It's perfectly sane for a black liberal to dislike affirmative action. Affirmative action had, at its peak, been the social institution of "blacks are retards with a propensity for not being as smart as anyone, and so they need us to extend a large amount of help to them to elevate them to the level of a human being rather than a chimpanzee."

I have dealt with many liberal Democrats in my time, some extremely severe ones, who have taken time to explain to me that blacks simply *could* *not* get into college without government aid because there is *no* *way* they'd ever be intelligent enough to pass the entrance exams. I have the greatest understanding for anyone who wishes to excise such views and the people possessing them from their lives.

It really is. There is no "separation of church and state". There is "not making laws banning or establishing the practice of religion."

Making laws to exclude state support of religious functions or state endorsement(!) of religion, including display of religious symbolism in courthouses as appropriated by the staff under the same budget which does indeed allow them to purchase *anything* *else* as discretionary decoration, would be in violation of this whole "Congress shall make no law" thing. Taking action without first making a law, on the other hand, would be a Constitutional crisis of Executive overreach, by which the Executive branch acts unilaterally as an authoritarian arm (i.e. a dictatorship or oligarchy).

The Constitution does not forbid states from making such laws, only Congress (Federal). This is sensible: Maryland doesn't have a "Congress", but rather a "General Assembly" comprised of an Upper and Lower House. A state could set itself up with a friggin' Parliament if it wanted. A state Congress would not be "Congress", because then the state could escape such clauses by not having a congress; instead, it would be "the States".

Lately, there has been the legal position that a more recent Constitutional amendment forbids states from engaging in practices forbidden to the Federal government (the Incorporation argument). This has a strange impact of invalidating state laws entirely, and of twisting the Tenth Amendment. It is only by this argument that one could argue the state has any obligation at all; and, by this argument, the state's obligation is to fund religious projects which fall under the funding guidelines for anything else--such as tourist attractions. In the Incorporation interpretation, it would be patently illegal for the state to *refuse* to fund such a thing based on it being a religious artifact; the baseless assertion of an imaginary separation of church and state, interestingly enough, would also demand that the state not take a stance *against* religion in this way.

Apparently, it is a hard concept to grasp.

Dunno. It says in the paper: Congress shalt make no law establishing state religion or abridging the free practice thereof. It doesn't say states can't do whatever.

On the other hand, it has been fashionable as of late to use an incorporation interpretation of the Constitution to claim that states are bound by Federal law and Federal restrictions, drawing the states under the same rule. Notably, this interpretation means state laws are automatically invalid if the Federal government can't make such a law, and has odd implications for the 10th amendment (that powers not granted to the Federal government nor forbidden to the states fall to the state or people; powers forbidden to the Fed are now also forbidden to the states). Nevertheless, under such interpretation, it would be illegal for the state to deny money to a religious project that otherwise falls under such rules as "reasonable tourism attraction."

This is why deliberate practice, as described by K Anders Ericsson, is so important. Deliberate practice is what makes experts, and summarizes in three simple concepts: goal-oriented behavior; a focus on technique; and constant, immediate feedback.

By deliberate practice, a person is *looking* for their flaws, setting goals to push their competence, and immediately getting burned when they push beyond their abilities. This style of practice aims to draw attention to those behaviors which are incorrect--gaps in knowledge, weakness in skill--so that a person may reconcile these things and improve.

Such practice continuously slims down the level of overconfidence, even as confidence increases. A person is appraised of their shortcomings, but also reduces them, simultaneously becoming more skilled and more aware of the weaknesses in their skill in that area.

I know what happens when you channel the phasers directly into the main engines! It's not pretty!

I remember it being quite pretty, and at the time wormhole effect was one of the first film visual effects created by scanning laser.

Also, beeeellllllaaaaaayyyy thhaaatt phaaaassseer ooooordderrr.

They add 3% to all prices, give you a 0.5% kickback and you're so happy for the money you "saved" that you act as their pro bono salesman too.

There's really no "playing" involved. If you are consumer, credit cards are simply better than store loyalty programs, on the merits.

BankAxept is better than credit cards, but Americans don't have BankAxept. Scandinavians have BankAxept, because the company that clears effectively every financial transaction in northern Europe, Nets Group, is a tolerated monopoly with a protected market, and banking regulations in Denmark clearly delineate transactions fees to be paid by the consumer.

