First step is one thing, but this is my son's method in the fifth grade. And if he does the standard way of dividing 1.62 into 0.27 (by working with the numbers instead of drawing boxes), he is marked as wrong even if he gets the right answer. All because he didn't use the EngageNY-Approved method.

I don't oppose improvements to education, but New York state's implementation of Common Core is worse than the old way, not better.

I didn't want to get into this here, but...

First off, it gives teachers scripts that they must follow. For this ten minutes, you need to say these words to the students in this manner and ask them this exact question using this exact example. They must answer you in this exact way. Next, you must move on to this topic in this manner. There's no room for teachers to adjust their teaching techniques to either assist kids who'd learn the material in a different way or to help advance kids who are ahead of grade level. All kids *MUST* learn in the exact same way.

Secondly, EngageNY is idiotic with math. There's no more working with numbers. If you have 1.62 divided by 0.27, you don't actually do the math. Instead, you draw 162 little boxes. Then you circle them in groups of 27. Then you count how many circled groups there are to get your answer. This doesn't teach kids how to do math and, even worse, it doesn't scale. What if the problem was 1.625 divided by 0.25? Would they need to draw over 1,600 boxes?

Thirdly, the high stakes tests are tied to teachers' jobs. If their kids do poorly, the teacher could be booted. So any chance the teacher would stray from the provided curriculum is reduced. The teacher MUST teach to the test because any time spent on non-test preparation increases the chance that their kids will fail. Add in the fact that the content of the tests is super-secret. Nobody is allowed to see them except the students taking them. Not parents, teachers, administrators. Nobody. The tests are taken, mailed to Pearson where they are graded and destroyed. Then the scores are released. How does knowing that Johnny had a grade of X help the teacher teach Johnny if you don't know what he got right and what he got wrong?

Finally, this constitutes an attempt by corporations to take over and profit from education. The big supporters of this curriculum are big corporations who will profit quite nicely over it. (Bill Gates Foundation, Pearson, Wal-Mart, etc.) I don't trust big corporations to write a "one size fits all" curriculum that will help my boys succeed. In fact, since they make more money off a kid who fails than one who passes (additional books, courses to help students/teachers/administrators, etc), they have a monetary interest in kids failing.

Don't mistake change for improvement. There are plenty of ways you can change education to improve it. Common Core/EngageNY/High Stakes testing is *NOT* one of those ways.

I'd hate to throw the GOP out entirely because then we'd be left with only one major party. What I'd like to see happen would be the GOP breaking up into a True Conservative (no neo-cons allowed) party and the Religious Right/Old White Guys party. Then we could regulate the RR/OWG party to be a third party that we all laugh at for their antics and we could have some decent candidates from the TC party to oppose the Democrats.

Note: This is coming from someone who tends to vote Democrat but would hate to see that as the only option on the ballot. I actually *WANT* other choices. Come on politicians, make my choice a difficult one.

That way leads to the end of democracy. Also, be careful of supporting restrictions on voting rights for "certain groups" lest you find yourself put into those groups. Who is to say that "revoke voting rights for the ignorant" won't get perverted into "revoke voting rights ignorant of how glorious our version of God is"? Then, we all won't be able to vote and the religious right would finally get free reign to appoint who they want without dealing with that pesky opposition.

There are plenty of people who are religious but don't take the bible literally. I actually happen to be one of them. My personal belief* is that the bible is an allegorical text meant to teach moral lessons, not to teach history. If God wanted to teach us history, Genesis 1:1 would have started "In the beginning, there was a Big Bang...." (It would also be a LOT longer to read ala "How It Happened" by Isaac Asimov.) If anything, I think religion is enhanced by science. Sure, you need to give up the "God magically poofed the world into existence 10,000 years ago" belief (then again, that should have gone away over a hundred years ago), but the "God of old" ruled over Earth and a sphere that essentially had stars painted on it. The "God of people who embrace science" rules over an unimaginably vast Universe.

* I think that all religion should stay as personal beliefs and I wouldn't think of trying to force someone else to follow my religious beliefs. So long as your religious beliefs don't hurt anyone else, I say go for it. I happen to be Jewish, but if you think Christ is the savior that's fine by me. If you follow Budda or Islam or Wicca or any other religion, I'm ok with it. I only take issue when some people - e.g. the Religious Right - think it is their religious duty to force me to follow their religious rules (to "save me").

There is a condition known as "manic depressive disorder." Essentially, you can have a day where you're feeling so great that you decide to move all of the furniture in your house, repaint the living room, run a mile, begin a novel, and more. You have tons of energy and can do it all. And then you crash into the depression stage where getting out of bed is a major achievement.

There were some very brilliant people who did some wonderful things in their manic stages only to sink into horrible depression stages (sometimes committing suicide while in these).

There's also the group that see idiocy all around and, knowing they can't fight it all, fight some battles and toss their arms up on others.

