My understanding of the idea behind common core math is that their goal was exactly that students should develop an understanding of math that would allow them to easily spot all the different ways they could do such calculations easily. I think the problem was that a lot of their methods come from people who understand the concepts already and think that their methods are nicely illustrative of the concepts, but who don't grasp that they only illustrate the concepts if you already actually know what's behind them. Then you end up with the reality with the boxes, counting, colours, etc. where the actual students mind is reeling and they're saying to themselves "what the hell is going on here, why are we doing this!" even more than with the way it was previously taught. It's even worse when they expect the student to "show their work" with by drawing the boxes, ribbons, whatever for themselves. That's just adding 40%+ to the time of each problem when the student isn't thinking about math at all, they're drawing the same boring thing over and over on autopilot. It's not like that kind of thing is entirely new of course. I mean, thinking back, I wish I'd had a unit circle stamp and a stamp pad. Because, seriously, what was the point of drawing it over and over and over? Once you'd done it a few times, it was just a waste of time to draw it yourself. So, basically common core took that sort of thing and magnified it.

Others have noted that the article wasn't claiming that AI is the reason that math skills are atrophying. Also, it seems to be all in how you use it. The AI has gotten mostly good enough at this point that it can be a pretty good math tutor. I mean, it's maybe more like studying with a friend who understands the material pretty well, but still misunderstands some things about the questions. But, it's a friend with infinite patience. For some students, it will help them learn far better than a teacher or math tutor leaning down their neck. Of course, that's not going to be the same for all students. They still have to want to understand the material.

They're not so bad, they just define things like "it is easy to see...", "clearly", "it suffices to show", "recall that..." to mean completely different things than normal speakers of English or, well, language.

As a parent, you've got to be careful with that one. There's a set of people who tend to be the ones where most people start blaming, and they typically live in the same home as the children. Of course, as you point out the common core math stuff was terrible. It does sound like your kids at least had a textbook? Many parents had to deal with their kids just getting handouts and the only lessons on how to use the "ribbon diagrams" etc. being given to the students directly in class making it impossible for the parents to help (or consult the non-existent textbook, or write the author, etc. The worst thing about the common core stuff is that the actual goal by the creators was to help kids to really think about math to make it easier, but they made it tedious, boring, and stressful. I mean, the example you gave of 20X14 is exactly the sort of thing common core is supposed to help with. They're supposed to look at it, recognize that it's actually 2X10X14, do the easy 10X14, then double that.

All that said though, if your eldest is going into grade 12 and really only has 3rd grade math, you really need to start tutoring her yourself, and don't worry about doing it so she can "show the work" for the school. Same for the eighth grade student. Her actual grades in math are basically irrelevant to her actual education at that grade level so it shouldn't matter if the school has a problem how she shows the work.

Do you mean a bibliography? Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but it sounds like you got most of the way through a degree without having to put bibliographies on your papers. I'm not sure if that would be ironic given that you're complaining about the slipping standards for kids these days or if it would back up your argument.

If we step outside just books for a moment, you're talking about destroying all of Van Gogh's paintings as well as paintings in all kinds of experimental forms like pointilism and fauvism, The Thinker, by Rodin, and frankly a huge assortment of archeological works in museums. If we do want to look at books, you would destroy the Great Gatsby and Moby Dick without a care.

These various works are, or were rare and were, at one point, widely considered to be crap. These days, all of thee things are quite valuable. Original copies of Moby Dick and the Great Gatsby that are in good shape with original dust jackets, etc. are worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I think the problem here is that you seem to be saying that the courts/law are insisting that the books must be destroyed for it to not be infringement, but that's not quite what happened. The court did use the fact that the scanning was destructive as an argument, but it wasn't required. In a common law system, it is problematic that it does imply a new rule. This mostly comes down to a question of nuance.

I think they were somehow trying to prove that set B (rare books that are out of copyright) doesn't exist because set A (rare books that are still in copyright) exist. I can understand your confusion because the "logic" of that argument is bewildering.

That raises the question. Is a "good" university one that takes anyone, regardless of ability, and raises their education level, or is it one that takes in the elite so it can output the elite? Is the purpose personal enlightenment of the students, producing good workers for employers, a mix? To simplify, what makes a good teacher? One who only picks the best and brightest, then gets showered with credit for the accolades their students receive? Is it all about an initial filtering followed by continuous filtering and ranking of people? Is education about ascertaining where people fall on some scale of their innate, immutable characteristics? Or is there some semblance of an idea that education is a process by which people can learn and improve?

So... right outside? Like, not even traveling beyond audible range to play it on say a paved school court or a parking lot or something?

It's not really dropping grades anyway. It's pass/fail. That's still a grade, it just changes the precision of the grade. Most universities have had options for opting to take some classes pass/fail forever, so this isn't actually a big deal.

Not to mention that the form of fusion that dominates in stars is the proton-proton chain. Earthly fusion reactors typically focus on Tritium-Deuterium.

And yet, if you can put up 10% of that project, you get 10% of the power. For solar, you can put it on the roof of existing structures, etc. That's the versatility I was talking about. Plus, when you do get past a regulatory hurdle, the physical construction is simple and fast. "First light" happens instantly if you hook cables to the panel during daytime.