That's the Friendly Numbers system. You're discarding the consideration that people tend to memorize doubles anyway, hence why they'll gravitate towards 5s (can you count by five? How many consecutive multiples of three can you spout off without pausing?) or doubles. Halving things is a useful skill, and also a common operation when dealing with fractional arithmetic, and so doubles become Friendly Numbers. This is why people don't memorize 6+7 as 13, unless they've played a lot of Tut's Tomb.

Soroban system memorizes the following for Addition and Subtraction: on 5, {(1,4),(2,3)}; on 10, {(1,9),(2,8),(3,7),(4,6),(5,5)}. 5 and 5 on 10 is meaningful enough to optimize out: it's right in the middle, half, and isometric. The others are meaningful and derivable, so can be computed as needed when they're not wholly memorized. Knowing the (2,8) complement and the (3,2) complement helps when playing Tut's Tomb, as you see 5 and 8 and immediately recognize 10+3 (again, we've rediscovered the Friendly Numbers system).

No, it won't. You have to stretch to number theory and explain the extremely abstract concept of base 10 being 0-9, then 9+1 overflows to 0, producing 1 digit in the next left column. The Soroban does part of this implicitly: the decimal place is wholly irrelevant, and the math is isometric regardless of where you place the decimal. Without an explicit and complicated explanation of overflow (it's only easy to grasp because I understand the concept already), it's hard to grasp that a 0-7 system would have 7+1 = 10: 10 looks like binary 10, and so the obvious association is made, and it's read as 12b7.

To implement effective mental arithmetic on hex, octal, and so on, you'd need a new set of complements; such memorization can't be made any easier by any teaching method, as it's already fully simplified. For hex, the center is 8 (half of 16), giving on 8 {(1,7),(2,6),(3,5),(4,4)} and on 16 {(1,15),(2,14),(3,13),(4,12),(5,11),(6,10),(7,9),(8,8)}. The procedures would otherwise be the same, although you'd need to memorize an expanded multiplication table up through 0-f x 0-f for multiplication and division.

The arithmetic prowess of the average Japanese third grader is so great that American media sensationalizes "Flash Anzan" (just Anzan, in Japan) as some kind of magical wonder in which tiny, gifted children perform as human calculators. It's nothing spectacular; it's actually pretty boring. Being aware of how the Japanese perform at math and how well they understand concepts as outlined above, my position on the Common Criteria is that it is a pile of "something must be done; this is something" created by confused politicians who did not put in enough research and decided they must invent something unilaterally from their own malformed education. Rather than structuring and optimizing, they have made much of the curriculum more complicated and slower.

It's notable that serious educators consider memorization a bad thing. Historically, we operated via faculty education: that flexing the brain, like a muscle, would make it stronger. This is wholly false: the brain is not a muscle, and exercising individual mental faculties does not improve them. The study of language does not make the brain stronger at learning language, and the study of math or the drilling of memory does not make the brain better at memorization. These are facts.

Based on the above facts, John Dewey lead a progressive education renaissance to throw out all faculty education and encourage student-focused, experience-based curriculum. Gone are the days of Latin and Greek, of multiplication tables, of rote memorization of history. What vestigial subjects do remain are explained in cultural ways, taught as plays and as experiences; sciences are taught by watching seeds grow rather than discussing biology. The brain is no longer flexed in a vain attempt to get mentally buff.

This view has one large flaw: memory is associative, and technique allows improvement of all mental faculties. Your memory won't get stronger; but, by learning Latin, you create a large basis of familiar Latin vocabulary to support the learning of French, Spanish, and other languages derived from Latin. Indeed, one can employ mnemonics techniques to improve memorization; and by retaining, even only retaining better during the initial period, one is able to apply freshly-studied knowledge to further knowledge immediately studied, forming associations and solidifying both of these, greatly increasing retention and overall learning speed. I have already shown mathematics techniques which similarly allow for rapid computation, once drilled in by rote, which in turn is easier if you can use a mnemonic to recall the parts you will *forget* initially.

Memory is the great starting point. Think about the Soroban: memorizing a pile of complements is hard, but memorizing that they are a countdown from (1,5) and (1,9) is easy. 1,2,3,4... 9,8,7,6... (1,9)(2,8).... Thousands of uses later, they are automatic. Likewise, in the study of history, great figures and events form an overall picture; mnemonics to recall each piece will allow you to see each reference as you study the surrounding territory, and recall from such references what information is referenced, until such time as the whole picture becomes self-supporting in the mind.

