You don't want the DONKEY. You want an advanced recon model, the one that pairs Data Acquisition Technology with the Autonomous Sumpter System. Included of course are HUD sunglasses.

I'd rather not look this gift horse in the mouth. (Though in Soviet Russia, gift horse looks you in mouth.)

Who is doing this explaining of morals in the absence of the church? I don't see a lot of this going on. I see a generation of youth who get whatever morality they have from the media they consume, living with one parent who is working hard to pay the bills and glad to hand their children over to the media babysitter. If that media glamorizes crime, violence and evil (because selling that is profitable), then that is what they often decide to do. After all, if there is no real meaning of life, why not do what you enjoy (even if it means making the lives of others hell)?

BTW I'm atheist, not Christian - but I see where society is headed and I don't like it.

One additional comment - at the younger levels, you do not need a genius to teach a genius, provided that the teacher is smart enough to recognize a smart child and teach to his level. At higher levels this is certainly true though, whether that genius is present in person or as an author of a work (book, web page, video, game), the child learning autodidactically. Also, being able to break a given problem or skill down into all the component skills necessary to solve that problem, and teaching them in order - that in itself requires above average intelligence. Much more than is probably thought.

I'm honestly not sure that the system is actually designed to discourage this (though it certainly feels like it). It's just an unintended consequence of the relatively low IQ levels of the teachers and administrators who design such systems, and the teachers who are actually doing the teaching. IQ, intelligence, call it what you will - is distributed in something approximated by a bell curve. If you had the brains to be doing advanced geometry and algebra at age 8, you are very, very likely to be smarter than virtually everyone involved in designing, administering and implementing education at any given primary or secondary school. You have an IQ that is high enough to be very rare.

There are lots of sad corollaries to this fact. Firstly, there are no resources to design an education system around a student that is 1/500, 1/1000, let alone 1/10000 in terms of rarity in the population. As soon as we approach the inverse of school population, there may not even be any student in the school who is that smart.

Secondly, it takes a smart person to understand statistics, the concept of distributions and the like. Even understanding my first two paragraphs is above the head of the average person. Due to influence of PC, its component blank slatism and the like, the number of people who both can and would even want to understand IQ, bell curves and the implications of the distribution of intelligence is even less. The ramification of this is that the vast majority of people automatically assume that anything they can't understand is either wrong or crazy, and impossible for anyone else to understand. It is insulting for many people to realize that there are problems that are too difficult for them to ever solve, but that others can solve with varying amounts of difficulty (or ease). They have an in-built chip on their shoulder towards these concepts. Most people also assume that they are smart enough to figure out who is smarter than they are, despite not realizing that there is a class of problems for which they will never, ever solve or perhaps even understand the solution, and so are incapable of judging those who will solve such things.

Then you have the problem of recruiting teachers who are capable of teaching a very bright child, if that is what you want your school system to do. There aren't any. The vast majority of the very small relative number of bright people in a given country are taking advantage of the exploitation of IQ by companies. Those who aren't duped by graduate schools into pursuing graduate education with no monetary payoff are busy earning lots of money, with job security and great working conditions. Why would they want to teach a bunch of relative dullards, when the pay is not there and the working conditions are crap? They are off doing medicine, engineering, law, business and the like.

So what do you get when your average teacher does not (want to) realize that any kid in class is smarter than they are, and can do mental gymnastics that they will never, ever achieve? And does not have the resources to allocate to it? And do not have teachers capable of teaching them? You get the current education system.

If you want to give a smart kid the opportunities to learn, you must do as the parents of the boy in this article did. You must school him yourself until he hits the point where he can autodidactically learn anything he wants to, and then give him the resources to pursue that. There is no substitute for a smart, motivated parent, involved in his child's education.

He's half right; the article is obviously referring to an analogue of acceleration. If m:distance, m/s:velocity, m/s/s:acceleration;
GWhr:energy, GW:power, GW/hr: increase in power per unit time

Those efficient Germans must be rapidly ramping up their technology. At the rate they're going, they'll be able to power their whole country (423GW on average) within 19 hours!

In an ideal world I would tend to agree. However, that does limit the number of people who can vote to maybe 10% of people, if that. It's a hard sell.

I lolled.

Because they've had this "dream" pounded into their heads since the day of their birth by their equally-brainwashed mothers.

Because if your daughter is going to have kids, you want her to shack up with some loser who can't make a commitment in front of all his friends and family, and her friends and family. After that loser cuts and runs, your daughter will be trying to keep her kids clothed, fed, educated and inadequately protected by herself - and doing a half ass job of all of it. Unless your daughter is an amazon and has been training martial arts since age 5, she won't stand a chance vs the average male with bad intentions.

