rsa4046

Some still do: it's called a gastrovascular cavity, and is present in marine invertebrates such as Cnidaria (jellyfish, coral polyps, anemones), Ctenophores (comb jellies); Platyhelminthes (flatworms, tapeworms).

Yes, oral exams, content created in plain sight, project-based activities, all of these can provide a true appraisal of student understanding. But these approaches, although highly rewarding for both student and teacher, are extremely time-consuming. They also run counter to the priorities of the district, which are forever and always: student achievement on standardized tests accomplished with minimal teaching personnel. The only ones benefiting here are the corporations providing and grading the tests. To a large extent it is a sham. More importantly, IRL science is not a multiple choice test. As you state above, whether you work in industry or academia, your value is what you can produce (usually by plain hard work), what problems you can solve, your imagination, creativity, what you can create yourself or with a group. But from what I've seen thus far: AI has little place in education.

After retiring at 65 from a university teaching and research science career (all pre-AI), I went back to teaching, but this time teaching high school science, mostly AP STEM courses at an A-ranked public high school. The cheating/AI problem is now a crisis greater than COVID. My experience: very few students in advanced and AP classes do not cheat — largely for the reasons given above — and it takes enormous resourcefulness on the teacher's part to design coursework and examinations in which cheating through AI is not an issue. Many teachers I know have all but given up — the cost and effort required to circumvent cheating are simply too great given the already sky-high demands on teachers' time and energy. And school administrations are little help, due to thoughtless and enthusiastic reliance on software at every level. In some ways they are part of the problem. I don't know what the situation is in schools outside the US. But here it had become an arms race.

[Edit: typos]

I was born in Beantown and remember the site before construction (“Scollay Square”) as being pretty seedy and a place to avoid (still least for an eight year old). The new City Hall and Government Center were a huge improvement, and occurred during a period of rejuvenation for the city (addition to Boston Public Library, Copley Square expansion, final renewal of the city's red light district, aka the Combat Zone). I do remember the controversy of the design and public reaction — yes, it's not for everyone, but I've always had a fondness for the building.

This can't be said often enough. We have two right wing parties in the US. That's it.

Great link, thank you.

> Quite sure that is the schools job. At least where I live the schools tend to assume several of the rights and responsibilities that normally fall on the parents.

Yes. The school is responsible for their safety and whereabouts. US K-12 public schools, if the child is missing from school, parents are contacted immediately. Teachers are responsible for attendance. All this is accomplished without device tracking. Federal law explicitly defines the school's responsibilities with regard to privacy rights of children in school. If parents wish to contact their child during school hours, they are asked to call the school, and school personnel will contact the child.

Device use is an enormous problem in schools. Talk to any teacher / admin: they will tell you allowing devices into schools has been a disaster.

> KDE connect is my goto for sharing between phone and computer.

Ditto. KDE connect is flawless, one of the best features.

My experience is that Word (and Office products in general) have worsened over decades, favoring and indulging the least adroit user to maximize their user base, cloying the product with showy gimmicks of marginal utility or worse, whose primary purpose seems to be to keep you glued to the machine for as long as possible.

I used to support MS products way back when, when they were largely a language company. No more. Life is short, and my patience with their products has come to an end. Sure, LaTeX can be a bear, a supremely frustrating one whose learning curve is more like a wall, but at least it's a bear that sits still, and for which there are authoritative sources when you get into a real bind. With Word, PowerPoint, or Windows itself, there are few such resources, relegating you to spend hours wading through the post swamp of self-declared Microsoft MVP “experts”, where your only comfort is that “3332 also have this problem”. No thanks.

> For example, Nature is so kind as to accept final submissions in latex, but they'll convert it to Word. So it's completely pointless.

There is large gulf between submitting a paper (typically limited to a few journal pages) to a well-equipped organization like Springer Nature, and submitting a manuscript hundreds of even thousands of pages in length to a university dissertation office, when that document must adhere scrupulously to various formatting requirements in terms of tables, figures, pagination, citation, appendices, cross-referencing, etc. Word is fine for memos, briefs, letters, and other fairly short documents. But its capabilities for creating complex documents that must include cross-referencing, strict placement of tables, figures, and other floats, citations, referencing, etc. frankly suck. Students can't afford expensive typesetting software: TeX and friends are high quality, stable, have a large and knowledgeable user community, and most importantly, are free. You can bet that publishing houses aren't using Word and PowerPoint to produce anything beyond email. They accept Word documents because of Microsoft's market dominance, which is unrelated to the quality of software they publish.

Really glad to see this work and result. My PhD dissertation 25 years ago (pub cited in group's Science paper) focused on laboratory synthesis of dolomite at lower temperatures (less than hydrothermal), but since then focused on virtual (kinetic Monte Carlo simulations) experiments as a means of understanding crystal growth. Really happy to see this fundamental progress.

Thanks for an excellent product. I'm a long term paid subscriber, and very happy with Bitwarden :-)

Great, uplifting story, thanks for including it.

