While I'd hate to be facing this thing when it let go, it looked like a huge pain to load. The Tredegar Iron Works was an interesting place to visit, BTW.
I'd love to see somebody actually exercise the thing; uncranking the back, loading each of the barrels, buttoning it up. Without special tools it must have taken a whale of a long time. A different version with only 15 barrels is loaded and fired below:
Prince Johnson's (one of the old warlords, with quite a record!) comments about Boko Haram waiting in the wings are less happy. I hope he is just shooting off his mouth.
A Mennonite Benedictine oblate Gerald W. Schlabach quotes Scott Sanders:
The national culture is wrong when it tells us that "the worst fate is to be trapped on a farm, in a village, in the sticks, in some dead-end job or unglamourous marriage or played-out game." "People who root themselves in places are likelier to know and care for those places," he insists, "than are people who root themselves in ideas." In our hemisphere, people rooted in ideas rather than places have been the ones who have committed the worst abuses against land, forests, animals and human communities — and hardly without shedding their bigotry. Those who do not value their own places are unlikely to value others', he argues. For unless one is "placed" one merely collects sensations as a sightseer, lacking the local knowledge that grounds and measures global knowledge. "Those who care about nothing beyond the confines of their parish are in truth parochial, and are at least mildly dangerous to their parish; on the other hand, those who have no parish, those who navigate ceaselessly among postal zones and area codes, those for whom the world is only a smear of highways and bank accounts and stores, are a danger not just to their parish but to the planet."
I like to say that "cosmopolitan ≅ homeless."
Do I need to emphasize the importance of stability for children? Consistency and faithfulness in parents must be really big deals, because the lack of them shows up in all sorts of misbehavior in the kids.
I know the economic machinery likes to use portable atoms, but sometimes we should try to dig in our heels.
Am I the only Firefox user who wondered, during its February campaign, whether Mozilla understood the meaning of the word "privacy?"
He links to an essay by Patrick Dineen, who asked students how many things from Western Civ they knew about.
I went over Dineen's list; I count 21 questions (e.g. who was Saul of Tarsus, have you read Paradise Lost). I'll grade myself harshly--if I knew roughly what something was but hadn't read it (e.g. Federalist papers) that's a no. Reasonably bright, voracious reader, with no TV, lots of books in the house, and not many nearby friends--I knew about 15 off that list when I entered college. (And also some things from STEM that Dineen apparently doesn't think are part of common culture--but they are.)
ACS was populated by children of embassy staff, aid workers, missionaries, visiting engineers--fairly right-side of the distribution. Most of my senior class wouldn't have done half that well on his list--say 6 items or less (there were exceptions). Everybody in class was doing an equivalent of the Grand Tour--which is an education hard to ask yes/no questions about.
My sample is from 43 years ago, with a less flexible curriculum (4 years English/Science 3-4 Math, Language, Social Studies, PE--that sort of thing). Perhaps there has been, as he asserts, an effort to dry up our connection to our past--some replacements leave me glumly suspicious--but it would be tough to prove it by my senior class. Or, as AVI pointed out, by Lewis. A long checklist will show us all badly wanting. like those "100 books every literate person should read" lists
Perhaps it is inevitable that the endless writing of many books(*) will attenuate any core. Among the waterfall you'll find books of equal caliber with the ancient ones. Over time, and certainly while they're in fashion, these new books will have great influence too. So why pick the old ones? (**)
I think "for historical reasons" is precise and accurate. If we are to be of the West, with any confidence that being Western is a good thing, then the history of Western culture belongs in the core of education. But St Johns College spends 4 years learning the core--that's way too much for the rest of us. How much can we pare down and still keep a sense of the flow of it all?
I think we can get something, but don't expect more than a sampling--Dineed asked for too much.
I know the arguments that we are now a multi-cultural society and the curriculum needs to reflect this. I get the claim, but I deny the strong version of it: we have to put first things first. Other cultures should enrich, but not supplant--I really don't want to live in the Balkans. Or, I gather, California, which seems to be halfway there already.
(**) Maybe for the footnotes, he said: not entirely facetiously. Aristophanes' Greece is pretty alien to us--different values, different tribal markers, etc. The Great Books are multi-cultural already!
The obvious worry for most people is, of course, fire. However, timber buildings are famously good at standing up to flames – columns and beams will char in an inferno, and that charred surface can actually stand up longer to heat than exposed steel. While steel heats up and buckles, wood first loses its water weight, then chars and resists the flames.
Umm.. When I look at the picture, I see a wooden chimney.
The pictures struck me as a bit odd. The gowns are flattering and all, but they are worn by models, not brides. Not one of them looks remotely happy. Risk; flee.
The U.S. Army is introducing a new shoulder-fired weapon that has the potential to change infantry tactics and revolutionize infantry warfare in a way unseen since the Battle of Königgrätz in July 1866. That battle, which marked the beginning of the end of the line infantry attack, saw Austrian troops carrying muzzle-loaders outgunned by Prussian infantrymen carrying breech-loading needle guns.
