It's true that the GP is just representing one interpretation. Just thought I'd throw out my favorite "interpretation", (objective collapse theory) as it doesn't seem to get much love. No multiple worlds. No living-dead cats.

Also, instead of thinking of things being fundamentally composed of objects that are sort of both waves and particles I find it easier to picture them all as waves that only occasionally act as particles under the right conditions. This seems counter-intuitive since most of the world we experience is a result of these interactions that make them appear as particles. But it makes it a lot easier when picturing how things work with QFT and the difference between virtual and non-virtual "particles".

Actually, this experiment makes a pretty good case that special and general relativity are a demonstrated facts. Unless there's some philosophical hair-splitting in the definitions I missed.

Well then I guess I'll just have to take your word for it Mister 914043. ;)

You know, I'd like to think there was a time when the majority of Slashdot users could cheerfully take on writing modules for the Linux kernel or *gasp* just code in C.

I know exactly how to use spreadsheets properly. Just don't.

There is nothing deep about the concepts of addition and subtraction. Tell a young kid you have two different piles of a number of objects. Combine them into a big pile and count how many are in it. Now they've mastered the concept of addition. Take a pile of a certain number of objects. Remove a certain number from the pile, how much do you have left? By gum, the concept of subtraction has been mastered. The CC processes are tricks to do the calculations more quickly. And since we have calculators that can do that anyways, who cares?

Things get more complicated with fractions. One part that trips people up is how dividing a number > 0 by a fraction > 0 and 1 leads to a number greater than what you started with? (Assuming positive numbers). Say you have a medicine of 8 oz and you must drink 1 oz each day, how many days does it take to finish it? 8 days from 8 divided by 1. Now take the same 8 ounces and you have to drink 1/8 of an ounce a day - how long? Now the correct answer matches your intuition and it makes sense that you'd come up with something larger. THAT is an example of concepts, not calculation tricks.

My favorite example of a mathematical concept, something to introduce to students after they know simple arithmetic, is the method that a young Gauss came up with to quickly add the integers from 1 to 100. It's easy to understand, clever, can be easy to show how to generalize up to any number, and it begins to show the difference between arithmetic and math.

But that' a big reason why we're arguing about this in the first place. If the first exposure kids have with math (arithmetic) is taught in such a way that they're put off by the subject then they're going to lose all interest before they even get to the real math.

More important than breaking things up is getting an intuitive understanding of what you're doing in the first place. If you can do something fairly simply in a subject intuitively, but it's taught in a way that introduces many more steps that remove you from the intuition then your interest-level is going to go from 60 to "why bother" in five seconds. The old method has less steps to clutter things up. Want to be able to do arithmetic quickly? Use a calculator; it's what we invented them for. Math is far more interesting than arithmetic anyways.

To go slightly off-topic, I'd love to know if they have a method to evaluate whether or not their curriculum actually works on the student body at large. Schools spend a lot of effort evaluating teachers, but isn't the curriculum you tell the teachers to use at least as important as the teachers themselves? I don't know if there is any amount of evidence that could convince them if the curriculum was deficient. "Oh look, we completely changed how everything is taught and the scores are going down. Obviously the problem is the teachers! "

These methods may come in handy at some point, but in my opinion they're horrid when introducing students to simple arithmetic. Make sure the students have mastered the fundamentals first and only then perhaps introduce them to some parlor tricks.

"In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

-Homer Simpson

From the Pentagon's document, under Zombie Threat Summary (section 4.6 vii)...

2. (U) Of note, where normal carniverouse zombie commonly groan the word "brains" semi-comprehensibly, VZ's [vegetarian zombies] can be identified by their aversion to humans, affinity for plants and their tendency to semi-comprehensibly groan the word "grains".

So then why can we not say, "The consciousness problem exists. A functional solution to consciousness does not exist. It does not exist because it is not computable."?

For what it's worth I also believe that the mind, including consciousness, is completely the result of what is functionally a computer. But I don't think it's possible to identify the essential qualities of what makes a working algorithm yield consciousness. That isn't to say that we can't come up with some self-learning machines that could yield consciousness. But we may still not be able to identify what it is that makes some of these achieve consciousness and not others.

The only way that conciousness could be non-computable would be if there is a supernatural element to it. Otherwise, the fact that it exists means it must be computable.

Nonsense. Just because something exists and is not "supernatural" doesn't mean that it must be computable. Take the halting problem for instance. There is no Turing Machine that is able to take any possible TM and input and determine whether the inputted TM will eventually halt or go into an infinite loop when run with the given input. This is true even though every TM must either halt or go into an infinite loop for any possible input. There's nothing supernatural about it.

Believing that no gods exist does not necessitate the belief that science (or anything else for that matter) can come up with "all of the answers".

This is quite controversial, mavericky science because it's very hard to test -

If it's not testable, then by definition it is not science.

hard to test != untestable