Hmm, wikipedia has a lot to say on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_techniques.

IIRC one of the leading proponents of alien involvement went to Egypt to get more evidence of his beliefs, found that he was completely wrong, and became an egyptologist. Once he'd gone to take a look he didn't have much sympathy with the whole "it's a mystery" viewpoint.

I had a physics teacher who said it was known that plumb lines were used because the deformation due to the weight of the pyramid was measurable at the top. A quick estimate suggests that the deflection would not be noticeable by several orders of magnitude.

Problem is when they gang up. Clinton changed the laws and then Bush the lesser pushed the changes to the limit of their ability to send the American economy to Asia and the Caymans for the benefit of a few rich donors.

There is always a massive media push to elect the most bought politician in the race, the one who will never go against his donors for the good of the people or the economy (NOT Bush Sr (trashed by media and his own party), Clinton, Bush jr, NOT McCain, Romney). Obama is bought, and way more bought than was hoped when he was elected, but much less than Romney or Bush jr. There is some hope, on any given issue, that Obama won't let the 0.1% sell off shared assets and grab deficit dollars for their benefit to be paid for by the rest of us.

Obama may sell out the electorate 80 or 90 percent of the time, but at least he digs in his heels on the odd occasion. Bush jr, Clinton, and Romney would/did sell out 100% of the time with a servile bow and an easy smile.

And other institutions that sway public opinion to allow politicians to do stupid and dishonest things and still get elected. Propaganda.

Uh, the guy is correct on all his points...

Statements like these permeate the outsourcing industry and encourage VPs to offshore. Then you interview the offshore employees and they don't know anything technical, can't produce reports/statuses, and can't use simple logic. There are good people in India, but nowhere near as many as the industry thinks there are and the good ones are not working for peanuts. The going rate for competent people is pretty close to US rates, the people work gets offshored to, who can't make those rates really can't do much.

CVs from offshored employees are pretty funny and almost universally fictional (based on 25 interviews over multiple projects). The guys we hire are pretty much as competent as the ones I deal with at IBM and Oracle, and the problem is the offshoring industry (with some help from the Indian educational system that is much more stratified than the US one).

I know people who do offshoring properly (they do 55% to 65% of work onshore, pay $15-20 an hour for offshore juniors, know people offshore and know the business culture there) and make it work, but they save 5-10% not the 60% the big outsourcers are aiming for.

And clients have to figure out that if you replace one person onshore with 5 people offshore who cannot, as a group, do the work of the one person they replaced, the client is NOT saving money. "But now you have FIVE people, you can do SHIFTS." Sigh... You can change the SLA from 2 hours to five days but you are not helping your business.

To prevent gun issues try welfare. Less people with nothing to lose, less people with no known address (everyone has a PO box at minimum). And there's no downside as welfare is direct economic stimulation, the money is spent instantly (not intelligently, necessarily, but fast, taxis to the liquor store or grocery bills, doesn't matter) on receipt.

Gun ownership is pretty much neutral toward crime, more random shootings, less bar fights/home invasions, but it increases accidental deaths. Training would be good. Teaching people (at least people who want them) guns aren't toys would be better; too bad it's impossible without the corresponding body count. Like for Zimmerman it's fun and power until the trigger pull, and then you're back to real life. And jail.

And any sort of self-defense with a gun gets massively played up by the NRA. You don't hear about it because it is rare. Accidents come up rarely, but frequently relative to the number of self-defense actions. You hear about them because they tend to be tragic (kids) and/or because gun control groups publicize them. And finding honest stats is a mess now, and more effort than I'm willing to make. The propaganda to truth ratio is low at both ends of the spectrum and they drown out the middle.

Gun ownership laws in Canada are applied way differently in the city, where guns stay locked or en route to/from the range, and outside where shotguns (for farmers) and rifles (for hunters) can be carried pretty freely. There generally aren't a lot of incidents in the rural areas, other than occasional drunk hunters shooting farmers, mostly in their own fields right next to the "no hunting" and "no trespassing" signs. This makes total sense to me. So many red state/blue state issues are just rural/urban divides with no comprehension on either side, though the propaganda (from politicians and media owners) doesn't help.

Or we could try the Chris Rock solution and make ammunition expensive. So if someone gets shot they had it coming... Like the dogbert solution: guns for everyone but ammunition only for me.

Companies will train cheap offshore people (our offshore teams get tons of training, but it doesn't help: if they were any good (even potentially good) they would be getting paid more elsewhere), and they are willing to train people for things that are not valuable to other companies.