Educators will go to great lengths to provide "practical" methods and "understanding", and to avoid "memorization" and "drilling". There is a great understanding that memorizing anything does not help, and that students are not to remember at all, but, rather, to understand. It is bollocks; you cannot understand what you cannot recall facts enough to explain.

You have to memorize all the perfect squares and perfect cubes of single-digit numbers. After that, you can find either.

Given that I know the decimal place is arbitrary (thanks to the soroban) and that the method follows a pattern (x^(1/n) find the largest perfect nth root of n digits), I can generalize this in many ways. By memorizing 8 numbers--the perfect exponents of 2 through 9--and operating on sets of n digits, you can compute the nth root of any number. For 4, it would be 4 digits, and all perfect 4th exponents.

For anyone who hasn't put in the effort to perform mental math of third, forth, and fifth roots, it is trivial to use mental multiplication or lattice calculation (Napir's Bones) to quickly write up 0^4 = 0, 1^4 = 1, 2^4 = 16, 3^4 = 81, and so on. With this short list, one may then inscribe upon paper the number, the 4th root operation, and then begin with 4 digits and follow the same algorithm as with the third and second roots. Thus if you really do require the exact fifth root of a number out to 17 decimal places, you can find it with a few seconds of computation and a sheet of papyrus or a stick and some sand.

The ancients did not have the PAO system or even the Mnemonic Major system for which to chunk and retain numbers. Had they, they would have likely used them for scratch pad in mental math, along with a mind palace to compose fifteen or more computation registers of six digits each. Mental math is computed rapidly by using a great number of systems which have been always known to those of any intelligence, and are frequently rediscovered by small children.

The chief mental math system in use today is the Friendly Numbers system. As a child, I would approach problems such as 13 + 22 by first adding the 3 and 2 to get 10 + 25. When given problems such as 13 + 22 + 17 + 19 + 35, I would then see 3 + 7 and 9 + 1, changing 13 to 10 and 22 to 21 in respect, and leaving 10, 21, 20, 20, 35, and thus 10 + 20 + 20 + 30 + 20 and 5 + 1, or 106.

Another historical mental math system is that of the use of the Japanese Soroban, a 4/1 abacus. The Soroban leads the way into Anzan: while the methods of the Soroban dictate how to operate the beads, the beads only represent numerical transformations. The memorization of the complement of 7 and 3 on 10 means that 25 + 37 is equivalent to 25 - 3 + 30 + 10. Thus the first step is to add 2 + 3 to gain 50, and then to add 7 + 5, and instead provide 60 and 5 - 3, which is 2. 62. It is also memorized that 3 and 2 are complements on 5, because the Soroban toggles the 5 bead and then provides the appropriate complement (rather than 5 + 0, it becomes 0 + 2); this is less obvious when dealing with straight decimal.

In short: a person calculating via Anzan--mentally, without manipulating a Soroban--would produce 50, then produce 60 and 2, calculating from left to right. In American schools, addition is by the carry system, in which it is taught by rote: 7 + 5 is the matter of counting 5 more from 7, which is why you see many people COUNT ON THEIR FINGERS WHEN THEY ADD, and you produce 2-carry-1. The same is followed for 2 + 3, plus the carried 1. This is many more operations, and the obvious friendly number systems come about as people memorize multiples of two: 7 + 5 becomes 6 + 6 which is 12; 2 + 3 + 1 becomes 3 + 3 which is 6. Anzan takes this a step further, computing each pair of digit additions by singular atomic computation rather than iterative loops and simplifying operations.

Soroban and Anzan multiplication come down to addition, through route of memorizing all products from 1x1 to 9x9 and performing the multiplication left-to-right and adding into an accumulator. One common method is strikingly similar to lattice multiplication, which tends to require n*m or 2(n*m) single-digit multiplication operations, plus 2(n*m)-1 additions. Mentally, if you recognize all multiplications immediately, it is likely faster to do more multiplication operations: you can compute the product of two large numbers from left to right in one pass, without having to follow a complex algorithm and temporarily memorize multiple numbers as you go.

