zootar

Tom Clancy plot generator

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=five_shitty_...

(see #4)

I, too, am irritated by people who advocate raising taxes for (or greater charity in) every bracket above their own. But Harris isn't doing that. He's asking the two former richest people in the world to tell him how to spend the fruits of his own labors.

But beyond that, Harris points out that a significant fraction of your "fruits" are not of your labors but of your favorable circumstances. He's telling you that you ought to share some of the fruits of your good fortune.

Even if you deny the role of chance in your financial success, how you spend your money has strong ethical implications. If other people believe I'm acting unethically in some way, I do consider it their duty to tell me.

Harris wants to do more than fix potholes, if he can. He wants a few smart, rich, and reasonably sincere people like Gates and Buffet to come up with a plan for him to do a lot of good with his money. When he says that repaving roads would be better than doing nothing, he's just saying that a good plan executed now will be better than a perfect plan executed never.

I don't think anyone believes that there has never existed a woman who was good at math/science. The questions some people have are about averages and gender roles. Offering specific "counterexamples" always strikes me as an odd thing to do in discussions about workplace or classroom diversity.

This long article is mostly true, but it doesn't contain any strong reconciliation of science and religion. The author states, correctly, that there is a huge amount that science can't yet explain, and that effective scientists must not rule out any possibility prematurely. He then suggests that this idea can help make religion and science more compatible in one's mind, but not without so many qualifications and reservations as to demonstrate that even he doesn't quite see how it's possible, which it isn't.

Most "atheists" are, strictly speaking, agnostic (or "possibilian," the author's preferred term). No scientifically-minded person is absolutely certain that no god exists. That doesn't make belief in a god in the least bit scientifically justifiable. Nevermind belief in a particular god. Until evidence for the existence of any god is found, the only rational position one can hold is that no god exists.

New to programming, you should probably get a book, start reading it at the beginning, and do some of the exercises. As soon as you think you understand how to do something, try it on your website. Pretty soon, you'll find you know enough to learn by doing, reading tutorials, etc.

What you want to avoid, whether you choose method 1 or 2, is the idea that you can write your first lines of code as a useful part of a real project. To learn effectively, you have to be willing to implement some examples, experiment, and throw some code away.

This reminds me of when people argue that public funding should be reallocated from research in pure science to applied science. Just as it's hard to predict what the applications of any scientific finding will be, it's hard to tell from where the inspiration for your best work will come, which of your personal experiences will prove valuable, or who your lasting friends will be.

In addition to the difficulty of rating teachers in a way that can be fairly coupled to pay, the fraction of teachers able to substantially increase their performance might be small. Identifying specific sources of confusion, inventing ways of explaining things to alleviate confusion, etc are non-trivial challenges.

What I think might be more effective than attempting to pay teachers for their teaching performance is paying teachers to produce very high-quality teaching material that other teachers can easily use themselves: detailed lesson plans, visual aids, interesting labs, textbooks, maybe even tables of sources of confusion and how to alleviate them.

The ethical reasoning about student plagiarism has become pretty simple-minded.

Of course, students must not cheat. But instructors must not create irresistibly tempting opportunities to cheat. If a test becomes available on the internet, it's the instructor, not the student, who fails to meet an ethical responsibility. To ignore the possibility that a copy of your upcoming exam is freely downloadable from a website (nevermind your inbox) would require an inhuman resistance to curiosity. I don't expect the professor in this case would find this reasoning convicning, but if he had even considered it, I doubt he would now be "physically ill, absolutely disgusted, completely disillusioned".

Another example is the "the person who lets someone copy is as guilty as the person who copies" dogma. This idea is routinely cited without explanation or evidence on the first day of classes. It may be practically necessary to punish those who enable plagiarism, but we can say that without denying the philosopical difference between handing in someone else's work and sharing your work with a friend. Indeed, I can't help thinking that Richard Stallman would oppose this kind of rule, which can make people who naturally want to help their friends terribly uneasy about doing so.

Kids can start programming a lot earlier if their introductory experience really minimizes frustration and time to gratification. Python is probably a good starting language for teenagers, but for pre-teens, who are much less cognitively mature, you'll have a lot more luck sooner if you introduce them to an IDE with great code completion and the power to make a GUI. Obvious candidates are Visual C# and Visual Basic, but I would strongly consider Adobe Flash as well. Children love making animations with Flash, and Flash's scripting language, ActionScript, has all of the features of a full-fledged programming language.

You can start even younger with HTML. HTML isn't programming, but it's relevant training for a developing brain. Balancing brackets, thinking logically, paying attention to detail, and the "write, run, debug" routine are all present when writing HTML.

My path to programming started when I discovered a copy of FrontPage Express (an old WYSIWYG HTML editor) installed on my computer. I quickly went from FrontPage, to HTML, to Flash/ActionScript, to Visual Basic, to C++. Obviously, that isn't the logical way for a teenager or an adult to learn programming, but for a child, it was incredibly natural.

I don't find your answer unhelpful.

Before your post, almost all of my ideas were of the form "travel to set of places X and see what you see." Now, I have ideas of the form "follow y while learning z", where y may be a band, a sports team, migratory animals, a circus, or famous trial lawyers in open court.

Maybe I could rephrase the question: "What would be the most memorable thing YOU could do with $8000?"

The things he dreamed about as a child are likely to be petty and unmemorable given his limited exposure to the possibilities.

Travel does seem obvious. I'm hoping for more specific answers, though.

He lives in Ontario, Canada. He's already been to Great Britain and France.

Most advocates of saving that I’ve seen in mainstream media are interested foremost in personal finance, not anti-consumerism. To them, the problem isn't that people enjoy spending money. On the contrary, they want to help people spend their money in a way that maximizes the amount of enjoyment derived. Writers like Stanley know that spending a lot of money early in your working life is rarely a way to maximize enjoyment.

What a lot of people don’t realise is that “short-term pleasures” cost a lot more when you’re older. In your 20s and 30s, you don’t need much more than a computer and a bicycle to be perfectly content. You have lots of energy to work, study, take cheap outdoorsy vacations, and cut your own lawn. But at some point, you start to find those things significantly more wearisome. That’s when it’s really nice to have the financial freedom to quit your job, eat in good restaurants, and outsource all of your home maintenance. By far the majority of people won’t achieve that level of financial freedom unless they defer a large proportion of their income from the first half of their career to the second half and to retirement.

Evidently, many people must overcome significant psychological obstacles to save their money. That’s why there are so many personal finance books trying to explain the same idea in different ways. Some emphasize the time value of money. Others, how expenses tend to increase over one’s lifetime. Stanley tries to reduce the urge to spend by showing that many big spenders are not actually rich or financially secure. The success of “The Millionaire Next Door” seems to be evidence that a lot of people find this approach helpful.

"The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values" by Sam Harris is a new release which falls into the category of philosophy, remarks on human behavior, and is bound to reference Bertrand Russell.

Harris, who has trained both as a philosopher and a neuroscientist, argues against the popular notion that science can have little or nothing to say about morality. Necessarily, he confronts related ideas like moral questions having no objectively right answer and science and religion being "nonoverlapping magisteria". Basically, he says that all moral questions must relate to maximizing the wellbeing of conscious creatures, and that what increases or decreases a creature's wellbeing can be studied scientifically at the level of the brain.

I just started reading it. Even if I'm not yet sure that I'm going to be completely convinced of the claim that "science can determine human values," I'm finding Harris to be a very clear thinker, as well as an amusing writer.

If you want a taste of his ideas and style, you can watch his TED talk, "Science can answer moral questions."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Valu... (It isn't available from Amazon until October 5; I bought my copy in a bookstore.)

I haven't read Caplan and Dickens' full exchange, but I doubt that the present article adds much to the discussion. The author emphasizes two points:

1. A cheaper and shorter academic program will not attract a lower caliber of student as long as it is challenging enough.

2. "Many blue collar and service jobs have extremely boring and unpleasant elements that are hard for workers to avoid. If your goal is to signal conscientiousness and conformity, a year of good performance at McDonald’s is probably a better signal than a year of academic success at most colleges."

The first point relies on intelligence and short-term effort being the relevant criteria. But Caplan's assertion is that conscientiousness and conformity are the characteristics that employees seek to signal. Those characteristics may be better evidenced by sustained effort. In any case, at some point, a distance run of increasing intensity but decreasing length becomes a sprint, a completely different sport. As you shorten the length of your education, eventually you'll get something that is more like an IQ test or other standardized test than a 4-year degree.

The second point seems to be totally unsubstantiated. If you take (present and former) fast food workers as your hiring pool, you find you've eliminated practically none of the loafers. That a potential recruit has both a PhD and a previous career at McDonald's could well be a sign of something good, but I doubt it could be concluded that the recruit was particularly conscientious during the McDonald's stage of his career. Work at McDonald's is closely supervised, requires little concentration, and never demands any effort outside of scheduled work hours. The necessary work ethic is not at all the same as that for the high-autonomy jobs sought by university graduates. The babysitting example is even more specious. Responsible for an infant, behind the wheel of a car, operating power tools, most functional human beings manage to bring to bear the requisite level of care. It's harder to do when lives aren't imminently at risk.

But the biggest fallacy is that manual labour is strictly harder than mental labour. Mental labour doesn't usually make you physically uncomfortable or physically tired, but in some important way, thinking is the hardest kind of work there is. At the very least, physical laziness and mental laziness in a potential employee are statistically independent events.

In the case of the Canadian meal, the image isn't really representative of the variety of meals that exist. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Meal_Pack for the list of entrees in 2005.) Certainly meat features in the majority, but every soldier can expect a vegetarian meal with some frequency. Choosing her example meals, I think it's possible that the article's author was somewhat biased toward names like "Swiss steak with Spanish sauce" and away from pasta, baked beans and other commonly canned foods.

It's already been suggested that providing vegetarian meals is a logistical nonissue. (Canadian soldiers are also entitled to Kosher and Halal meals, and I can't imagine that that's uncommon.) But it's easy to imagine military professionals arguing the opposite. Logistics, tactics, and esprit de corps are used to justify several kinds of bigotry and obstinacy in Western militaries. It seems to me that, as a rule of thumb, legitimate military concerns do not easily justify lower standards of tolerance, human rights, or, (as Julien Assange will agree) openness. Canada has rejected at least two of these arguments experimentally by allowing openly gay service members (unlike the US) and by permitting women to serve in every trade (unlike the US and the UK).