Execs worry, correctly, that the people they train will leave if they get valuable skills without significant raises. People do leave and leverage their training but the solution is for all companies to train so that there is a larger skilled pool available, not to avoid training so they all have to poach a few candidates and/or hire cheap but incompetent people in large numbers (to assure failure is complete). Of course it is easier to do what everyone else is doing, fail, and blame the business environment (the business environment created by their campaign donations to give them money for failure).

US capitalism is slitting its wrists and buying politicians to keep up the blood transfusions.

If salespeople do not want to sell the phone it probably has less to do with quality than with the profit per unit than with the commission. If the provider has to give away Windows phones they won't pay a big commission to the salesperson who sells the plan. The "Windows phones are crap" comments can probably be translated as "my commission for selling Windows phones is crap." I don't see a reason to get a Windows phone as it stands, but I would not shop somewhere that refused to show or sell me an item they advertise. I'm not partial to places that push commission either as they are going to try to push high margin items and hide bargains.

Difference is most control freak bosses will tank all their projects. Jobs was able to control freak to success. Sigh, my clueless ex-PHB is reading his biography and taking the lesson that control freakiness is good (dude, stick to scapegoating and work on the neglect, it will be better for everyone, or duct-tape yourself to your chair). It's not good if everything fails when you touch it. You can (should?) get away with too much involvement if you are a genius in matching technology to consumers.
Jobs' legacy: millions of talentless managers having more impact on greater failures.

Generally everyone in a given school knows exactly who the good and bad teachers are. It is rare that it makes any difference whatsoever to the careers of the teachers.
I failed a single class during my time in school. The failure rate for that teacher was 75%, vs ~40% in classes taught by other teachers. He told his boss "it's your fault. Every year! Every year you put all the bad students in my class." He was not the worst teacher, just the worst teacher teaching a challenging first year class, before students learned how to deal with such teachers. I remember one prof actually being fired (and re-hired at a different university, sigh) but it was more because of his crappy research than his crappy teaching (he could make the simplest material impenetrable, I don't know if anyone showed up for his lectures after the first day, I didn't, the course was easy if you missed the lectures)..
Here in Canada some high school teachers' jobs depended on students taking their courses (non-critical non-science courses). A few teachers briefly risked their jobs by offering challenging courses. It did not last. The courses became meaningless, high marks, low effort, low standards. But many students were happy (other than the ones trying to differentiate from the average to get into med or whatever, how far above a 92% average can you go?), and the teachers kept their jobs. Not really good for anyone.
Not much difference from the average office. Some people are great, some are terrible. It is more obvious with teaching because instead of a few constant co-workers raving or bitching you have 30 students a year propagating praise and/or criticism.
One reasonable evaluation would be to look for a teacher who reverses typical grades, i.e. students who generally do well do poorly and vice versa. It normally indicates a teacher who evaluates based on something other than the material (often sucking up).

The jumping crap was annoying, but it did not take that long. I finished close to all the HL games (2, ep 1, ep 2, HL, blue shift, at the last chapter of opposing force) without cheats (on wuss level), without taking huge amounts of time, and I'm not even a good FPS player. Not every part of every game works (the bits where you have to move stuff and walk on it so as not to touch the ground tried my patience) but overall I'm glad I did not miss any bits or use cheats. I was happy to pay full price for portal 2 (I got portal late) even though I finished it in about 8 hours over less than a week. And that is considering I have not played the multiplayer yet. I will take quality over length. On the other hand I miss games like the original X-com (finishing that was time consuming) and master of orion (that I still play occasionally). One observation is that I now choose to lower the difficulty level and finish games where I used to leave it really high and often burn out. I'll have to go back and try dragon age on a lower level, or maybe just play better (but then I finished Baldur's Gate and many/most of the sequels, not sure why I did not stick with Dragon Age).

Actually, other than Thomas, Bush I was remarkably good, raised taxes appropriately (yes, very possible), ran his war well, got respect from people in other countries, was turfed by the neo-cons. Bush II was remarkably bad, ran his war badly, sold out the economy to a few rich friends and some people in other countries, was hated by most people in other countries, and was loved by the neo-cons. Not much similarity really.... Clinton was closer to Bush II unfortunately, as is Obama. More a product of both parties basing all their processes around fundraising instead of trying to get votes or do what is right for the country. Bush I actually appeared to believe he had some sort of "duty" to his country, and was hated by his party because of it.

Well, to be fair, some science is stamp collecting.

I was pleasantly surprised by Anathem as well. The Baroque Cycle had occasional neat bits but they were few and far between.

I think eggs were supposed to be bad because of the cholesterol link (that was poorly understood), and not because people who ate more eggs died young.

I have more confidence in a study that says "we did some research and we found X but we don't know why" than in a study that says "hey X probably causes Y so we should reduce X." At least for human health and other complex items.