No doubt all of these things are necessary - I'm just saying that any student who is capable of such things is already far above and beyond their peers. Even those basic standards often aren't met by "scientists" who are getting published in major journals, so it isn't much of a surprise that high school students aren't getting there.

Yes, it should be much better, but this is just one entry in a long list of things that are wrong with education.

Found this:

http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawki...

It says that a 3K black hole has a mass of 4x10^22 kg, a bit larger than the Everest-sized black hole.

The Everest-hole hole is extremely hot, 10^8 K, but it's still radiating so slowly that it'll take 10^21 years to evaporate, so it would be more than enough to destroy the earth.

I'm not quite sure how to solve for one that would be hot enough to suck in the earth before evaporating, but I see that a black hole that would last 1 second is a mere 70 million kilograms, with a radius of about a picometer.

It's denser than that. The Schwartzschild radius of a black hole with a mass around 10^15 kg (a rough guess) is about 10^-12 meters (about a picometer). Give or take a few orders of magnitude. Wolfram Alpha has a convenient Schwartzschild radius calculator. The evaporation time for a black hole that big is 10^30 seconds.

The smaller a black hole is, the denser. The number you give is for a star-sized black hole. There isn't any known way to form grain-of-sand sized black holes, though they might have formed in the very early universe. In which case one could be wandering through the solar system at this very minute....

I agree he doesn't belong on that list. I do think on the list of America's worst presidents, he'd be at the top of the list.

Ignored warnings from the previous administration, top FBI officials ignored field agents who were warning of something bad, and got our country attacked.

Then he started an incredibly stupid war in Iraq, which led to the rise of ISIS.

Presided over the building of mass surveillance of the American people.

Took office during a boom, left office under the worst economy since the great depression. It's my theory that what caused the ruined economy was fuel prices more than quadrupling during his reign. Buy gas to get to work, or pay the mortgage? Tough choice!

Took office with a balanced budget, left it with the largest deficit in American history. Meanwhile, infrastructure was crumbling and he did nothing.

Now, if the list was of people who did the most harm to our country, he should be on that list. Mao and Pol Pot were very evil men who killed millions of people, but they didn't harm America.

in a nutshell, the only diff between republicans and democrats, these days, is the ultra religion that the republicans insist that we all have to endure.

other than that, both fellate big (and even small) business, both hate the individual, both hate freedom and liberty, both love cheap labor and could care less about the locals being able to AFFORD things, both are owned by military and hollywood, both are parties of the rich and well-to-do.

the ONLY difference is in religion. I would expect the same loss of freedom from both sides; but with the D's its a little bit less in-your-face when it comes to the US going in the direction of a theocracy.

kang or kodos, is mostly does not matter anymore. we're screwed no matter what.

(oh, and australia, the UK and a lot of the west is similarly screwed. so its not just the US; its a new sickness that is overtaking the previously-free world).

Phony as a three dollar bill... You must have the most fluid memory around. While he was president, the word 'progressive' never showed up. You are trolling, and can't be taken seriously

I think you are overestimating the average science student. The fact that they've even measured something and gotten within an order of magnitude means two things: they have actually DONE an experiment (rather than just a survey or some engineering project described by a poster) and secondly, it is falsifiable! (ie, the result actually has meaning in a scientific sense). Getting those two aspects right will instantly put a student in the top few percent of projects in a school.

Furthermore, most of these things are done at a middle school level, sometimes at a high school level. Although many criticisms could be levied against their experiments, what is the real point? To have a flawless experiment? Or for students to understand the scientific process? Experimental design and clear communication about complex topics is much more important than accuracy of results, and the science fair venue is adequate for that.

I don't disagree with you that we need higher standards, but the science fairs are merely a symptom of very deep systemic problems. For starters, anti-intellectualism and ineffectual teaching (because of crappy teacher education) are good places to start.

The worst two I've visited were Kuwait and Qatar, both read 140F/60C on thermometers in the shadeThat's one of the numerous reasons people questioned how the hell Qatar won hosting the 2022 World Cup. It's expected that nearly 4000 workers will die just in building the necessary stadiums and related infrastructure necessary to host the games.

Citation needed. Nowhere will you find the word "trinity", nowhere will you find "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit" spelled out directly. The Trinity is inferred, a theological construct. In this particular case, I have no objection to it, but we shouldn't pretend it is literal scripture - it is derived, indirect theology.

The idea that all believers will vanish and disappear into the sky is said nowhere directly in scripture. The Left Behind series has about as much to do with the Bible as Taco Bell has to do with Mexican cuisine. The entirety of rapture theology was conceived in ~1830 - so it didn't exist for most of the church's history.

They aren't. They are indirect interpretations made by humans, but you've read the bible in that light for so long that you don't see any other possibilities there when you read it.

My point is, biblical literalists often aren't really taking the literal meaning of scripture - they are taking one specific interpretation of scripture, a certainly flawed theological construct (being developed by humans, and diverging significantly from past doctrine) and claiming that it is the only possible interpretation.

You decry the schisms within the church, but in my mind the phony appeals to Biblical literalism, and every denomination's tendency to mistake theology for scripture, is exactly the problem. We must admit to one another that even if the Bible is divinely inspired and completely flawless, our individual readings of it will always be slightly different and mistaken, and hence we shouldn't get too caught up in any specific brand of systematic theology because we are all certainly mistaken in one detail or another.

The point being: we can say, with no doubt whatsoever, that Love is the priority of Christ. The bible communicates this both taken as a whole and taken as specific verses. Holding this belief also will tend to make us act more like Christ. The rapture, on the other hand, is clear only if you interpret many different verses in very specific ways, and it isn't clear how it fits into the overriding message of Love. What's more, it causes its adherents to behave in very un-Christlike ways... after all, if this world is going away, why care for it? If people's souls are all that matter, we should just evangelize to them and ignore their earthly troubles, right? This is an attitude not at all in keeping with Christ's actions, and this theology produces very "Bad fruit" in believers, so why defend it?

Let's be true literalists, and humble ones, and focus first and foremost on those things that are unilaterally clear from the text, and be willing to compromise on anything that is an indirect derivation of scripture. This attitude will tend to unite us by promoting the things that all Christians already affirm, and it also has the fortunate tendency to move contentious issues into the sidelines, where they belong.

the CURRENT system is designed (patched) to disallow major changes. so, no peaceful solution exists to reform us.

you want violence? I'm ok with that, if its othe only way to fix things, but I'm not excited about living thru it. no sane person is.

but I repeat, peaceful solutions won't work when the game is all stacked against reform and the power broker club circles the wagons and protects themselves against ANY real change.

show me one government that has gone this bad and self-corrected without a revolution. name one.