It's big and heavy, though apparently effective. They puff it nicely: "No longer will our Soldiers have to expose themselves by firing and maneuvering to eliminate an enemy behind cover. Our Soldiers can remain covered/protected and use their XM25 to neutralize an enemy in his covered position."
Maybe so, if you have enough of them. But I assume that the other side will have some too. Then what happens to your protection? Maybe it does mean new tactics, but it won't be quite as pretty as they make out.
”Where there are young ladies, there will the young men go.” For this reason, a chief who has many wives will also have many young men in his service. Such young men are supposed to keep their love affairs with the chief’s wives a secret as a sign of respect for him, although he is very much aware of their activities.There are one or two wives who are absolutely reserved for the chief.
If they get caught they have to publicly humble themselves and pay a fine to the husband.
Another aspect, among the Gbandes, has to do with marriage order. If a man marries an older sister, he can go down the list marrying younger and younger sisters without a problem. But if he is careless enough to marry the youngest first, the older sisters are automatically his mothers and ineligible to be spouses.
About dance: “It is usually an acrobatic celebration in which the accompanying musicians must follow the dancer rather than the dancer’s following a set musical pattern or rhythm.”
Witches essentially become infected with witch-ness, and are typically unaware of it themselves. Dr. Dennis notes that eating from a joint pot, or drinking from a joint bowl with a common ladle, are therefore hygienic practices intended to prevent a person from accidently ingesting “witch-ness” and becoming a witch—and thus becoming a danger to others and himself (witch-ness can kill the witch, too). Sorcery is a trait acquired deliberately, as opposed to witchcraft. Cremation (done for those found after death to have been witches) precludes reincarnation.
The mother and often the father take the name of the firstborn child: e.g. “njee-mother.”
Ancestral spirits sometimes transform into the shape of strangers to test the character of their descendants in how they show hospitality.
These elders firmly believe that Western types of laws are unenforceable by their courts because those laws are based on individual rights. The Gbandes consider this a calamity for any society; for them, there can be no individual rights per se, only individual rights based on tradition and approved by the group. Only the group has rights; but since these rights become rights supported by every member of the group, they become individual rights because of their reciprocal nature. …. Western peoples are looked upon as makers of many laws as well as breakers of many laws.
It was beyond the scope of his book, but I wonder how the cultures (Gbande and quasi-Western) interacted, as each side influenced the other. People at the borderland pick up a little from across the way. I have a gut feeling that the bad characteristics, or those that present badly in the opposite culture, will tend to be picked up first—human cussedness at work. Maybe one place to look is at the Indian/French interactions in North America: If you can find a non-PC analysis.
Yuri Miler introduced the program, then handed off to Hawking, who spoke of using technology to transcend human limitations. Freeman Dyson said the interesting part of space exploration isn’t the planets but the other objects—which is an important point for this project, because the chances of getting close enough to a real live planet to get any info are essentially nil. Druyan started talking about how prescient Sagan was, and I had to be elsewhere (missed Loeb). Jenison had a touch-feely talk about the world learning to work together (I suppose the proper rituals must be done), and Warden spoke of exploring our own solar system first—which is a very good point, and a project that might actually be completed.
You’d have to fire off thousands. When accelerating these things you are essentially balancing a small sail (size not given, but it will be flexible!) on a pillar of light and trying to get it aimed to better than two tenths of a milli-radian—if you want to get as close to the star as Pluto is to the Sun. It sounded a bit like using a shotgun to try to hit the 200 yard bulls-eye. But maybe my intuition is wrong.
They plan to beam back the images captured by the probes. Assuming the sails are still in good enough shape to gather energy from the star, beaming it back seems a little fraught. I’d think you’d need to fire off a cloud of re-transmitters behind them. I don’t have the numbers for signal strength, or for the background rates, so I can’t estimate whether that makes sense or not.
Even if there’s something important to look at, the probes won’t be slowing down to chat. At .2c, they’d cover the distance between the Earth and the Sun in 40 minutes. All decisions have to be made on the spot (9 years to get a reply back from Earth!).
On the other hand, it might be handy to send various kinds of probes through the Solar System on the cheap. True, you won’t get gorgeous pictures, or get anything in orbit, or get anything to land. But getting out where the comets live, if the camera resolution is good enough, might give you enough parallax to spot more of the beasties. There are lots of things one could try.
UPDATE: An official list of issues
The grandchildren are thought of as the grandparent's parents who have been reincarnated. Therefore, as children, they occupy the same position as the grandparents, but a little higher than the grandparents because they are supposed to be their seniors. However, the older a child becomes the more he takes on his own identity and the further he becomes removed from the position of seniority. When he becomes an adult, he occupies a position of less respect or honor.