That assumes that somehow the building of each happens in a vacuum completely unaffected by the other. The reality is that, while it may not be a zero sum game, both have opportunity cost and they compete in that arena.

For some reactors, they can consume some of the nuclear waste as fuel in cycles that are unproven economically. That's a lot of ifs for what is known to be a marginal reduction in the actual problem. Of course, once again, I don't actually view the waste problem as being the biggest con in nuclear power.

Increasing demand for electricity, sure, but reducing demand for power. When you consider primary power consumption, electrification in transport and heating across residential, commercial, and industrial sectors presents the possibility of cutting the non-electrical portion of it in half or more. The real world mileage of a modern BEV including environmenttal controls is about 3 miles per kwh. Average household mileage is about 55 miles per day, so about 18.333 kWh. The average household currently uses about 30 kWh per day. So we're talking about an approximate 61% increase in household power usage but, across the board with other transportation sectors (excluding shipping and long range air transportation for now) and heat pumps, etc. total electrification would increase electric demand by about 35%. So, sure, we would need more electricity. Of course, we would also need a lot less primary power. That 35% increase is just not some insurmountable goal though. Also, the electrification push should also come with a push for more efficient, intelligent (and not in the "my refrigerator has an app so I can see if the light is one" way), grid aware appliances.

The reality is that the US is at about 25% renewable power. The world is at about 34%. Europe is on the threshhold of 50%. At its current, relatively slow growth rates, the US will reach 100% renewable around 2038, and the 135% required for near total electrification in around 2044, and that's without any major technology leaps, like average solar panels doubling in efficiency to match the best lab ones we have now. If the US actually catches up to the EU rate, it would hit the 135% mark in 2038. If it caught up to China, it would be around 2033. So, the big problem for nuclear power is that, for any nuclear project starting now, there is a very high chance that the market for its power would be completely replaced by renewables when it's finished.

I addressed and acknowledged that, but nevertheless, solar panels or wind turbines simply don't create those kinds of problems in the first place. They don't have to have special measures to prevent them from spontaneously melting deep into the ground, etc. Factors like the extremely high specific power involved, the use of inherently dangerous and corrosive substances (radioactive and nonradioactive), the pressures involved, even the possibility of failure of the aforementioned safety measures all introduce a domain of things that go wrong that can't happen with renewables.

Now, as I said, those are not my main concern. The economics and logistics are. I do need to point out that those other concerns are not imaginary, though.

But one of the premises of SMRs and other modern nuclear attempts is that those troublesome regulations and paralyzing oversight can be removed and that is desirable and necessary for the assembly line production method to thrive. We won't bother with talking about the fact that it's already a massive failure if we're talking about needing to airlift in equipment to prevent a disaster since we've already accepted that we're talking about newer designs and those should, in theory, not fail catastrophically (well..., I'll get into that), if power/cooling is lost and they are simply abandoned rather than a mad scramble to stop the problem. But, we do have to get into exactly what catastrophic failure is and isn't. The newer designs are more likely to protect the public. But, if these events do happen, it's still a catastrophe, just more of an economic one with a completely unrecoverable reactor. Not to mention that they are often still effectively permanent disaster areas. Ones that are safely contained inside a containment building, but perfectly safe as long as it is never opened.

That didn't really have anything to do with what I said about economies of scale. The point was that the SMR logic doesn't make any sense. As you reduce the size of the reactor, the power produced scales down faster than the amount of other stuff you need to operate the plant. So SMRs are more expensive per unit of power.

Sure. Not disputing that. But the actual amount of effort they spend, and have spent on nuclear power is just a fraction of their total activities.

The data simply don't seem to be pointing that way, although I suppose it depends on what "we" means there. If you mean the whole world, then it really doesn't look that way. Basically, most of the nuclear projects right now are experimental. People are waiting to see how they turn out before they even start on other projects. We are looking at a decade plus before any subsequent projects are completed and most other projects are still going to wait to see how those ones do. By the time that happens, there simply isn't going to be any non-niche market for nuclear plants. People will wonder why they would be needed at all when wind and solar provide the vast majority of electrical power already. Without some really amazing breakthrough, nuclear just doesn't make it because slow and steady only wins the race when the faster racer takes a nap under a tree.

Still not really the point. If by to "move away from nuclear" you mean closing existing plants early, you might have a point. However if you just mean not building new ones that it really seems like you do not. New renewables go up fast, and they are operational essentially immediately. A nuclear plant produces no power until after "first light" when it is 100% complete. A 10% complete wind or solar farm produces 10% of the power. If you only complete 70% of it then have to stop for a decade, the farm produces 70% for that decade.

Synthetic jet fuels would be a parallel goal of course. Ideally as much of aviation as possible would be swapped with electric. Using swappable metal-air primary batteries (for example aluminum-air) and and efficient flying V plane designs (which have the added advantage that they naturally have enough volume relative to weight capacity that the airlines simply can't stuff people in like sardines) has the potential to make 80% of plane routes all electric (and still just as fast as current commercial airliners). The remaining 20% would be routes that require higher altitude flights to avoid turbulence over certain mountain ranges or certain storm patterns.

I am pretty sure pretty much everyone in this discussion is aware of it though. In any case, it is a serious indictment of fossil coal (not a problem for the synthetic stuff I mentioned though, since the only elements in it would be carbon and any radioactive carbon in it would have come from the atmosphere to start with anyway), but coal wasn't really a consideration in this discussion in the first place. I will certainly concede that "it's not as bad as coal" is actually a good argument when we already have coal under consideration. So, coal being a bad idea seems like something we can all agree on.

Regardless of Hollywood context though, it's pretty much undeniable that what the original poster said about the catastrophic nature of something going wrong is correct. There is, in fact 880 tons of what they are calling corium barely kept cool by constant pumping of water underground in Fukushima right now. The place needs something like 50 megaWatts to pump and filter the water, ventilate and maintain negative internal air pressures, oh and maintain a massive zone of frozen ground! They have only just now started removing the spent fuel rods that weren't even involved in the meltdown. They can't even realistically start on the actual cleanup until what they now say will be 2037 (that is likely to be pushed back) and that job is not expected to be completed for a century.

Given that sort of thing, I think it is reasonable for someone to point out that, when a wind turbine goes wrong, the consequences aren't quite so massive or require so much trouble to clean up.

Now, some of the new designs do indeed deal with some of those problems. Like the whole thing with needing constant power to avoid a catastrophic failure, or the pooling of spent fuel into a critical mass. That's definitely a good thing if any get built, but it doesn't remove the concerns for people who have been told repeatedly that this sort of thing literally can't happen again before it happens again.

Personally, at this point, any such concerns are on the back burner for me. I think the safety questions and the waste disposal problems that have lingered for nearly a century at this point are frustrating, but they are simply not showstoppers for me. My problems with nuclear power focus primarily on speed and agility and nuclear power is not fast or agile. Renewables quite simply seem to be faster and more versatile, not to mention, until someone proves otherwise, cheaper.

As for SMRs specifically, my concerns boil down to economies of scale and essentially the square cube law. Everything suggests that SMRs produce less power per unit of pretty much everything involved. The reactor cores don't produce as much thermal energy for their size relative to larger cores in the first place. Then, while some things in the rest of the plant may scale down linearly with the size of the core, many things do not, so there needs to be more overall plant for the actual rate of power produced. Plus refueling schedules, etc., etc. Ultimately, they seem to mostly exist at this point to draw in investment. Most nuclear scientists whose careers aren't riding on this will tell you that SMRs aren't really practical except for niche applications.

That is a pretty loaded statement.. Let's not forget that the anti-nuclear stance of Greenpeace was mostly about nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing. Even the single guy, who isn't generally considered a "founder" (let alone multiple founders) by anyone other than himself (or all the people who quote him as the founder or multiple founders to promote nuclear power). Basically, there are 7 founders from the original committee and then 2 more who were involved in the Green Peace name and in directing the committee. Patrick Moore, the "founder" you're talking about wasn't on the committee, wasn't originally a director, didn't name the organization, and, even if he counted as a founder, would only be 10% of the founders. He was an early member and was on the first boat trip, and was an early leader and was there as the organization grew and renamed to Greenpeace. There is another claimant to being a founder, Paul Watson who formed a breakaway organization who never went pro-nuclear power. Ultimately, there are dozens of early members with similar bona fides to Moore who could make a roughly equal claim to him to be a founder. ) Moore was a guy who left Greenpeace after a dispute over chlorine policy (as a tipping point anyway, he was apparently pretty autocratic and didn't get along with people), then failed in his business and realized he could make a career out of selling himself to lobbying firms as a "Greenpeace founder". He started with promoting the clear cutting of old growth forests for logging companies. He expanded from there, eventually to nuclear power. He also moved on to climate change denial, including claims that it's actually good for the planet.

Basically he's a sellout who went into PR and "crisis management" who helps companies green wash. This is the guy who had an interview where he said you could drink a whole quart of glyphosate and "it wouldn't hurt you." to which the interviewer replied "We have some here. Do you want to drink it?" to which he replied "I'm not an idiot!" and stormed out. So, in other words, someone who literally can't swallow his own story.

Basically at present, nuclear is pretty much doomed to be relegated mostly to niches for the foreseeable future because there seem to be better alternatives.

"We should be moving away from coal" is a good argument. Absolutely we should be moving away from coal. But that argument is orthogonal to what we should be building for new power generation aside from that we shouldn't be building coal power (not fossil coal anyway, though there is an interesting argument for capturing CO2 from the ocean to make what would essentially be pure carbon synthetic coal to be used as carbon-neutral to slightly carbon-negative third or fourth tier power storage and burned for power with iron-oxides to avoid burning any atmosphere nitrogen and producing only pure CO2 as exhaust). Since the actual context was safety standards and how they needed to be tighter for nuclear because of how catastrophic things could be if things go wrong, then contrasting with coal power wasn't really appropriate.