Cap'n Refsmmat

When you're closer to the Sun, the Sun's gravitational influence is very large. You have to move very fast to avoid being "sucked" in. When you're very far away, its influence is smaller. If you go fast, you'll just go flying off into deep space instead of staying in orbit. Make sense? (If you're doing this for a physics course, you've probably learned Kepler's laws or Newton's laws of gravity, and you should try to use them to explain this.)

So by "works" do you mean "the Jewish Law" or "good things"?

Here's a quick CNN article and video about Sir Ken Robinson: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/17/ted.ken.robinson/index.html?hpt=C1 Robinson's full speech and ideas were presented at TED, and if you have fifteen or twenty minutes, I highly suggest you watch the video: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html If you don't have time for that, at least watch the video in the CNN article, as he makes very interesting points there as well. His big point is that mass education ignores the individual talents that people have. He gives the example of a girl who was too fidgety and active to succeed in her elementary classes -- until a psychologist said, "Put her in a dance school," and she became a professional dancer. By forcing every student to learn the same things, and ignoring that students can have specific talents, we squash their talents and their creativity. So. Is there merit to Robinson's claims? How would an education system that fosters individual development work? And should some teenagers be sent to pole-dancing lessons? (Just kidding about one of those...)

Based on my conversation with a born-again evangelical minister, I can advance a simple compromise: if you have faith, you will do good works. The minister (ministress? she was female) said that now that she's born again, she can't even think of doing bad things. Her faith compels her to do good works.

Well, here's one perspective: (the booklet is Happily Homeschooling Teens: Moving into the World.) I found a dissertation on homeschooling, but in the literature review its claims that homeschooling can have a positive impact on socialization were backed up by the Journal of Research on Christian Education, which unfortunately does not have its complete archives online. There's a cited article in the Home School Researcher, but our university library does not subscribe and I'd have to pay for access. Apparently it says that "children who were home-educated had fewer behavioral problems than their public schooled counterparts." The rest of the dissertation is about academic achievement rather than socialization, and it is written by a Christian in direct favor of homeschooling. Another MS dissertation asserts that "children who were schooled at home ‘gained the necessary skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed to function in society...at a rate similar to that of conventionally schooled children.’" This was based on a study of 30 homeschooled families. From this quick research, I think the real answer is that nobody has done conclusive research either way. The sources in favor of homeschooling, like the Journal of Research on Christian Education, claim it's good; the educators in favor of public school claim it's bad. The research I've dug up so far seems to me to be inconclusive.

I'd dispute this. That may be true in elementary school, but my experience in high school is that social groups are almost exclusively in-school. Nobody I knew socialized with the neighborhood unless someone they knew from school lived nearby. Also, being in a school exposes you to far more people on a regular basis than you could ever be exposed to in a neighborhood. At school, you can't simply avoid that one annoying kid down the street -- you might share a class with him. Rather than avoiding uncomfortable situations by avoiding the neighborhood jerk, you're forced to learn to deal with the situation and overcome it. Of course, there's the downside that you might suffer emotional or physical harm at the hands of the jerk when at school. I'm going to do a search of the literature on this and see if studies have been done on the socialization of homeschooled children.

We're on 2.8, although I'll be upgrading to 2.9 soon enough. Let me know if there are problems with the import tool -- I might have to tinker with some file permissions or something to let it run.

That's hardly the case in every abortion. Yes, but that's not the argument Severian used and you brought up. On the same token, the choices aren't (a) abort (b) have your life destroyed, just like they aren't (a) kill the guy (b) let him kill others. In the case of abortion, there's usually © let someone else adopt the baby. Though as Mr Skeptic points out, That's hardly the case in every abortion, though.

"Destroying the woman's life" isn't killing her, is it?

Yeah, that looks great.

Integral sign's a bit jagged, isn't it? Antialiasing may be a good idea.