And seniority is a really big deal.
A Gbande proverb: "He who is wise is one who listens to his wives."
Some scholars try to date the gospels very late. Try to imagine yourself writing about Jesus as He talked about "not one stone left on another." Could you resist the temptation to add "and so it is to this day?" Me neither.
Ecclesiastes never mentions games. (We laughed at the idea of what the Preacher would say about basketball. I know people who've watched Star Wars a dozen times, but who watches basketball re-runs?) By the same rule, that makes it pre-Hellenist. "Runners race to reach the end, and they end where they began; this also is vanity." No way he'd have omitted it.
Some of the best evidence comes from Peking University, where scientists used fMRI to scan the brains of Chinese college students as they viewed images of Asian and Caucasian faces with either neutral or pained expressions. Before viewing the images, some students were primed with rapidly flashing statements specifically about death, such as ‘My body would rot after death’. Others were primed with negative statements unrelated to death, for instance, ‘The coming exam makes me uneasy’.
Later, researchers examining the data found that Asian students who were primed with thoughts of death had greater empathetic response to the pain of other Asian faces than to white faces in two specific regions of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the nearby mid-cingulate cortex, reflecting work that came before. The study, published in NeuroImage in 2015, documented the powerful impact that thinking about death, otherwise known as 'mortality salience’, has on the empathy gap between races, a chasm with obvious relevance to police on call.
If that strikes her as the best, in view of what's been learned about priming studies lately, I harbor deep doubts about the accuracy of the rest of the studies. And the further claim that tribal differences don't seem to matter just adds to my skepticism.
Does anybody know much about the methodology and reproducibility of these things?
We had plenty of time to strike up conversations about the weather, the tattered basketball on top of one of the gymnasium fans, and the groups of middle school kids brought in to see the zoo.
Wisconsin presidential primaries: pick a party on the ballot and mark whoever you like. Or dislike least. Seesaw: back-room deals to pick candidates based on favors rendered and promised isn't very pretty, so let the voters decide. But which voters, and on what basis ("if you do read the newspapers you are misinformed")? That doesn't look very pretty either, especially when the voters pick a candidate that doesn't have much to do with the party (and thus won't get much done). So add super-delegates that are party stalwarts. That kludge makes voters unhappy too and some may sit out the general election in protest. Nothing is going to work perfectly, and I have a suspicion that we'll be drifting back to greater party control soon, and then years afterwards, assuming we still keep up the formalities, back to voter selection.
Back in '03 I tried to figure out a plan for a binding "None of the Above" on the ballot. I still think it is worth a shot.
As we left, a woman with a slightly grumpy two-year-old on her hip came out of the gym. "No, they didn't have any suckers for you," she told him.
Somehow or another the man, and presumably others, engaged the hijacker in conversation; even getting him to pose with the man. The vest was a fake and the hijacker despondent, so it was easy. If it had been real -- calming the hijacker is on the todo list.
I wonder if that was Innes' intent. Shall I give him the benefit of the doubt? that silly grin...
I'm not one of the Twits, so I missed most of the furor
They wanted to make clear, they said, that members of all Islamic sects in Syria were "brothers and sisters" - and that the Alawites "should not be associated with the crimes the regime has committed".
The document claims that Alawites are not Shia, and
The leaders also acknowledge that Alawites have incorporated elements of other monotheistic religions into their traditions, most notably Judaism and Christianity, but say they should "not be seen as marks of deviation from Islam but as elements that bear witness to our riches and universality".
That doesn't sound like a group confident of their tribe's leader.
But maybe I'm wrong, and this is really a peace gesture from Assad. I don't see how it would work, but there are plenty of subgroups I don't see. (Our government seems just as blind: we trained "moderates" who promptly joined the "radicals." Maybe Assad knows some radicals he could cleave off.)
But it seems to be real: Bridge International Academy may be taking over elementary education in Liberia.
The approach seems to be: large classrooms, teachers reading from scripts prepared for the group. I gather they incorporate testing and "teacher" (5 week training) evaluation as well. Cost/pupil $6/term.
Bridge’s model is “school in a box” – a highly structured, technology-driven model that relies on teachers reading standardised lessons from hand-held tablet computers. Bridge hires education experts to script the lessons, but the teacher’s role is to deliver that content to the class. This allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don’t have college degrees – a teacher is only required to go through a five-week training programme on how to read and deliver the script.
They seem to be doing this already in Kenya and Uganda.
This sort of thing makes me itchy: one size fits all, centralized, not sure about transparency.
In addition, the programs have to be assembled for pupils speaking a dozen languages. I'd also wonder about how the company plans to enforce its rules: if (e.g.) a teacher takes a couple of months off, how do they find out dash the supervisor small and what can the company do about it if they find do find out?
Two things suggest that this might be a good idea anyway.
I hope this works.
