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POTUS 45.0: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

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Re: POTUS 45.0: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

TWO SPACES! The Oxford Comma should always be used, too! Dagnabbit!

Brent is one hundred percent... RIGHT!

People who don't use the Oxford comma are savages. I'm looking at you NYT.
 
I am bad at Twitter. Is the "Following" number a good indicator of the number of retweeted posters? If so, then... only 1500? In 2 months that's just about 25 a day. Of course, it may be a chore in itself to find / ID / check each for uniqueness, although hopefully that is all automated.

I was trying to type out an explanation, but it seemed confusing when I re-read it.

How many Tweets they have is more representative of how many people they have Re-Tweets, but that number would also include any news articles they have also Re-Tweets, or any posts they made themselves.

The Following/Followers is just their connections or friends they have. Following are people you (or Trumpgrets in this case) want to see in your Twitter timeline when you log in to read (IE: your Facebook wall, your Linked In news feed, but for Twitter.) Followers are people who think you (or Trumpgrets) is interesting enough to read about in their feed.
 
Re: POTUS 45.0: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of women are expected to march in Washington after Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. This past Tuesday, the singer-songwriter Fiona Apple gave those preparing to protest a signature chant.

The chant is on a new one-minute track called “Tiny Hands,” which repeats 10 words recorded by Ms. Apple on a phone:

“We don’t want your tiny hands/anywhere near our underpants.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/...ens-march.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
 
Re: POTUS 45.0: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

Never, ever use two spaces after a period. It's like talking to a brick wall.
 
Re: POTUS 45.0: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

Isn't the purpose of education to give kids the skills they need to be able to take care of themselves as adults?

Skills is just animal training. Education is to wake in kids the abilities they themselves have to then acquire skills for particular tasks.

Now, the way we do education is to train kids in tasks and hope they notice what's going on in their minds when they "get it." Notably, we changed that effort in the late 50s to try to actually educate kids -- have them explicitly concentrate on what happens in their minds when they are analyzing problems. That failed, spectacularly. The problem seems to be that not all people ever actually advance that far -- in fact, the majority of people do not. So now we are slowly drifting back to animal training with only a few vestigial organs lying around like "critical thinking." The theory now is, as in the old days, the kids who can reach "meta-training" and recognize what is happening during problem-solving will figure it out just like they always have, at around 9 or 10 years old. They'll be bored with the animal training we put the other kids through, but that boredom itself actually helps them break out of conformity and discover themselves, out of self-preservation.

Dr. Mrs. reported something very funny when she had some staff come back from some sort of BS management seminar. They breathlessly related how they were taught that the key to effective communication is to split your attention and use half of your mind to "float above" the interaction and examine it.

Dr. Mrs. was dumbfounded that this could possibly be news to anyone over the age of about 9. We each have the memory of the gradual recognition in second or third grade that communications between people is not a "straight track" that takes you somewhere, but a huge switchyard in which you have the power to flip back and forth between tracks -- sometimes to get to the point faster, often to get your interlocuter to the point you reached long ago, and sometimes just to screw around and make interesting patterns to stave off boredom. The same is obviously true in any mental activity: reading, teaching, problem-solving.

I opined that there may simply be an invisible line which some people never cross. My comparison is with a math class I was taking in sophomore year -- it was sometime to do with eigenvalues and Hamiltonians etc. I was bumping just up against my "speed limit" as far as the ability to assimilate and then take off from new information, when the grad student teaching the course and her TA got into a personal "aha!" moment about their own research. I watched them take off at light speed and I felt that from my perspective they had literally just vanished from my "sense space" of taking meaning from symbols (noises emitted from their face holes, scribbled marks on the whiteboard). I was *lost*: I wasn't just on a slower-moving train, I was on a train that didn't go there. It wasn't lack of information, it was cognitive disability.

This has happened about 8 times in my life and each time if the speaker was a woman I have wanted to immediately make children with her and steal half her genes for my line. There is nothing hotter.

(BTW, reading the research of one person on this forum is one of those 8 instances. I regret in this case it's a he so YY babies are not within the realm of possibility. But if you're reading this, f-ck you for being qualitatively smarter. It is a sobering thought to realize "I could study this for an infinite interval of time and not understand it." Like a man with no beard for Beatrice, this is not for me.)

More and more I feel that most people spend most of their lives lost, and in fact that most people do not even recognize that there are "worlds behind the world" they can't see.

I suspect those two grad students would have the same experience if they were in the room at the 1927 Solvay Conference. Beyond the simple spectrum of "speeds" at which we learn, there are also dimensions, probably infinite, and not all minds can perceive all the dimensions.

tl; dr: Education is for opening minds. Animal training is for filling them.
 
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Isn't the purpose of education to give kids the skills they need to be able to take care of themselves as adults?

It's one of the purposes, but it's far from the only one. Otherwise we'd all go to trade schools and higher education wouldn't exist.

If you're measuring k-12 education based on GDP or median income, you're going about it way wrong.
 
It's one of the purposes, but it's far from the only one. Otherwise we'd all go to trade schools and higher education wouldn't exist.

If you're measuring k-12 education based on GDP or median income, you're going about it way wrong.

What are the right ways then?
 
Re: POTUS 45.0: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.


Ya know, I hate to be a cynic, but a lot of this feels like CYA. As in we didn't bother to vote or we voted Trump/3rd party, and now that he actually got elected even though we expected everyone else to vote to keep him out of office, NOW we plan on doing something about it. :rolleyes: Look, it doesn't work that way. Protesting never takes the place of voting. I'm sure many of these activists did vote Hillary and have a clear conscience. However, I'm just as sure a real good portion of these people didn't vote Dem up and down the ticket. Well guess what? Trump and the Republicans are going to ignore your little protests just like Walker and crew did in Wisconsin. Do what makes you feel good, but come Nov 2018 don't think that you already did your duty by showing up for a Jan 2017 rally. :rolleyes:
 
Re: POTUS 45.0: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

Ya know, I hate to be a cynic, but a lot of this feels like CYA. As in we didn't bother to vote or we voted Trump/3rd party, and now that he actually got elected even though we expected everyone else to vote to keep him out of office, NOW we plan on doing something about it. :rolleyes: Look, it doesn't work that way. Protesting never takes the place of voting. I'm sure many of these activists did vote Hillary and have a clear conscience. However, I'm just as sure a real good portion of these people didn't vote Dem up and down the ticket. Well guess what? Trump and the Republicans are going to ignore your little protests just like Walker and crew did in Wisconsin. Do what makes you feel good, but come Nov 2018 don't think that you already did your duty by showing up for a Jan 2017 rally. :rolleyes:

I agree. The US has reaped what it has sewn. Me? My conscience is clear.
 
Re: POTUS 45.0: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

So is the US election process biased? If it were based on popular vote, this would be a Democratic government - rather the GOP has control over all branches. The problem? The states and districts result in serious gerrymandering outcomes. The numbers?

US Senate popular vote nearly a dead heat - national vote GOP 49% to Dems 48%
US Senate seats not even close - GOP 241, Dems 194

US House popular vote landslide for Dems - GOP 42% to Dems 54%
US House seats GOP holds majority - GOP 52 to Dems 46%

US POTUS popular vote Dems win - GOP 46% to Dems 48%
US POTUS outcome - Trump wins

The outcomes are mirrored at the state level - at least it is for MNs House and Senate.
 
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