You would at least be given the chance to fail. Instead of being assigned to 'write the documentation' in a University project, you would get a decent task which you may actually learn something from. By the time you get to a real job you may actually know what you are talking about.
which was done decades ago, I laughed at the 80s mention, I was taught as child in the 60s and in 70s this was popular science fair homemade wind tunnel experiment.
About once a month slashdot runs article on "discovery" or "invention" that is decades old
Really? They performed experiments with syncronised flapping wings in a homemade wind tunnel? They actually timed real birds wing flapping to confirm the hypothesis? I call bullshit on this one. It is very typically Slashdot "stupid science / is this new??" kneejerk reaction and as usual there is no fucking evidence. I suspect the experiments you are talking about was with fixed wings.
In any case, aerodynamics with fixed wings is obviously pretty ancient by now, but sensible modelling of flapping wings is far more recent.
And neither does the media-consuming public. Most would totally ignore your measure of precision regardless of whether you call it standard deviation or mean absolute deviation. For them your average is absolute and if any values aren't at all near it something is terribly wrong. They will also not rest until every school performs above average and nothing in your work will convince them otherwise. The public doesn't like uncertainty and will assume every outcome is for a special reason, and this even goes for the non-religious ones. The idea that some things aren't absolute and are actually uncertain and variable terrifies them.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in sports. Everything there is always "written in the stars" or "destiny" and if you win it always proves beyond doubt your are better than your opposition (or you were 100% cheated by the refs). Hell, journalists may have had a full article written up 2 minutes before the end of a game and then completely change everything to be about one team's dogged determination because chance would have it they scored in the last minute. I love football (soccer), but discussing it can be frustrating.
If you still believe you can convince them, use mean absolute deviation in your "executive summary" or press release and leave the standard deviation as is in your actual paper. The only ones that actually read the paper are scientists anyway. The typical journalist reading your actual paper is likely to misunderstand something in every paragraph anyway. Changing real science to pander to the masses is a fucking huge mistake.
Now you too can own stolen credit card to buy all your online pr0n! All for the limited cost of $1. Nothing could be easier! Simply pay by Credit Card! No hassle!
Yes, because people like myself like shopping there as the staff are generally happy and hence far more polite than the people working in the tesco down the road where they barely speak english and simply can't be arsed.
It goes both ways! A positive feedback cycle; treat your employees well and give them ownership and most tend to be happy and perform better and you tend to do better and you can thus treat them even better.
Although, to be fair, it is probably easier to do this in an upmarket retailer than in Tesco, where absolutely ever penny counts and margins are razor thin.
The John Lewis Partnership, the most upmarket of any widespread retailer (Waitrose and John Lewis brands) in the UK is employee owned. Their wages are good, they are profitable (with a strongly positive trend) and typically pay out two months salary as a yearly staff bonus.
Why would anyone need to make such a specious argument to justify not wanting a compulsory governor on her car? The simplest argument is, "It's my car, and I choose to be the device that limits its speed." You see, a car is a privately owned possession that has use on public roads, but its use is not limited to public roads.
For 99% of all people that is also a specious argument, since their cars are never used on private roads where it is possible to break the speed limit. Their venture onto private ground is limited to their driveway and private carparks, neither of which could remotely sustain a 150 km/t speed.
Also there is nothing wrong with the public saying that you are fine having a non-speed-limited car (we won't interfere with you privately owned possession), but we won't allow you to drive on our public roads, because that is actually a privilege and not a right and we get (through democracy) get to chose who drives on it. We already refuse plenty of people/cars.
"These qualities ATTRACT parents who are involved and want their children to do well in school so they will bend over backwards to get them out of the public school system leaving the parents who either cant or wont care."
"yes -- force. The school my children attend require 40 hours of volunteer work each year -- otherwise your child goes back in to the lottery"
This highlights exactly what is wrong with our current social structures. You kick the child out of a school because their parents don't volunteer enough? What the fuck? It is simply morally wrong to punish the child for the parent's failings. They already have a shitty lot in life due to uncaring parents and you are applauding making life even shittier for them?
If you kick out a child because their parents don't volunteer or you set the bar of entry so that you ATTRACT parents who are involved, you don't punish the uncaring and uninvolved parents, you punish their children. How can you possibly justify this?
"What you just described, was hard work on the part of yourself and your parents."
He didn't chose his parents and so the hard work done by his parents was from the poster's point-of-view; luck. Furthermore, his attitude of hard work was probably due to learning the same attitudes from his parents. So he was doubly lucky to have less constraints put upon him than peers with shitty parents.
Unless you find a way of chosing parents better, your start in life and your constraints in life are usually set for you. It is very, very rare to overcome poor, lazy, uneducated, uncaring and abusive parents AND school and reach university.
"You don't need speed limits if you have traffic jams."
Actually, you may need speed limits, not for safety but for reducing the traffic jam. Traffic jams are caused by sudden stops on the motorway and the fact that acceleration is not instant. This causes a shock wave propagating backwards throughout the motorway becoming much worse as it travels backwards.
They've found that if they can manage to reduce the speed of traffic at peak hours everyone gets into London quicker. It's much better everyone travels at 40mph to begin with as this makes it unlikely you'll suddenly have to drop to 0mph, which will cause tailbacks behind you.
My favourite of these arguments is the argument against speed-limiters on car:
"I may at some point need to go really fast to avoid an accident".
Often used by people who don't like the idea of limiting a car to 150 km/h despite the fact that their country doesn't allow travel faster than 120 km/h anywhere. Because of this, they come up with all sorts of extremely unlikely scenarios where travelling really fast may save them. They also try very hard to ignore other solutions than driving really fast.
The war on drugs have totally torn several countries apart. They are now practically lawless, ruthless and scary places to live and even visit. All because of a fruitless fight to protect people from themselves. Sadly it will now be impossible (at least in the short to medium term) to bring these places back to stability, even if we finally gave up the war on drugs, because the drug cartels have amassed too much money and weaponry, all because of the immense profits possible because the product has been made illegal.
I wouldn't be surprised if the drug cartels have been bribing government officials to keep the hard line on drugs going.
I was wondering how impressive it was and attempted to resolve this with trigonometry to find the likely error distance 1 light year away.
This got me in trouble with precision (the angle is of the order 1.0e-11 in Radians) but knowing that the angle is a constant here, the error should scale linearly with the distance.
If we use 400,000 km as the distance to the moon, 1 light years is roughly 2.0e7 times the distance to the moon (Google search calculator).
Thus an error of 20mm = 2.0e-5 km error at 400000 km should give around 2.0e7 * 2.0e-5 km =~ 400 km, meaning at 1 light years away, their error is roughly on par with how far away Ryan Air puts you from your real destination.
Win95 was also the first to incorporate Internet capability (a TCP/IP stack) in the operating system, which by 1995 was a very big deal. On Windows 3.1, you had to use third party software (such as Trumpet Winsock) if you wanted to get onto the Internet in a meaningful way (such as running a web browser.)
Not quite. Windows 95 shipped without TCP/IP and it required the Plus-pack (which TBF was included in many OEM-versions) with Internet Explorer 1.0 to get a TCP/IP stack installed (or install third party software, like Netscape Navigator). Also Windows 3.11 for Workgroups got a TCP/IP add-on pack from Microsoft before Windows 95 was released. Microsoft eventually bundled their TCP/IP stack with Windows 95 in Service Pack 1 which also came with Internet Explorer 2.0.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
