bh23ha

Dare I suggest he spend some time telling his customers about his time as an apprentice, the broken locks, and how long it took to get good. Then after that pick the lock. Educate your customers.

Political parties are not static. They move and evolve and change, and grow and shrink and may become tiny and spend years in the political wilderness.

When a party is reduced to a regional rump, and has several litmus test for their tiny, tiny tent. When one of the most important test is are you anti or pro science, you can't seriously expect a lot of scientist to belong to club which is fervently against anyone who dares to believe in evolution.

Let me first clarify that I'm not talking about education as a type of technical school that will teach you what ever skill is hot at the moment.

Rather I think the original point of this discussion started with the claim that good design is not just how things looks but rather a deep understanding of how the whole thing works. Knowledge which is both wide ranging and deep is a prerequisite for good design.

That is something I strongly agree with.

A liberal arts education was suggested as the thing which provides both deep and wide ranging knowledge. And obviously I am bit sceptical of that.

For example:

I view college rather as a place for people to learn more about themselves, and to have the freedoms to discover things they would never discover on their own.

Exactly! Except I don't quite agree with never discover on their own. College happens to coincide with the time of your life where you are learning the most about yourself.

And if you decided to travel the country (or the world) on a motorcycle, I bet you would learn a lot about yourself and have incredible freedom, and discover things you'd never even dreamt about.

But I don't mean to disparage college. College also brings together other students and professors and it's very safe, so an absolutely great experience.

However, I do find that often people who defend liberal arts education imply that self discovery without it is just not as good. I strongly disagree with that, I don't think you even need college for self discovery. Curiosity and a sense of adventure is just as good. Add travel to that mix and I think few colleges can beat that.

The other unfortunate implication is that people who don't have a liberal arts education are a bit shallow or narrow focused, or not quite as well rounded. This I find frankly offensive. But never mind how I feel about it, I think it's plainly wrong.

Science and engineering don't sap student's souls. Scientists and engineers are not all boring, grey people, with no sense for art or music. I recall the Ad Council commercials with a boy telling the street musician to get a job, and a little girl asking her dad to read to her from the Federal Reserve meeting notes.

Actually, if I had to name the one area of study which saps people's souls with overbearing work loads, it would be medicine. And MDs aren't exactly known to be shallow or not well rounded.

Scientists and engineers love music and art too. I mean how can you look at the Millau Viaduct http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/01/wonders_bigdigs/sour... and not see the art and beauty in it?

Your paragraph:

For a creative mind, all of these things aid both in specific studies — I could reel out a list of scientific discoveries formulated by scientists who were inspired by an utterly different line of thought — and in the more important study, which is: realizing that the world is interconnected in a lot of ways, and that those connections tend to mirror other connections elsewhere, and that studying all these other things will lead to a richer and deeper education/human being.

Is a perfect example of implying that scientists and engineers are just not as aware of the nature of the universe, the subtle connections in it, the beauty in it. That scientists and engineers just aren't quite as "creative".

College isn't about me getting a job. It's about me becoming a better person. Liberal arts is geared towards making me more diverse and thoughtful than I would be otherwise. It's working.

And amazingly science and engineering work in exactly the same way for science and engineering students.

I mean literally no one wants to hire software engineers right out of collage. So yeah, pretty much exactly like a liberal arts degree :)

Or in other words, the more actively engaged the electorate is, the stronger the "public" lobby is vs. other private lobbies.

And the smaller and more local a government is, the more engaged the electorate is. Prime example, the smaller states have more independent senators, governors, etc. By independent I mean literally (I) and not (R) or (D), not just metaphorically independent.

It would be like a university except it would really be up to the students to learn what ever and how much ever of it they wanted, and the autodidact-versity would just provide the venue and the books and the internet connection.

I also think that any certification that comes out of this process would be there only if a student wants it. And the student would decide what level of certification they care to try and get. And much like a Ph.D. thesis defence, a committee would take an adversarial position to the student and if the student successfully defends what they've learned, they would get a shiny certificate of some kind.

Or maybe all will just hinge on a student contributing something to human knowledge by publishing a scientific paper which gets cited by someone. Only if your paper got cited do get the right to call yourself a... something what ever.

Something like that.

Just so people don't miss interpret what I'm saying: I do think we should try to prove medtech is safe and does something. But I think the quantity of proof we require slows down innovation tremendously. And the penalty we pay for bringing things YEARS to market later then we could have is human lives.

Or in other words, Starbucks could also have been mismanaged. And http://www.peapod.com/ is still in businesses.

As others in this thread have pointed out, the key distinction between bubble 1.0 and 2.0 is complete nonsense vs. real value.

Most likely currently hugely overvalued value, but still real value.

After bubble 1.0 burst, it hurt the very concept of business on the internet badly.

When 2.0 bursts, a very few companies will close shop, the rest will simply be worth a lot less and lay off people but will return to operating profitably as before.

Ron Paul is by no means perfect but Sweet Zombie Jesus, he is still 100 times better then the wast majority of politicians.