Division is a bastard process. I know of no good way to compute division, ever. It always comes to guessing and verifying the highest perfect divisor, with no method to actually compute it. This can be done by table, of course: knowing the two multiplicands, you know the product; knowing each product, you know a high and low multiplicand (equal if perfect squares), and so you can reflexively select the product immediately less than the number you are trying to divide, and perform your long division. There is no need to guess if the number is divisible by at most 6, or if it could possibly be also divided by 7 and provide a positive or zero remainder; you can know at a glance. In this way, the fast process of multiplication in reverse is the only process that does not involve guessing.

The ancients knew many of these things. Many more came from more modern theorists: Karl Gauss invented the summation, and you are doubtless familiar with the pull-down method of derivative calculus (f'(ax^n) = nax^(n-1)). A Mr. S. had developed memorization techniques to store structured formulas in his head--he knew nothing of algebra, but could store all formulas at a single glance by encoding them in a memorable way readily performed by and similarly effective for any ordinary human being. Such techniques--the memorization, the understanding, and the diminishing of effort--are our most precious and yet most neglected and forgotten skills.

Think about the last time you saw a cashier struggle with a cash register, then call someone to bring a calculator to remove $1.27 from a $3.14 total. Realize this person could easily learn to glance at the figures and know, immediately, the computed difference. Realize this is a person who could learn, with high competence and perhaps an hour per day of investment, firm elementary algebra, geometry, and differential calculus in under a year. The human capacity for knowledge and intelligence and creativity is not an inborn trait; all such things which appear natural to some people are mental thought processes which every other person can emulate to identical effect, thus making every individual a potential genius. Application of technique does this to people.

That is where we stand: the great and vast majority of the planet are physiologically and functionally identical to geniuses, in the same way that two identical carpenters with identical toolboxes are identical even if one is attempting to hammer in a screw with a crowbar and the other has fetched the powered driver. We know one of these will build a house more effectively; we also know that the other will perform exactly as well if he would only fetch the correct tool, which is in his possession but not being employed.

How to build a plow... how to grow wheat... how to build a house... blacksmith...

I have texts older than Jesus that tell me how to turn regular people into geniuses. I have access to information I intend to use to fix the school systems by improving the learning process at the level of base theory. I have looked at fast mental math and mathematics teaching curricula which provide people an automatic mental math skill. I've studied philosophy and project management, both with large usefulness and implications in all contexts.

Your world won't get far if you don't understand how to produce governments, what imperatives govern societies--not "thou shalt not steal" and "child pornography is bad", but what makes these things wrong, and why does it fall to society to enforce these things and not to enforce "don't fuck your neighbor's wife"? You won't get very far without people who can learn efficiently, who can compute the mathematics behind engineering largely in their head and on paper, and who can take large initiatives and turn them into well-executed plans. You can't derive or rediscover technology without a firm grasp of the scientific process.

Two thousand years got us here from nailing a carpenter to a tree. Civilization existed for thousands of years prior to that. The Egyptians and Chinese had beer and oil 6000 years ago. The modern era came so unfathomably slow that our calendar is based on less than a third of human history--some estimates put civilized society's beginnings as far back as 13,000 years.

They had plows and oil 6000 years ago.

Thanks for the tips. I haven't installed CyanogenMod because it doesn't support some of my phone's hardware features, but I'll choose my next phone more carefully. Paranoid seems to have an even narrower range of hardware that it supports. I could possibly do some tinkering with either of these to make them work on hardware not already supported. But as with my desktop computer, I'm past the stage where I want to put a lot of effort into that kind of thing - I'm more focused on what I can do WITH my devices than TO them. Also, as far as I've been able to tell, (please correct me if I'm wrong), using Cyanogen or Paranoid still won't address many of the app permissions problems, as many apps won't work when certain permissions are denied, even when those permissions are absolutely not needed for the app to do its job.

As for enabling mass storage and stripping out stuff myself, I've not done very much programming, and learning how to program just so I can have a secure and useful phone seems a bit much. Besides, AFAIK, (and again, please correct me if I'm wrong), most apps are not open source, so I couldn't readily modify them evem if I wanted to do so and had the skills.

My point about FFOS was that it has the potential to be a less toxic ecosystem than Android, with perhaps fewer privacy and security holes baked in.

These transmitters are 500,000 watts. I did the math once and figured the transmitter 3 miles from my house would expose people to 2000W of microwave radiation on the ground for several blocks. This would ignite trees and houses, and melt people.

Helicopters aren't legally allowed near the tower.