For example, my wife and I are fighting against EngageNY, Common Core, and the high-stakes testing that New York State has implemented. Without going too much into it (since it is off-topic), let's just summarize to say that New York's Board of Education is highly corrupt and this was rushed into to benefit politicians and funnel money to corporations, not students or teachers. In fact, it is actively hurting students. So we're fighting this fight.

Unfortunately, we can't fight every fight. I doubt anyone could. Even if you were single, with no kids, and were able to fight these fights every day, I doubt you would be able to battle all of them. At some point, you need to pick and choose and people are more likely to pick the battles that affect them immediately (schools) and less likely to pick battles that might affect them later on (science funding). This isn't to say that science isn't important - I definitely think it is, but you can't fight all the fights all the time.

Before you judge someone for throwing up their arms in frustration at this instead of fighting, take a closer look and see what other battles they're fighting.

The problem is that these people aren't just ignorant. People who are ignorant can be educated and then they're fine. These people are willfully ignorant. They are purposefully ignorant. They take pride in their ignorance and will do everything in their power to stay ignorant. Trying to educate these people is a losing proposition because they won't listen no matter what you say or how much proof you show them.

It would be tolerable if these people were just conspiracy nuts ala the "moon landing were faked" folks. We could laugh at them and move on with our lives. These people, however, are in seats of power in the government and are making big decisions about scientific funding. Again, perhaps we could laugh at them if we knew that the educated populace would toss the ignorant politicians when the next election rolled around. Unfortunately, the purposefully ignorant politicians are representing purposefully ignorant people who keep voting them in and who actively oppose educated politicians. To make matters worse, the willfully ignorant politicians gerrymander their districts so that it is nearly impossible to get them voted out of office. They might be purposefully ignorant about science but they are very intelligent about how politics works - a very dangerous combination.

You can't reason with these people. You can oppose them, but it can be very frustrating when you are derided for wanting someone who is educated to make these decisions instead of someone who thinks God *poofed* everything into existence 10,000 years ago as proved incontrovertibly by a book that they take literally. In the end, I can understand why some people throw their arms up in frustration.

The interesting thing for me is: Will it play movies off of a USB hard drive? Right now, I rip DVDs that I own to MP4 and put them on a USB hard drive. I hook that up to my Roku box and it plays those movies. (I'd keep them in MKV format, but Roku has issues with MKV. I've had much more luck with MP4. It's an extra conversion step, but it works.)

Amazon's box has a USB port but (according to the reviews at least) it doesn't use it. Could USB support be coming in a firmware update? If so, this might be a tempting buy.

Whatever happens, though, it's nice to see more competition on the OTT setup box front. More competition means better products for less (or the same) money and this is good for consumers. If only for that reason, I welcome Amazon into the market.

our jogging pace is also finely tuned to be the most annoying to outrun

I knew it! I knew people evolved to be annoying!

As other posters have pointed out, chances are that one of three things happened:

1) The flies were doing well enough even with the zebra's stripe-protection and so there wasn't a strong evolutionary pressure to get past this.

2) The stripe-aversion consisted of a benefit (e.g. kept them from landing on surfaces that could harm them) and this outweighed any benefit of being able to get past the zebra stripes.

3) The biological cost involved with overcoming the stripe-aversion (e.g. better eyes) was too great for the flies so that any benefit they gained was outweighed by the disadvantage of the "improvement."

Wait. All nerds hate Wil Wheaton? Is it a contractual obligation to hate him? I happen to like the guy. Does this mean I need to hand in my nerd card now? I *knew* I should have read the fine print when I signed the Standard Nerd Contract!

Every husband knows that, in any debate no matter what the evidence is, the wife is always right. And if, by some chance, she's wrong, it's probably the husband's fault somehow. This is stipulated in the fine print of every marriage contract.

There was one good reality show: The Mole. At the beginning of the show, one of the contestants was chosen to be the mole. Nobody (audience or contestants) knew who this person was. The contestants would complete events to try to add cash to the pot with the mole either sabotaging the effort as subtly as possible or being purposefully helpful to avoid suspicion. Contestants needed to be as observant as possible because each "elimination point" would involve a quiz about various events and would require contestants to guess who the mole is. The one with the lowest score (least observant) got eliminated. Eventually, you were left with the mole and the winner of the contest.

It was actually a cerebral show (as far as reality shows go) and light on the forced drama. Needless to say, it didn't survive long since apparently the reality TV crowd wants dumbed down shows with as much forced drama as possible.

That's the first thing I thought also.

Car: "The light will turn red in 30 seconds. I recommend driving at 30mph so that it will be green again when we get there."
Driver: "Thanks." *hits the gas and speeds up to make it through the light as the yellow changes to red*

This isn't to say that we shouldn't implement more safety features. (The countdown clocks on red/green lights that others have mentioned sound interesting.) However, we shouldn't be surprised when some bad drivers take those features and pervert them to make themselves an even greater danger on the roads. (All the while thinking that they are perfect drivers.)