One of the two who subdued the Tucson shooter was armed, but correctly judged it unnecessary to use his weapon when he got close to the shooter. Simply being armed though, probably played a big role in deciding whether to move toward or away from the sound of spontaneous gunfire. Six were killed.

Most gun massacres in the U.S., such as at Virginia Tech (where 33 were killed) happen in areas where citizens are not legally permitted to be armed. I think that is the point: you can't play god when you are walking among peers.

It benefits everyone for your neighbor's children to grow up to be useful people. Until our society becomes comfortable with people starving to death in the streets, it is much cheaper to educate a child than sustain a useless adult with public resources.

Even if we get comfortable with people starving in the street, they are not just going to starve to death peacefully. Desperate people are understandably capable of committing all sorts of nastiness to preserve their lives, and then you have to pay to incarcerate them.

It's a bit hyperbolic, but the point is that your life is significantly better because you have educated civilized neighbors, and it is not too absurd to expect you to help pay for it.

It is probably meant as a joke but it is still a good point. Educated people wield power disproportionately in other ways though. Wouldn't you prefer, for example, that engineers for the defense industry have a solid understanding of contemporary history, regardless of whether or not they are sufficiently interested or motivated to study it on their own time?

What is the quote from Jurrassic Park about being too concerned with whether or not you could to stop and think about whether or not you should?

As a scientific programmer, I find it amazing that any significant portion of people in serious IT place no value on math higher than and including trigonometry. Is this actually the case?

And as a citizen in a democracy, I find it amazing and frightening that a significant portion of people who actually vote see no value in general education courses. When I was a kid in the 90's, we used to call someone a "tool" as an insult.

I could certainly stand to lose a bit of the snarkiness; I am about to start a job among engineers. You should probably review basic circuits though, because you are still misunderstanding something:

Parallel components have the same voltage difference applied across them. Adding a bulb to another in parallel will not affect the brightness of the original bulb (as long as the current is still low enough to consider the battery ideal). Both bulbs are as bright as the original bulb, and the battery is supplying to each branch the current it supplied to the original lone bulb. Adding 3 bulbs in parallel just adds additional bulbs that draw the same power as the original, and increases the total current (and power) drawn from the battery by 300%.

Adding the bulbs in series does what you describe. Perhaps that is what you are miscommunicating.

I checked through the first couple of google results until I found a good reference for you. Everything here is correct.
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/circuits/u9l4b.cfm

I only call this out because you criticize "teach the test" type education, which I do as well for good reason, but then you ironically illustrate one of the largest failures of this type of education. It breeds people who are very confident in an only partial understanding. To stick to my earlier example, it creates the sort of students who might take a lot of pride in correcting you about the start date of the civil war without even knowing what events started it.

Series and parallel circuits are very different, but there are superficial symmetries between the currents of one and the voltage drops of the other, and people often use these to remember the phenomenological behavior. It's the easiest way for most people to get a B on the relevant test. Doing it that way is not understanding; it is rote memorization, and can leave people susceptible to confusing two things that are very different.

Uh, if you are building a circuit with two resistors and a battery, putting the resistors in parallel does increase the total power dissipated on the circuit. The total effective resistance is less, therefore the current drawn from the battery is higher, and since the battery's voltage will stay relatively constant, more total power is dissipated. This all follows from Ohm's law.

Perhaps you misspoke; your language certainly lacks the precision of someone who has actually worked with circuits. If that is the case though, it is just as likely that you misinterpreted what the book was trying to say.

The problem with modern education is that students memorize a collection of effectively disjoint dry facts that is appropriate for a given multiple choice test, and don't actually learn anything. It's something you may have fallen victim to yourself. Do you really understand the dynamics of current in electrical circuits, or did you see something that you thought contradicted an isolated fact you were once told?

When I teach physics I routinely overhear students talking about how "different" physics is from other classes, because there are not usually well defined directions to follow and it requires more intuitive understanding than they are accustomed to. That probably wouldn't be the case if their history classes had them writing essays about the motivations for the American civil war rather than identifying the start and end dates on a time-line.

There are already recorded instances of natural parrots communicating these things. Look up Alex the grey parrot.

If you are Black or Hispanic, this is a static property of your biology. It will never change. If you are religious, odds are that you inherited it from your parents, but it is still a choice. Not necessarily an easy one if it stems from childhood indoctrination, but it is still a choice, and therefore it's socially acceptable to make fun of it.

It's the same mechanism by which people who choose to be religious justify hating homosexuals.

It isn't genetics...at least that is not the mechanism. It's indoctrination. It's being told from the time that you could first parse language that there are infinitely bad consequences for questioning certain things.

Here is a relevant post from the past: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2738993&cid=39431381

It might take a kid five or six years to overcome the virtual threat of no Christmas presents if they do not believe, and acknowledge that Santa Claus is an unreasonable concept that had been passed to them as truth their entire life. Many adults never overcome the virtual threat of eternity in hell.

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

This is a problem with any vaguely democracy-like system. Your children are going to be biased towards your believes, so that with a larger family, your political influence is ultimately propagated across more votes. Your actual power in a democracy, assuming you do not hold office, is correlated with the number of children you have. Therefore, your capability to influence the nation is negatively correlated with your educational level and positively correlated with your religiosity.

Democratic governments have to be biased towards the politics of those who breed like rabbits.

Actually, it sounds a lot like the cost of a college education after about 18 years. I guess people have their priorities though.

While he is certainly known for not breaking his consistency to please voters, I have always been curious how many of his official stances on topics like abortion are and always have been essentially mandated by his job as a politician representing Texans.

To be fair, I don't think you would find many students who are frustrated by additional interactivity, but it can certainly hinder them.

My experience teaching physics implies that this can be a terrible thing. Even having answers in the back of the book is devastating. When students get instant feedback, especially when an intermediate mistake goes without consequence, they do not bother understanding anything, but are happy as long as they can "do" it. They will engage in trial and error until they get the right answer, and then feel that they learned something. In the absence of instant feedback, if a student does not know what to do next, they would be forced to recognize that they do not understand the problem, they would spend some more time with the materials, and they would continue when they could do so confidently.

With instant feedback, students just try the first thing that comes into their head. Often, it is correct just because the student had seen a similar example somewhere and blindly applied a procedure they did not understand. Why not? There is no consequence if it is wrong, and it saves you the trouble of serious study. Without these mechanisms, the student would more heavily weigh their confidence in their understanding, regurgitating a similar example would more likely fall below the threshold, and they would probably develop their understanding further.

You should be especially careful to avoid anthropomorphizing the physical processes in these sorts of discussions.

I think that would be better served by arguments with peers. A teacher is an authority figure, and when they disagree with a child, there is an implication (if not an explicit assertion) that the child is wrong. If a teacher is going to teach evolution as a "theory" (quotes indicate the colloquial usage), they are not likely to acknowledge the validity or strengths of a student's argument. This is not a good environment in which to learn critical thinking.