dgordon

7 ms·

31.
by dgordon 16y ago
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.
32.
by dgordon 16y ago
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.
33.
by dgordon 16y ago
You say that like it's a bad thing. ;-)
34.
by dgordon 16y ago
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 p
35.
by dgordon 16y ago
>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
36.
by dgordon 16y ago
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 th
37.
by dgordon 16y ago
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
38.
by dgordon 16y ago
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 mul
39.
by dgordon 16y ago
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
40.
by dgordon 16y ago
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
41.
by dgordon 16y ago
>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.
42.
by dgordon 16y ago
I would hope most students learn a lot more than basic calculus in four years of college.
43.
by dgordon 16y ago
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.
44.
by dgordon 16y ago
"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
45.
by dgordon 16y ago
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
46.
by dgordon 16y ago
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 tha
47.
by dgordon 16y ago
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
48.
by dgordon 16y ago
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 probl
49.
by dgordon 16y ago
"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 stand
50.
by dgordon 16y ago
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," t
51.
by dgordon 16y ago
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. T
52.
by dgordon 16y ago
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 bette
53.
by dgordon 17y ago
Finally. An Oregon Trail reference that remembers that fording the river never, ever worked. Caulk the wagon and float was the way to go.
54.
by dgordon 17y ago
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.
55.
by dgordon 17y ago
People should be free to do whatever they want, but not to make other people finance their wants. I see no contradiction.
56.
by dgordon 17y ago
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.
57.
by dgordon 17y ago
"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. O
58.
by dgordon 17y ago
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"
59.
by dgordon 17y ago
"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 tas
60.
by dgordon 17y ago
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.

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