Although there must be a physical limit to how many memories we can store, it is extremely large. We don’t have to worry about running out of space in our lifetime.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the-memory-capacity
neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.
There may be disadvantages to viola lessons, chess tournaments, learning languages, soccer practice, and poetry but I'm confident that the advantages of all of those things far outweigh the disadvantages. I do, however, limit the time my kids spend in front of a TV. There is research showing that TV has a detrimental effect on cognitive development.
neuroscience researchers are increasingly coming to a consensus that bilingualism has many positive consequences for the brain. Several such researchers traveled to this month's annual meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., to present their findings. Among them: Bilingual children are more effective at multi-tasking. Adults who speak more than one language do a better job prioritizing information in potentially confusing situations. Being bilingual helps ward off early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in the elderly.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/26/health/la-he-bilingual-brain-20110227
I have seen research showing that kids in immersion bilingual programs, though they initially lag, have a larger English vocabulary than their peers by 6th grade. There have also been documented advantages in math.
Anecdotally, my 7 year old reads Rick Riordan for pleasure, knows his nth roots, can solve basic algebraic equations, and speaks some Mandarin Chinese. Maybe it's because he didn't fill the limited space in his brain with the names of 10,000 Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh characters
As a parent who desperately wants his children to become fluent in at least two languages I am stuck with horrible choices because I live in America. I have cobbled together language training for my two older sons while they were young enough to learn but it was extremely difficult. Now, to get an immersion Chinese program for him, I am using school of choice to send my youngest to an inner city school where they are so poor that they just fired all of the elementary school art, music, and PE teachers to close a budget gap. When will we make education a priority in this country?
It isn't welfare, Medicare, military spending. It is all these little small waste of money projects that add up.
You just took welfare (12%), Medicare (13%) and Defense (25%) off the table http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/welfare_budget_2012_4.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_federal_budget Good luck finding enough unneeded paper clips to eliminate from the budget when you've declared half off limits already.
As well paying for inefficient policies in the government, which are harder to track down.
Have you worked with humans before? I've worked for and in lots of large companies and I can assure you that we do things inefficiently. I have yet to see a compelling argument that Government (with all its failures and inefficiencies) is any less efficient than the private sector. Think about Worldcom, Countrywide mortgage, Enron, AIG, pets.com... Besides, after decades of Government that has been focused on cutting down on "waste, fraud, and abuse" surely we've got at most of the easy stuff.
I've taken only one Udacity course and not in programming, so I have a n of less than one but I found the course I took less than ideal.
On Udacity I took introductory statistics, as a refresher. I took classes in scientific stats, business stats and forecasting many years ago so I have some basis for comparison. I found that the course sometimes emphasized technique over understanding and broke lessons into small bite size chunks that were often so small that I questioned the utility since if a problem is broken into baby steps I can sometimes complete each step without understanding the approach to the whole.
Government regulations are nearly always outdated and too cautious.
The original article in the Times makes no such claim and the blog post that the
without proof that the regulated activity will harm anyone.
Give me a break. What happens is the EPA acts based on scientific evidence like this:
The E.P.A., following the recommendation of its scientific advisers, had proposed lowering the so-called ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, set at the end of the Bush administration, to a stricter standard of 60 to 70 parts per billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/science/earth/03air.html?pagewanted=all and then the politicians caves in to industry. Mercury regulations were delayed 20 years despite that based on the scientific evidence.
EPA estimates that the new safeguards will prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths and 4,700 heart attacks a year. The standards will also help America’s children grow up healthier – preventing 130,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms and about 6,300 fewer cases of acute bronchitis among children each year.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/bd8b3f37edf5716d8525796d005dd086!opendocument of course, now industry is suing to block the new regulations. http://www.edf.org/health/timeline-delay
We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids? -- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission
