You keep on saying this. Could you perhaps enlighten the thread with a link to the video wherein she makes this claim?

Is that a fact?

Maybe they're just not that smart....?

Sorry.

Think about music. Learning the different scales by memory is important, but if you don't think about them in terms of intervals, and about those intervals in terms of whole-number ratios of frequencies, then you'll (probably) never become a great musician. Multiplication is interesting here, because there are lots of different ways of thinking about it, and when you come to do things like multiplying matrices, you see that it isn't always just repeated addition.

Perhaps they are behind where you were in terms of rote numeracy, but perhaps they have a deeper understanding of numerical objects than you did at that age?

Don't care. Use an eftpos card. Who carries cash? And why don't they put the tax up on the price list anyway? As an occasional visitor to the US, I hate that.

No, I can't. Or at least, not any pair of single digit numbers. And I certainly can't do the same with division. Addition I'm okay at, but sometimes make errors.

I do have a degree in mathematics though, and a job that requires the use of that mathematics almost every day, so perhaps its not that important generally. And in any case, estimation I would propose is a more important skill. And an understanding of the relative orders of magnitude. Like, for instance, how many a million really is. Kids are interesting in this respect, they're always grasping for larger and larger numbers (a thousand million billion days!!), yet they don't even really understand how many a hundred is.

Anyway; Once upon a time, it would have been considered a serious educational detriment to be unable to cut a quill pen from a feather. Today, we have biros. Ah... progress!

You say this like it's anything short of a total disaster for education. If it were to pass the effects would be felt for generations to come.

I remember discovering that linux was basically a kernel + a collection of crazy scripts to start 'services'. Bonkers plan, should've been replaced years and years ago. I have little knowledge of systemd, and its '.ini' files don't fill me with confidence, but those scripts just *had* to go.

CO2 emissions are a measure of cost (to the environment), not efficiency. Efficiency is purely a measure of how much energy is wasted in the energy conversion process. I would imagine that this is quite hard to calculate for a gas water heater though.

Where do you live that drying outside is not an option? Pollen and bugs? So, you have lots of pollen, and bugs (presumably we mean little flying thingies here - we're not talking about germs right?), but it's not hot enough outside to dry your clothes?

A surprise to me too. I live there, experienced the quakes, lost power and water for weeks, dug a loo in the back garden, etc etc etc. But I didn't see, or even hear about, fights breaking out over anything. Is your source that terrible 'docudrama' made by some people from Auckland who had apparently never visited Christchurch before?

Water did take a long time to show up, eventually water trucks turned up in the streets. Had the water supply been affected in a more widespread way (parts of the city were more or less unaffected, as mentioned elsewhere it's the ground conditions that really matter) we would have been in real trouble.

That's a very good point - and the argument that word and excel can't be replaced in a business environment is increasingly untrue. Not that they'll be replaced with behemoths like libreOffice - we've pretty much replaced them with google docs and an installation of confluence. I haven't opened word to write a document for quite a long time, and I certainly don't miss it.

Let's not be silly. OSX is free if you steal it. More power to you for doing so, but don't pretend that building a 'hackintosh' and running an illegal copy of OSX on it makes OSX free.

This remark betrays a deeply held racism that you really need to take a good hard (non-agressive) look at. Seriously.
No, you do not 'know' anything about 'blacks' (whatever that term might actually mean? Africans? Ghanians? Nigerians? African-Americans? People who like wearing a lot of black?). You hold prejudices about people who are not white.

Not liking gays is pretty much a lot like not liking, oh I don't know, redheads for instance. And then defending that position as being a "valid political position". And then getting into arguments over whether people who have red hair have it through choice, and whether or not dying one's hair red is an equally indefensible act.

It's just completely and totally silly. If that guys over there wants to do nasty things to that other guy, and they're both grown-ups, then get the fuck over it bucko and move on. Also if that girl over there wants to do some other things to that other girl, and they're both grown-ups, then get the fuck over that too. Except, like most anti-gay people, you're probably not nearly as anti-that as you are anti-the-other. Right?

Fact: none of these things are any of your business.

You Americans and your freedom. It's not OK to have sex with children - it causes incalculable harm that often lasts more than a single generation. Are you seriously trying to argue otherwise? Seriously? Or is this just an intellectual exercise for you, one in which the (ill-defined) term 'freedom' trumps all other concerns?