What's new
By:
USCHO Fan Forum

This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

  • The USCHO Fan Forum has migrated to a new plaform, xenForo. Most of the function of the forum should work in familiar ways. Please note that you can switch between light and dark modes by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right of the main menu bar. We are hoping that this new platform will prove to be faster and more reliable. Please feel free to explore its features.

Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

Status
Not open for further replies.
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

St. Clown said:
Carson was a pediatric neurosurgeon, not just a pediatric surgeon. That mad him something like the funky grandmaster, not just the grandmaster.

That said, a conversation I recall from the PPACA thread a long while ago, the various doctors on the board made comment that many doctors spend so much time studying medicine that they become a loss on many other subjects. There was even an article linked where an accountant talked about how badly doctors run their private practices because they don't understand cash flow and payroll management the way they should or think they do. They become the epitome of the German term Einfach Idiot. Literally, it means "single subject idiot", but essentially translates to savant.
Click to expand...
Another anecdote: when we lived in Geneva, it was not at all uncommon to come across a waitress or barber or bus driver who spoke 4, 5, even 6 languages (which of course always included English). However, it was pretty difficult to find an English-speaking doctor. We had a few conversations with local friends about it, and the consensus was that 1) Doctors are mainly from the country/region where they work, so they haven't traveled or emigrated as many "lower-class" workers have done, and 2) they mainly study bio, chem, sciences, and don't study languages.
 
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

LynahFan said:
Another anecdote: when we lived in Geneva, it was not at all uncommon to come across a waitress or barber or bus driver who spoke 4, 5, even 6 languages (which of course always included English). However, it was pretty difficult to find an English-speaking doctor. We had a few conversations with local friends about it, and the consensus was that 1) Doctors are mainly from the country/region where they work, so they haven't traveled or emigrated as many "lower-class" workers have done, and 2) they mainly study bio, chem, sciences, and don't study languages.
Click to expand...

The waiter needs you to like him; the doctor doesn't. :)

I'm not surprised that people from highly technical fields tend to have gaping holes in their knowledge. Scientists and engineers are often spectacularly ignorant about art, music and literature (as humanities graduates likely are about basic science and math). There are only so many hours in a day and particularly young people just haven't banged around enough to learn anything important yet.

But they still have the aptitude for it -- anybody who builds a ladder in some topic can in principle build a ladder in any topic -- reason is one of the foundational abilities, probably second only to curiosity in predictive value for who makes it to the top of an intellectual endeavor. I find it very weird and I assume it very rare for someone highly accomplished in anything other than some oddball one-off skill like athletics or musicianship to also lack the "rules of construction" for feeding in information and making logical connections. Dude climbed that ladder at least once -- we know that. So what happened to cause the rungs to fall out of his ladder?
 
Last edited:
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

Kepler said:
The waiter needs you to like him; the doctor doesn't. :)

I'm not surprised that people from highly technical fields tend to have gaping holes in their knowledge. Scientists and engineers are often spectacularly ignorant about art, music and literature (as humanities graduates likely are about basic science and math). There are only so many hours in a day and particularly young people just haven't banged around enough to learn anything important yet.

But they still have the aptitude for it -- anybody who builds a ladder in some topic can in principle build a ladder in any topic -- reason is one of the foundational abilities, probably second only to curiosity in predictive value for who makes it to the top of an intellectual endeavor. I find it very weird and I assume it very rare for someone highly accomplished in anything other than some oddball one-off skill like athletics or musicianship to also lack the "rules of construction" for feeding in information and making logical connections. Dude climbed that ladder at least once -- we know that. So what happened to cause the rungs to fall out of his ladder?
Click to expand...

As you well know, Kep, docs lose their marbles, not their rungs.
 
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/u...on&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

This one...I don't know what to say about this one.

Between the 14th hole and the 15th tee of one of the club’s two courses, Mr. Trump installed a flagpole on a stone pedestal overlooking the Potomac, to which he affixed a plaque purportedly designating “The River of Blood.”

“Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,” the inscription reads. “The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ ”

...

“No. Uh-uh. No way. Nothing like that ever happened there,” said Richard Gillespie, executive director of the Mosby Heritage Area Association, a historical preservation and education group devoted to an 1,800-square-mile section of the Northern Virginia Piedmont, including the Lowes Island site.

“The only thing that was remotely close to that,” Mr. Gillespie said, was 11 miles up the river at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff in 1861, a rout of Union forces in which several hundred were killed. “The River of Blood?” he added. “Nope, not there.”
Click to expand...

OK, maybe Trump knows something about the site we don't.

“That was a prime site for river crossings,” Mr. Trump said. “So, if people are crossing the river, and you happen to be in a civil war, I would say that people were shot — a lot of them.”
Click to expand...

So wait, because someone at some point walked by there during the Civil War, it must have been a hail of bullets and carnage? Does he think that during the entire war it was just a free-for-all of people running around and shooting people? How is this a coherent thought?

“How would they know that?” Mr. Trump asked, when told that local historians had called his plaque a fiction. “Were they there?”
Click to expand...