And sure, there are people out there whose commitment isn't worth the paper it's written on. In the old days before easy travel around the country (and world), they were shunned in the community and this had some effect. Now a woman needs to learn how to gauge whether her mate will honor his commitments. It's harder for sure. But marriage as an institution is still definitely a valuable institution for women, primarily those who will be having children. Such a woman is foolish in general for forsaking it. And a parent is foolish for not inculcating a desire for marriage in his/her daughter, especially knowing how silly some young women can be and the irrevocability of decisions such as having children to a non-committal loser.

Same deal with the perceived need to have kids. Gotta get those buns in the oven, you know. How many times have you seen mummy's little girl pushing along a wee toy pram with a wee baby doll in it? Who brought that damned and damning prop into the kid's life?

Honestly, what is the big problem with having kids? If we didn't have kids our species would die off. And anyone who has had kids knows that boys and girls are different, and on average have very different drives.

You've never heard of the term "clucky"? There is an instinct to want to have kids, too. May not be present in all animals though, just as there are some humans with an instinct for sex but no instinct to have children.

I would like to see XKCD's working out on both his "Tr0ub4dor&3" password and his "correctbatteryhorsestaple" password. What is the N and what is the L, and how did he come to that conclusion?

Nevertheless, using an English dictionary as a source of easily remembered, huge L is a good idea. Unfortunately most of the world limits passwords to something in the 8-20 character range, making this idea something of a Dvorak keyboard layout in terms of its superiority but general impracticality - as the world has standardized on a potentially inferior password creation idea. It's got more chance of catching on than Dvorak though, because there is no cost to each individual website or application enabling long passwords.

That being said, anyone using the password generation feature of a password manager will always have more bits per number of characters than the XKCD scheme.

It's not only rare, it's even common. When I went to school, the Dean remarked to everyone that it was worrying that people studying engineering tend to become or stay conservative. Perhaps it was in relation to several of the mandated categories of classes for engineers all having a leftist political bent, which would tend to make the average person adopt leftist views. Perhaps the thinking went "Hey, we'll force them to take a 'choice' of several different classes of political indoctrination masquerading as learning, and then they'll think that their all-knowing professor is correct and then adopt his or her views. The same general idea has worked for the MSM for years, why not here?"

The problem they were facing is that they were attempting to modify the opinion of intelligent individuals who have firmly adopted the engineering mindset of rigorously seeking truth, and doing their research. If a political stream of thought does not benefit them they are not going to adopt it.

I suspect that when you mention Shockley you are referring to the media's interpretation of his views, not his actual views. There was a reason that he took to taping his conversations with reporters and then providing them with typed transcripts.

It is surely true that plenty of high IQ people make mistakes from time to time. (e.g. Your friend was obviously not doing her thinking with her brain.) However, the strange opinions that they have are very often right. The mainstream view has been wrong about many topics repeatedly throughout history, and that holds true today. When the paradigm begins to shift, it is invariably started by a lone high IQ individual who publicly states their own theory, which will be in opposition to the consensus.

It kind of disappoints me when I read an article on slashdot that is about something worthwhile that humanity really needs to get behind and fund, yet there won't be many comments. This is one of those types of articles. Normally the surefire comment magnets are trolling articles, or feature a topic that has a lot of fanbois, or better yet a technological holy war between several factions of fanbois.

However, that shouldn't be a sign that no one is interested or cares about such things. We do. This site is about Stuff That Matters. Researching and preventing low probability cataclysms now we have the technology to attempt it is a very important and noble goal. Whether the average person realizes it or not, those goals are more important than 99% of other charitable goals, because without a habitable earth or human population there is no point to any charity.

So in future while I can't usually add much more than a boring "this is great, more of this please" or a dumb joke if at all, this stuff is important and yes, we need more of it. Don't take low numbers of comments for lack of interest or perceived priority.

I know I'm setting myself up for a flood of "that's what she said" jokes, but perhaps the only reason this hasn't been raised before is because of that very reason. So here goes.

What I could never understand about Subway is the distinct lack of options between the 6 inch and 12 inch. The 6 inch is not quite enough food, and furthermore it is much more expensive per gram than the 12. The 12 inch is much better value, and though it certainly can be eaten in one sitting I feel like a lard bucket for doing so. Something between 8 and 10 inches would be perfect.

Every other fast food joint has a range of different sized options suited to my specific caloric needs but not Subway. What gives? Is it part of their marketing strategy to encourage every cheap bastard to get the 12 inch option? Have they considered dividing a foot long sub into 3 segments (4, 8, 12) but realized that lots of women would order 4 inches instead of 6?