voter than a lot of adults.

Finally. An Oregon Trail reference that remembers that fording the river never, ever worked. Caulk the wagon and float was the way to go.

Fortunately, another limit is imposed by women getting access to education and then birth control. That has played a huge part in bringing the birth rate down.

People should be free to do whatever they want, but not to make other people finance their wants. I see no contradiction.

I've only even heard of one of the Booker winners (Life of Pi.) Maybe I'm just that uncultured. Then again, maybe the literary establishment is just that insular.

"The most important piece of literature in the past half century was written by Salman Rushdie, an indian."

Really? I'd put Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago way ahead of anything else I've read from the past half-century for importance. Or do you not consider that literature because it's nonfiction?

Either way, what was so important about the Satanic Verses (or do you mean a different book by Rushdie?) besides the fact that it pissed off some religious dictator?

I got a head start on you, so I spent six years in school condemning Hazelwood and other criminally unconstitutional decisions, but what's more important are all the years since. I didn't learn to justify eliminating the rights of "minors" for their age alone, like most people seem to. And, more to the point, I never "got used" to waking up before 7 am in school, because you don't get used to sleep deprivation. You just get less and less healthy.

Was I perfectly responsible with my sleep time, doing of homework, etc., in school? Of course not. No one was. But that fact doesn't disprove that it's very difficult for most teenagers to follow the sleep schedule that American schools impose on them, and not just because they like to stay up late.

"not true, this stupid bill which will never see a vote or chance of passage, only bans the cooks from adding it. It would put the salt under control of the diner at the table."

Do you even cook? Salt added while cooking brings out the taste of food. Salt added afterwards makes food taste salty. I guess with soups this wouldn't occur, but otherwise it makes a big difference.

There's actually no evidence that eliminating salt lowers blood pressure more than a tiny amount. Sea salt, with its trace minerals, actually lowers blood pressure when it's added to the diet. It's much better for you for other reasons too, well worth the extra money.

Have the worse-off schools dump their football teams and you'd be financially OK for quite a few supposedly ambitious activities, but that won't happen in many places.