The chemical composition of the world ocean reflects the balance of inputs from the continents (as described, from riverine input as well groundwater), atmospheric cycling, and outputs: extraction via evaporite minerals in marginal environments, weathering at the seafloor, exchange over a range of temperatures with mid-ocean ridge basalt, and precipitation of minerals (mostly in the form of biogenic carbonates such as CaCO3, biogenic silica, etc.), as well as their subsequent dissolution, and lastly the biological processes of CO2 fixation and respiration of organic carbon (including electron acceptors other than O2, such as iron, sulfate, etc.).

It is the solubility of sparingly soluble phases such as CaCO3 that controls much of the seawater composition: surface seawater is close to saturation with respect to CaCO3 (calcite, aragonite). Because halite (rock salt, NaCl) is highly soluble, seawater is, conversely, fairly concentrated with respect to these ions. Seawater must be extensively evaporated to remove the far more soluble (evaporite) minerals. Over geologic time, the composition of seawater has changed, reflecting the relative pace of the various processes listed above that deliver and remove components from solution.

I couldn't bear to use Windows without `Everything`. It's the only way to reliably find _anything_.

> For example, I strongly suspect that if any real accountability and real restitution had followed in the wake of something like the 2008 financial crisis, we'd see a lot less radicalization today.

Very much agree with this — an opportunity stupidly discarded.

“I'd buy that for a dollar!”

I bought and installed a Sommer Evo+ (German made), after Chamberlain, Craftsman products crapped out prematurely. So far, so good (7 years), extremely quiet; slow, but well put together.

I'm glad you got a good one. I didn't (Zenfone 5z), and after their customer ‘service’, have sworn off ASUS for good.

https://www.reddit.com/r/zenfone/comments/ollaq6/i_will_neve...

Great book, well ahead of its time.

Or, “Well, think me up a cup of coffee and a chocolate doughnut with some of those little sprinkles on top ...”

Inspired! Still grinning, thank you.

I drove a cab in Boston in the 70's (yes, I'm probably older than most here). The work was hard, tedious, dangerous, and uneven in terms of income: some nights you'd make out ok, others barely enough to break even. But dealing with drunk people was a huge problem, for all the reasons you describe in your account. I have similar stories, humorous to think of now, but hugely depressing and demoralizing at the time. I imagine ride sharing as a job to be far worse: at least I didn't have to worry about the vehicle.

You should publish your piece. I don't know where, but I found it the most interesting response in this thread.

I agree (academic research scientist, geosciences, now semi-retired). The current system is utterly unsustainable. Many outside academia are unaware how much universities rely on federal funding of indirect costs, and although the overhead rate continues to creep, the university itself supplies less and less real support. I also don't know how it will end or how the bubble will burst, but the entire enterprise is suffering from unsustainable costs and corruption of ideals.

David Graeber has argued persuasively that there is little real anthropological evidence to support the notion that money arose from the ‘inefficiency of barter’. [1—3]

1. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-on-the.... 2. https://newrepublic.com/article/159227/david-graeber-changed... 3. Graeber D. 2011. ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years'. Melville House, NY

This. As a recently retired academic research scientist (i.e., still ‘working’, but no longer in the lab, and no longer paid LOL), this can't be emphasized enough. Most scientists are highly specialized: experts in their local area of interest, the command of which must be fairly deep. They are aware of which papers are about to appear in press, either because they were either a referee at some point in the review process, or received a 'heads up' preprint.

Your statement on ‘finding cumulative truth, i.e. figuring out the overall state of research’ is a key point.To become newly acquainted with a research area (on one's own) is a daunting task, requires plowing through dozens and dozens of past research articles, review summaries, abstracts, texts, even conversing with authors of these works. But rapid progress is oft realized when people in two or more separate areas serendipitously interact in new projects, thus bringing expertise — heretofore missing or weak — to bear on a common problem. This is the intrinsically collaborative aspect of science that survives despite intense intramural competition.

Thanks for this link, WSJ is always paywalled.

Sorry, typo: fairly inaccurate

"This means that concrete structures, for all their stone-like superficial qualities, are actually made of the skeletons of sea creatures ground up with rock. It takes millions upon millions of years for these sea creatures to live, die and form into limestone. This timescale contrasts starkly with the life spans of contemporary buildings."

This description is fairly accurate. The CaCO3 (used as a source of calcium in the cement component of concrete) is completely decarbonated in a 1450°C kiln in the process of cement manufacture, combined with silica (from shale) +/- SO4 (from gypsum) and sintered to form an anhydrous calcium silicate (clinker: e.g. tricalcium silicate, Ca3SiO5, ‘alite’), then powdered (e.g. ordinary Portland cement, OPC). The skeletal limestone is long gone — and the above decarbonation step is the reason cement manufacturing process is a significant GHG source (in addition to fuel consumption by the kiln itself).

Mixing water with the powdered clinker generates a very rapid, exothermic, partial dissolution of the primary silicate. The rapid release of silica results in nucleation and growth of calcium silicate hydrate (CSH) plus Ca(OH)2. CSH binds the remaining unreacted solid mass together, giving cement its durability and strength.

English subtitles are included. Found this history quite amazing.