I for one am extremely sceptical that a large set of deeply understood diverse experiences can be obtained in 4 or 5, actually anything less then 10 years, at college.

In my experience, a "liberal arts education" is a great way to spend a lot of money while having a hell of fun time and learning about history and stuff, in an extremely safe environment.

Obviously a tiny percentage of students with true passion for knowledge will seek out challenges and get a lot more out of college.

But the difference between the average liberal arts student and the average science/engineering student, is that the average science/engineering student does not need to seek out the opportunity to work hard and be wrong.

And that is why if I am forced to pick with no other information, I pick science and engineering.

IQ found to be influenced by a whole mess of genes, and nutrition in parents, and grand parents, and hugely by the environment. And IQ tests found to be very bad at distinguishing between knowledge and intellect.

Then they could partner with FedEx, UPS, or DHL.

Then car manufactures can put in optional parental override, but a better marketing name would be computer assist. Especially for old people, they wouldn't get computer override, they'd have computer assist.

And a few years after that, when the statistic are in and computer driven cars are much, much, much less likely to kill anyone then human driven cars. Even after you discount drivers under the influence. Then we'll see political pressure to have computer "assistance" in every car.

For some it would be war more then corruption and for a very few it's not true at all, but they won't be developing for long.

I started running with an ancient pair of shoes. Flat, thin sole, absolutely no cushioning in it. After quite some time, I bought new running shoes, thick sole, lots of cushioning.

On my first run with the brand new shoes, I was much faster. MUCH faster. I got home amazed and thought I should have switched a long time ago, what was I thinking running in those ancient beat up shoes!

And I thought these new shoes must have a lot of bounce in them. So I jumped up a bit - nothing, no bounce. So I took them off, and tried to bounce them again. Still no bounce. They are cushioned, they dampen shock, absorb it, they are the opposite of bouncy.

Well then I should have been slower, why did I run faster with dampening? I kept thinking about that, and then the next day my knees were in pain. And that's when I seriously started researching running and shoes.

And I've pretty well convinced myself barefoot is the way to go. But to avoid stepping on you name it, look for shoes like the Vibrams, avoid heavy cushioning.

A long long time ago art, craft, science and even what then passed for engineering and manufacturing, were all pretty much the same thing.

Over time we started to separate things, first science split off, but eventually we even split craft from art.

And what's left in art is not some sensible definition like what can educate the illiterate, enlighten the literate, and entertain the enlightened.

It's not even some fuzzy definition like what ever is a comment on the human condition. The stand for an art piece could totally be that, until the artist tells you it's just the stand the art is still coming. Even some artists who make amusing and animated art have been accused of not making art at all but some kind of crafty floss for the eyes bullshit that so totally not art.

(Please be aware that when I wrote the above I had sculptures in mind, not video games.)

Art, and I don't just mean the products of art, but the all encompassing culture, critics, buyers, sellers, "artists", groupies, the whole thing: it is all a social hack.

If you totally buy into and can't use your own taste to tell something good from something else, we'll then you've been totally 0wn3d.

If you just like music and some other artsy type things, but don't get "it". Well then you're doing much better then people who overpay for crap they don't understand, but you still don't get it.

If you get recognition and/or fame, money, what ever, but you get for something which requires a lot of work/effort/time/talent, what ever, then you're really good at that thing! But you're not necessary also really good at art. Even if the thing is something everyone agrees is super artsy, like painting.

If you're getting paid, especially if it's a lot, for anything that doesn't require much of anything, this includes work/time/loss of dignity/etc, if you can get paid a lot from "art" for not doing much, well then you get it and are winning at this particular game.

But we can't do that, the whole point of LLPs and Incs. is to limit the investor's liability.

This is partly why we have agency risk.

This is why while I consider myself a libertarian, I still think we need competent and aggressive regulators in all the places where the market is not self-corrective.

But I'm not sure how we could avoid regulatory capture for ever.

Or in other words, debugging code is twice as hard as writing code, so if you write the smartest code you can, you will not be able to debug it.

But having said that, I do think that the headline is link bait. I only agree with it if you add: "On very large, long term projects".

For the release often and early and start-up crowd, smart and fast is probably better then disciplined and maintainable.

I am tempted to tattoo this on... somebody.

Or the decidedly low-tech genocide in Sudan. Or the genocides and crimes against humanity in all the other places.

Bottom line is Homo homini lupus. It's not like the risk of US soldier casualties is that much of deterrent.

Bombs, A-bombs, robots, not that different, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

As to extreme do-normalization, colour me sceptical, why not parallelise and throw more hardware at the problem?

Or cultural traditions like

Mărţişor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%83r%C5%A3i%C5%9For

and

Martenitsa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martenitsa

Or ancient history, or recent history, or genetics, etc.

This really makes me wonder about the study, and exactly what they measured?

Pretty much the same goes for most of your food too.

Water is the only thing that would get tricky. But large chunks of the northern hemisphere have A LOT of water. Think Seatle, or for that matter, ALL of New England, especially northern New England.