Okay then. So unknown tragedies occur fairly often in pregnant women, where two embryos fuse together. Nobody knows, but it could be tragic. Should we attempt to develop procedures to stop re-integration of embryos, to prevent the tragedy? It's relevant to the question of whether a fetus is a "life." Suppose a couple has their eyes on a dream home. They save up money for years, make plans, find the perfect land, etc. Construction starts, gets halfway through, and then the entire thing burns to the ground. Tragic, yes? But not because the house was alive and we "killed" it. Tragic because it was their dream, and their dream was squashed. So if we're trying to figure out abortion or miscarriage, it's important to know why it's tragic. True, just like I could anesthetize a 40-year-old person and then kill them. But that person also has free will, and I am violating that will by killing them against their wishes. I'm not sure if that's included in "suffering," but if not, I'd add it as an additional criteria. Once there's a nervous system, there's at least some conception of "will," and most people's will is to stay alive. "Will" is generally associated with a mind. Intestinal gurgles after dinner aren't "willed," generally speaking, but they do result from biochemical interactions. I suppose this just replaces "soul" with "mind," though, and it's just as hard to define.

To the people who have graduate degrees/jobs/careers/etc.: Is joining a college honor society worth it? I received an invitation to two freshman honors societies. The qualifications required to join are $70 and a 3.5 GPA. The societies do a few hours of community service each semester and give you a nice pin to put on your tie. (No mention of scholarships in the letter or their website.) If I am writing a resume, does anyone care that I have an honor society listed, when it really means "I have a 3.5 GPA" and that's already on the resume? (The general impression I get from the Internet is a solid "No.")

I dunno, I'd much prefer simply removing the troublemakers from the Politics section rather than removing myself. I'm sure Phi feels the same way. Seems reasonable enough to me.

In the uses of the term that I've heard, theoretical physics is often presented as the natural opposite of experimental physics. You get the impression of professors standing around chalkboards using math to come up with ideas, rather than technicians in a lab using reality.

Yes, but they're still natural and tragic. So claiming that chimeras aren't tragic because they're "natural" doesn't work. So why aren't chimeras tragic? But do they care because a life had been lost, or because they had been hoping for a child and their hope just died? Imagine if they weren't even trying for kids, and a miscarriage popped up -- would they care as much? If you kill something with no nervous system, it is incapable of suffering. It's incapable of even wishing that you didn't kill it. Something with a nervous system begins to have emotions and "free" will. (Not trying to argue about free will here. What I mean is that it makes choices, whether they're determined or not.)

The epistles in the New Testament. 1 and 2 Corinthians are the ones that spring to my mind first, but there are many others. You really ought to read the New Testament sometime, ideally in a decent study Bible so you get the context.

But is the history curriculum a false view or merely a different one?

Does that mean we could achieve #3, simply by farming on uninhabited parts of Earth 500,000 years ago?

That's because we're terrible about using units. Look at the potential!

Remove agriculture from the picture and our resource and land use goes down dramatically. Since the plant magically grows anywhere, we could easily grow it in apartments, kitchens, etc., and large-scale agriculture would dwindle. Of course, people would still want variety in their food, but chicken-flavored artificial fruit surely isn't too hard...

Dunno. I'm fairly certain that happiness is expressed in units of clams. You know, happy as a clam...

Also, try tinkering with the size of the integral sign. It may look better if it's smaller so it "flows" with the FN part.

Many forms of death are "natural" but still tragic. A sudden unpreventable heart attack is quite natural, but still tragic. Also, you know, miscarriages, according to your own account... True. But was it tragic because a life had been lost, or because they had been hoping for a child and their hope just died? Imagine if they hadn't been trying for years, but didn't care at all -- then would it be tragic? No, I wouldn't say it's whether it can feel pain that matters. Rather, by the time it can feel pain, I'd assume its nervous system is sufficiently well-developed to grant it some measure of "selfhood."

Fortunately, we're not purebred dog breeders here. Thus, in the thought experiment, we preserve selfhood, and it's not tragic. In a chimera, there's no selfhood involved, and it's not tragic. But this leads to the other problem -- aborting a zygote isn't tragic either. When does a fetus gain selfhood? I'd say that selfhood becomes an issue with a fetus when it has a nervous system capable of sensing pain and so on.