Ah yes, using the classic Creationist debating tactic.

Mr. Trump repeatedly said that “numerous historians” had told him the golf club site was known as The River of Blood. But he said he did not remember their names.
Click to expand...

"Are you sure it was a book? Are you sure it wasn't nothing?"



The whole story is just...I can't even...how can they...
 
Last edited:
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

I pass the turnoff for the Ball's Bluff battlefield on my commute. Louis Menand's Metaphysical Club has a great description of Oliver Wendell Holmes almost dying there. tl;dr: don't send intellectuals to war -- war is dumb and they're not good at it anyway.

As for Trump, I do not know why people invest in the idea that he's some sort of master manipulator trolling the media and the Republican party. Occam's razor: he's just an idiot.
 
Last edited:
LynahFan said:
Another anecdote: when we lived in Geneva, it was not at all uncommon to come across a waitress or barber or bus driver who spoke 4, 5, even 6 languages (which of course always included English). However, it was pretty difficult to find an English-speaking doctor. We had a few conversations with local friends about it, and the consensus was that 1) Doctors are mainly from the country/region where they work, so they haven't traveled or emigrated as many "lower-class" workers have done, and 2) they mainly study bio, chem, sciences, and don't study languages.
Click to expand...

Geneva is not that far from Ithaca, isn't it? :)
 
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

Kepler said:
I find it very weird and I assume it very rare for someone highly accomplished in anything other than some oddball one-off skill like athletics or musicianship to also lack the "rules of construction" for feeding in information and making logical connections.
Click to expand...

Former Nittany Lion and current Baltimore Raven John Urschel is the exception to your rule. A true math genius and a genuinely nice guy. :) Oh, and he was born in Canada too! ;)

Urschel, the Ravens' fifth-round draft pick, loves much more than football. He's an insatiable academic, a veritable math genius who graduated from Penn State with a 4.0 GPA, a bachelor's degree and a master's in math. He published his first research paper, "Instabilities of the Sun-Jupiter-Asteroid Three Body Problem," in the journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy, and taught undergraduate classes.
Click to expand...

And from Wikipedia: :eek:

In 2015, Urschel co-authored a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. It is titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians" and includes "a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue."
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

Kepler said:
I pass the turnoff for the Ball's Bluff battlefield on my commute. Louis Menand's Metaphysical Club has a great description of Oliver Wendell Holmes almost dying there. tl;dr: don't send intellectuals to war -- war is dumb and they're not good at it anyway.

As for Trump, I do not know why people invest in the idea that he's some sort of master manipulator trolling the media and the Republican party. Occam's razor: he's just an idiot.
Click to expand...

It isnt a troll job, he is playing to the lowest common denominator and it is helping him at every turn. If the masses turned away from him he would flip flop faster than the love child of Mitt Romney and John Kerry ;)

He is no genius mind you, but he doesnt have to be. If this was anybody but him doing it I would say it is performance art but as is he is just saying anything that comes to mind and the stupider it sounds the more the morons love him.
 
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

Handyman said:
I said the same thing to my dad this weekend. Trump is playing this perfect. He isnt stupid, he realizes people are stupid and is using it.
Click to expand...

Funny. My dad and I had the same conversation. We went a step further though and he explained to me Ted Cruz's history arguing in front of the SCOTUS. After a long discussion we both agreed that we aren't sure that he's a true believer but rather he's an extremely intelligent attack dog who just happened to pick the GOP as the territory he defends.
 
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

dxmnkd316 said:
Funny. My dad and I had the same conversation. We went a step further though and he explained to me Ted Cruz's history arguing in front of the SCOTUS. After a long discussion we both agreed that we aren't sure that he's a true believer but rather he's an extremely intelligent attack dog who just happened to pick the GOP as the territory he defends.
Click to expand...

The thing that argues against this is Cruz' father, who is a True Believer and a real piece of work.
 
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

So it's come to this.

All the candidates for the Lupo the Butcher nomination are losing on foreign policy to a girl.
 
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

Not sure where Matt Bai's recent comment on the Princeton/Wilson situation belong, so I am posting it here.

More to the point, though, is that today’s students have grown up in a society that increasingly eschews moral complexity. They’ve never known a time when you can’t choose your own media, your own history, your own truth. Theirs is a binary world where everyone is either all good or all bad, where the only reality worth hearing online or on cable TV is the one that reaffirms your preconceptions.

But history is complicated, and so are the people who make it. The messy reality is that great people sometimes do terrible things, and terrible people sometimes do great things. To discard all the actors we find abhorrent, along with all the things they might have accomplished, is to deny the vexing contradictions of humanity — which is exactly what real knowledge is about.

And this is where a lot of these university administrators are failing their students spectacularly right now. Their job isn’t to root out “microaggressions” or “trigger words,” to sterilize campus life in an effort to stave off discomfort. Their job is to make students understand that truth is often confounding and uncomfortable — that, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” (I’ve quoted this before, but in the current climate, it bears repeating.)

A little cliche', perhaps, but worth noting.
 
Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.

Princeton is being stupid no two ways about it.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top